Zeitgeist

We have officially entered a Baudrillardian bizarro world. Put before us now is silent video of a seemingly sickly and impoverished man, who is apparently Osama bin Laden, seated in a ransacked apartment watching cable-news reports on himself as a grand anarcho-terrorist mastermind.

As Srdja Trifkovic mentioned to me in an interview that will be posted soon, the media and political establishment's story has changed so many times, and the evidence and explanations it has issued have been so strange and ambiguous,  it seems more likely than not that Osama was in fact killed by American special forces on May 2, 2011. If his death were fabricated, then the establishment would have surely concocted a more plausible and consistent description of events--and been able to keep its story straight. 

What actully happened is something we won't learn for years.

But still...wasn't Osama bin Laden supposed to be left-handed? 

It was hard not to get swept up in the recent royal wedding, despite the loathsome celebrification and tabloid vulgarity that accompanies it. As many of my friends have been emailing me this morning, along with the inherent seduction of grand ritual, here before our eyes was an overwhelmingly White crowd genuinely proud of being British.  

The idealized couple, moreover, instills in the people the conviction that marriage and fidelity is royal and beautiful, not a burden. And even if the Windsors are newcomers of German extraction, royal adulating connects Britons with a millennium of ancestry and tradition.       

On the other hand... a part of me views the event much as I’d view flag-waving Red State yahoos who never stop expressing their loyalty to a government that seeks to dispossess them.  

The situation is different in Britain, of course. Now bereft of aristocratic connections, Parliament essentially stands for liberalism: endless debate, legalism, and faux-representation. The monarchy is actually the more “democratic” institution in the sense that the sovereign subjects the people. As the more primal political institution--that which achieved dominion through right of arms--the monarch commands every prime minister to defer to his more fundamental right to rule.  

Via Reason:

Last week [January, 2011] a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Administration by Lee Paige, the DEA agent who literally shot himself in the foot with an allegedly unloaded gun while talking about firearm safety to a roomful of Florida children—right after announcing, "I'm the only one in this room professional enough . . . to carry this Glock 40." In a complaint he prepared on his own, Paige claimed DEA officials made him a "target of jokes, derision, ridicule, and disparaging comments," ruining his career as an undercover agent and motivational speaker, by releasing a widely viewed video of the 2004 incident. U.S. District Judge Jack Shanstrom said Paige had failed to present any evidence regarding the source of the video. Rather than celebrate a court victory for the DEA, let's just watch the video one more time.

While accessing a video about dinosaurs on the BBC Newsbeat, I came across another, which struck me as rather peculiar: Gemma Massey on Life as a Porn Star.

Silly me. There was I, expecting a grim tale of drugs, plastic surgery, and venereal disease, when I was treated, instead, to an upbeat feature about the joys of being an international porn star, in LA, complete with finger-snapping dance music, camera shutter sound effects, and dynamic editing.

It rather looks like a fashion feature or Hollywood report on a youth channel.

For two minutes we experience a 28-year-old female, disfigured by sun-beds, implants, peroxide, and Botox, talking about how she makes ridiculous amounts of money; has cars and houses and plastic surgery paid for at the click of a finger; and works subject to rigorous health and safety standards, much safer, really, than regular dating.

I would have expected this type of reporting from Channel 4, a slick multiculturalist organ that caters for middle class liberals and has a well-established track record of scabrous titillation in the guise of either youth entertainment or gritty or thought-provoking documentary.

This is the BBC.

It may be difficult for those overseas, unfamiliar with this once great British institution, to appreciate exactly how far the goalposts have moved, vis-à-vis present interpretations of providing a public service, so it is worth reminding ourselves of what the BBC used to look and sound like:

Bear in mind that the likes of certain well-known military historian would still consider that a degenerate version of the BBC as defined by Lord Reith, the corporation’s controller from the latter’s inception in 1927 until 1936.

Indeed, the BBC was set up by the British government as a public service (funded by tax-payers) and Lord Reith’s mission was to educate the audience through serious programming. He—and I have spoken to at least one person who remembers this—insisted that radio announcers wore dinner jackets while on air. Addressing the Empire was a considerable responsibility, and one had to rise to the occasion.

