While watching the video of efforts by left-wing thugs to disrupt Richard Spencer’s recent talk on affirmative action at Providence College, I was reminded of a conversation I had sometime in the late 1980s with a former member of the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society who had been involved with the movement to oppose the Vietnam War since its inception circa 1962. He recalled how in the early days of the antiwar movement, protest organizers were thrilled if they could get fifty people to show up for a rally. To publicly oppose the war at the time was physically dangerous, and such rallies were always at risk of being physically attacked by vigilantes shouting epithets like “communist” at the protestors. If organizers of the rallies could get police protection at all, they were happy to have it. Not only were public demonstrations in danger of such assaults, but so were quiet and peaceful meetings of those who opposed the war held in church basements or on university campuses. Of course, we all know that the anti-Vietnam War movement morphed into a mass movement just a few years later.

So it is indeed ironic that half a century later it is those who challenge the established dogmas purveyed by the Left who similarly experience the disruption of their efforts to peacefully speak and organize, who become the targets of epithets like “racist,” “sexist,” or “classist,” and who are threatened with physical violence. Incidents of this type are exceedingly common. It is now widely known that conservative speakers on university campuses, even entirely mainstream neocon-friendly “movement conservative” types, are routinely shouted down and threatened by leftists. As most readers are probably aware, right-wing organizations outside the mainstream, such as American Renaissance, have endured even worse attacks. At times, simply attending an anti-illegal immigration rally can be all that it takes for one to become the victim of a physical assault.

A number of observations could be made concerning the demeanor and behavior of the disrupters of Richard’s presentation at Providence. One is the obvious fact that they are so certain of their own moral superiority and the nobility of their crusade that they feel ordinary rules of civilized discourse or common courtesy no longer apply to them. Another is that far from their image of themselves as enlightened, free-thinking rebels, they come across more like brainwashed zombies similar to members of the LaRouche cult or the Moonies I used to encounter selling flowers on the streets of Washington, D.C. years ago. Their level of intellectual prowess seems to amount to little more than thinking that merely throwing labels at people and ideas they find disagreeable counts as a valid refutation of the opposing viewpoints.

Judging from the hysteria of their reaction, one would think that Richard was advocating genocide rather than arguing for the fairly standard right-of –center position that affirmative action is a bad idea, a position that even some minority scholars and analysts hold. It is also rather difficult to see how Richard was arguing for “white supremacy” given that the data he was presenting actually showed Asians to be the top performers with regards to SAT scores. As Richard pointed out in his talk, it was he who was the moderate and the protestors who were the extremist nutjobs.

For the diversitarians, affirmative action is not merely a policy preference, but a sacred article of faith, like the Holy Trinity or the Immaculate Conception. Affirmative action is a political tool the liberal establishment utilizes to maintain the loyalty of one of its core allies and constituent groups, the black elite and the middle class professional sectors of the black population. Affirmative action is an entitlement used as a reward for political loyalty from these sectors. It is doubtful that AA is of much benefit to genuinely impoverished or disadvantaged blacks, many of whom do not even finish high school, much less attend college or obtain professional-level occupations. And as Richard pointed out, if the goal of AA was to help the poor and disadvantaged in the first place, AA would be class-based rather than race-based.

Indeed, “black conservatives” like Thomas Sowell and Elizabeth Wright have documented a myriad of ways in which policies implemented by the welfare state and civil rights bureaucracy that has meta-morphed in recent decades have severely undermined the organic economic, cultural, and family life of urban black communities, and contributed exponentially to the social pathologies often found in those communities. Likewise, the black libertarian economist Walter Williams has produced rather extensive evidence indicating the contribution of efforts at intrusive economic micromanagement to high unemployment rates among urban blacks.

