What Was Obama’s LSAT Score?

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

From Steve Sailer in 2013:

From Breitbart in 2012:

A new, self-published book [Barack O’Liberal] by “pragmatic libertarian” Alan R. Lockwood claims that Barack Obama, while brilliant, may have entered Harvard Law School in the bottom 20% of his class, based on mediocre college grades–and high Law School Admission Test (LSAT) scores.  

Lockwood arrives at his conclusions with the help of demographic data published in 1990 by the Law School Admission Council (LSAC), which administers the LSAT. …

Ironically, data leading to Obama’s likely LSAT scores have been publicly available “for over two decades from, among other places, the Library of Congress,” Lockwood says. 

According to Lockwood, LSAC data reveal that during the 1987-88 academic year, ten African-American students from Columbia University applied to law school. Only two earned LSAT scores above the 63rd percentile, and those each had scores in the 94-98th percentile–i.e. scores between 42 and 45 on the 48-point scale then in use (166 to 171 on today’s 180-point scale). The other students earned scores that would have been extremely unlikely to qualify for admission, even considering factors such as affirmative action.  

Other demographic data from LSAC–including the fact that there were only two 27-year-old African-American students five years out of college that year who achieved scores in that range–further suggest that Obama’s LSAT scores were among the two from Columbia in the 94-98th percentile.  

Therefore it is likely, Lockwood concludes, that Obama was admitted to Harvard with LSAT scores near the median of his class (Lockwood suggests a score of 43). 

However, Lockwood argues, Obama’s grades were less competitive. Biographer David Maraniss notes that Obama claimed to be a B-plus student at Occidental College–roughly a 3.3 GPA. His GPA at Columbia was reportedly 3.7, and so his combined GPA was near 3.5. (Lockwood takes these numbers roughly as given, though he says they could be slightly inflated.)  

That could put him at the bottom 20% of his law school class, 80% of whom had both a GPA above 3.5 and LSAT scores above the 95th percentile. 

Obama might have been rejected “under an LSAT-GPA only system,” Lockwood argues. Yet he confirms that Obama excelled once at Harvard Law, graduating in the top 14% of his class–and famously becoming the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. 

This sounds pretty reasonable, although I haven’t checked the methodology or sources. But it’s a clever way of approaching the question. You look at various demographic crosstabs that Obama’s score would appear under and look for scores that show up in each. Of course, there’s a big assumption that Obama wasn’t one of the 63rd percentile or lower applicants, but assuming he was one of the two very bright black applicants from Columbia who applied to any law school doesn’t seem unreasonable.

A commenter notes that the highest score in Obama’s possible range (98th percentile) would put him only at the 25th percentile among the current HLS class. (Most elite educational institutions have seen test score inflation over the last generation, however, so Obama’s percentile among first year students was probably a little higher back then.) Scoring at the 25th percentile, combined with mediocre college grades, makes your odds of getting in pretty low without some other juice. It’s a big pyramid of applicants and Obama was down toward the broad base. As Obama said while at HLS, he likely benefitted from affirmative action.

On the other hand, most non-STEM higher educational institutions aren’t terribly difficult once you’ve got your foot in the door. If you are black, you can take a lot of race and law type classes (Obama’s specialty) to free up time for networking and working on the law review.

Obama’s election as editor of the Harvard Law Review was a political decision: the favorite had been a brilliant Jewish leftist radical who wanted to promote the ascendant Critical Legal Theory — Obama rallied the conservative Federalist Society voters to block the far left Crits by implying that he’d be a caretaker editor not a crusader for the rising leftist postmodernist theories, which he was, and that they could pat themselves on the back for voting for the first black editor. But you have to be pretty smart just to be a plausible caretaker editor.

As I’ve theorized in the past, very good LSAT scores fits in with the report that Obama only applied to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law schools, with no safety schools. With his high LSAT score and his affirmative action brownie points (and, as a commenter notes, his Harvard legacy brownie points), he knew he was a lock to get in to one of those schools.

This also may help explain Obama’s failure to develop as a legal scholar despite being given every imaginable opportunity over a dozen years or so (including being given a huge advance to write an analytical book about law and race, which he utterly failed to do, eventually producing an autobiography instead. Obama is about as smart as the average elite law school student, but not as smart as the average elite law school professor.

