Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzhock Adlerstein write:
There is no gene for hatred. Youngsters learn it from others—from parents and peers; from sermons and social media. So Americans would do well to heed calls to oppose hateful barbs aimed at our Muslim neighbors.
It also follows that officials should be vigilant about attitudes of refugees seeking to emigrate to the United States. The Syrian people are trapped in a black hole of civil war, a criminal regime, wholesale slaughter and ISIS barbarity. The world has witnessed a desperate exodus with migrants and refugees literally washing up on mostly European shores. Here in the U.S, the President finds himself caught in a fierce debate with critics demanding that we know more about each applicant, lest there be ISIS operatives amongst them. Others object to questions visa applicants are asked, including: “Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?” Clearly, the entire vetting system needs a reboot.
A good place to start is in understanding the values the American-wannabees carry in their luggage.
Syria, before its descent into chaos, formalized a twelve-year educational system in 1967. Despite the secular tendencies of the Baath Party that controlled Syria for the last half-century, it included mandatory religious education. An overriding goal was convincing the majority Sunni population that the small governing Alawite sect were also good Muslims. The religious education incorporated by the Ministry of Education hewed to a strict – albeit not fundamentalist – Sunni interpretation, to the exclusion of all others.
Only a small number of studies of Syrian textbooks have been published, although they stop around 2003. Nonetheless, they give us a good picture of what Syrians who may soon be our neighbors were taught for decades.
According to one of the most cited studies, Prof. Joshua Landis at University of Oklahoma found that the Syrian textbooks do not malign Christians, unlike those of other Arab countries. However, Jews – not Israel – are singled out for contempt and extermination. A tenth grade text book teaches: “The logic of justice requires the application of a single inescapable verdict on the Jews; namely, that their criminal intentions be turned against them and that they be eliminated.”
All other religions are treated even more poorly. Landis’ summary: “Islam accepts only two choices for pagans [i.e. disbelievers, or members of any religion other than those that revere the Bible]: that they convert to Islam or be killed.”
Do attitudes of intolerance affect behavior? In a recent interview with La Stampa, Syed Farook, the father of San Bernardino mass murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, spoke of his efforts to convince his son that taking up arms was not necessary. His message to his son was hardly a model of tolerance and understanding. “Certain problems disappear on their own,” he said. “In two years Israel will not exist anymore. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there anymore. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine.”
Do attitudes determine behavior? Not always. But we owe it to ourselves to learn as much about pervasive attitudes in other societies, and figure out their impact on any candidate seeking admission to the US.
How much faith do you place in the U.S. government figuring this out? I have none.
When it comes to Israel, Dennis Prager wants to keep it a Jewish state. Mar. 24, 2014, Dennis's questions to his guest Caroline Glick revealed his concerns:
* "Everybody thinks one-state is the end of the Jewish state."
* "On what do you base that? Why have we been fed the wrong [demographic] figures all these years?"
* "If the [demographic] numbers had not been false, you would not be advocating the one-state solution?"
* "[Her book] is primarily based on what she contends are the real numbers of Jews and Palestinians in the area west of the Jordan river, west of the state of Jordan, and if everybody was in one state, there would still be a two-thirds Jewish majority."
* "The notion of a Palestinian state would end… What's in this for a Palestinian?"
Caroline: "Full civil rights. Freedom. Everything."
Dennis: "Everything but their own national expression."
"What do you say to having millions of people in your population who want to annihilate your state?"
Caroline: "We're talking about three million people and a lot of them do but what can you do? You have to prevent them doing that… I don't understand why we should have sympathy for aspirations of people whose aspirations are based upon negating us and destroying us."
Dennis: "Having within your population millions of people who loathe you and feel they were cheated out of their own national expression, you don't worry about that?"
Yet, when it comes to America, Dennis has long supported mass immigration and he has expressed no interest in maintaining a majority population of whites and a dominantly white culture (even though it was whites who created the United States of America). Echoing Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager has often said he is "more afraid of what America will do to immigrants than what immigrants will do to America."
Jan. 9, 2014, Dennis said: "It's a nation of immigrants. The difference is us, not them. We tried to Americanize them then."
Au contraire, wrote Steve Sailer in 2004:
But look at Europe. Its experience proves that the different immigrant approaches of the host countries matters less than what the immigrants bring with them…
Finally, the French have traditionally tried to do with their immigrants almost exactly what the neocons recommend here: cultural assimilation, education in civics theories, monolingualism, meritocracy, separation of church and state, and all the rest…
Officially, France is what the neocons say America is: a "Proposition Nation" defined by adherence to ideological concepts rather than by descent. Indeed, the American and French "propositions" are basically identical…
But they've failed miserably with their huge North African Muslim population, which now makes up somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population. (The French are so neocon that they refuse to count by ethnicity.)
Indeed, this French neocon philosophy probably can't survive the impact of the Muslims. France's Muslims are now so poor and hostile that the most dynamic political figure, the center-right Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (himself the son of aristocratic Hungarian immigrants), has called for France to junk its tradition of equality under the law and institute affirmative action for Muslims.
Similarly, Brazil, despite its endless boasting about having no race problem, recently imposed racial preferences.
The trend in France, and Brazil, follows Sailer's Law of Quotas:
"In the long run, ideology is irrelevant; instead, there will be affirmative action if at least one politically significant ethnic group is well below average in competitive ability."
What Mexicans in particular and Latin Americans (outside of Cubans) have done in general in America mirrors their low achievement in their native lands. Edward S. Rubinstein wrote in 2004:
A new study by the United Way of Los Angeles finds that 53 percent of the city's adult population—3.8 million people—are functionally illiterate. [United Way, Literacy@Work: The L.A. Workforce Literacy Project, September 2004.]
The percentage soars to 84 percent in heavily Hispanic south L.A., dropping to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley.
When we last checked, only 41 percent of Los Angeles' population was foreign-born. Thus the illiteracy problem in that city is not limited to immigrants. Many of their U.S.-born children must also be functionally illiterate.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about half of hispanics in America are basically illiterate, and the problem is getting worse. "Among Hispanics, the percentage with Below Basic prose literacy increased 9 percentage points between 1992 and 2003…" By contrast, only 7% of whites and 24% of blacks are this illiterate.
Oct. 5, 2010, Dennis wrote an open letter to American hispanics. Though for high rates of legal immigration, Dennis said: "No country in the world can allow unlimited immigration. If America opened its borders to all those who wish to live here, hundreds of millions of people would come in. That would, of course, mean the end of the United States economically and culturally."
Hispanic-Americans, along with blacks, are located primarily at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. They consume more government services than they pay for in taxes and it seems to be in their group interest to vote for higher taxes and more welfare. By contrast, it is in America's group interest to restrict such immigration.
Prager's pro-immigration position is closer to the neoconservatives (William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, etc) than to the conservatives such as Steve Sailer:
The neocons argue that immigrants should be admitted based on their current—or eventual —assent to the propositions underlying the United States government, such as “All men are created equal.” But the neocons have failed to answer numerous questions about how their philosophy would work…
President Bush has asserted that most Iraqis share our fundamental political values. If that’s true of the furious Iraqis, who are notorious even among other Arabs for self-destructive lunacy, then how many billions of other foreigners qualify to move to America?
And exactly whom would the propositionists keep out, other than the most fanatical Muslim fundamentalists? With the exception of a handful of refugee dissidents, the vast majority of immigrants to America are in it for the money and are willing to mouth whatever platitudes would be required to get in.
Finally, there’s an insidiously Jacobin implication to propositionism. If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving in them make thought criminals like you and me?
Ultimately, propositionism seems less like a well thought-through philosophy and more like ethnocentric nostalgia, an intellectualized exercise in ancestor-worship. Emotionally, the neocons abhor asking tough questions about today’s immigrants because they see that as the equivalent of asking tough questions about their own Ellis Island immigrant forebears and, thus, about themselves.
Internet poster Stephen T. wrote about Prager to Lawrence Auster Nov. 24, 2006: "If his wife needed some chores done while he was out of town and told him she intended to go to a street corner and randomly hire a Mestizo Mexican day laborer in the country illegally to work around the house with her in his absence, he would feel completely relaxed and have no worry whatsoever about her safety. However, if she said she was going to hire an American man to do the same thing, Prager said he would greatly fear for her well-being."
Auster replied: "That is one sick liberal. He has not even read in the papers of the endless series of rapes and murders of white Americans, not to mention lesser crimes, performed by Mexican and other Hispanic illegal aliens, including murders of their white employers?"
Another poster replied:
Dennis Prager…has a deeply heartfelt, emotional investment in believing that, while Americans are turning their backs on “conservative values,” there is somewhere else on the face of this earth a superior “other” culture—a simple, pious, goodhearted folk, who will work as servants for his family for practically nothing and who embody the old-time values he reveres… When reminded of the rampant corruption, immorality, violence, and cruelty which these same Mexicans have created in abundance in their failed, backwards country of origin, Prager typically excuses it all as entirely the accidental quirks and flukes of a broken political system—having nothing to do with any sort of cultural or societal ills of Mexicans at large. I live in Los Angeles and I also know where Dennis Prager lives: it’s an outlying, heavily private security-guarded community nowhere NEAR any of these “other” people whose values he supposedly admires so much. His kids have all attended exclusive private schools (not the LAUSD, with its Mexican-style 60% dropout rate) and I doubt Mr Prager socializes with many of the working Americans he delights in seeing downgraded from middle-class status to the level of third world peasants.
Internet poster "Gary M." wrote to Lawrence Auster in 2008:
Prager interviewed Michelle Malkin a number of years ago on his radio show about her book,Invasion. At one point, Malkin became so distressed by what she was hearing from him, that she stopped and asked, “Mr. Prager, do you even believe we should have a southern border?”
…Prager seldom, if ever, has anything but gushing praise for immigrants of the Mexican variety. He says he favors a border fence, but… he is one of these people who also supports a huge increase in legal immigration to go along with any reductions a fence might provide in illegal immigration.
On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis said: "Why is the [American] latino population so left of center? Because they left countries whose culture is big government. We have not taught them. We haven't taught anglos, or the people who have been here the longest — blacks. We haven't taught anybody what American values are, so why would we expect a latino to be in favor of a small government United States?
"They have not asked the question — why is America prosperous and Mexico not? And El Salvador not? Guatemala not? Nicaragua not? Colombia not? Why?"
To Dennis, the answer is simple — values. Jan. 3, 2014, Dennis said: "Latin America is the greatest enigma in the world. The most exhilirating people as a rule. You can't go to Latin America and not fall in love with the people. The sum is worse than its parts. They produce terrible governments and terrible ideas and an inordinate number of terrific people."
Latin America does not produce ideas. It borrows them from westerners. Steve Sailer wrote:
For his encyclopedic Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Peter Watson interviewed 150 scholars from around the world about who was responsible for the great innovations. Watson recounted that "…all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note."
Latin Americans tend to under-achieve — both inside and outside of Latin America — their IQs (Venezuela's average IQ is 84, Mexico's 87, Brazil's 87, Colombia 89, Chile 90, Argentina 96 while the United States is 98).
Sailer wrote in 2005: "Latin American politics was long dominated by imported ideologies, such as Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s and laissez-faire in the 1990s. They were largely irrelevant because none of them dealt directly with Latin America's essential political problem: the enduring racial conflict originating in the Conquest of a half millennium ago."
Sailer wrote in 2006: "Latin Americans do the worst on school achievement tests relative to their IQs than any other large group of people. Some of that is cultural — Mexicans, especially, don't like to read and don't like to go to school…"
Sailer wrote in 2005 about American Hispanics, noting "a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics…"
Mar. 26, 2014, Dennis said: "Why did North America prosper and South America did not? In North America, they had private property. In South America, it went back to the king. The state was gigantic in South America and the individual was gigantic in North America and that's the difference to this day."
"Why is America prosperous and El Salvador not? The answer to that will explain everything. That is the Republican/Democrat divide. It's not the people. Your people are as bright and industrious as ours. It can only be the values. People from Latin America bring the values of Latin America to the United States and there is a receptive community that shares those values — the left."
"It used to be that when people came to this country, they didn't have those [leftist] values. They came to America and they knew, wow, this country is prosperous. I want to be prosperous. So therefore I am going to go into business and I will make a first generation business and I will work 18 hours a day and then my children will be prosperous. And that's exactly what happened, whether you were an Italian immigrant, a Russian immigrant, a Jewish immigrant. But now it's different. Values are brought that have a receptive audience. The more that latino immigrants decide to exalt the individual, the worse it is for the Democrat party."