One now thinks of Lord Reith in his grave, and can only wonder at how many revolutions per second he spins.

The inequivocal message sponsored by the BBC in 2011 is that for a girl to have herself filmed naked, with genitals in full view and copulating with strangers for money, is a rather brilliant career choice: after all, even Massey’s parents decided that it was quite alright after she told them how much money she was making for relatively easy work.

In his hilarious, horrifying, and profoundly insightful short book The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis assumes the persona of a mid-level administrative demon in Hell instructing his cousin, a guardian Devil on Earth, in the myriad ways to steer his client down the slick and well-trod road to damnation. At one point, the infernal bureaucrat narrator exults at just how cleverly demonic propagandists have trained the foolish humans to be on guard against the very type of wrongdoing that is least likely to happen in a given era’s Zeitgeist:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic… Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to be slaves or tyrants, we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Currently, a fashionable outcry has arisen in chic circles against the sadly ubiquitous phenomenon known as “bullying.” While many people are, no doubt, sincerely opposed to wanton acts of cruelty and humiliation by the strong and well-placed against the weak and vulnerable, one must nevertheless be aware that taking a political stand against bullying is, at best, a bland, empty gesture, much like opposing drunk-driving, homelessness, child abuse, or pollution; worse, it is quite often a brazenly fraudulent stance, since bullies as such are in reality not the true target of most contemporary “anti-bullying” campaigns. Instead, certain political interest groups have hit upon the idea of characterizing their opponents as ipso facto “bullies,” simply because they have the temerity to oppose what is so obviously right and true (gay marriage, legalized abortion, or some other ideological hobbyhorse), which can only be a result of hateful and repugnant motives, the same kind of mean senior football jock to steal a puny ninth-grader’s lunch money and shove him in his locker.

One would be hard-pressed to imagine, for example, that a Christian evangelical coed who gets mocked and threatened by militant campus homosexuals for expressing her conservative values would ever be considered a victim of “bullying,” no matter how egregiously cruel the abuse she endures. Nor are crocodile tears shed for Whites who are viciously assaulted by Blacks, or for Catholics gleefully derided by Jews. No, the campaign against “bullying” is nearly always invoked solely when a “victim” group favored by the Left (Blacks, Jews, homosexuals) is seemingly wronged by the “oppressor” class (namely White heterosexual Christians).

James Kirkpatrick’s review of Atlas Shrugged’s long-in-coming film incarnation highlighted something that is often underlined by some libertarian economic commentators: the need to have a productive economy—an economy based on savings and production, rather than on indebtedness and consumption.

This was recently, if perhaps obliquely, highlighted by an unlikely source, the BBC, which on 15 February ran an article by Stephen Evans that attempted to answer Why the German and UK economies differ sharply?

The article began:

Compare and contrast, as they used to say in the exams.

The German economy grew by 3.6% last year and is expected to grow by more than 2% this year.

According to the latest figures, the British economy actually shrank in the last three months of 2010, although it is expected to grow by 2% in 2011.

In the UK, unemployment is rising. In Germany, it is falling. The British unemployment rate is higher than Germany's, and so too is the rate of inflation.

In Britain, trade is in deficit. In Germany, it is in sizzling surplus.

Drilling for growth

Trade is the key to the German recovery.

The country makes things that others want to buy - particularly in growing economies, and particularly in China.

The German economy currently meshes nicely with China's needs, such as machinery to industrialise. It is also good at providing China's wants, including BMWs for the new rich.

As Germany's Economy Minister, Rainer Brüderle, told the BBC: "We give the equipment to the world, to the virgin markets that need it and want it".

German industrialists make much of the strength of their manufacturing.

Dieter Burmester created and owns Burmester Audio Systems which makes very high-end amplifiers and speakers - the price tags say hundreds of thousands of pounds, euros or dollars, for the top of his range.

"I don't understand politicians who don't know the value of production", he says.

You can see German technology all over the world, very often from small companies.

The disaster in Chile with the mining workers? The drilling machinery was from Germany. Drilling a tunnel in Switzerland? The machinery comes from here.

"Many years ago, when some countries saw their future in service industries like I believe the British did, I wondered about it.

"The strongest economy you will have is when you have to deal with something concrete, and it's not just a number written on paper," said Mr Burmester.