Additionally, there is some evidence that black children who are educated in culturally specific Afro-centric schools perform much better than black children who receive conventional public schooling. The reasons as to why this is so are inconclusive but what is interesting is that the efforts of either conservative and libertarian black scholars like Sowell, Wright, or Williams, or of Afro-centrists with a nationalist or separatist outlook, are routinely attacked or dismissed by white liberals and the captains of the civil rights industry alike. Indeed, such people are often reviled by the Left. The obvious reason for this is the fanatical egalitarian-universalist ideology that has come to dominate the Left, an ideology that just happens to coincide with the political and economic self-interest of those who push it. It is an ideology that seeks a society where all resources are controlled and managed by the state and administered according to a spoils system the ostensible purpose of which is the imposition of bureaucratically-managed “equality.” The ultimate outcome of totalitarian humanism taken to its logical conclusion would be a totalitarian state organized as a kind of caste system whereby individual rights are assigned on the basis of group identity and group rights are assigned on the basis of the position of the group in the pantheon of the oppressed or on the victimological family tree.

Given these considerations, it might be apt to compare our present day lefto-fascist, stormtroopers-on-granola with the Red Guards of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards were, of course, bands of youthful vigilantes who scurried about China during the 1960s smashing up cultural artifacts deemed “old” (e.g. conservative, traditional) and engaging in vigilante violence against persons deemed “reactionary” (mostly dissident intellectuals and those labeled “bourgeois” or originating from politically incorrect cultural or class backgrounds.) We see a similar though milder version of this today in the West today with attacks on expressions of traditional culture (like Christmas celebrations), historical artifacts considered to be reactionary (like Confederate Civil War monuments or streets named after Confederate generals), and vigilante actions against people given labels like “racist,” “fascist,” “sexist,” or “classist.”

I suspect that these “antifa” types, these Red Guards-on-tofu, would be every bit as murderous and destructive if the authorities would sanction it, as Chairman Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. We’ve seen hints at this already with the nonchalant attitude of the authorities towards threats of murder and arson against innocent people made by the Antifa in response to American Renaissance’s planned gathering in 2010. Plenty of other incidents have occurred where destructive or violent behavior by those claiming to act in the name of noble causes like “anti-racism” and “anti-fascism” have been overlooked or dealt with leniently by authorities convinced of the purity of their motives or restrained by political pressure.

The great irony presented by the Antifa is that despite all of their posturing as radicals and revolutionaries, they’re essentially doing the establishment’s bidding. The attitudes they subscribe to are not fundamentally different from those of the liberal elite overlords of the wider society. The Red Guards-on-tofu are simply a smellier, more ill-mannered, undisciplined, more in-a-hurry version of the liberal establishment itself. Wouldn’t it be an even greater irony if indeed the growing counterculture of the alternative right were to grow into a large influential movement as the leftist counterculture and antiwar movements did in the 1960s, with the Antifa and their ilk assuming the role of the “hardhats”?

Last week, I travelled to Providence College in Rhode Island, where I attempted to trick unsuspecting undergrads into believing that cognitive racial differences are real—and thus affirmative-action and “diversity” programs are bootless and destructive—by making crude appeals to… science.  At least, that’s what the foul-smelling “anti-fascists” with hoops through their noses claimed as they tried to disrupt my talk.

My trip was sponsored by the Providence College Republicans, in conjunction with Youth For Western Civilization. (YWC’s Tim Dionisopoulos, who organized the event, has a helpful recap here; as you can tell by Tim’s intelligent explication of my arguments, he’s no ordinary undergrad.)

The screenshot of me smiling and waving before a banner that read “Hate Not Welcome” pretty much sums up the antifas’ epic failure:

• They weren’t able to shut us down. Indeed, they slinked off after I made it clear that I didn’t take them seriously and would not cease my presentation.

• More important, on the video, they themselves appear like “fascist” stereotypes. Image is (almost) everything, and the image of last week’s event is of sloppily dressed thugs screaming obscenities at a calm, civil gathering of students.

I doubt that the One People’s Project, which instigated the protest, will be bragging about a great blow struck for social justice any time soon.