On May 16, 2006, the AP reported: "With guns drawn, plainclothes police in a suburb of South America's largest city stopped and frisked motorists in a hunt for gang members who set off a five-day wave of violence that left at least 133 dead by Tuesday."
Sailer headlined: "Ahh, the Sweet Life in Latin America!"
He continued: "Real life is making the Brazilian gangster cult film City of God look like Sesame Street."
"I can't wait for the Senate immigration bill to pass so we can start importing more Latin Americans."
Why do civilizations decline? Rushton described one 19th Century theory:
The character of a civilization was determined by the traits of the dominant race, often created by the union of several related tribes. If wealth grows, cities develop, and an international society forms. Among the new arrivals are persons belonging to ethnic taxa that have never initiated a civilization. Degeneration sets in and the intrinsic worth the people originally possessed becomes lost, for the population no longer has in its veins the same quality blood with which it began. (Race, Evolution and Behavior, pg. 274)
Jan. 28, 2014, Dennis said: "How could blood have culture? That's pure racism. That's what the Nazis believed."
"I have never found blood important. I have always believed love and values infinitely more important than blood or sperm or egg. I'm always amazed by people who live in the modern era and have such primitive beliefs."
"I don't say genes have no impact on the way people behave. I think genes are significant. I'm talking about blood. Blood and genes are not the same thing. I want my children to have my values. I don't care if they have anything biological about me."
"Everything in life is ultimately values. That's all that matters… Do you fight for the good versus the bad? Race is one of the least significant things in the human species, up there with shoe size."
Prager's distinction between "blood" and "genes" makes no sense. Genes determine a man's blood. Blood is just one of many reflections of genes. A single gene, for instance, determines the ABO blood type. According to Wikipedia: "Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. All organisms have genes corresponding to various biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type…"
Gene Expression wrote:
The median IQ of European peoples is now listed as 99, and this mostly holds for rich countries in the North and poor ex-Communist ones in the East, as well as white Americans, Australians, etc., and whites in six different Latin American nations.
In World on Fire Amy Chua describes the relationship between economic status and "Indian-blood" throughout Latin America: "Latin American society is fundamentally pigmentocratic: characterized by a social spectrum with taller, lighter-skinned, European-blooded elites at one end; shorter, darker, Indian-blooded masses at the other end…" (p 57).
As an example she describes her experience in Mexico: "Almost without exception the Mexican officials, lawyers, and business executives we dealt with were light-skinned and foreign educated, with elegant European names. Meanwhile, the people doing the photocopying and cleaning the floors were all shorter, darker, and plainly more "Indian- blooded." While considerable social fluidity exists in Mexico, it is also true that lightness of skin correlates directly and glaringly with increasing wealth and social status." (p 59)
The trends Chua observes within Latin American countries also appear to operate between these countries, with countries with mostly European populations, like Chile and Uruguay, being the most economically developed and countries with largely Amerindian populations, such as Bolivia and Ecuador being the least economically developed. Coblogger emeritus Godless Capitalist once compared 12 South American countries and found a correlation of .96 between GDP-per-capita and percentage of the population that is white.
Lynn's data confirms this general picture with intelligence as well. Both with between country differences (e.g. Uruguay (96) and Chile (99) score like European countries, while Ecuador's IQ scores range within the 80s), and within country differences; to use Chua's Mexico as an example, last year Lynn tested a representative sample of 920 in Mexico with the Standard Progressive Matrices and found that whites had an IQ of 98, Mestizo (mixed race) 94, and Native Indians 83 – all compatible with Chua's observations of a "spectrum" of "social status" by amount of "Indian-blood".
On Nov. 14, 2013, Dennis Prager said: "Importing people, large numbers of whom don't share your values, is not a good answer for these [European] countries."
If the values of big government are the problem, how come big government societies like the Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway are prosperous? And when Scandinavians move to the United States, how come they prosper while fourth-generation Mexican-Americans do not? How come 65% of American Jewish adults over 25 graduate from college and 50% of Asians, 30% of non-Hispanic whites, 18% of blacks and only six percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans (with similar statistics for other good things in life like wealth, health, credit worthiness, which largely fall in accord with IQ scores)? Perhaps big government has less to do with it than human capital.
Dennis has historically spent more time on his radio show talking about adultery than about immigration (the index to his books Think A Second Time and Still the Best Hope contain no entry for "immigration" nor is the topic ever tackled in Prager's 16 years of publishing a personal journal) even though the human capital of a country will have more effect on its welfare than 99% of political legislation. You won't find many prosperous countries, for instance, where the average IQ is under 90.
In 2013 and 2014, Dennis opposed immigration reform aka amnesty because it would predominantly legalize immigrants from Latin America "with left-wing values" who were unlikely to vote Republican. (Feb. 4, 2014)
All things being equal, notes the book Race, Evolution and Behavior, blacks have more kids and younger populations than whites, who in turn have more kids and younger populations than orientals. On average, orientals invest more in their kids than whites, and whites invest more in their kids than blacks.
On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: "I would like more black African immigration to the United States to bring those family values here."
Which African family values? Africa is a disaster with an 8% rate of AIDS infection. Africa has 18% of the world's land, 15% of the world's population and 1% of the world's GNP. Who wants to import that primitive way of life?
Gene Expression wrote:
References to the subject from the 60s and 70s typically gave Africans an IQ much like African Americans, thus Jensen (1973) wrote: "We do know that studies of the intelligence of Negroes in Africa have found them to average at least one sigma below Europeans on a variety of tests" (p. 66). Lynn (1978) is no exception. It wasn't until 1991, that Lynn had revised this estimate dramatically to minus 2 standard deviations, which has been the source of much anger and controversy ever since. Well, the current volume drops it a little bit lower even, to an IQ of 67 as the median score from 57 studies collected from 18 different African countries. Similarly, the average IQ of black populations from 6 locations in Latin America and the Caribbean is 71. This is virtually the same as the score for Ethiopians in Israel. In developed, predominately white countries, a second cluster of scores emerge for black Africans. African-Americans, of course, score about 85, while the median IQ from 20 studies of blacks in Britain is 86.
Ernest Van Den Haag, who Prager often cites in other matters, wrote in National Review in 1965:
One need not believe that one’s own ethnic group, or any ethnic group, is superior to others… in order to wish one’s country to continue to be made up of the same ethnic strains in the same proportions as before. And, conversely, the wish not to see one’s country overrun by groups one regards as alien need not be based on feelings of superiority or ‘racism’. …The wish to preserve one’s identity and the identity of one’s nation requires no justification…any more than the wish to have one’s own children, and to continue one’s family through them need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others.
Van Den Haag wrote in the Dec. 1, 1964 issue that intelligence could be accurately gauged by IQ tests, that it is largely heritable and that integrated education hurts whites and "demoralizes" blacks. "I am all in favor of improving the quality of education for all. But this can be done only if pupils are separated according to ability (whatever determines it). And this means very largely according to race."
Feb. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "The best explanation [for anti-Semitism] was given by a non-Jew, Ernest van den Haag. He was a major thinker that not everyone remembers today and it is too bad. He was quite something. Whatever he wrote on, he wrote with brilliant clarity. He wrote The Jewish Mystique. He said the Jews introduced a universal Judge Who demands certain behaviors and for this they have never been forgiven."
On pg. 165 of his book on James J. Kilpatrick, William P. Hustwit wrote:
The northern new conservative journalist Irving Kristol cautioned William F. Buckley to drop any criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act "in terms of racial differences." To do otherwise would be "political folly" and injure the conservative movement.
William Buckley wrote an April 8, 1969 column called “On Negro Inferiority." He praised Arthur Jensen’s research about race and IQ as “massive, apparently authoritative." He added: "Professor Ernest van den Haag, writing in National Review…brilliantly anticipated the findings of Dr. Jensen and brilliantly coped with their implications."
This kind of talk about race kept Prager from identifying as conservative until the conservative movement changed to a color-blind neo-con (aka Jewish) perspective in the 1980s.
Mar. 21, 2014, Dennis said: "One of my heroes [was] William Buckley Jr. He was a great man and a great thinker. I had the occasion to have dinner with him and it was a highlight of my young life."
Dennis Prager wrote a July 17, 2002 column entitled, "Why My Son's Best Friend Is Black."
…[B]lack Americans have been choosing segregation. You can see it at lunch tables in many schools, in the separate black graduation ceremonies and dorms at colleges, in the proliferating number of race-based professional organizations, and in choosing to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. …I still believe in the racial ideal I was raised with — integration.
…Second, it is most relevant that my son is a religious Jew and that his friend is a religious Christian.
…Steven is a wonderful boy who happens to be black. My son is a wonderful boy who happens to be white. Race is a non-issue to them, as it always should be among good people. For both boys, their religious identity is more important than their racial identity. Because Steven and my son are both religious, they have, often unwittingly to be sure, many values in common. When we explain to Aaron that Steven cannot play on Sunday mornings because he is at church, Aaron entirely understands; he was at synagogue the day before and couldn't play with Steven at that time. Both boys know the importance of watching their language, making blessings before eating, and much more. Steven and his little brother usually join my family at our Friday night Sabbath dinner, and almost always wear a yarmulke at the table. In fact, Steven expresses more interest in the religious rituals than the average secular Jewish guest — once again illustrating that values, especially transcendent ones, are far more humanly unifying than race or ethnicity. Any member of my family is more likely to bond with an African-American Christian than with an irreligious Jew.
It is difficult to overstate my pleasure at seeing these two boys becoming close friends. All credit must go to Steven's mother. She has chosen to live among non-blacks and to raise a son with Christian, human and American identities that are at least as strong as his African-American identity (which, for the record, she hardly ignores — Steven speaks fluent French in order to keep alive the language of his Haitian grandparents).
At our Sabbath table I see the real American dream unfold, and only wish more Americans of all colors and ethnicities would share this dream. Why is my son's best friend black? Because they share values that transcend race, and because they live near each other.
I wonder what would happen to this neighborhood if six Haitian families (with identical values to the family above) moved in? What would happen to property values? Prager's Haitian friends sound like lovely people, but statistically speaking, Haitians, inside America or inside Haiti, are a disaster, with sky-high rates of crime, including murder, and STDS, including AIDS.
And what happened to this friendship as the two kids grew up? As About.com pointed out: "The older children get, the more likely they are not to socialize closely with peers of a different race." Aaron is now in his 20s. I suspect his closest friends are not black just as Dennis's closest friends are not black.
Would Dennis ever write a column about his son's best friend being white? No, that's too boring. This wonderful black family that stimulated his column is the exception that proves the rule that everywhere in the world, including Africa, as compared to whites and orientals, blacks throughout history have tended to low levels of achievement and literacy and to high levels of crime and dysfunction, whatever the cause. No society, including America, and no neighborhood, has been able to import large numbers of blacks without importing those higher levels of crime, dependency and dysfunction. Despite trillions of dollars of social experiments, these problems have proved intractable.
No white or asian country has successfully assimilated blacks as a group to life results that match the majority population (just as whites and orientals as a group have not matched black strengths in preaching, rhetoric, sports, improvisation, charisma, dance, rap, jazz, etc). Blacks, whether as communities or countries, have never, statistically, met the levels of literacy, education, income, and lawfulness of their white and asian neighbors.
Despite these universal and obvious differences in behavior between the races through all times and in all places, according to Dennis, race should be a non-issue to all good people. "I'd be happy to have five kids from different races so long as they had my values," said Dennis Jan. 22, 2014.
Who are you going to believe about the unimportance of race? Dennis Prager or history? Surely you won't believe your lying eyes? Good people don't notice patterns. That's racist.
Different races have different strengths. As the black reverend and former NFL star Reggie White said:
Why did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white? Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?
Well, it's interesting to me to know why now. When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it.
White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world.
Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure.
When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality.
When you put all of that together, guess what it makes. It forms a complete image of God. God made us different because he was trying to create himself. He was trying to form himself, and then we got kind of knuckleheaded and kind of pushed everything aside.
Steve Sailer holds by Reggie White's thinking and hence he's more real about life than Dennis:
As a Reggieist (i.e., one who considers human biodiversity both a reality and a net blessing), I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.
For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests — by necessity objective and standardized — can never measure this adequately.
Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?