Dependable products

He is a classic German engineer and entrepreneur.

His company is a typical example of the "mittelstand", that swathe of medium-sized, often family-owned firms which produce things, often of high quality, with much investment in research and design.

His product is handmade in Germany. The words are written on the back of every item in English, but there is much research and development behind it.

He is an unflashy engineer. Solid, but with carefully planned change, might be his motto.

"Solid" is the word that keeps recurring with the German economy.

For consumers, it translates as "save then spend".

Note the reference to the importance placed by the Germans on quality and design in manufacturing, and on manufacturing in Germany. Note also the implicit lesson in the different experiences resulting from the respective economic models: an economy based on transporting and selling low-quality, rapidly-obsolescing goods, hurriedly slapped together in Third World sweatshops by prognathous platyrrhines of photon-like brain mass, and bought with borrowed fake money at high interest, may initially lead to an influx of quick cash and a temporary illusion of wealth, but it eventually flounders, catastrophically, and takes longer to recover at a much greater cost.

In 1994, Constantin Film had a problem.  They possessed the film rights to the Fantastic Four but would lose them unless they made a movie right away.  They also did not have the budget necessary to create the kind of film required.

This was the solution:

The director and actors were paid low salaries and told that if the movie was not released to theaters, it would at least be used as a pilot for a television series.  The producers were lying—they had no intention of releasing the movie.  However, this cinematic abortion allowed them to hold onto the filming rights.

In 2005, Constantin Film made another Fantastic Four movie, this one starring Jessica Alba.  It had a budget of $100 million dollars.  Needless to say, the special effects were a bit more sophisticated.

The difference between 1994’s Fantastic Four and Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 is that they released this one in theaters.

The following is an installment in AltRight's ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

Much as with publicly burning Korans, no, dressing like a slut does not justify violence to one's person. That said, what I find most remarkable about these women is how angry they get by the mere suggestion that their actions might have consequences. 

One can be sure that the policeman who warned against dressing skanky has been put through the sensitivity-training ringer. If he were more honest, he might have instead suggested that the women avoid looking slutty around the Diversity that Canada and the City of Toronto have been assiduously importing over the past quarter century. Though saying such a thing might have brought everyone, including the officer himself, a little too close to a recognition of the contradictions of contemporary liberalism. 

YWC has published a hilarious catalog of some modern American icons: 

Where Are They Now?

Rodney King, the Jena 6, and the Duke Lacrosse stripper

By William Houston

One of my favorite hobbies for several years now has been keeping track of former "civil rights" celebrities after their fifteen minutes of undeserved media fame are over. It is an excellent way to demonstrate how political correctness has corrupted American journalism.

Everyone in America has at least a passing familiarity with these victims of White "racism," but few are familiar with their trials since then, which the mainstream media has refused to give the same amount of inordinate attention.

Where are these martyrs for "social justice" now?

Rodney King

Rodney King is my personal favorite: in the years since the Los Angeles riots, which led to the death of 55 people, King has been arrested for soliciting and having sex with a transvestite prostitute in Hollywood, beating his wife, multiple DUIs, vandalism, beating his own child, and indecent exposure in a public park while being high on PCP.

In 2003, King drove his car into a house after weaving through traffic and traveling at a speed over 100 mph. Two years later, he was arrested after threatening to kill his daughter and former girlfriend.

Don Lemon recently glamorized Rodney King in a CNN Presents special report called "Race and Rage: The Beating of Rodney King" to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the alleged "racist beating" of this scumbag.

King won a cool $3.8 million dollar settlement in his civil suit. He used the money to start a hip hop record label.

A month ago, Rodney King was stopped by the LAPD for erratic driving and was issued a citation for driving with an expired license. Twenty years later, Rodney King is still a threat to public safety.

Jena 6

The Jena 6 were six black students in Jena, Louisiana who in an unprovoked assault beat a White student named Justin Barker nearly to death in 2006. Al Sharpton marched on Jena with 15,000 to 20,000 supporters to protest the clear injustice that was done to Barker's black attackers.

The Jena 6 movement was hailed in the mainstream media at the time as "the first struggle of the 21st century Civil Rights Movement."