Affirmative action is the Orwellian name given to efforts to hire, admit, or otherwise promote people of certain racial or ethnic groups, merely because they belong to those groups. The name of this game derives from the notion that it actively helps people, i.e. it is “affirmative”, rather than harming people who belong to excluded groups. In the second edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, Character, and Other Lies (2010), Steven Farron traces the history, the excuses, the lies, and the deceit behind this form of racial discrimination.

The origins of the policy known as affirmative action (hereafter “AA”) lie in the Kennedy Administration, when incipient concern for the civil rights of Black Americans caused many in power to notice that Blacks were underrepresented in the universities, the professions, and in government. To most of them, inequality of outcome was de facto evidence of "discrimination"; there could be no inequality of ability or intelligence between races. In Daniel Moynihan's famous report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (1965), he wrote, “There is absolutely no question of any genetic differential: Intelligence potential is distributed among Negro infants in the same proportion and pattern as among Icelanders or Chinese or any other group.”

Yet affirmative action, as a policy if not a name, goes back further, and most definitely was motivated by the recognition that at least one group in particular possessed greater intelligence and ability to succeed in academia and in life. That group was the Jews. In the early years of the 20th century, Jewish admissions to elite universities rose greatly. By 1919, 40 percent of Columbia's students were Jewish, and for university administrators who wanted their institutions to retain their character, “radical steps had to be taken." And here lies the origin of non-academic criteria for admission to a university, in other words the doctrine of “diversity.” At this point, university admissions bureaucracies began their cancerous growth, since while it was a simple matter to screen students based on academic merit, it was not so simple to admit students seemingly on qualities like “leadership” or “character,” when in reality one wanted only to keep out a disfavored group.

Current AA policy relies on defining favored groups, and Farron ably dissects the absurdities of this practice. For instance, “Black” denotes anyone with at least one Black ancestor, and furthermore, bureaucrats are not allowed to override the self-description of any candidate for hiring, promotion, or admission. In other words, someone who says that he's Black (or Hispanic, etc.) must be taken at face value, no matter how absurd it seems. “Hispanic” was so defined as to exclude anyone with origins in Brazil, yet fully White Argentinians and Uruguyans fall into this category. Financial success is no impediment to becoming a recipient of AA either; a Black millionaire is eligible for preference over a poor White, and in fact most AA benefits go to the middle and upper middle class. It will not have escaped notice that while AA was meant to benefit victims of historical discrimination, not only have most Blacks alive today not experienced it--especially so when they come from the middle class-- but Hispanics have never been subject to slavery or Jim Crow, and have not even been a major presence in the U.S. until recently.

In the United Kingdom there is an over-paid and perfectly superfluous civil servant, Trevor Phillips, who earns his self-important living as the chief of the “Equality Commission”.

The Daily Telegraph reports that in a speech to be delivered before the Policy Exchange think tank,

he will argue that the phenomenon of subprime home loans, which led to the 2008 banking collapse, emerged because even wealthy black families could not obtain regular mortgages.

And that

“it's not a thing that the bankers and economists like to talk about, but the American financial crisis was precipitated at least in part by racial prejudice.

“Why were so many minority families taking these expensive loans?

Because discrimination left them with no choice.

“The rapid growth of the sub-prime market in the past decade probably owed more to the history of racial discrimination than any other factor.” [my emphasis]

And that

Racism did not cause the crisis … we would probably have faced a meltdown at some point even if all the loans had been to white folks. [my emphasis]

... there is no doubt that when the full story is unravelled we'll find that a racial factor did play a role in what happened. 

In other words, racist United States bankers are to blame for the credit crisis.

Now, my understanding is that where a racial factor played a part in the credit crisis was in the desire by a number of United States presidents, particularly Bill Clinton and G. W. Bush, to increase home ownership among Blacks and Hispanics. As it was pointed out in 2008,

To encourage broader homeownership, did not Congress amend the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 to require commercial and mortgage banks to lend to high-risk borrowers? Banks that failed to comply were hit with fines and faced rejection when they requested mergers and branch expansions. Suddenly the subprime mortgage business boomed, and Countrywide Financial became its poster child.