Good thing that doctors don't follow Dennis Prager's color-blind approach as different medicines often work differently for different races who frequently have different health challenges. As Dr. Sally Satel wrote (with assistance from Steve Sailer) in the New York Times in 2002: "In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works."
Forbes reported in 2005: "A flood of studies has emerged showing racial differences in how patients suffer from disease–or benefit from drugs–in ailments ranging from osteoporosis to cancer. And several more have looked at the effects of drugs on particular racial groups. Many of the doctors conducting the studies are African-American."
Steve Sailer wrote: "Knowledge of racial differences in genes is a good thing: it tells blacks that they should be extra careful to limit salt intake, that they should get checkups for prostate cancer, that they should imitate Jews with their Tay-Sachs disease testing and find out if they are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia, etc."
So in matters of life and death, race can matter very much.
J. Philippe Rushton, Canada's most famous professor, wrote:
Just as women doctors have advocated that to conceptualize women as being the same as men leads to a neglect of women’s problems and their treatment (e.g., premenstrual symptoms and menopause and hormone replacement therapy), so black doctors have become concerned that treating blacks the same as whites is to neglect black problems. For example, 30 percent of the people who have kidney failure and undergo dialysis are black, but estimates are that fewer than 10 percent of organ donors are black. Blacks fare better with organs donated from blacks.
Another example is that genetics contributes to black hypertension. Black men experience a faster heart rate when performing moderate exercise, although the pulse rates of the black and white men while resting showed no significant differences. Black men have higher rates of cancer of the prostate than white men who in turn have higher rates than Oriental men, one determinant of which is testosterone (Polednak, 1989).
Racial differences exist in risk for AIDS with blacks being most at risk and Asians least so. In the United States, blacks, who make up 12 percent of the population, represent 30 percent of those with AIDS. Among women, 53 percent of those with AIDS are black. Fifty-five percent of children with AIDS are black.
Race is also a critical factor in the success of many medicines. For example, Asians are more sensitive to the drugs used to treat anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, requiring lower dosages; they are also more likely to have side effects with lower dosages (Levy, 1993). Another widely cited example is that Asians are more sensitive to the adverse effects of alcohol, especially to marked facial flushing, palpitation, and tachycardia. Levy (1993: 143) argues that ethnicity should be taken into account in formulary selection and prescribing decisions for individual patients.(Race, Evolution and Behavior, pg. 8)
Another way to see the importance of race is in sports. As the former black star Darryl Dawkins said: "Black basketball is much more individualistic. With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, … if somebody makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you've got to come right back at him with something better, something more stylish… It's all about honor, pride, and establishing yourself as a man."
Regarding high school basketball, Dawkins said: "So if you're not scoring beaucoup points, if your picture isn't in the papers, if you don't have a trophy, then you ain't the man and you ain't nothing. Being second-best is just as bad as being last. And if a teammate hits nine shots in a row, the black attitude is, 'Screw him. Now it's my turn to get it on.'"
Why is white basketball more structured? "Because the white culture places more of a premium on winning and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating."
In the 1977 NBA championships, the Portland Trailblazer (with a largely white core) matched up with the largely black Philadelphia 76ers. "They beat us in six games," Dawkins said, "and the series marked the most blatant example of the racial difference in NBA game plans. We were much more flamboyant than Portland, and certainly more talented. We had more individual moves, more off-balance shots, more fancy passes, more dunks, and more entertaining stuff. But everybody wanted to shoot and be a star (including me), and nobody was willing to do the behind-the-scenes dirty work."
"The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish. No one player is good enough to beat five opponents on a consistent basis. The black style also creates animosities among the players because everybody ends up arguing about who's shooting too much and who's not shooting enough."
When black Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman made an epic rant Jan. 19, 2014 after his team defeated San Francisco in the NFC championship game, Dennis Prager said: "I expect human decency [from athletes]. Perhaps I am spoiled because the sport I follow most avidly is hockey and you don't get this [way of talking after a game] in hockey."
Hockey is overwhelmingly a white game and professional football is overwhelmingly a black game. Blacks are better at rhetoric (visit a black church for example) and trash talking than are whites, who tend to be better at team work.
In the Olympic 100 meter dash going back to 1984, all 64 finalists have been of West African descent. In the NFL, former Giant Jason Sehorn is the only white starting cornerback since 2000.
Another way to see the importance of race is to look for flourishing cities, states or countries with majority black populations. I can't think of any.
Another way to see the importance of race is to look at the two places leading the way in America in volunteering — the white cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City. Whites tend to be more altruistic than other races and the least interested in organizing in their own racial interest. The societies they create tend to be prosperous and therefore attractive to non-white immigrants, while blacks never create affluent countries.
As Steve Sailer wrote: "Contemporary American mainstream conservatism has been deformed by its allergy to leftist identity politics into arguing that traditional concepts of identity, such as ethnicity, race, kinship, sex, religious membership, and class, not only shouldn't mean anything, but that they don't mean anything, which is awfully silly."
Thinkers such as Sailer see the world more clearly in some ways than does Dennis because they give race its due. As Sailer wrote in 2007: "We realize that race is an inextricable part of human nature. Why? Because 'race' is the inevitable outgrowth of 'family.' A racial group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree. When you start from this simple but profound definition, you can begin to answer all those questions that baffle and irritate…about why humans continue to act as if blood relations were important to them. (Quick answer: because they are.)"
Why bother to talk about the realities of race when it will only hurt your career? Sailer answered: "I believe truth is more beneficial to humanity than lies, obfuscation, ignorance, wishful thinking – and even hipness."
With a nod to the Tom Wolfe insight above, a Steve Sailer reader emailed him:
Maybe each particular group must feel that they have a theoretical chance to dominate or else there will be a psychological schism too large to bridge without overt domination of one group over another.
A diverse society therefore has two options: living a lie that every group is equal in ability (eventually backed by force as it fails) or a caste system backed by force.
This would seem to argue against neoconservative color blind society that ignores group differences.
A Sailer reader emailed: "If a critical mass of blacks decides to abide by the White egocosmos, it will damage the credibility of its black counterpart, and thus compel (eventually) blacks to accept being in second place in the dominant paradigm. Thus where going by the book might be the better individual strategy, the preservation of group vanity requires the instillment of an alternative paradigm reflecting the endowments of African-Americans, where they come in first and whites in second."
In a September 23, 2008 column, Dennis Prager predicted black race riots if Barack Obama is not elected:
And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.
Compared to East Asians at the furthest extreme and then whites, blacks, said the book Race, Evoluation & Behavior, have:
• _ shorter gestation periods
• _ earlier physical maturation (muscular control, bone and dental development)
• _ smaller brains
• _ earlier puberty (age at first menstruation, first intercourse, first pregnancy)
• _ more developed primary sexual characteristics (size of penis, vagina, testes, ovaries)
• _ more developed secondary sexual characteristics (voice, muscularity, buttocks, breasts)
• _ more biological than social control of behavior (length of menstrual cycle, periodicity of sexual response, predictability of life history from start of puberty)
• _ higher levels of sex hormones (testosterone, gonadotropins, follicle stimulating hormone)
• _ higher levels of individuality (lower law abidingness)
• _ more permissive sexual attitudes
• _ higher intercourse frequencies (premarital, marital, extramarital)
• _ weaker pair bonds
• _ more siblings
• _ higher rates of child neglect and abandonment
• _ greater frequency of disease
• _ shorter life expectancy
Isn't race just skin-deep? Rushton wrote: "Biological evidence shows that race is not a social construct. Coroners in crime labs can identify race from a skeleton or even just the skull. They can identify race from blood, hair, or semen as well. To deny the existence of race is unscientific and unrealistic."
What about crime? Rushton wrote:
Most people of any race are hard-working and law abiding. There is no “criminal race.” However, the difference in average crime rate means that a much higher percentage of Blacks can fall into a life of crime. The 85 average IQ of criminals is almost identical with the 85 average IQ of Blacks, so IQ is related to crime. Although Blacks make up only about 12% of the U.S. population, each year they commit about half of all crimes.
INTERPOL Yearbooks show the same three-way pattern of race differences in crime. African and Caribbean countries have twice as many violent crimes per person as do European countries and three times as many as do the Asian Pacific Rim countries like Japan and China.
U. S. Department of Justice statistics report that Blacks are 60 times more likely to attack Whites than Whites are to attack Blacks. For the 20% of violent crimes that are interracial, 15% involve Black offenders and White victims; 2% involve White offenders and Black victims.
Recalling his 1985 meeting with George Kennan, architect of America's containment policy against the Soviet Union, Vincent Chiarello wrote:
I remember…Kennan’s deep pessimism about the future of the United States. Time and time again, he came back to the same theme: that unfettered immigration from non-European nations would be a disaster, and that the thin line that separated the U.S. from the rest of the world would disappear. … [Harvard political scientist Samuel] Huntington was fiercely opposed to the notion of America as “a propositional nation.” Kennan emphasized that same objection by repeatedly pointing out our Anglo-Saxon roots and cultural heritage. I cannot help but believe that, toward the end of that session, Kennan, who was to live to more than 100 years, was saying that Anglo-Saxons, that is, the white race, were being endangered by a flood of unassimilable strangers that would shake the nation to its very foundational core.
In his 1993 memoir, Kennan wrote:
There will be those who will say, 'Oh, it is our duty to receive as many as possible of these people and to share our prosperity with them, as we have so long been doing.' But suppose there are limits to our capacity to absorb. Suppose the effect of such a policy is to create, in the end, conditions within this country no better than those of the places the masses of immigrants have left: the same poverty, the same distress. What we shall then have accomplished is not to have appreciably improved conditions in the Third World (for even the maximum numbers we could conceivably take would be only a drop from the bucket of the planet's overpopulation) but to make this country itself a part of the Third World (as certain parts of it already are) thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions that might have continued, as it now does, to be helpful to much of the remainder of the world by its relatively high standard of civilization, by its quality as example, by its ability to shed insight on the problems of the others and to help them find their answers to their own problems.
Intelligence
Like all of the Western world's public intellectuals who are more interested in status than in truth (see Jason Richwine's 2013 dismissal from the Heritage Foundation for an example of what obvious truths one should not say publicly if you want to get ahead), Dennis Prager says he cares little about IQ. By being deliberately obtuse, he gets to have a nice life, make millions of dollars, enjoy vast popularity and go on television regularly. On the other hand, he sacrifices truth for cant.
As Jared Taylor wrote: "All people who hedge their opinions in the hope of a larger audience convince themselves that discretion is the price of influence—as they bank their honoraria and swan through the corridors of power. And, like [James J.] Kilpatrick, they build oases far from the racial chaos they no longer combat with all their strength."
Jan. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "All of my life I have said that the most important macro value, societal value, is truth. Virtually all evil emanates from lies."
Feb. 18, 2014, Dennis said: "People think brains are more important than everything. I knew at such a young age that was not true. I saw these kids in high school, some of them had such magnificent brains, but they couldn't navigate life. There were kids with great brains who cheated on tests…"
"I think those studies [that show a correlation between IQ and delayed gratification], if they exist, are crap. The idea that IQ correlates with character sickens me. You think a person of normal intelligence doesn't understand delayed gratification but a person with an Einstein IQ understands it better?"
Caller: "I think they're able to live in the future a little bit more."
Dennis: "Do you know how many brilliant Nazis and Communists there were? There were more intellectuals who supported Stalin than hardhats. I'm giving you a powerful example of the lack of correlation between brilliance, great brains, and decency. There is no correlation."
Caller: "Maybe it works better in the other direction and say that most people who become petty criminals and live lives of characterless drift tend to not have high intelligence."
Dennis: "That's a good question. I don't think it's necessary. I think people of completely average intelligence can be superior human beings. I don't think the saints of the 20th Century, like those who rescued Jews in the Holocaust, had extraordinary IQs."
"The brains thing blows my mind. I know I have a good brain, but I have rarely been impressed with brains. So what? It's a blessing like a good voice is a blessing. It never excited me when I would meet brilliant people. If they weren't good, they were boring. I felt that as a child and I feel that today. Goodness interests me more than brilliance."
"This reveling in brains drives me crazy. It's like revelling in baseball ability. If you have it, great, but it doesn't make you who you are."
"The stupid stupid notion that brains determine your life. Common sense is more important than brains. Wisdom is more important than brains… The average person is perfectly intelligent enough to deal with life. I have met very very few people that I walked away thinking, that person has a very low IQ. Everybody I work with at my home radio station is bright. Every single person. Since it runs across the gamut of human background, I have to believe that the vast majority of people are bright… I know one rocket scientist who is an emotional and psychological basketcase. It's a very narrow greatness, brains. Without wisdom, common sense, and character, it's nothing."
