Steve Sailer writes: Ron was motivated by both parties of the Sacramento legislature voting quietly to put on the ballot in 2016 a ballot measure in effect repealing his signature Proposition 227. This 1998 measure switched the default in California schools from bilingual education to English immersion, passing with 58% of the vote.
Ron’s intervention, although strongly opposed by the Spanish language TV network Univision, successfully ended the bizarre but worrisome possibility that the state of California was subsidizing its own Quebec-style language imbroglio by encouraging Spanish-speaking students to postpone grappling with learning English until they were too old to pick it up easily.
Small children quickly learn languages that they are immersed in, so the old bilingualist orthodoxy perversely (or intentionally) weakened English acquisition.
The government subsidizing massive levels of public school teaching in Spanish sent the message that the powers that be wanted Hispanics to remain linguistically isolated, much as the government of Quebec sends that message to Quebec residents. As we’ve seen with Black Lives Matter, ethnic activists tend to demand most loudly what the government, with its tax dollars to spend, is hinting it wants them to demand.
It turns out, however, that when the government tells the children of immigrants to learn how to speak English, they learn how to speak English.
After all, all over the 21st Century world, speaking English is cool. I’ve often pointed out that even in heavily Spanish-speaking Van Nuys, CA, the Plant 16 movie complex rarely shows a movie dubbed into Spanish or with subtitles. I don’t have to give a single thought to whether a movie playing there will be in Spanish or English. The throngs of Latino teens who show up to watch, say, Oscar Isaac (a Latino who speaks English superbly) in The Force Awakens almost all comprehend English well enough that they would never do anything so awkward as admit they’d rather see the latest blockbuster dubbed.
But even though the English-dominant system molded by Ron in 1998 is popular with the children of California, it’s unpopular with ethnic activists. So the legislature decided to encourage voters to break what doesn’t need fixing. But they did it in a very understated manner to keep the public from noticing what’s going on.
So that’s why Ron decided to jump into the Senate race at the last moment: to draw publicity to what the profiteers of linguistic divisiveness are up to.
Interestingly, Ron’s previous campaign for office – his run in the 1994 GOP primary against incumbent governor Pete Wilson — was strikingly successful. Ron earned 34% of the vote challenging Wilson, who was strong enough to go on to defeat Kathleen Brown by 15 points (one of only two defeats in eight runs for governor suffered by the Brown dynasty of California; the only other politician able to beat a Brown for governor was Ronald Reagan).
COMMENTS:
* Then in 1998 he backed Prop 227 which banned bilingual education and mandated English immersion. Unz was the principal financial backer and public face. It passed. Some time in 1999 or 2000 or thereabouts, The New Republic had him on the cover as the man who runs California or something like that.