As a lecturer at the U. of Chicago Law School, Obama was perfectly competent to explain in lucid prose both current sides of issues in his specialty of discrimination law (see his tests and answer sheets), but he’s not a creative intellect who can push beyond the current talking points. And, presumably, he’s smart enough to know that, which is why he didn’t embarrass himself by delivering the book for which he’d been paid six figures. Of course, he was still offered tenure by the posh U. of Chicago Law School despite publishing nothing on the law, an offer that would have been astonishing to a white lecturer, as two legal scholars told the NYT in 2008.

I’ve also theorized that the day Obama received his LSAT scores in the mail may be when his personality changed from the introverted nobody depicted in David Maraniss’ biography to the grandiose Future President of the United States who reminded classmate Jackie Foxx of the Runaways when they were at Harvard Law School together of her former bandmate Joan Jett’s tricks. (I’ve never taken the LSAT but I presume it focuses more than the SAT on Obama’s strong suits such as verbal logic and vocabulary, but not on math, which doesn’t appear to be an Obama strength.) For most of his life, Obama had receded into the background (an acquaintance who had known both Obama and George Stephanopolous at Columbia said Obama made almost no impression relative to the future Clinton aide and broadcaster). But, suddenly at Harvard Law, validated by his LSAT scores and surrounded by 22-year-old law nerds, the 27-year-old Obama was a rock star.

Of course, the irony is terrific. Cognitive testing was recommended by Cyril Burt a century or so ago as a way to find diamonds in the rough among the lower classes, a service to Britain for which he was knighted by a Labour Government. But we have all been told over and over that standardized tests are biased against blacks. Yet in the case of the President of the United States, testing worked just like Sir Cyril said it would: a black loner gets quantitative proof that he really is as smart as he thinks he is and blossoms.

Why wouldn’t Mr. Obama release his strong test scores? First, there’s the family problem. There is evidence that Mrs. Obama remains sore about her not scoring well on standardized tests (for example, she failed to pass the relatively easy Illinois bar exam at her first opportunity while her husband did pass), which she likes to imply is due to bias. Her husband’s fine score on the LSAT suggests that the problem lies not in the tests, but in Mrs. Obama.

Second, has any journalist ever flat out asked Obama what his test scores are? How do we know he wouldn’t tell him? I don’t mean, has any journalist sent a request to his press secretary which got denied, I mean, has any journalist ever asked Obama face to face about his tests scores? He seems like the kind of guy who would remember all his standardized test scores in detail. In 2011, Maraniss got some time with him in the Oval Office and asked him about his grades at Occidental and Columbia, and Obama gave detailed, plausible-sounding responses. I would hardly be astonished if Obama turned out to be just as forthcoming about test scores if anybody ever asked him.

COMMENTS:

* Obama has a higher percentage of white genes than his spouse.

* Obama tends to depict himself as not having been a very serious student, and apparently he didn’t receive undergrad honors, so he’s not really hiding anything by declining to reveal grades. by contrast, presumably Obama would have an interest in revealing top test scores, for example, to rebut theories that he somehow got extra-special preference in admissions to law school (e.g., that his applications listed him as foreign born). Then again, having hidden all this information so far, why in the world should he ever reveal it? At this point it seems that the main remaining significance of all that isn’t known about Obama is to remind people how poorly the mainstream media did in vetting him back in 2007-08.

* Obama’s IQ has been estimated at about 138 in IQ. The average Harvard student is at around 133, but this is with the diversity pool included.

Take it away and the average Harvard student would most likely land somewhere Obama is.

Bill Clinton is at what, 148 to 155 IQ? Nixon was slightly higher than Obama but not far off. Reagan was certainly quite a bit lower than Obama.

So would FDR have been if he were alive today.

Yet Reagan/FDR are the two greatest 20th century presidents if you had asked the Democratic and Republican bases to name just one of their own from that century.

This probably shows the limits of IQ. You need to be in the 90th or so percentile relative to the rest of the population, so you’re no dummy, but once there the performance in the presidency correlated with IQ drops heavily. (Note: see Hoover’s very high IQ in comparison with FDR’s moderate IQ).