In 2007, Jesse Ray Beard was accused, convicted and sentenced for simple battery, simple criminal damage to property less than $500 and simple assault.

In 2008, Bryant Purvis was arrested for assaulting a fellow high school student in Texas.

Corwin Jones was arrested for trespassing and simple battery following an incident in which he struck a man from behind.

Also in 2008, Mychal Bell spat in the face of his female attorney and pushed her to the ground. He was arrested later that year for shoplifting, resisting arrest, and simple assault after trying to steal $700 worth of clothes from a Dillard's department store.

In 2010, Bell was arrested and charged with battery after punching someone who was "running his mouth" at a Jena barber shop.

Catrina Wallace, the sister of Robert Bailey, founder of "Organizing in the Trenches," and central organizer of the Jena 6 protests, was arrested in "Operation Third Option" in 2009 and was recently convicted on three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. She faces decades in prison.

Marcus Jones, father of Mychal Bell, is calling for a Justice Department investigation into the arrest and conviction of Ms. Wallace.

I’m proud to announce that one of my more popular articles at AltRight, “White Devils” (27 March 2011), has been reposted at the Huffington Post under the less euphonious title “The Racial Biases of Duke Hating” (23 March 2011).

Oh wait—HuffPo didn’t repost my article; it had it rewritten by a liberal journalist, Rob Kirkpatrick, who softened its edges. (I thank STDV for bringing this to my attention.)

To see what I mean, take Kirkpatrick’s opening paragraphs:

First, a disclosure: I'm a Duke Blue Devils fan. I didn't attend the university, and I've been told by someone from the South that I would have fit in better with the student body on the rival Chapel Hill campus than I would have with the one in Durham. (I think she meant that as a compliment, and as a lifelong state-school guy, I take it as such.) But I can't help it; I simply enjoy watching Mike Krzyzewski's team win year after year by playing disciplined, fundamentally strong basketball while avoiding the showboating and individual-over-team play, not to mention the NCAA violations, that often mar the college game.

And as a Duke fan, I've become quite familiar with Duke Hating, a favorite pastime of fans of pretty much every other college team in the country. I've heard all the reasons why we should hate Duke: Duke is to be hated for its success -- though, for some reason, we need not hate other winning programs like UCLA or North Carolina. Duke is to be hated because it's a private school -- though, for some reason, not other private schools like Syracuse or Wake Forest. Or the four-time national champions are to be hated because they're perpetually "overrated" and "get all the calls" -- something that has yet to be quantified, but which seems to stem from a fuzzy conspiracy involving the referees, the Selection Committee, Dick Vitale, and, I think, Oswald's ghost. (For a good piece on the history of Duke hating, see Mike Kline's column for Bleacher Report.)

Duke has been this generation's most successful men's college team, so haters come with the territory. But what's increasingly disconcerting is the racial element that often seems to be at the heart of antipathy toward Duke. Over the past two decades of Duke dominance, the haters have had one thing conspicuously in common: The slick-dishing Bobby Hurley? Hustling overachiever Steve Wojciechowski? Sharp shooter J.J. Reddick? Duke haters especially hated these guys. Yet you almost never heard the haters go after a Grant Hill or a Chris Carrawell or a Nolan Smith. It's been the white players at Duke who've usually drawn the most venom... especially from white fans.

Now read my opener:

There is no college basketball team more hated and reviled than the Duke University Blue Devils. Books have been written on the subject; websites are devoted to it. Simply mentioning the names "Christian Laettner," "Bobby Hurley," "J.J. Redick," or "Danny Ferry" in the wrong place evokes sneers, jokes about high shorts, claims by some that they could take each of these men in a fight, and crude accusations of homosexuality.

It's hard to imagine another college team generating multiple Top Ten Most Hated Players lists, or being trashed on the Gawker family of websites. Even the cloying and sleazy John Edwards was willing to announce publicly during his first presidential campaign, "I hate Duke Basketball."  

Duke can inspire love, too, of course, and a large fan base made up mostly of people who have no real connection to the school. (Up until I actually attended grad school at Duke, I was one of these, having been a quiet but sincere fan since watching Christian Laettner sink "The Shot" against Kentucky in the '92 NCAA regional finals.) ESPN's generous coverage of the Blue Devils speaks to these vicarious Dukies, but also to the millions who love to hate.   