"If you don't know what to do with your IQ, what's the good of having a Stradivarius IQ?"
"People put up bumper stickers, 'My child is on the honor roll.' I've never been impressed with that. How about, 'My child is honorable.'"
Philosopher Michael Levin said in 1998: "Belief in the reality and significance of intelligence is inversely correlated with education, which is correlated with IQ. You have to be very intelligent to believe there is no such thing as intelligence."
Psychologist James Thompson wrote: "Rindermann found that higher IQ countries (not just East Asian ones) tended to be more moral, less corrupt, more humane and more liberal in their approach to human freedoms. One can certainly argue that intelligence does not guarantee morality, but that is a different point."
Gedaliah Braun wrote in 2009:
I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.
It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking—as does planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African…
It has long seemed to me that blacks tend to lack self-awareness. If such awareness is necessary for developing abstract concepts it is not surprising that African languages have so few abstract terms. A lack of self-awareness—or introspection—has advantages. In my experience neurotic behavior, characterized by excessive and unhealthy self-consciousness, is uncommon among blacks. I am also confident that sexual dysfunction, which is characterized by excessive self-consciousness, is less common among blacks than whites.
Time is another abstract concept with which Africans seem to have difficulties… It appears that the Zulu word for “future”—isikhati—is the same as the word for time, as well as for space. Realistically, this means that these concepts probably do not exist in Zulu thought. It also appears that there is no word for the past—meaning, the time preceding the present. The past did exist, but no longer exists. Hence, people who may have problems thinking of things that do not exist will have trouble thinking of the past as well as the future.
This has an obvious bearing on such sentiments as gratitude and loyalty, which I have long noticed are uncommon among Africans. We feel gratitude for things that happened in the past, but for those with little sense of the past such feelings are less likely to arise…
In America, blacks are said to have a “tendency to approximate space, numbers and time instead of aiming for complete accuracy.” (Star, June 8, 1988, p.10.) In other words, they are also poor at math. Notice the identical triumvirate—space, numbers, and time. Is it just a coincidence that these three highly abstract concepts are the ones with which blacks — everywhere — seem to have such difficulties?
White rule in South Africa ended in 1994. It was about ten years later that power outages began, which eventually reached crisis proportions. The principle reason for this is simply lack of maintenance on the generating equipment… In short, there is no such thing as maintenance in Zulu thought, and it would be hard to argue that this is wholly unrelated to the fact that when people throughout Africa say “nothing works,” it is only an exaggeration.
Whereas Western cultures internalize norms—“Don’t do that!” for a child, eventually becomes “I mustn’t do that” for an adult—African cultures do not. They rely entirely on external controls on behavior from tribal elders and other sources of authority. When Africans were detribalized, these external constraints disappeared, and since there never were internal constraints, the results were crime, drugs, promiscuity, etc. Where there have been other forms of control—as in white-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa, or the segregated American South—this behavior was kept within tolerable limits. But when even these controls disappear there is often unbridled violence…
One explanation for this lack of abstract thinking, including the diminished understanding of time, is that Africans evolved in a climate where they could live day to day without having to think ahead. They never developed this ability because they had no need for it. Whites, on the other hand, evolved under circumstances in which they had to consider what would happen if they didn’t build stout houses and store enough fuel and food for the winter. For them it was sink or swim…
According to now-discredited folk wisdom, blacks are “children in adult bodies,” but there may be some foundation to this view. The average African adult has the raw IQ score of the average 11-year-old white child. This is about the age at which white children begin to internalize morality and no longer need such strong external enforcers…
Another aspect of African behavior that liberals do their best to ignore but that nevertheless requires an explanation is gratuitous cruelty. A reviewer of Driving South, a 1993 book by David Robbins, writes:
"A Cape social worker sees elements that revel in violence … It’s like a cult which has embraced a lot of people who otherwise appear normal. … At the slightest provocation their blood-lust is aroused. And then they want to see death, and they jeer and mock at the suffering involved, especially the suffering of a slow and agonizing death.” (Citizen [Johannesburg], July 12, 1993, p.6.)"
There is something so unspeakably vile about this, something so beyond depravity, that the human brain recoils. This is not merely the absence of human empathy, but the positive enjoyment of human suffering, all the more so when it is “slow and agonizing.” Can you imagine jeering at and mocking someone in such horrible agony? During the apartheid era, black activists used to kill traitors and enemies by “necklacing” them. An old tire was put around the victim’s neck, filled with gasoline, and—but it is best to let an eye-witness describe what happened next:
“The petrol-filled tyre is jammed on your shoulders and a lighter is placed within reach . … Your fingers are broken, needles are pushed up your nose and you are tortured until you put the lighter to the petrol yourself.” (Citizen; “SA’s New Nazis,” August 10, 1993, p.18.)
The author of an article in the Chicago Tribune, describing the equally gruesome way the Hutu killed Tutsi in the Burundi massacres, marveled at “the ecstasy of killing, the lust for blood; this is the most horrible thought. It’s beyond my reach.” (“Hutu Killers Danced In Blood Of Victims, Videotapes Show,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1995, p.8.) The lack of any moral sense is further evidenced by their having videotaped their crimes, “apparently want[ing] to record … [them] for posterity.” Unlike Nazi war criminals, who hid their deeds, these people apparently took pride in their work…
In 1993, Amy Biehl, a 26-year-old American on a Fulbright scholarship, was living in South Africa, where she spent most of her time in black townships helping blacks. One day when she was driving three African friends home, young blacks stopped the car, dragged her out, and killed her because she was white. A retired senior South African judge, Rex van Schalkwyk, in his 1998 book One Miracle is Not Enough, quotes from a newspaper report on the trial of her killers: “Supporters of the three men accused of murdering [her] … burst out laughing in the public gallery of the Supreme Court today when a witness told how the battered woman groaned in pain.” This behavior, Van Schalkwyk wrote, “is impossible to explain in terms accessible to rational minds.” (pp. 188-89.)
These incidents and the responses they evoke—“the human brain recoils,” “beyond my reach,” “impossible to explain to rational minds” — represent a pattern of behavior and thinking that cannot be wished away, and offer additional support for my claim that Africans are deficient in moral consciousness.
I have long suspected that the idea of rape is not the same in Africa as elsewhere, and now I find confirmation of this in Newsweek:
“According to a three-year study [in Johannesburg] … more than half of the young people interviewed — both male and female — believe that forcing sex with someone you know does not constitute sexual violence … [T]he casual manner in which South African teens discuss coercive relationships and unprotected sex is staggering.” (Tom Masland, “Breaking The Silence,” Newsweek, July 9, 2000.)
Clearly, many blacks do not think rape is anything to be ashamed of.
The Newsweek author is puzzled by widespread behavior that is known to lead to AIDS, asking “Why has the safe-sex effort failed so abjectly?” Well, aside from their profoundly different attitudes towards sex and violence and their heightened libido, a major factor could be their diminished concept of time and reduced ability to think ahead…
An article about gang rape in the left-wing British paper, the Guardian, confirms this when it quotes a young black woman: “The thing is, they [black men] don’t see it as rape, as us being forced. They just see it as pleasure for them.” (Rose George, “They Don’t See it as Rape. They Just See it as Pleasure for Them,” June 5, 2004.) A similar attitude seems to be shared among some American blacks who casually refer to gang rape as “running a train.” (Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler, Vintage Books, 1995.)
Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and counterfactuality. Subjunctivity is conveyed in such statements as, “What would you have done if I hadn’t showed up?” This is contrary to fact because I did show up, and it is now impossible for me not to have shown up. We are asking someone to imagine what he would have done if something that didn’t happen (and now couldn’t happen) had happened. This requires self-consciousness, and I have already described blacks’ possible deficiency in this respect. It is obvious that animals, for example, cannot think counterfactually, because of their complete lack of self-awareness…
In his 1990 book Devil’s Night, Ze’ev Chafets quotes a black woman speaking about the problems of Detroit: “I know some people won’t like this, but whenever you get a whole lot of black people, you’re gonna have problems. Blacks are ignorant and rude.” (pp. 76-77.)
If some Africans cannot clearly imagine what their own rude behavior feels like to others—in other words, if they cannot put themselves in the other person’s shoes—they will be incapable of understanding what rudeness is. For them, what we call rude may be normal and therefore, from their perspective, not really rude. Africans may therefore not be offended by behavior we would consider rude — not keeping appointments, for example. One might even conjecture that African cruelty is not the same as white cruelty, since Africans may not be fully aware of the nature of their behavior, whereas such awareness is an essential part of “real” cruelty.
I am hardly the only one to notice this obliviousness to others that sometimes characterizes black behavior. Walt Harrington, a white liberal married to a light-skinned black, makes some surprising admissions in his 1994 book, Crossings: A White Man’s Journey Into Black America:
“I notice a small car … in the distance. Suddenly … a bag of garbage flies out its window . … I think, I’ll bet they’re blacks. Over the years I’ve noticed more blacks littering than whites. I hate to admit this because it is a prejudice. But as I pass the car, I see that my reflex was correct—[they are blacks].
“[As I pull] into a McDonald’s drive-through … [I see that] the car in front of me had four black[s] in it. Again … my mind made its unconscious calculation: We’ll be sitting here forever while these people decide what to order. I literally shook my head . … My God, my kids are half black! But then the kicker: we waited and waited and waited. Each of the four … leaned out the window and ordered individually. The order was changed several times. We sat and sat, and I again shook my head, this time at the conundrum that is race in America.
“I knew that the buried sentiment that had made me predict this disorganization … was … racist. … But my prediction was right.” (pp. 234-35.)
Africans also tend to litter. To understand this we must ask why whites don’t litter, at least not as much. We ask ourselves: “What would happen if everyone threw rubbish everywhere? It would be a mess. So you shouldn’t do it!” Blacks’ possible deficiency in abstract thinking makes such reasoning more difficult, so any behavior requiring such thinking is less likely to develop in their cultures. Even after living for generations in societies where such thinking is commonplace, many may still fail to absorb it.
According to Dennis: "Use your common sense. Whenever you hear the words, studies show' — outside of the natural sciences — and you find that these studies show the opposite of what common sense suggests, be very skeptical. I do not recall ever coming across a valid that contravened common sense."
Say the authors of the book, 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, "Contrary to Dennis Prager, psychological studies that overturn our common sense are sometimes right. Indeed, one of our primary goals in this book is to encourage you to mistrust your common sense when evaluating psychological claims. As a general rule, you should consult research evidence, not your intuitions, when deciding whether a scientific claim is correct. Research suggests that snap judgments are often helpful in sizing up people and in forecasting our likes and dislikes, but they can be wildly inaccurate when it comes to gauging the accuracy of psychological theories or assertions."
When it comes to studies Dennis likes, he has a difference attitude. Mar. 26, 2014, he said: "There is no evidence to support the notion that saturated fat increases the risk of heart disease. I have been eschewing chicken skin for the past 25 years. It makes me sick to think of all the boring chicken I've been eating when all the taste is in the skin. You don't know how much importance I attach to this that this is the new study. It applies to so much."
"I bought the saturated fat issue. I've been eating non-fat yoghurt, which, with one or two exceptions, is white paste. The ultimate — non-fat milk. Why not ask for white water?"
According to Steve Sailer: "The greatest trick the intelligent ever pulled was convincing the world intelligence doesn't exist."
Sailer wrote: "Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms."
To quantify the statement that "Jews are a small group, but influential in their areas of concentration," in 2009, the Atlantic Monthly came up with a list of the top 50 opinion pundits: half are of Jewish background.
Over 1/3rd of the 2009 Forbes 400 are of Jewish background, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency's reporter who covers Jewish philanthropy.
This is not to say that influential Jews are at all united in what they favor. On the other hand, it is more or less true that Jews hold something of a veto over what topics are considered appropriate for discussion in the press, Jewish influence itself being the most obvious example of a topic that is off the table in polite society.
John Derbyshire wrote: "I can absolutely assure you that anyone who made general, mildly negative, remarks about Jews would NOT—not ever again—be published in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, The Weekly Standard, National Review, The New York Sun, The New York Post, or The Washington Times. I know the actual people, the editors, involved here, and I can assert this confidently."