As usual, Mr. Phillips’ Emmental logic, treats inequality of outcome as synonymous with inequality of opportunity. If Blacks and Hispanics in the United States owned proportionally fewer homes, it was not because they were less productive and less financially reliable than the Whites, but because of White racism. And if Black and Hispanics produced less and were less reliable financially, it is because of White racism too. Never mind that it was White presidents pushing to boost Black and Hispanic home ownership.

Bankers are undoubtedly guilty, but they are guilty of greed, which drives them to prey on anyone, irrespective of race, creed, age, gender, disability, or sexual orientation. 

Mr. Phillips is worried about a disproportionate impact on ethnic minorities of the budget cuts being implemented by the coalition in its efforts to reduce the previous Labour government's colossal deficit. What he means by “disproportionate”, however, is not “out of line with ethnic minority averages” but “out of line with the White average”.

In other words, because on average Whites perform better economically, Mr. Phillips is requesting preferential treatment for minorities—preferential treatment he knows he is likely to get, because of White anti-racism. After all, that is why he is here, earning a fat living at British taxpayers’ expense, doing absolutely nothing useful, and even advising think tanks without feeling the need for solid research.

Cuts? I say shut down the Equality Commission and have Mr. Phillips get a job in the real world.

The Daily Mail reported the other day that British Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron is studying the possibility of imposing compulsory quotas for women in company boardrooms—a demand previously made by Labour’s Harriet Harman, and previously derided by the Conservatives while in opposition. Apparently, Mr. Cameron is drawing inspiration from Scandinavian countries, where companies are required by law to ensure that at least 40% of board members are women.

No mention has been made of exactly how this will improve operational efficiency, the quality of products and customer service, or profitability.

I have no problem with women in boardrooms if they are there for the right reasons—meaning, they are the most skilled persons for the job not currently employed elsewhere. But I do have a problem with the government, which knows nothing about my company’s needs, telling me whom I must hire and whom I must promote, to what positions, and how soon.

Having long known management consultants whose clients have been either among the industry leaders nationwide or prestigious multinationals (indeed, one of the consultants, now retired, worked for one of the latter), one certainly cannot dismiss the famed glass ceiling for women in management as pure feminist agitprop: although this is less the case nowadays, there has been, and there still is, a tendency among some to take women less seriously in corporate environments, and this has inevitably impacted on promotions. (If executive women are sometimes unpleasant, masculine, and abrasive, it owes as much to the need to be heard and be taken seriously as it owes to feminism. This would be consistent with social identity theory, which predicts that in conflict situations competing groups will grow to resemble each other, even if ingroup members’ perceptions of the outgroup come increasingly to exaggerate ingroup-outgroup differences, real or perceived. In a male-dominated environment, women competing for resources, and equipped with an adversarial group identity by the feminists, will inevitably adopt male tactics and characteristics.)

Having said this, however, and with the caveat that mediocrity and incompetence abound all the way up and down the corporate ladder, irrespective of sex, there are also women who do not deserve to be taken seriously, who are hypersensitive, and / or who, found lacking in efficacy and / or industry, exploit equality legislation to obtain undeserved advantage. And, more importantly, there are also many women who do not dream of being ball-busting executives: indeed, many are content to have economic autonomy, while others would rather be at home looking after their families.

The underlying assumption with quotas is that (a) every person has the same potential to do a job as well as any other given the same opportunities; and (b) when a person who is not a member of a protected category is not successful with a job application it is always unjustified, unless another member of a protected category has been successful instead.

Mr. Cameron’s brand of feminism cannot accept that women may tend to order their priorities differently from men, and that his may have contributed proportionally to different outcomes vis-à-vis the corporate ladder. As usual, inequality of outcome is equated simplistically with inequality of opportunity.