Obama’s bright enough to be president and then some. His main issue is that he’s an introvert, he also has a strong and visceral dislike of politics such as it is made and prefers to outsource his agenda to the lesser minions to let them duke it out while he just threatens with the veto from above(but everyone knows he doesn’t have the energy to engage so his threats are usually meaningsless).

Compare this with LBJ, another moderate IQ guy who was very aggressive and a people person, loved the personal and psychological side of politics. He gots lots of stuff done. Obama had a supermajority unlike anything anyone had in over 40 years. He had no excuses and only got a single major bill, and that bill was essentially a ripoff from a Republican plan from the 1980s.

* As a lawyer who got a pretty high score on the LSAT and who studied under some great law professors, I must say, there is no connection between these things and being an effective political leader.

The LSAT is all about reading comprehension and verbal logic – no math, science, history, or even vocabulary. It seems to be designed to test for verbal intelligence, to the exclusion of everything else.

Elite law professors are quite brilliant men for the most part, but their field is a hoary cul-de-sac of learning, focusing only on analyzing the minds of long-dead men by reading opinions which were likely only written in service of long-dead financial interests. It is useless beyond imaging to the non-specialist, including practicing lawyers. Legal scholars spend most of their time inventing and analyzing “tests” of their own making, classifying opinions according to those tests, and bad-mouthing other professor’s tests. It’s slightly more relevant to the modern world than studying Kabbalah all day, but not by much.

It is complicated and jargon-rich, but so is lepidoptery.

You can measure the relevance of law professors by asking any practicing lawyer when he last read an article in a law journal written by a law professor. In 12 years of litigation practice I haven’t read one, nor seen one reference to scholarly articles in cases or pleadings. This is true across specialties, with the partial exception of Constitutional Law – a specialty practiced by a tiny handful of people.

The LSAT does one thing well – bar people of moderate intelligence from going to law school.

Law school does one thing well – train lawyers. However, whether that’s because it’s an effective system, or whether it’s just because we don’t allow too many idiots in the door, who can say?

I happen to think Obama’s been a decent President, but it’s possible that that’s just because the last one set the bar so low.

* The Bell Curve has some interesting statistics on LSAT scores of applicants. In 1993, the year of the study, more than 1100 white students had LSAT scores of 170 or greater compared to only 3 black students (p.456) At ten of the most highly selective schools there was an average 2.9 standard deviation difference in LSAT. The smallest difference at any of these schools was 2.4 standard deviations. This means that the average black LSAT score at Harvard is down in the 50-60% percentile range. Why the assumption that Obama was one of America’s top three Black scorers his year? He doesn’t have much of a vocabulary and his use of logic is limited to straw man arguments. Who hasn’t known smarter, more academic blacks than him? He has his charms but don’t think they include high LSAT scores.

* “First off Obama’s father was admitted into Harvard before the word affirmative action existed.”

He was part of an international scholarship program, an example of AA before there was AA. Harvard would bend over backward to admit someone in that program. It wasn’t like he was applying out of the general population pool.

I don’t see any evidence that Obama Sr did any great work at Harvard; he was asked to leave the PhD program, though that may have been due to his drinking, womanizing, and finances rather than bad grades. He did graduate Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Hawaii in three years with an economics degree, and had attended an exclusive Anglican boarding school in Kenya, almost certainly as a scholarship boy on the basis of merit. He was 23 or 24 when he started at UH.

Obama pere’s paper here:

http://www.politico.com/pdf/PPM41_080411_bhobama_article_1965.pdf

doesn’t seem indicative of any great intellect. I suspect Obama Sr was fairly intelligent, but in over his head.

* Obama was the first African American president of the law review, so the professors might have felt pressure to make sure his grades were respectable to maintain the institution’s credibility.

