Kevin MacDonald

A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence andPersonality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media.

But it doesn’t seem to work that way. When it comes to a politically charged issue like the changeability of IQ, there is no necessary gradual path from being out in the intellectual deserts to acceptance among media and political elites.

I was thinking about that when I read Ronald Brownstein’s recent column, “King’s Echo: Why equal opportunity is now a competitiveness issue” (titled more appropriately, “Cashing the Civil Rights Check” in the print edition of the LATimes). The basic idea is that during the Civil Rights Era, the issue of equal opportunity was framed “in the soaring language of moral justice.” But now, with Whites becoming a minority, the rationale has changed: “The cause of providing an equal chance to all, which was historically framed as a question of fairness, has become an issue of economic competitiveness.” We need smart, educated non-Whites to fund Social Security and the rest of the federal behemoth.

After acknowledging that Blacks have made substantial advances, he deplores the fact that they haven’t caught up completely:

And yet the disparity between these groups and whites remains daunting. The median income for blacks and Hispanics is still only about three-fifths of the level for whites; the poverty rate for both is about twice that of whites. Perhaps most ominous are the continuing racial gaps in education. The share of blacks with four-year college degrees remains only two-thirds the level for whites; fewer than half as many Hispanic adults as whites hold degrees. That disparity helps explain why federal figures show that African-Americans still earn about 20 percent less in weekly wages than whites, and Hispanics make about 30 percent less.

For Brownstein, the obvious implication is that society (i.e., White folks) haven’t done enough to bring about equality. And that means more money for education. And that’s not all:

That isn’t just a matter of spending more money; it requires diligent education reform and finding more creative ways to compensate for the decline of the two-parent family, especially in the African-American community. Inevitably, it also means investment in schools, health care, training, and tuition aid for a diversifying future workforce that won’t meet international standards without it. Unless the nation honors that check, all Americans eventually will pay a price.

Notice that America has to “compensate” for Black family patterns–we have to adjust to the way they are rather than attempt to change their behavior. The problem is not Black teenagers having babies with no paternal involvement; it’s up to society to find a way to educate the children.

But when it comes to education, we have to move heaven and earth to change educational outcomes. This prescription assumes that Black educational achievement (unlike family patterns) is easily changeable if we just cough up the dough. It shouldn’t matter if a high school dropout has an IQ of 70. Her child would be able to be a rocket scientist if society just stopped being so racist and  provided more money for schools and the rest of his wish list.

Dream on!

Needless to say, Brownstein didn’t breathe a word about Arthur Jensen or anyone else in this line of research. No mention of the research showing that IQ and educational achievement aren’t so easily changed and that we simply don’t have such a technology.

It’s the same with the Israel Lobby. Despite the fact that academics with excellent credentials have shown that the Iraq war was the result of a campaign by the Israel Lobby and strongly identified Jews in the Bush Administration with close personal and professional ties to Israel, it’s rare indeed to hear such talk among elite politicians or read about it in the MSM.

Some things must be relegated to “extremism”–not fit for utterance by respectable people.

Perhaps there is some hope based on a recent paper modeling change of opinion. It found that if just 10% of a population strongly believes something and is impervious to opposed arguments, the population as a whole will swing to their position. It could be that race realism (and the ideas related to White identity and interests as well as beliefs that Jews are influential in ways that often are not in the  interests of Whites) are gradually percolating through the White population, soon to be followed by a tsunami of change.

We’ll see. But the problem is that the study didn’t model what happens when the current state of opinion is controlled by elites that are not open to opposing views; in the case of the American media this is at least partly because elite attitudes are intimately tied up with their perceptions of their own ethnic interests. That’s a tough nut to crack, although the Internet certainly provides an opening for skirting the MSM.

 

A very encouraging development is that the Israel Lobby is increasingly on the defensive with the Republican base. Both Ron Paul and Rand Paul have proposed cutting the foreign budget. A letter from Ron Paul was headlined “Stop buying friends overseas, save $6 billion!”

“Borrowing money from China — or printing it out of thin air — to hand out overseas in [an] attempt to purchase friends has been a failing foreign policy, as we see most recently in Egypt where there is not even a government in place!” Paul wrote in his Dear Colleague letter. “We should seek friendly relations and trade overseas, but we cannot justify lavish gifts to foreign leaders when American taxpayers are increasingly feeling the pain of our economic crisis…. We cannot afford to have ‘business as usual’ when we are bankrupt.”

The bill is not endorsed by the leadership and probably won’t pass, but “Paul’s amendment represents the rising tide of opposition to foreign aid and the increased difficulty of defending such aid in Congress.”

These calls to restrict foreign aid are framed entirely within the context of a completely out of control federal budget. But that hasn’t stopped the David Horowitz from his usual over the top craziness, painting anyone who doesn’t do everything Israel wants as an anti-Semite: “Ron Paul is a Vicious Anti-Semite and Conservatives Need To Wash Their Hands of Him.”

Long ago Bill Buckley drummed the anti-Semites out of the conservative movement, and the movement thrived as a result. But the Jew-haters have returned. For years the Texas crackpot, Ron Paul, has been attacking America and Israel as imperialist powers — the Great Satan and the Little Satan, and calling for America’s retreat from the battle against our totalitarian enemies. At the recent CPAC conference Paul’s Jew-hating storm-troopers swarmed the Freedom Center’s table to vent their spleen against Israel as a Nazi state. Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel  — the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States.