Were it not because the imposition of quotas is a zero sum game, where every person who is favoured by the quota system is another person who is displaced in turn, I would be thinking that this is not about equalising outcomes, but about maximising tax revenues: after all, more women in senior executive positions means more women in the high income tax bracket.

What is certain is that any quota system will result in less qualified women displacing better qualified men. Definitely not in every case, as there are many very talented women out there and many incumbents who do not deserve to be where they are, but it will definitely happen. And where this happens, the quality of the decision making at boardroom level will be lower, which will impact negatively on the entire organisation, and even the consumer.

Any quota system will also impact negatively on women, as those attaining boardroom positions will fall immediately under suspicion of being there because of the quota system rather than because of professional merit. You can well imagine the rage and frustration of a genuinely deserving woman executive—one who probably had to strain to be taken seriously—in the presence of sceptical male colleagues who will now, in addition, have reason to see her as an affirmative action beneficiary, rather than a fully qualified partner. And, in addition to undermining this women’s authority at the boardroom level, quotas will also undermine their authority among those directly below them, for the better-qualified men who were passed over for promotion will certainly not take their new woman bosses seriously. Some men, demoralised, may engage in passive aggression and reduce their output, possibly going on strike by doing exactly no more and no less than what they are paid to do, interpreting instructions literally and keeping strictly to the 9 to 5 schedule, even, or especially, when there is a crisis. Some may take a page from Hermann Melville’s novella, Bartleby, the Scrivener, and practice outright passive resistance. Other men, infuriated, may work double-time actively to undermine their new woman bosses.

Aware of this, women executives, whether at boardroom level or on their way there, will certainly notice and act accordingly. Quotas are likely to exacerbate an antagonistic climate of competitive nastiness.

This will be far from helpful when organisations are already rife with all manner of intriguers, sycophants, back-stabbers, opportunists, hypocrisy, deception, bruised egos, pettiness, and personal hatreds; and where there are plenty of free-loaders, time-servers, gossips, and blunderers who rise purely because of their adeptness at blame transferring and gluteal osculation.

As usual, feminism, rather than reconciling the sexes in a spirit of teamwork, drives a wedge between them and sets them at war with each other. This is not how the alternative Right would approach matters of sex and gender: over here we view the sexes as complementary, each endowed with their own unique skills and ways of doing and seeing things, but ultimately working in concert. Feminism is all about us-versus-them; it is a force of destruction and revenge, not a constructive effort towards synergistic harmony between the sexes.

And there is also the matter of free association. Supposedly, we enjoy it in our democratic society. In reality, we are often denied it: millions of people we do not want around us are imported or allowed in, with government collusion or sanction, and settled in our communities, making them, the high streets, and the transport system, far more unpleasant than it needs to be. And now, as employers, should Mr. Cameron go ahead with Labour’s idea, and should less-qualified women be promoted over better-qualified men to meet minimum government quotas, we will have to suffer annoying, odious, incompetent partners and directors on the boards of our companies, holding positions of immense responsibility, being paid large sums of money, and causing more headaches than it is worth, rather than the persons we would have chosen on the basis of merit, talent, and personality.

And what next? Previous experience suggests this is to be thin end of a wedge, which will open the way for further, and even more unpleasant, impositions; more quotas, to ensure the full spectrum of colour, creed, gender, age, IQ, disability, HIV status, and sexual orientation is uniformly represented in every area of private and professional life, irrespective of relevance or merit, without the option to choose whom we would rather work or associate with. So much for meritocracy and free association.

Perhaps the response will be greater automation, and the dispensing with of humans whenever possible, for fear of whom one may be forced to work alongside with. Perhaps the response will be emigration: many companies, fed up with the previous Labour government’s predatory tax code, relocated their businesses out of the United Kingdom, in favour of more fiscally amenable pastures. Perhaps the response will be outward compliance, followed by subterfuges and workarounds—subtle psychological warfare to force resignation of affirmative action beneficiaries in hopes that another, better candidate will fill their positions. Or perhaps the response will be a call for more women in coalmines, construction, and oil drills.