Experts in IQ such as Richwine note: "IQ scores can be thought of as individual probabilities that aggregate into certainties in large groups." In the words of NYU's Steven Goldberg, IQ is to achievement in people what weight is to achievement in offensive tackles in the NFL.
Slate published an essay by two Psychology professors Apr. 14, 2014:
IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers.
IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity. In a 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal, Scottish researchers Lawrence Whalley and Ian Deary identified more than 2,000 people who had taken part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932, a nationwide assessment of IQ. Remarkably, people with high IQs at age 11 were more considerably more likely to survive to old age than were people with lower IQs. For example, a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population) was 21 percent more likely to live to age 76 than a person with an IQ of 85. And the relationship between IQ and longevity remains statistically significant even after taking SES into account. Perhaps IQ reflects the mental resources—the reasoning and problem-solving skills—that people can bring to bear on maintaining their health and making wise decisions throughout life. This explanation is supported by evidence that higher-IQ individuals engage in more positive health behaviors, such as deciding to quit smoking…
Given everything that social scientists have learned about IQ and its broad predictive validity, it is reasonable to make it a factor in decisions such as whom to hire for a particular job or admit to a particular college or university. In fact, disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society. For example, in occupations where safety is paramount, employers could be incentivized to incorporate measures of cognitive ability into the recruitment process.
Professor Linda Gottfredson wrote:
1. IQ (as long as it's a good measure of g) predicts a broad range of life outcomes better than does SES [socio-economic status], from GPA to longevity. Corollary: You can wash out IQ's apparent predictive superiority only if you load your SES battery with additional surrogates for parents' or own g.
2. The phenotypic correlations between IQ and measures of social class (education, occupational prestige, income) are from a half to two-thirds genetic in origin.
3. SES cannot explain the big IQ differences among siblings growing up in the same household: They differ two-thirds as much in IQ, on the average (11-12 points), as do any two random strangers (~17 points). This is a glaring fact that SES enthusiasts have studiously ignored.
4. Adult functional literacy (e.g., see the fed's NALS survey) predicts life outcomes in exactly the same pattern as does IQ, though they won't tell you that. Functional literacy is measured by having subjects carry out everyday life tasks, such as using a menu to figure out the price for something. Persons scoring at levels 1-2 (out of 5) have been described as not having the ability to use their rights or meet their responsibilities in the modern world (40% of whites, 80% of blacks). Pick out a few NALS tasks at various levels and ask your critic what % of adults s/he thinks can perform them. They will be shocked and so will you when you see the data–go to my 1997 "Why g matters" article for NALS, or my 2002 "highly general and highly practical" chapter for health literacy items–e.g., on diabetes.
5. IQ predicts on-the-job performance better overall than any other single predictor (SES isn't even in the running), it predicts better when performance is objectively rather than subjectively measured, and when the tasks/occupations are more complex in what they require workers to do. At the same cognitive complexity level, IQ predicts job performance equally well in manual and non-manual jobs (e.g., trades vs. clerical. The exact same complexity pattern is found with functional literacy–the hardest items are the most complex (require more inference, are abstract rather than concrete, contain more distracting irrelevant information, etc.)
6. A large followup of Australian veterans found that IQ was the best predictor of death by age 40 (had 50+ predictors). Vehicle fatalities were the biggest cause (as is typical), and, compared to men with IQs of 100+, men of IQ85-100 had twice the rate and men IQ 80-85 had three times the rate. (Remember, SES could not explain this.) The US (and apparently Australia) forbid induction of persons below IQ 80 because they are not sufficiently trainable–found out the hard way.
7. Finally, if you succeed in describing g as a general learning and reasoning ability (one that gives high g people an increasing edge when tasks are more complex), then it is easy to show g's life and death relevance when you describe how health self-care and accident prevention are highly dependent on learning and reasoning. Consider what it takes to be an effective diabetic–lots and lots of judgment on a daily basis, or you're likely to lose your sight, your limbs, etc.
Gottfredson wrote:
Of all human traits, variation in general intelligence (g) is the functionally most important in modern life. The first question that behavior genetics tackled was ‘‘how heritable are within-group differences in intelligence?’’—the answer: ‘‘very.’’
Gottfredson said: "Keep in mind that false belief in infinite human malleability led to some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. I also think it is patronizing and usually self-serving when elites contend that the American public cannot be trusted with certain facts."
Gottfredson wrote:
If all 13‐year‐olds took the same 15‐minute test (WASI), I could give you each child’s odds for all these adult outcomes without knowing anything else about them.
– Drops out of high school,
– Holds mostly unskilled jobs, skilled jobs vs. professional jobs
– Performs those jobs well
– Lives in poverty AND
– Can find a particular intersection on a map, or grams of carbohydrate per serving on a food label
– Adheres to a medical treatment regimen for diabetes or other chronic illness
– Dies prematurely
Gottfredson wrote:
The first step in assessing the real-life importance of g/IQ is to determine whether scores on highly g-loaded tests (tests that measure g well) predict differences in valued life outcomes. Correlations do not prove causation, but they are a first step in doing so. The most studied outcomes are performance in school (such as school marks and achievement test scores), performance on the job (mostly supervisor ratings), socioeconomic advancement (level of education, occupation, and income), and social pathology (adult criminality, poverty, unemployment, dependence on welfare, children outside of marriage). The relations of intelligence to health, health behavior, resilience in the face of extreme adversity, longevity (length of life), and functional literacy (the ability to do routine reading, writing, and arithmetic tasks in modern societies) have also begun to draw much attention. Thousands of studies have looked at the impact of mental abilities on school and job performance, and large national longitudinal studies in both Europe and the United States have shown that IQ is related to various forms of socioeconomic success and failure. Here are their most general findings about g’s association with life outcomes.
Correlations with IQ are pervasive. IQ predicts all the foregoing outcomes to some degree. Subjective well-being (happiness) is the rare exception: it is regularly found not to correlate meaningfully with IQ level. In general, g relates more to instrumental behavior than emotional reactions.
Correlations with IQ vary systematically by type of outcome. IQ’s predictive value ranges widely, depending on the outcome in question. For example, when averaged over several years, performance on standardized tests of academic achievement correlates about as highly with IQ as two IQ tests do with each other (over .8 on a scale of -1.0 to 1.0). In contrast, correlations with IQ are closer to .6-.7 for school marks, years of education completed, and longevity. They are about .5 with prestige level of occupation, .3 to .4 with income (the correlations rising with age), and .2 with law-abidingness.
Correlations with IQ are higher when tasks are more complex. To illustrate, when jobs are ranked in overall complexity of work, the correlations between IQ and job performance rise from .2 for simple, unskilled jobs, to .5 in middle-level jobs (skilled trades, most clerical work), to .8 in the most complex (doctors, engineers, top executives). Stated another way, it matters little how intelligent workers are in low-level jobs, but it matters a great deal in high-level jobs, regardless of whether the job seems academic or not.
IQ/g is best single predictor, mental or non-mental. IQ/g usually predicts major life outcomes better than does any other single predictor in broad samples of individuals. For example, whether IQ predicts strongly (educational performance) or weakly (law-abidingness), it predicts better than does social class background…
Social privilege theory also predicts that the impact of environmental conditions will accumulate with age, but longitudinal studies show that IQ actually becomes more heritable over the life span (from 40% before entering elementary school to 80% by mid-adulthood). Perhaps most surprising of all, differences in family advantage have no lasting effect on IQ by adolescence, at least in the U.S. and Europe, so family members are no more alike in IQ by adulthood than their genetic relatedness would predict…To take one example, the post-World War II communist government of Warsaw, Poland, assigned families of all social classes to the same housing, schools, and health services, but this social leveling failed to narrow intelligence differences in the next generation…
The pattern is that, when two groups differ in average IQ, the proportions of their populations found at each point on the IQ distribution differ most at the extremes, or tails, of the IQ distribution. This is seen most clearly by looking at the ratios in the bottom three rows of Figure 3. Take, for example, blacks and whites above IQ 100. Blacks become progressively rarer, relative to whites, at higher IQ levels: 1:3 above IQ 100, 1:7 above IQ 110, and only 1:30 above IQ 125…
IQ 75 signals the ability level below which individuals are not likely to master the elementary school curriculum or function independently in adulthood in modern societies. They are likely to be eligible for special educational services in school and for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) from the U.S. government, which is financial support provided to mentally and physically disabled adults. Of course, many do marry, hold a job, raise children, and otherwise function adequately as adults. However, their independence is precarious because they have difficulty getting and keeping jobs that pay a living wage. They are difficult to train except for the simplest tasks, so they are fortunate in industrialized nations to get any paying job at all. While only 1 out of 50 Asian-Americans faces such risk, Figure 3 shows that 1 out of 6 black- Americans does.
IQ 85 is a second important minimum threshold because the U.S. military sets its minimum enlistment standards at about this level. Although the military is often viewed as the employer of last resort, this minimum standard rules out almost half of blacks (44%) and a third of Hispanics (34%), but far fewer whites (13%) and Asians (8%). The U.S. military has twice experimented with recruiting men of IQ 80-85 (the first time on purpose and the second time by accident), but both times it found that such men could not master soldiering well enough to justify their costs. Individuals in this IQ range are not considered mentally retarded and they therefore receive no special educational or social services, but their poor learning and reasoning abilities mean that they are not competitive for many jobs, if any, in the civilian economy. They live at the edge of unemployability in modern nations, and the jobs they do get are typically the least prestigious and lowest paying: for example, janitor, food service worker, hospital orderly, or parts assembler in a factory.
IQ 85 is also close to the upper boundary for Level 1 functional literacy, the lowest of five levels in the U.S. government’s 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). Adults at this literacy level are typically able to carry out only very simple tasks, such as locating the expiration date on a driver’s license or totaling a bank deposit slip, but they typically cannot perform more difficult tasks, such as locating two particular pieces of information in a sports article (Level 2), writing a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill (Level 3), determining correct change using information in a menu (Level 4), or determining shipping and total costs on an order form for items in a catalog (Level 5). Most routine communications with businesses and social service agencies, including job applications, are thus beyond the capabilities of persons with only Level 1 literacy. Their problem is not that they cannot read the words, but that they are not able to understand or use the ideas that the words convey…
IQ 105 can be viewed as the minimum threshold for achieving moderately high levels of success. It has been estimated to be the point at which individuals have a 50-50 chance of doing well enough in secondary school to be admitted to a four-year university in the United States. People above this level are highly competitive for middle-level jobs (clerical, crafts and repair, sales, police and firefighting), and they are good contenders for the lower tiers of managerial and professional work (supervisory, technical, accounting, nursing, teaching). Figure 3 shows that Asian-Americans are 6-7 times more likely than blacks to exceed the IQ 105 threshold. The percentages are 53%, 40%, 27%, and 8%, respectively, for Asians, whites, Hispanics, and blacks.
IQ 115 marks the ability threshold for being competitive as a candidate for graduate or professional school in the U.S. and thus for high levels of socioeconomic success. Partly because of their higher educational promise, individuals above this IQ level have the best prospects for gaining the most coveted occupational positions in a society. This is the IQ range in which individuals can be self-instructing and are, in fact, expected to instruct, advise, and supervise others in their community and work environments. This is therefore the IQ range from which cultural leaders tend to emerge and be recruited. The percentages exceeding this threshold are, respectively, 40% (Asians), 28% (whites), 10% (Hispanics), and 4% (blacks).
Psychologist Byron M. Roth wrote:
The most notable difference among Jewish groups is average IQ. While the Ashkenazi average is 110, the Sephardic average is about 99, close to that of Europeans. The Mizrahim score about 91, markedly lower than Europeans, but higher than the Arabs with whom they have lived, whose average is about 84. The genetically distinct Falashas have IQs of about 70, typical of sub-Saharan people.
These IQ differences have had an important impact on the achievement of each group. This is especially clear in Israel, where they live side by side. The Israeli population of about 6 million people (in 2000) is about 40 percent Mizrahim, about 40 percent “European,” and about 20 percent Arab Muslims. Comparisons are complicated, however, because the 2.4 million characterized as European include 110,000 Sephardim. Furthermore, many in the group classified as European Jews are immigrants from Russia, a large number of whom—some Israeli demographers estimate as many as 900,000—are not Jews at all. They are ethnic Russians “who pretended to be Jews in order to obtain permission to leave the Soviet Union.” For these reasons the average IQ of those classified as European Jews is estimated to be about 106, lower than would be the case if all were Ashkenazim.