For me, the source of Duke Hate has always been rather obvious ... and unmentionable.

Yes, it has a lot to do with the team's famed "Tobacco Road" rivalry with the formidable North Carolina Tar Heels, whose Chapel Hill stomping grounds is a mere 15-minute drive on 15-501 from Duke's faux-Gothic campus. While UNC is a genuinely Southern place (or at least used to be), Duke is an institution for transplants, a school mockingly known as the "University of New Jersey at Durham." And while Chapel Hill is full of wine-and-cheese liberals, Duke undergrads are imaged as an army of mini-Gordon Geckos and overachievers... a stereotype that's not altogether inaccurate. In the only event of its kind I've ever heard of, after Duke lost the 1999 Championship Game to Connecticut, tens of thousands of Carolina fans poured out onto Chapel Hill's Franklin St. to celebrate and get drunk. This rivalry is intense, to be sure, but Duke Hate is much bigger.

Certainly, a lot of Duke Hate derives from Coach Mike Krzyzewski's success, his three National Titles and winning percentage over .750. Whenever Duke loses a regular season game on the road, more often than not, the opposing fans flood the court as they'd just won a title. But resentment alone can't explain the intensity of Duke Hate. Few people truly loathed UNC's legendary coach Dean Smith, whose exploits equal Krzyzewski's.    

A lot of Duke Hate, no doubt, comes from a certain "preppiness" associated with its players... a quality that was put into stark relief in the '92 Championship Game, when clean-cut Duke went up again Michigan's "Fab Five" freshman, who had pioneered the hip-hop look of bald heads, baggy shorts, black sneakers and socks, and street-ball style.  Laettner would latter describe them as "real loosy-goosy," which they were.

But this "preppiness" charge has alwats seemed to me like a euphemism for what really bothers people about the Blue Devils -- during Coach K's tenure, his teams have been majority white, and with some notable exceptions like Grant Hill and Johnny Dawkins, Duke's most beloved/hated players have been Euro-Americans. People love to hate the Dukies because they stand as a flagrant violation of the trajectory of college and professional basketball over the past 30 years. Duke is white, they play white, and they win.

The two articles are strikingly similar in tone and rhetoric.

Now, I’m not making plagiarism accusations. I don’t believe in the concept of “idea theft,” at least in the context of journalism (on some level, we are all second-hand dealers in ideas.) And Kirkpatrick develops these ideas on his own (though, in my opinion, in an inferior fashion); he also adds some anecdotes from the past year that support the general thesis.

That said, when I googled “Whiteness” + “Duke Basketball” today, "White Devils" is the first and third listings on the front page. “White” + “Duke Basketball” puts my article second and fifth.  Sure, Kirkpatrick could have come up with these ideas on his own… But it’s highly likely that he would encounter my article while doing even cursory research; and quite frankly, it’s dishonest of him not to link to it. I guess that’s life, when you’re among The Damned.

Steve Sailer has had similar experiences reading the editorial page of the New York Times:

One of the eerier feelings for me is to start reading a New York Times op-ed and realize partway through that the columnist is engaging in an argument with me, even though I'm not named. That happens several times per year with David Brooks's NYT columns. (I've been told on trustworthy authority that he is a regular reader, so I'm not just being paranoid here.)

A moderate amount of his stuff seems to be either echoing or arguing with me, (The last time Brooks mentioned my name in the NYT back in 2004, he got a lot of grief from the commissars about it.)

Without the Secret Decoder Ring, it's often hard to figure out what Brooks is talking about. … [H]is September 2007 column on "The Waning of IQ" … makes no sense at all except under the presumption that NYT subscribers are regular iSteve readers who are almost persuaded by my work. …

My impression is that Brooks finds my work highly persuasive, but also highly troubling, both from an ideological and career perspective. So, he sometimes seems to be groping around for some way to refute me, but all without mentioning my name. Thus you end up with weird columns that are structured like this:

1.    The conventional wisdom is [something that only iSteve readers would dare imagine].

2. But, the latest research actually shows that this [utter heresy] isn't quite the sure thing everybody [i.e., my readers, not NYT subscribers] assume, and the reality is [pretty much what politically correct people everywhere assumed all along it was].