Personally, I would prefer a system and a culture based on merit and teamwork, where men and women contribute with their own unique perspectives and approaches to action in the effort solve the different problems in life. Whatever the wrongs of the past, quotas is not the solution.

Well before Labour’s seizure of power in 1997, I knew Tony Blair and Gordon Brown would be trouble. Even my most pessimistic forecasts were eventually exceeded by the dynamic duo. And now, in the six months following 13 years of heavy-handed Labour government, with the nation groaning under the iron heel of that miserable party, it is clear that under David Cameron’s coalition we are in for yet more of the same.

One of my great joys in life is watching the next clueless meme pop up and spread like wildfire.  The latest is that education reform is going to solve this country’s problems.  Newsweek hopes that “imposing standardized test-based accountability for schools and teachers and fostering competition among schools” will be the one area where Republicans will work with the Obama administration.  The villains in this narrative are the teachers’ unions.  Tom Friedman tells us that “countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class.”  More interesting is a recent Atlantic piece which points out America can’t use “the diversity excuse” to explain away our country’s failures.

These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.

Actually, the diversity excuse mostly applies to blacks, who are twelve percent of the population and the worst performers on standardized tests, and who have been speaking English (or something that resembles it) for three hundred years. Never mind that though...

So Hanushek and his co-authors sliced the data more thinly still. They couldn’t control for income, since students don’t report their parents’ salaries when they take these tests; but they could use reliable proxies. How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”

The closest thing America has to a bright spot is Massachusetts.

Is it because Massachusetts is so white? Or so immigrant-free? Or so rich? Not quite. Massachusetts is indeed slightly whiter and slightly better-off than the U.S. average. But in the late 1990s, it nonetheless lagged behind similar states—such as Connecticut and Maine—in nationwide tests of fourth- and eighth-graders. It was only after a decade of educational reforms that Massachusetts began to rank first in the nation.

What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school—a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy.

Standards for teachers!  Why didn’t anybody think of this before?  Actually, many people have, it’s just that objective tests for educators have been criticized for being racist. From the first edition of The Affirmative Action Hoax, pages 155-156.

...in the early 1980s, the three main American newsmagazines devoted cover stories to the scandalous performance of American teachers and prospective students on qualifying tests, thus recognizing that it was a vital national concern.  However, their stories hid from their readers that the cause was affirmative action university admissions and graduation.

Newsweek did not mention race at all.

Time’s article quoted ungrammatical, barely intelligible sentences written by American teachers and documented their terrible performance on qualifying tests.  It offered several explanations, one of which came close to the true one: “In Oregon, a kindergarten teacher who had been given As and Bs at Portland State University was recently found to be functionally illiterate.”  At one point, it carelessly included a parenthesis that disclosed how that could happen.  Pinellas County Florida, “required teacher candidates to read at an advanced tenth-grade level and solve math problems at an eighth-grade level.  Though all had their BA in hand, about one-third of applicants (25 percent of whites, 79 percent of blacks) flunked Pinellas’ test.”

U.S. News and World Report printed a selection of questions from the National Teacher Examination to show how risby easy they were.  It constantly blamed the problem on inadequate funding, and its cover showed a white teacher wearing a dunce cap.  But in two sentences in the last column on the last page, it mentioned, “In Florida, 84 percent of all those who took the exam last October passed.  However, only 37 percent of black students in education passed, which has raised concerns about worsening an already serious decline in the number of black teachers.”  Of course, it is exactly this concern that has prevented the use of legitimate qualifying tests.

Steve Sailer has pointed out before that quotas would be preferable to the kind of affirmative action we have in America because you could at least get the most qualified of each race.  But if liberals ever get their education reform and find that any test used will reveal the need to fire 80% of black teachers, the exam will be thrown out and even the white incompetents, of whom there are more than there are unqualified blacks in absolute terms, will get a pass.