Nevertheless, on all measures of social and educational success, the Europeans do better than the Mizrahim, who in turn do better than the Arab citizens, a ranking perfectly consistent with IQ estimates. Of particular interest are the Ethiopians, who do very poorly, and behave like American blacks. According to an Israeli researcher, many “identify with an ‘aggressive and semi-criminal African-American youth culture’ and have become a ‘kind of ethnic underclass.’"
Charles Murray said:"IQ is a raw material to which you add all sorts of other things [such as ethics and industriousness] which we don't know how to measure well."
"Half of the children are below average, which by the way, I have gotten hissed for saying on college campuses… The limits on the ability to learn are quite strict… There are sharp constraints on what anybody who is average to below can learn."
Dennis refuses to read the 1994 book by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, The Bell Curve. Best not to know.
Yet when it came to a topic he cared about — marijuana use — Dennis read approvingly from the Wall Street Journal Jan. 23, 2014 that marijuana lowered teenager's IQ: "I believe that."
So in Prager's view, IQ matters not at all except for when it does.
Steve Sailer wrote in 2009:
Have you ever noticed how in the New York Times' universe, IQ is unquestionably valid and terribly, terribly important in the Health section of the newspaper? (See, for example, the NYT's recurrent coverage of the effects of the exposure to lead in reducing I.Q.) In this Health section article, for example, the Times is getting worked up over an IQ test given to 2-3 year olds, which is pushing the age limits of IQ testing. And the sample size is only 53. And yet, there's absolutely zero quibbling about the usefulness of IQ testing in this article. It's simply assumed that, of course, everybody knows that a difference in average IQ scores of about eight points is a big deal. Yet, in the Education section of the Times, where you might think IQ would be even more relevant, it rarely comes up. And when it does put in an unwelcome appearance, it is often dismissed as discredited.
Dennis has math skills below that of the average crack dealer. In that respect, he's the opposite of Charles Murray, who has an MIT PhD in quantitative analysis. One way of understanding Prager's veneration of common sense over studies is that Dennis can't analyze statistics and therefore he prioritizes his gut.
In a 2009 interview at the International Society for Intelligence Research, Dr. Murray said: "Intelligence is absolutely essential in economics and political science except it is always called 'educational attainment.' It is the construct that dare not speak its name because people will not confront that educational attainment is statistically highly correlated with cognitive ability and it just might be the cognitive ability that is responsible for social outcomes."
"People who deal with public policy on the right are every bit as scared of IQ as people on the left. I keep thinking this is bound to end real soon, within the next decade, as neuro-scientists and geneticists unravel this story."
"The ability of social scientists to not look at things they don't want to look at is stunning."
"You do not have to make a choice between writing about these topics and sacrificing your devotion to the truth. You can write about almost anything as long you write it obscurely enough. The great example of that was David C. Rowe. He wrote a piece for one of the major psychological magazines about the architecture of the black-white difference and it was an incredibly powerful argument that what you were looking at was not the result of environmental differences. It was an elegant piece of work but it was also very difficult. David did not go out of his way to make it obvious what he was saying and it got no flack."
"If you decide you are going to write for a general audience and you are on some of these taboo topics, you better be the right personality type. Arthur Jensen has such great equanimity that it never touched him. Phil Rushton just has a great time with the whole thing and thoroughly enjoys the fight. I was clinically depressed for about six months after The Bell Curve came out. I hated it. It was no fun."
"I've got a book in the works, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. I have now figured out a way to avoid being called a racist. I'm just going to talk about non-Hispanic whites… It just makes the whole interpretative process easier."
"If you want to compare the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa with Singapore, Japan and China, I think the differences in IQ explain a significant part of that difference. If you want to compare Italy and Germany and Sweden, I don't think that's going to buy you a lot. IQ is a fairly blunt instrument."
If IQ shapes how people turn out more than preaching does, than Dennis Prager is less important, but if what America most needs is moral instruction, then Prager is the man.
Dennis said on his radio show (circa 1995) that anyone who believes that blacks have on average a lower intelligence is a racist. He was embarrassed to have had a guest on his show (circa 1994) who said that different races have different statistical IQ (accepted by virtually all psychometricians).
On Oct. 23, 2013, Dennis said to his guest, John Alford, associate professor of political science at Rice University and one of three authors of the new book,Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences: "Isn't that a risky thing that you undertook to argue that there are biological bases for political positions?"
Why would Dennis regard this inquiry as "risky?" Dr. Rushton explained in a 2002 article for the Albany Law Review:
Although it was in England that Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911),coined the word "eugenics" (meaning "well-born" or of "goodbreeding"), the concept itself goes back at least to the Ancient Greeks. Plato and his pupil Aristotle held decidedly strong views on eugenics that went far beyond anything proposed by Galton orLaughlin. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth centurywas a worldwide phenomenon spanning the political spectrum from Tory to Socialist. The First International Eugenics Congress was held in London in 1912 with ex-British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour delivering the inaugural address, and with Winston Churchill, a later British Prime Minister, as Honorary President.
In the early twentieth century, eugenic laws were enacted in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Canada, Australia,and Latin America and just recently, in Communist China. In Sweden, for example, between 1935 and 1976 about 60,000 youngwomen deemed mentally retarded or otherwise handicapped weresterilized to ensure they did not produce defective offspring thatwould need to be supported by the state. These laws remained on their statute books until 1976.
In the U.S., the first sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907… By 1917 laws had been enacted in fifteen more states that applied to "socially inadequate" people, "mental defectives" and others. In Washington and Nevada the laws were particularly stringent, and in Missouri they bizarrely includedchicken thieves… In 1922, to rule out such anomalies, Laughlin codified many of these into a model sterilization law that wouldinclude: the feeble minded, the insane, criminals (including the delinquent and wayward), the epileptic (which included Laughlin himself), the inebriate, the diseased, the blind, the deaf, the deformed, and the dependant (including orphans, ne»er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps and paupers). By these standards a large partof the American population might qualify. Seen as excessive, this was part of the reason eugenics began to fall out of favor.
Eugenic thinking was still well established during the 1920s. In 1927, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes supported state-mandated sterilization of the mentally retarded in the Buck v.Bell decision. Writing for an eight-to-one majority that includednoted civil libertarian Louis Brandeis, Holmes penned the often quoted line; "[t]hree generations of imbeciles are enough."
Although many conservative Americans at that time, such as Teddy Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, J. C. Penney, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were enthusiastic about eugenics, so were many left-of-center Americans such as Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) and even radicals like Emma Goldman and Hermann J. Muller, a future Nobel laureate for his work ingenetics, who was a Marxian Socialist and an admirer of the SovietUnion where he worked for several years. Even some religious thinkers of both the Christian and Jewish persuasions advocated eugenic principles. For all their political differences, eugenicists shared a concern for promoting the fertility of healthy and productive individuals and for discouraging the fertility of the sick and dependent.
The Great Depression (1929-1932) hastened the decline of eugenic thinking because it became obvious that socio-economic forces also played a major role in people's life outcomes. Millions who had been productive workers suddenly found themselves unemployed and dependent. After World War II eugenics fell into further disrepute, because it became associated with Hitler's genocide… Most historians of the eugenics movement recognizethat the scientists involved embraced the study of biology,demography and genetics. Many eugenic scientists continued their work but jettisoned the term, now one of opprobrium.
In 1921, the soon-to-be President Calvin Coolidge expressed his fear in a popular magazine that "[b]iological laws show . . . that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races." An earlier president, Theodore Roosevelt, was hoping to unite thewhite settlers from diverse European nations into a purely Caucasian nation. He opposed the immigration and settlement of non-Europeans in what he wanted to be an America populated by peoples of European descent. These were consensus views among "Old Americans." Many prominent psychologists saw the continuing ascendancy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as consistent with their analyses ofthe World War I (1917-1918) data from the military conscription, in which tens of thousands of young men were tested on verbal and non-verbal IQ tests. European groups such as the Italians, Greeks, Russians, and Eastern Europeans scored lower, and they along with the Jews were popularly thought to be inferior, subversive, or otherwise a threat to the earlier immigrants of Nordic and Anglo-Saxon stock. Discrimination against these recent immigrants and the resident Native American and African populations whose ancestors had been dispossessed and enslaved, led to measures meant to protect the resident White Americans from "degeneration." Strong legislation was enacted against African Americans enforcing segregation in the Southern States, while other state legislatures passed laws prohibiting marriages between African Americans and Whites. In several states, marriages were prohibited between individuals deemed to be "feeble minded", mentally defective, or suffering from venereal disease.
Now that eugenics is out of favor and has few defenders, there is little to prevent those like Lombardo from adopting the extreme and distorted position that all of its multifarious facets can be dismissed as nothing more than a smokescreen for "pro-Nazi" and "white supremacist" prejudice. In this writer's opinion, The Great Depression led many to over-react to the point that they believed free market economies had to be replaced by centrally planned socialist ones and likewise, that hereditarian theories had to be completely replaced by culture-only theories. When legally enforced school segregation of Blacks and Whites in the Deep South was overturned in the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, many over-reacted again confusing the ethical concept of equality before the law with the empirical question of whether there is evidence of a genetic component in the average difference between Blacks and Whites in cognitive ability. Lombardo's equating of eugenics with Nazism does not hold. Undoubtedly, the eugenics movement includes several dark episodes in American history. However harshly today we may judge support for policies such as sterilization of those deemed to be unfit, prohibition of racial intermarriage, repatriation of Blacks to Africa, and much more restrictions on immigration policy, it iswrong to equate these ideas with Nazism, gas chambers, and someof the worst mass murders, war crimes and crimes against humanity ever committed. Expressions of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) ethnocentrism, and even admiration for the Nordic founders of America, are a long way from supporting Nazi exterminations. There is a clear difference between ethnic pride, or even ethnocentrism, on the one hand, and xenophobia on the other.
Nothing in the history of the behavioral sciences has been as contentious as the question of how much genes play a role in humanbehavior, especially regarding ethnic and racial group differences. Ever since World War I and the widespread use of standardized mental tests, mean group differences in cognitive performance have been regularly discovered. The vexing question that still remains is whether the cause of group differences in achievement is purely social, economic, and cultural, or whether genetic factors are also involved.
In the 1920s and 1930s the Franz Boas culture-onlyschool of anthropology succeeded in decoupling the biological from the social sciences. Darwinism as a whole became marginalized in the human sciences, swept away by various environmentalist doctrines… In the 1950s, revulsion at the record of Nazi racial atrocities tainted any attempt to restore Darwinism to the social sciences. From that time on, it became increasingly difficult to suggest that individuals or groups might differ genetically in behavior without being accused of harboring Nazi or racist sympathies. Those who opposed the genetic-evolutionary perspective and who believed in the biological sameness of people remained free to write what they liked, without fear of vilification. In the intervening decades the idea of a genetically based core of human nature, on which individuals and groups might differ, was derogated. From the above it is easy to see why the egalitarian culture-only perspective became politically enmeshed with Third World decolonization, the U.S. civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and the renewed debates over immigration. Playing the "Nazi race card" against scientists who have investigated the genetic and evolutionary basis of human behavior has been a repeated occurrence…
Today most scientists and historians engaged in the serious study of race do so from either the race-realist or the hermeneutical perspective. On one side, those I have termed race-realists view race as a natural phenomenon to be observed, studied, and explained. They believe human race is a valid biological concept, similar to sub-species or breeds or strains. On the other side, those I term the hermeneuticists view race as an epiphenomenon, (like gender as opposed to sex ) a mere social construction, with political and economic forces as the real causal agents. Rather than actually research race, hermeneuticists research those who study race. Alternative and intermediate positions certainly exist, but the most heated debate currently takes place between advocates of these polar positions…
Because Dennis refuses to learn about IQ, much of reality befuddles him. For instance, he doesn't know why many employers require a college degree as a substitute for banned IQ testing of potential workers.
Law professor Amy L. Wax wrote in 2012:
Although non-cognitive capacities make some difference, general intelligence is simply a more important variable for achieving proficiency in a wide range of occupations. This is true even in professions, such as nursing or teaching, that would seem to depend heavily on special non-cognitive skills like compassion or patience. Indeed, it is safe to say that cognitive ability better predicts on-the-job performance than does any personality trait or talent that IOP experts have yet identified. Conscientiousness — the personality trait with the strongest documented link to job success — shows a correlation with job performance in the range of about 0.2 to 0.4, in contrast with the significantly higher correlation of 0.5 or more for IQ. Contrary to the Supreme Court's assumption in Griggs, the comparative power of IQ extends even to relatively uncomplicated positions requiring modest skills, such as clerical or retail work. What this means is that hiring on the basis of intelligence — as opposed to other, non-cognitive personal attributes or talents — will almost always produce better-performing workers.