As I mentioned, Kirkpatrick adds some interesting details to the mix, including a couple that make one believe that Duke Basketball is, most definitely, Stuff Black People Don’t Like. (Indeed, White basketball players might fall into this category.):

The day after last year's classic championship game between Duke and Butler, ESPN's Rob Parker and Skip Bayless spoke about the unusual number of white players in the game, which boasted (gasp!) five white starters. The Hated vs. The Hoosiers had more than lived up to its billing in showcasing two teams playing tough, smart basketball in a closely fought battle that came down to the last shot as Duke squeaked out a 61-59 victory. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best title games of all time. The nation's First Fan, President Obama, was inspired to call both teams in their locker rooms to congratulate them. But in the context of this discussion of the game's "whiteness," Parker labeled this one-for-the-ages final as being one of the worst NCAA championships ever. Not content with that statement, he added that if Butler -- the mid-major team with two Academic All-Americans that had captured the hearts of every non-Duke fan along with at least one Duke fan in yours truly -- had won the game, they would have been the worst championship team ever.

His synopsis seemed a pretty clear code for racial preference: Parker didn't like how these white guys played the game.

In “White Devils,” I mentioned that in the early ‘90s, Duke’s clashes with UNLV and Michigan were almost civilizational: Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley battled “the Forces of Darkness,” as Will Blythe put it—two teams that were all Black, that featured players laden with NCAA-rules violations and suspect academic records, and that pioneered the angry, thuggish, baggy-shorts, shaved-head, street-ball style that has come to define the college and professional games.

As Paul Kersey notes in his retrospective on Michigan’s “Fab Five,” the NCAA’s and NBA’s collective decision to go “all in” on Black players has been a pyrrhic victory. In their time, the Fab Five, and other gangsta athletes, made college basketball “cool.”  Over the long term, the preponderance of tattooed and surly freaks on the court has made the professional game all but unwatchable for White fans. (The NFL has always benefited from the fact that its players wear helmets and face-masks.) The NBA was some 370 million dollars in the red in 2009-10 and has lost over a billion dollars in the past five years. In a desperate attempt to increase revenue, the league is now going after the Hispanic market, doing things like putting “los” in front of the team’s nicknames.

At any rate, Kirkpatrick notes that the in the early ‘90s, the players were well aware of—indeed, motivated by—the racial aspects of the Duke vs. UNLV and Duke vs. Michigan match-ups.

In his self-produced documentary for ESPN on his old "Fab Five" team at Michigan, Jalen Rose made a pointed statement about the team that drubbed his Wolverines by 20 points in the 1992 title game: "I hated Duke and I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms."

When later pressed to expand upon his comments, Rose explained, "Certain schools recruit a typical kind of player whether the world admits it or not. And Duke is one of those schools. They recruit black players from polished families, accomplished families. And that's fine. That's OK. But when you're an inner-city kid playing in a public school league, you know that certain schools aren't going to recruit you. That's one. And I'm OK with it. That's how I felt as an 18-year-old kid."

In a response published in the New York Times, former Duke and current NBA star Grant Hill effectively rebuked Rose's words: "In his garbled but sweeping comment that Duke recruits only 'black players that were 'Uncle Toms,' Jalen seems to change the usual meaning of those very vitriolic words into his own meaning, i.e., blacks from two-parent, middle-class families."

What interests me more than all this is the asymmetry one sees across college basketball: White college basketball fans who cheer on Black teams. Discomfort over this, in my view, is the origin of Duke Hate. Put simply, White fans hate and resent Duke because, deep down, they wish their team looked like the Blue Devils.

Whether I’m right about this or not, it is sad to report that there’s reason to believe the grand Laettner-Hurley-Ferry-Reddick-Wojo tradition might be coming to an end. Duke’s current freshman class is three-fourths Black, as is its 2012 recruiting class.

Could it be that in the wake of the Lacrosse case—or rather in the wake of the administration’s creation of various “anti-racism” initiatives in respond to a hoax—might someone have pressured Coach K to change the complexion of Duke Basketball? This is pure speculation, on my part, though it’d hardly be out of character for today’s academic establishment. Only time will tell.

And there’s always BYU!