Unlike most liberal shibboleths, perhaps the teachers matter idea has some truth to it (not as much truth as human biodiversity of course, but you have to start somewhere).  On the LSAT, used for law school admissions, and the GRE, taken by prospective graduate students, those who majored in education are consistently among the worst performers.  It’s not surprising that a profession dominated by unions attracts the least ambitious and capable people.

Whether liberals ever beat the teachers’ unions remains to be seen.  The opening shot in the war going on was this year’s mayoral race in Washington, D.C., where the main issue was school chancellor Michelle Rhee.  The Swipples were excited about school reform and thought they knew what was best for blacks, who themselves more sensibly understood that having the public education system as a jobs program was in their best interests.  If we’ve learned anything over the past forty years, it’s that our highly intelligent elite can usually get its way against the more numerous but passive and dimmer masses.  It’s just that on the issues of school prayer, immigration, affirmative action, etc. the Left had their secret weapon of moral certainty, due to the fact that the enemy was the wrong kind of white people.  We’ll see how quickly they lose their zeal when it’s their favorite victims who are standing in the way of their goals.  

MONTREAL — The Conservative government moved to allay concerns among ethnic groups Friday that their job prospects could be diminished by a move to eliminate an affirmative-action policy in the federal public service.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney held a late-afternoon conference call in which he fielded a battery of questions from ethnic media about the implications of a federal policy shift.

The government announced this week that it would review federal hiring policies and said it planned to scrap a practice where some jobs are reserved for minorities.

The Public Service Alliance of Canada estimates that such an exclusive policy applies to less than two-tenths of one percentage point of all federal jobs -- or 91 of the 5,000 posted in 2008.

Kenney assured reporters from different community media outlets that broader efforts to encourage minority hiring would otherwise continue.

"There's been some misunderstanding that we're somehow ending or questioning or throwing into doubt the broader affirmative-action program," Kenney said.

"That is not the case. We are merely encouraging the public-sector employers to ensure the principle of equality of opportunity."

~CTV News

 Healthy societies concern themselves with quality and recognize and reward their best citizens. Unfortunately, by doing the exact opposite, duplicitous Western society seems bent on undermining its own efficiency and effectiveness in an attempt to achieve a “just and equitable society.” Instead of focusing on hiring individuals based on education, skill set, and experience, the 410 federally regulated employers -- “private sector employers” that fall under federal jurisdiction -- and employers and contractors certified under the “Federal Contractors Programs” (which unsurprisingly includes many of the major universities in Canada) are encouraged to:

analyze their organizational practices to determine whether designated groups are underrepresented, and develop employment equity plans to lay out remedial policies where needed. A finding that certain groups are underrepresented should lead to the use of short term numerical goals for the hiring and promotion of persons in designated groups in order to increase their representation in each occupational group in the workforce.<<

In order to achieve this quantifiable goal of universal mediocrity, Canada implemented its own federally regulated version of Affirmative Action under the auspices of the Employment Equity Act, which specifically states that:

The purpose of this Act is to achieve equality in the workplace so that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability and, in the fulfilment of that goal, to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities by giving effect to the principle that employment equity means more than treating persons in the same way but also requires special measures and the accommodation of differences.

And in case their should be any doubt the act also states that:

“[M]embers of visible minorities” means persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour…”

This act, in conjunction with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, provides the legal backdrop against which it may become the norm (has it already?) for the federal government and their related employers to discriminate against people of European descent, especially males, in an attempt to increase the workplace representation of “historically marginalized” groups.

The Federal government has been pursuing an obviously anti-White and discriminatory policy in its hiring processes for certain jobs, and yet few Canadians seem to care. I am led to wonder what reaction we could have expected had it been reported that the government had been reserving 91 of 5000 federal jobs specifically for White males?