“Vicious anti-Semite”? “Jew-hating storm troopers”??

German Chancellor Angela Merkel caused a sensation recently when she stated bluntly that Muslim integration has “failed.” Despite the media controversy, Merkel was merely acknowledging a broad consensus in Europe, and one that crosses national and party boundaries. In Merkel’s Germany, for example, a recent survey found that 55 per cent of respondents think Muslims are a burden on the economy, and around a third believe that Muslims will “overrun the country.” Throughout Europe, Muslims live in parallel societies, and the dream of a harmonious multicultural future has little basis in reality. Thilo Sarrazin’s well-publicized book, Germany Does Away With Itself, pointed to the many shortcomings of immigrants (including low intelligence and educational achievement) and placed the blame for the failure to assimilate squarely on the Muslims.

Popular sentiment is increasingly on the side of those who would sharply curb immigration, particularly Muslims immigration. And the rise of European nationalist parties is certainly one of the more encouraging developments for White advocates. Times are changing.

Nevertheless, parties addressing these concerns still have a serious problem establishing their legitimacy. Opposition to immigration is the lightning rod of contemporary politics throughout the West and has been met with vicious opposition by the Powers That Be.

Indeed, it might be said without exaggeration that opposition to immigration and multiculturalism have defined a “no-go zone” for decades—beyond the pale of legitimate political discourse. “Far right” parties that challenge the consensus on these issues are typically seen by the elite media and the political establishment through the lens of conventional post-World War II moralism—as hearkening back to National Socialist attitudes of racial exclusion and superiority. Within this worldview, opposition to immigration and multiculturalism is immediately shrouded in the rhetoric of the Holocaust that has become the cultural touchstone of European civilization at least since the 1970s.

Steve Sailer has an important blog at VDARE.com quoting  from Russel K. Nieli’s essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. It’s no surprise that there is affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos: “To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”

Unfortunately, the authors lump Jews and non-Jews into the White category, but combining their results with what we know about Jewish admissions to elite universities yields some interesting results.

In a 1998 op-ed (”Some minorities are more minor than others”), Ron Unz pointed out “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” (See also Edmund Connelly’s take.)  A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. (Princeton had only 13% Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over 6 times the Jewish percentage in the population to around 10 times.)

From The Occidental Observer.

I heard Naomi Cahn and June Carbone talk about their book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture (Oxford, 2010), on Commie Radio Pacifica, so you can be sure there is a “progressive” message. As summarized in their op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, the idea is that families in Blue State America are thriving, while families in Red State America are failing because they are too hung up on old fashioned ideas like sexual abstinence.

There is an obvious dishonesty in this approach because it completely ignores race in the analysis in an effort to pin the blame on traditional sexual beliefs and customs. Blacks and Latinos who live in urban areas and in very Blue States exhibit high rates of teenage pregnancy, non-marriage, and dropping out of the education process — much higher than Whites in Red State America.

So what they are really trying to explain is variation in family patterns among White people. And there they have a point. Red State White America is in a crisis. (Indeed, it’s no accident that Red State America is where most of the much-commented-on White anger is coming from.) The data they are summarizing really relate to some of the correlates of education which are in turn linked to IQ. But we have known at least since The Bell Curve that higher IQ people not only are more likely to go further in the  educational system, they are more likely to have stable marriages, they don’t have babies outside of marriage, and they begin child bearing later. These people are more likely to live in large urban and suburban areas where there are jobs for educated people.

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberal? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Continued from Part I


In Commentary's symposium on Norman Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberal? historian Jonathan D. Sarna calls attention to the fact that "outside the United States liberalism is nowhere near so dominant a faith among Jews. In Israel, to take an obvious example, Jewish liberals and Jewish conservatives are fairly evenly matched."

Actually, Israelis who might remotely be described as liberal are a distinct minority -- the old Labor Party founded by Zionist socialists is on its last legs, accounting for only around 10 percent of the Knesset and functioning mainly to provide a fig leaf of respectability for the dominant ethno-nationalist Right.

Identification with the left is not a general characteristic of Jews; it is, however, a definite phenomenon within countries in the Jewish Diaspora, indicating that in searching for an explanation of the attraction of American Jews to the left, one must also look to this Diaspora experience in Europe and other European-derived societies.

Thankfully, Podhoretz does not try to explain the Jewish attraction to the left as resulting from a moral imperative stemming from the very nature of Judaism itself.

Under Discussion: Why Are Jews Liberals? By Norman Podhoretz. Doubleday (2009), 337 pages.

Norman Podhoretz is something of an anomaly. His entire life has been centered around his Jewishness, but he sees himself as an outsider in the mainstream Jewish community. He shares a great many of the attitudes typical of that community, but draws different conclusions about how to navigate the contemporary American political landscape in a way that's "good for the Jews."

One area where Podhoretz is absolutely mainstream among American Jews is his sense of history. The first half of his recent book, Why Are Jews Liberal? lays out his version of the "lachrymose" theory of Jewish history in Europe and America in which the Diaspora has been one long vale of tears since the beginnings of Christianity. Whether or not this view of history is correct, the important point is that this is how the great majority of Diaspora Jews see themselves and their history. (My view is that many outbreaks of anti-Jewish feelings result from our evolved ingroup/outgroup psychology.)

This lachrymose view has major implications for understanding contemporary Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora. It proposes that, beginning with an unfortunate theological belief (that Jews killed God), Jews have been passive, innocent victims of marauding non-Jews.