On Oct. 31, 2013, a caller asked: "Why I agree with everything you said about the educational system in the United States and how you could much more wisely spend $50,000 a year on education, the bottom line still in this country is that you cannot get a substantial job in this country without a degree. How do you get around that?"
Dennis: "There is an answer — social pressure on companies to drop that awful that awful policy that you have to have a college degree when it is irrelevant to 99% of the jobs that people do with a college degree. I would like to know why you need a college degree for almost any job in this country?"
As James Taranto doesn't stick his head in the sand on this issue, he can describe in the Wall Street Journal "the historic origins of the higher-ed industry's credential cartel. As we've explained before, it goes back to Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that companies could not administer IQ tests because they had a racially "disparate impact"–that is, it discriminates against blacks because they score more poorly on average than whites do.
"The disparate-impact test in Griggs, written into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991, applies only to employers. Educational institutions are free to administer IQ tests, which is essentially what the SAT and other entrance exams are. To assure that their degrees pass muster as a condition of employment, colleges and universities go to extreme lengths to ensure a "diverse" student body, including discriminating in favor of blacks (and selected other minorities) in admissions."
On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: "We have in the United States a certain percentage of conscienceless people. When I think about this knockout game and the laughter that accompanies it, we have a certain percentage of young people, disproportionately among blacks, that are conscienceless. At some point are we going to drop this notion that racism causes this and just confront this terrible fact?"
Former Heritage Foundation policy analyst Jason Richwine points how IQ affects morality:
IQ, a construct that psychologists use to estimate general intelligence, has been separately linked to elements of social capital, such as sophisticated ethical thinking, altruism, planning for the future, political awareness, adherence to informal community standards of behavior, and cooperation for the greater good.
The social attitudes of citizens are the building blocks of social capital, and IQ plays a role in shaping many of them. For example, psychologists have developed measures of moral reasoning that overlap substantially with IQ. When confronted with a moral dilemma, a person operating at the lowest level of moral reasoning would consider only his own self-interest. As moral reasoning becomes more sophisticated, people tend to give more consideration to community welfare, and to apply abstract principles to resolve moral dilemmas. Because of the cognitive demands of such reasoning, smarter people are much more likely to transcend simple self-interest in their ethical thinking. People who do so are likely to be better neighbors and better citizens.
Intelligent people are also likely to be more altruistic, which could help form tighter bonds within communities…
It makes intuitive sense that smarter people should be able to internalize future rewards more easily. They are probably more future-oriented because they can better manipulate their surroundings, whereas incompetent people exert less control on their future, making it murky and unknown. Whatever the cause, the impulsivity of low-IQ people has serious implications for social capital. People in less intelligent populations will be less willing to set up networks for potential long-term payoffs, make personal investments in the community, and follow basic norms of behavior with the expectation of future reciprocity.
On Dec. 6, 2013, Dennis said: "In the car crash of the Fast & Furious star [Paul Walker], there were kids who went by and stole from the crash afterward and I always think this, what happens to the conscience in such persons? You're a living vulture? There's a car crash and two dead people and you go and steal from it? I admit this is silly, but it is always my initial reaction that I want to interview them."
An interview with such criminals would likely show they have an IQ in the retarded category and don't think about consequences.
"I think America is deteriorating… When there are bunches of kids walking around playing the knockout game…and then videoing it and putting it on the Youtube… The number of children born from mothers who are not married."
Where are these problems at their worst in America? In black and latino life. As America allows in more immigrants with low IQs, the country heads towards Idiocracy.
As Jason Richwine wrote for Politico:
The American Psychological Association (APA) tried to set the record straight in 1996 with a report written by a committee of experts. Among the specific conclusions drawn by the APA were that IQ tests reliably measure a real human trait, that ethnic differences in average IQ exist, that good tests of IQ are not culturally biased against minority groups, and that IQ is a product of both genetic inheritance and early childhood environment. Another report signed by 52 experts, entitled “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” stated similar facts and was printed in the Wall Street Journal.
So when Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard University, speculated in 2005 that women might be naturally less gifted in math and science, the intense backlash contributed to his ouster.
Two years later, when famed scientist James Watson noted the low average IQ scores of sub-Saharan Africans, he was forced to resign from his lab, taking his Nobel Prize with him.
When a Harvard law student was discovered in 2010 to have suggested in a private email that the black-white IQ gap might have a genetic component, the dean publicly condemned her amid a campus-wide outcry. Only profuse apologies seem to have saved her career.
In none of these cases did an appeal to science tamp down the controversy or help to prevent future ones. My own time in the media crosshairs would be no different.
So what did I write that created such a fuss? In brief, my dissertation shows that recent immigrants score lower than U.S.-born whites on a variety of cognitive tests. Using statistical analysis, it suggests that the test-score differential is due primarily to a real cognitive deficit rather than to culture or language bias. It analyzes how that deficit could affect socioeconomic assimilation, and concludes by exploring how IQ selection might be incorporated, as one factor among many, into immigration policy.
Because a large number of recent immigrants are from Latin America, I reviewed the literature showing that Hispanic IQ scores fall between white and black scores in the United States. This fact isn’t controversial among experts, but citing it seems to have fueled much of the media backlash.
Dennis Prager is squarely among those denouncing the above experts in IQ while freely admitting he knows nothing about IQ. He showed his obliviousness in this June 7, 2011 column:
While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners’ conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words “they isn’t.”
Closed captions display the words spoken. They don’t correct for poor grammar.
All I could think was: How can a grown man in America today say “they isn’t” rather than “they aren’t”?
First, how is it possible for anyone to graduate an American elementary school, not to mention a high school or, most incredibly, attend college, and leave with an inability to conjugate the verb “to be”?
Second, has anyone — a parent or another relative, a teacher, a friend, a coach — in that player’s life ever corrected his grammar?
I assume that the answer to the second question is “No.”
And I assume that the answers to both questions are related: The left, which dominates our culture and educational institutions, has too often lowered standards for black Americans. Even worse, it has declared that if you are black, “they isn’t” is not only not to be corrected, but many in academia have declared it an acceptable form of English, i.e., Ebonics, or Black English.
It doesn’t end. I saw “they isn’t” the same week the Democrats and others on the left virtually unanimously condemned all Republican attempts in state legislatures to pass legislation requiring voters to show a photo ID. The Democrats labeled it a means of “disenfranchising” blacks. Many Democrats compared it to Jim Crow laws.
“Jim Crow, move over — the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place,” charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state’s new voter ID law.
It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black.
Reality reveals, however, that neither leftism nor America's education system is failing blacks (or whites or Asians or Latinos), because, according to the 2013 PISA test results (with life results to match), "Asian Americans outscored all large Asian countries (with the exception of three rich cities); white Americans outperformed most, but not all, traditionally white countries; and Latino Americans did better than all Latin American countries. African Americans almost certainly scored higher than any black majority country would have performed."
People with low IQs of any race are going to have more difficulty with grammar and getting photo identification and other tasks of life, whatever the education and political system.
Fifty two of the leading thinkers on intelligence published this essay in the Wall Street Journal Dec. 13, 1994 in support of The Bell Curve:
Intelligence tests are not culturally biased against American blacks or other native-born, English-speaking peoples in the U.S.. Rather, IQ scores predict equally accurately for all such Americans, regardless of race and social class. Individuals who do not understand English well can be given either a nonverbal test or one in their native language…
The bell curves for some groups (Jews and East Asians) are centered somewhat higher than for whites in general. Other groups (blacks and Hispanics) are centered somewhat lower than non-Hispanic whites…
The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks…
IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes. Its relation to the welfare and performance of individuals is very strong in some arenas in life (education, military training), moderate but robust in others (social competence), and modest but consistent in others (law-abidingness). Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance.
A high IQ is an advantage in life because virtually all activities require some reasoning and decision-making. Conversely, a low IQ is often a disadvantage, especially in disorganized environments. Of course, a high IQ no more guarantees success than a low IQ guarantees failure in life. There are many exceptions, but the odds for success in our society greatly favor individuals with higher IQs.
The practical advantages of having a higher IQ increase as life settings become more complex (novel, ambiguous, changing, unpredictable, or multifaceted). For example, a high IQ is generally necessary to perform well in highly complex or fluid jobs (the professions, management); it is a considerable advantage in moderately complex jobs (crafts, clerical and police work); but it provides less advantage in settings that require only routine decision making or simple problem solving (unskilled work).
There is no persuasive evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial-ethnic groups are converging.
Linda Gottfredson wrote:
Adults near the threshold for mild mental retardation (IQ 70) can usually learn simple work tasks (mopping a floor, answering a telephone, etc) if given sufficient hands-on, one-on-one, repetitive instruction and supervision. People of average psychometric intelligence (IQ 100) can learn a wide variety of routine procedures via written materials and demonstration. Individuals near the threshold for mild giftedness (IQ 130) can be self-instructing…
On the whole, g is not correlated with differences in personality, temperament, or physical strength, and it is only moderately correlated with interpersonal… skills…
Finally, g level has highly generalized effects on individuals' wellbeing, from physical health to social status… g…is generally the best single predictor — better than socioeconomic status — of both the good and the bad life outcomes that concern policymakers (e.g. success in school and work, delinquency)… Compare, for instance, the risks facing young white adults of very low IQ (below 75) to those of very high IQ (above 125). The former are twice as likely to become divorced within five years (21% versus 9%), but their risk of unemployment is 6-fold (12% versus 2%) and living in poverty is 15-fold (30% versus 2%)…
Cohort studies reveal robust relations between childhood IQ and adult mortality… [E]ach additional IQ point was associated with a 1% reduction in relative risk of death…
IQ was the best predictor of motor vehicle fatalities [three times as high for people with IQs 80-85 as compared to those scoring 100-115].
Mar. 20, 2014, Dennis said: "Very few people are stupid… What renders people to stupid conclusions is agendas."
According to Linda Gottfredson, 40% of urban out-patients don't understand when their next doctor's appointment is scheduled, 70% don't understand how many pills of a prescription to take, and 95% don't understand the informed consent form. Stupidity kills and it is not evenly distributed among the races.
According to the results of the NALS 1993, most blacks can't write a brief letter explaining an error in a credit card bill, let alone use an eligibility pamphlet to calculate SSI benefits. About half will struggle to locate an intersection on a map.
When I worked in insurance and law offices, many of our black and latino clients didn't know how to use a self-sealing envelope. I had to include instructions in our letters. Many couldn't spell the street they lived on. One latino got a big settlement, spent it all on cocaine, and promptly got arrested for raping a girl in a park.
Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Mar. 16, 2014:
So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
Dennis responded: "Charles Murray talked about IQ in one of his books. He spoke about average IQs among blacks in America and whites in America, but Krugman might as well argue that Charles Murray argued for the genetic inferiority of whites to asians because asians have higher IQs than whites."
"I don't care about IQ. I admire Charles Murray. He's one of the important thinkers of our old time but I do not find that important. IQ does not make you inferior or superior. Is there one person listening to this program of any race who believes that the measure of a person's worth is IQ?
"I've always argued that IQ is largely irrelevant. I am so committed to that that I do not know my IQ and I do not know my children's IQs nor do I give a damn. What difference does it make? Does it make you wiser? No. Does it make you happier? No. Does it make you more decent, kind or moral? No. It's one tiny little tool. That's all. It may be very helpful if you are going to do rocket science or higher mathematics."
Martin Luther King
Dennis Prager often praises Martin Luther King. On Jan. 27, 2011, Dennis's Facebook page said: "Celebrate Martin Luther King day today by reading and sharing the profound 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail.' Print it out and put it on the kitchen table for the kids to read. It's an important national holiday. Put the flag out and talk about the Reverend and read excerpts at dinner tonight."
National Review through the 1970s supported white segregation around the world while Dennis has always called such segregation "evil", including in his first edition of Ultimate Issues.
Will Herberg, who Prager often cites about Judaism, blamed Martin Luther King for the 1965 Los Angeles Riots, writing in the Sept. 7, 1965 National Review:
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the ‘cake of custom’ that holds us together. With their doctrine of ‘civil disobedience’ they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes…that it is perfectly all right to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance… And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted ‘school strikes’ sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit violation of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed.