A time there was when the awarding of a title of nobility in European countries was intended as formal recognition of the recipient's service to the crown, to the country, or to the state. Under the feudal system, the honour was given in exchange for military service and was hereditary; but in modern times it has been given, at least in theory, as a very special life-time award by the state to a tiny handful of individuals deemed by it to have led a singularly meritorious career. That is why the process has been termed 'ennoblement' -- the implication being that these individuals are somehow noble and worthy of such appellation. For this reason, concommittant with the very exclusive privileges they obtain, ennobled citizens have added responsibilities, especially with regards to standards of conduct.

When Tony Blair's Labour regime seized power in 1997, the nobility as a system had long been on the wane, the aristocracy having been progressively stripped of its legal powers through successive reforms. All the same, the majority of the House of Lords prior to 2000 was in the hands of a hereditary aristocracy, which were largely Conservative members. During the late 1990s, Blair undertook his long-threatened 'reform' of the House of Lords with gusto and in a partisan fashion, determined, above all, to increase Labour's representation in the chamber (according to him and his supporters, it needed to be more modern and 'democratic'). While at it, he also undertook to multiculturalise this old institution, as it was too uniformly White and male for his liking.

Two beneficiaries of Blair's policy were foreign-born Muslims: Manzila Pola Uddin (from Bangladesh) and Amir Bhatia (from East Africa), who became Baroness Uddin and Lord Bhatia respectively. They joined Indian-born Swraj Paul, since 1996 Lord Paul, and a wealthy long-standing supporter of the Labour Party and of the man who most diligently ruined the British economy in the decades since World War II, Gordon Brown.

Having been ennobled under such extraordinary circumstances, one would have thought that their Lordships and Ladyship would have gone the extra mile to prove their worth. After all, does not aristocracy mean 'rule by the best'? 

Yet, how did they repay the British state for the honours it bestowed upon them?

By theft.

All three have been found guilty of misappropriating public funds through fraudulent expenses claims. 

Needless to say that they are not the only ones in Parliament who have been found guilty of misconduct. The Parliamentary Expenses Scandal of 2009 provided a most unedifying spectacle, with many of these peers' 'blood-and-soil' British colleagues also caught with their arms elbow-deep in the cookie jar -- essentially pickpocketing me and all other taxpayers.

All the same, it is still especially galling when individuals who were not even born in the country and who have been awarded high honours instead of worthier citizens, behave in such corrupt and dishonourable fashion.

All now face suspension from the House of Lords and have been asked to return the £200,000 ($300,000) they stole. But in a just world, they would be stripped of their peerages altogether: these are not individuals deserving to be called 'noble'.

Dr. Steven Farron, author of The Affirmative Action Hoax, joins Richard to discuss the real cost of racial preferences in admissions and hiring.

Farron's discussion of the competency of Black and Hispanic police officers, doctors, nurses, and teachers is truly shocking. 

The Affirmative Action Hoax's official website can be found here. A second edition will be published in the coming months by the New Century Foundation. The article referred to at the end of the podcast, "Prejudice Is Free, But Discrimination Has Costs," can be read in full here.  

You can subscribe to AltRight Radio on Apple's iTunes here. 

You are but one man. Yet you are reading this website, so you are likely to be computer-savvy, verbally capable, and highly politically motivated. You have read innumerable diagnoses and predictions of a gloomy future, many of them all too accurate. But amidst this abundance of prophetic reaction, you have also observed a distinct shortage of feasible plans of action.

We have a plan. We have begun doing something which is both perfectly legal and astonishingly effective. Here is how you can join us.

1. Get a government, media, or nonprofit job, ideally as a system administrator

2. Obtain emails and files demonstrating wrongdoing

3. Upload them to the Internet as an anonymous whistleblower

4. Only quit a few months later, well after the firestorm

To understand why your actions will be so devastatingly effective, we begin by acknowledging that America as we know it is not salvageable.