In its August 24, 1957 issue, National Review editorialized against giving blacks the right to vote because it would threaten civilization in the South:
The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.
National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct… It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.
The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class… Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
Sam M. Jones wrote for National Review (NR) in 1957 that "the problem of school integration in the nation’s capital may be eventually solved by the steady migration of the white population out of the District of Columbia.” Jones cited IQ differences, “a white average ranging from 105 to 111 and a Negro average of 87 to 89…. Data on juvenile delinquency…revealed a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism and sex-offenses in integrated schools. Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools. Senior and junior class plays have been discontinued. Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation or attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls. In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago."
On the the tenth anniversary of Brown, NR editorialized June 2, 1964:
But whatever the exact net result in the restricted field of school desegregation, what a price we are paying for Brown! It would be ridiculous to hold the Supreme Court solely to blame for the ludicrously named ‘civil rights movement’–that is, the Negro revolt . . . . But the Court carries its share of the blame. Its decrees, beginning with Brown, have on the one hand encouraged the least responsible of the Negro leaders in the course of extra-legal and illegal struggle that we now witness around us… Brown, as National Review declared many years ago, was bad law and bad sociology. We are now tasting its bitter fruits. Race relations in the country are ten times worse than in 1954.
In the Nov. 2, 1957 issue, classicist Revilo Oliver reviewed Ashley Montagu’s Man: His First Million Years:
Dr. Montagu, who composed the UNESCO Statement on Race, has again skillfully trimmed the facts of anthropology to fit the Liberal propaganda line. Every anthropologist knows, for example, that aborigines in Australia propagated their species for a hundred thousand years without ever suspecting that pregnancy might be a consequence of sexual intercourse. Equally striking evidence of intellectual capacity is provided by the many peoples that never discovered how to kindle a fire or plant a seed. But Dr. Montagu, after making a great show of cautious objectivity, proclaims that ‘anthropologists are unable to find any evidence’ of ‘significant differences in mental capacity’ between ‘ethnic groups.’ If you can tell such whoppers with a straight face, you too can ask the ‘United Nations’ to recognize your right to largesse from the pockets of American taxpayers.
In 1979, William Buckley said about Martin Luther King: "When it was black men persecuting white or black men–in the Congo, for instance–he was strangely silent on the issue of human rights. The human rights of Chinese, or of Caucasians living behind the Iron Curtain never appeared to move him."
American Renaissance magazine said in 2007: "Once the ancient distinction between black and white was broken down, the 1960s made short work of virtually every other distinction whites had taken for granted: man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and perverted, diligence and sloth, health and sickness, good and bad."
American Renaissance magazine said in 2009:
In the minds of many, King towers above other Americans as a distinguished orator and writer, but this short, 5’6½” man often stole the words of others. People believe he was a Christian, but he doubted some of the fundamentals of the faith. Our country honors King, but he worked closely with Communists who aimed to destroy it. He denied racial differences, but fought for racial favoritism in the form of quotas. He claimed to be for freedom, but he wanted to force people to associate with each other and he promoted the redistribution of wealth in the form of reparations for slavery.
Jared Taylor wrote in 2012:
In the late 1990s, the magazine was saying sensible things about immigration, multiculturalism, and even race and IQ. It defended The Bell Curve, called for serious immigration reform and published Philippe Rushton. This was too much for the NR’s founder, William Buckley, who removed the two men most responsible for honesty. He forced out Editor John O’Sullivan in December 1997, and in February 1998 exiled Senior Editor Peter Brimelow to the powerless position of Contributing Editor. Mr. O’Sullivan’s replacement was none other than the Mr. Lowry who now finds Mr. Derbyshire’s work “nasty and indefensible.”
Starting in 2002, NationalReview.com published Dennis Prager's column every week. Once dominated by professors, the publication now primarily features pundits reacting to the events of the day.
In an Apr. 2, 2013 column praising the greatness of the Bible, Dennis included Martin Luther King in the same sentence as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln:
It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as "deists." It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. (yes, “the Reverend,” almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, “Dr.”) Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.
It is values, not genetics, that account for white and asian accomplishment, according to Prager. Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis wrote:
In colleges throughout America, students are taught to have disdain for the white race…
For example, from the day they enter college, many students are taught about white privilege — how innately advantaged white students (and all other whites are). Last week, the president of Western Washington University posed the question on the university's website: "How do we make sure that in future years we are not as white as we are today?"
Imagine if the president of the University of California at Berkeley had posed the question, "How do we make sure that in future years we are not as Asian as we are today?"
Inner city young blacks who work hard in school are routinely chastised by other black youth for "acting white."
Regarding white privilege, last year, three academics at the University of Rhode Island wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
"The American Psychological Association's educational goals for the psychology major include sociocultural and international awareness, with learning outcomes regarding mastery of concepts related to power and privilege. Other professional organizations, including the American Sociological Association, have developed similar learning goals for teaching in higher education. Instructors have been charged with teaching their white students to understand their own privileged positions in society relative to those of marginalized groups."
The key point here is that the word "values" never appears. Instead of asking what values made America's Founders great, the left asks what race, gender and class privileges enabled those men to found America. Instead of asking what values does the white majority (or, for that matter, on some campuses, the Asian majority) live by in order to succeed, and how can we help inculcate those values among more less successful people of all racial and ethnic groups, the left asks what privileges do whites have that enable them to get into colleges and graduate at a higher rate than blacks and Latinos.
The undermining of the very concept of values was starkly made clear last month at a national inter-college debate tournament.
As reported in the Atlantic last week:
"On March 24, 2014 at the Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) Championships at Indiana University, two Towson University students, Ameena Ruffin and Korey Johnson, became the first African-American women to win a national college debate tournament, for which the resolution asked whether the U.S. president's war powers should be restricted. Rather than address the resolution straight on, Ruffin and Johnson, along with other teams of African-Americans, attacked its premise. The more pressing issue, they argued, is how the U.S. government is at war with poor black communities."
In the final round, Ruffin and Johnson squared off against Rashid Campbell and George Lee from the University of Oklahoma, two highly accomplished African-American debaters with distinctive dreadlocks and dashikis. Over four hours, the two teams engaged in a heated discussion of concepts like 'nigga authenticity' and performed hip-hop and spoken-word poetry in the traditional timed format. At one point during Lee's rebuttal, the clock ran out but he refused to yield the floor. 'F— the time!' he yelled.
In a national intercollegiate debate contest, a black debating team won by transforming the topic of the debate, one that that had nothing to do with race, into a race question.
But to object to this, or to argue that a team might be disqualified for yelling "f— the time" when told it had gone over the time limit, or to ask what performing hip-hop has to do with the topic "whether the U.S. president's war powers should be restricted" — is now deemed to act white.
Apr. 22, 2014, Dennis said: "The American dream, the American value system, the Judeo-Christian value system is that race does not mean anything. It is the only moral belief. The Left has picked up where racial fascism left off."
"The answer to the racism of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, was to end racism, not to institute it in a different form."
"Why would I want to answer negative racism with affirmative racism? You have the same treatment of all people irrespective of color. The only answer to racism is to be color-blind. When you are not color-blind, you are racist. Well-intentioned racism is not better than ill-intentioned racism."
May 14, 2014, Dennis said: "We're told about old white men. The bane of society. Guess who supports the arts? Old white men. As they move on, who's going to support the arts. Boy, is this country going to long for old white men one day, especially left-wing institutions, all supported by them."
"Old white males should go on strike. See what happens to the institutions of America. To the museums. To the orchestras. To the ballets. To the operas. To the colleges. Who do you think gives to all these endowments? Who do you think buys the tickets to these [classical music] concerts? Last time I was at Disney Hall, it didn't look all that multi-racial and multi-ethnic to me. Pretty much all old white males and females. Maybe the group they love to attack has done some good for society or is that racist? Whenever the Left uses 'racist', it means that they don't have an argument."
"These WASP males made the greatest country in the world. It had nothing to do with their color. They could have been BASPs — Black Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But they weren't. You are only allowed to crap on WASPs. If you say anything good, you're called a racist."
"You can have this stupidity about white privilege but you can't have white contributions. Can you imagine that? White contributions. Which do you think has been greater?"
"Why are Nigerians among the most successful Americans? What privilege did they have? What privilege did Koreans have to make such success in one generation?"
Why Are Jews Liberal?
Here are some highlights from a 2005 column by Dennis Prager as selected by Lawrence Auster:
* … Jews (outside of Israel) are indeed overwhelmingly liberal and disproportionately left of liberal as well.
* Most Jews are frightened by anything that connotes right-wing—such as the words “right-wing” and “conservative.”
* Liberal Jews fear most religion. They identify religion—especially fundamentalist religion and especially Christianity—with anti-Semitism.* Despite their secularism, Jews may be the most religious ethnic group in the world. The problem is that their religion is rarely Judaism; rather it is every “ism” of the Left. These include liberalism, socialism, feminism, Marxism and environmentalism. Jews involved in these movements believe in them with the same ideological fervor and same suspension of critical reason with which many religious people believe in their religion.
* The Jews’ religious fervor emanates from the origins of the Jewish people as a religious people elected by God to help guide humanity to a better future. Of course, the original intent was to bring humanity to ethical monotheism, God-based universal moral standards, not to secular liberalism or to feminism or to socialism. Leftist Jews have simply secularized their religious calling.
* Liberal Jews fear nationalism. The birth of nationalism in Europe planted the secular seeds of the Holocaust (religious seeds had been planted by some early and medieval Church teachings and reinforced by Martin Luther). European nationalists welcomed all national identities except the Jews’. That is a major reason so many Jews identify primarily as “world citizens”; they have contempt for nationalism and believe that strong national identities, even in America, will exclude them.
Lawrence Auster, a Jew who converted to Christianity, wrote:
As Prager describes it, the overwhelming majority of Jews oppose, fear, and regard as evil everything that our society is based on: conservative values, free enterprise, religion, Christianity, even nationhood itself, and they are compelled to these anti-American views by what they see as their religion.
Dennis Prager wrote Oct. 14, 2014:
One of the deepest disappointments in my life has been Jews’ opposition to wars against evil. I had always assumed that, as the victims of so much evil throughout history, and as heirs to the great moral teachings of the Bible and Judaism, Jews, of all people, would support fighting on behalf of victims of the greatest evils.
Take fighting Communism, for example. Along with Nazism, Communism was the most genocidal movement in human history; it actually enslaved and murdered considerably more people than Nazism. Yet, most Jews didn’t support anti-Communism in general nor anti-Communist wars in particular. Even worse, Jews were disproportionately pro-Communist. In Stalin’s time, the Yiddish press was the most pro-Communist press in the Western world. And among those in the West who gave Stalin the secrets to the atomic bomb, nearly every one was a Jew.
How could that be? How could so many people who see themselves as bearers of a great moral legacy, or who simply see themselves as highly moral, have either been supportive of the greatest mass murder machine ever devised; or, as was more often the case, opposed fighting the greatest mass murder machine ever devised?
On what moral grounds did Jews oppose supplying the South Vietnamese government with arms to help save itself from being taken over by Communist North Vietnam? Most American Jews not only opposed fighting the Communist regime of North Vietnam, they even opposed merely supplying the South Vietnamese government with military hardware so that it could defend itself when, in violation of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, North Vietnam attacked South Vietnam. And in those very same accords, America had promised to replace every South Vietnamese bullet and tank lost in defending itself.
After all, American Jews hadn’t opposed the Korean War, in which nearly 37,000 Americans and more than two million Koreans died. That war was a mirror of the Vietnam War. The southern half of the Korean peninsula — just like the southern half of Vietnam — was pro-West and anti-Communist; and the Communist North, backed by China and the Soviet Union, sought — in both Korea and Vietnam — to forcefully impose Communism on the south.
Nothing has changed today. Most American Jews vigorously supported President Barack Obama’s plan to remove all American troops from Iraq. The consequences, which everyone who opposed this plan knew would happen, were that Iraq would go from relative stability to mayhem and bloodbath. Why hasn’t this mattered to most American Jews?
Contrary to what Dennis Prager alleges, Judaism has been strangely silent about the need for Jews to lobby their non-Jewish host nations to fight wars against evil. There's also nothing in Jewish history to suggest that this has been a historical practice of Jews. Instead, Jews, like all other groups, push for policies that are in their self-interest.