* For anyone (such as the skeptic’s blog above) who questions Lockwood’s claims about the LSAT data for Obama, the data are completely documented in the 1,235 endnotes to Lockwood’s book entitled Barack O’Liberal: The Education of President Obama. Based on official data published by the group that administers the LSAT (i.e., the Law School Admission Council) in its National Statistical Report 1984-85 through 1988-89 (available, for example, at the Library of Congress), Chapter 5 of Barack O’Liberal proves that Obama had an LSAT score that was either below 34 or in the 42-45 range. If he scored in the lower range, it’s shown that he scored in about the bottom one percentile of his Harvard Law School class. The book also discloses a majority of Obama’s college courses (with virtually no math or science classes), his likely undergrad GPA (and the reasons to be skeptical of his public claims about his GPA), the legal errors in his Harvard Law Review article, a second law review article he published (that has unattributed language uncannily similar to that of a famous philosopher), his opposition to including women in the Harvard Law Review’s affirmative action program, the very liberal bias he had in the Harvard Law Review articles he selected for publication while president of the HLR, the overwhelming evidence that he benefited from affirmative action (as both Jesse Jackson and Obama have asserted), why Obama should have been the second (not the first) president of the HLR, and Obama’s class rank at Harvard. Facts are facts.

Posted in Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Blacks | Comments Off on What Was Obama’s LSAT Score?

WEHT To Hawaii?

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes: We’ve had a couple of commenters in the past who were superbright Hawaiian intellectuals, which is a pretty rare thing.

The federal government has invested a lot of money in Hawaii over the decades. For example, Congress put up a lot of money to start the East-West Center at the U. of Hawaii as America’s version of the Lumumba University in Moscow for waging the Cold War around the Pacific Rim. The President’s mother was affiliated with it for much of her career.

But Hawaii has really dropped off the radar.

For example, I’ve seldom heard anybody say anything insightful about the President in relation to his being from Hawaii. Nobody pays attention to Hawaii anymore, even though it was an obsession in the 1960s and into the 1970s.

The idea is to figure out which state has the best educational policies and which are executing the worst: It looks like Massachusetts does education well. The state underwent a big reform 20 years ago and it seems like it was pretty legit. Texas and Indiana are next.

California is clearly pretty bad at public schooling, a combination of liberalism of ideology and conservatism of budget. It has pretty limited budgets and then it wastes what money it does spend. LAUSD was destroyed by busing in 1978. Jewish parents pulled their kids out of public schools. That’s pretty much been memory-holed.

Louisiana isn’t all that bad, not compared to its lackadaisical traditions, perhaps due to post-Katrina reforms.

But most states are pretty average: adjusting for demographics reduces the spread in scores. There are a few outliers: Indiana, a state with smart governors recently, is particularly interesting. But there really isn’t all that much variation once you adjust for demographics, suggesting that demography is the 800 pound gorilla.

But also some of the variation is accounted for by differences within groups: Florida looks pretty good, but that may be because its Hispanics are fairly white. Massachusetts probably has smarter white people than West Virgina has on average, and so forth.

– They are looking at grade equivalents above or below the national average. If a state at averages one grade above the country it would be at +12 months.

– They are doing a multiple regression in which the national averages for each race, for free lunch or not free lunch, for special ed, etc. are adjusted to what they’d be at the national average. For example, Mississippi’s school system isn’t as bad as it looks from raw scores, it just has a whole bunch of blacks and poor whites. Minnesota’s isn’t as great as it seems, it just has a lot of middle class whites.

* Hawaii has been another portait of our future for generations.

It is a textbook case of elite-driven cheap-labor-importing population replacement, and the results are evident in those test results.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian nation was accomplished through the machinations of a group of what we would now consider foreign global elites who wanted cheap labor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Kingdom_of_Hawaii

Filipinos are now the largest ethnic group, and growing due to immigration, birthrate and young age.

The test results show the future of Hawaii more than other things because they look at the students (kids), whose ethnic breakdown skews much further toward recent immigrants, etc. Median age of the Japanese is way higher, and they aren’t taking tests in school anymore.

There are now more Filipinos than whites or Japanese, and, I think, more Hispanics than there are Hawaiians.

Sad!

* Many public schools in the US are like foreign entities. I like to call them government schools actually.

I live in a rich area, but one where they bus in the Mexicans to attend the public schools and hence you must go private. It pisses me off that my property tax dollars educate Latin America’s lower class. These government schools are like a different universe from the private schools. I would never, ever subject my children to the government school hellholes. I would drive two hours each way to work to prevent my children from attending the government schools. I would eat one meal a day. I would simply never send them there.

I love to laugh at the suckers who say with a straight face that more money will help these schools/kids. What a joke! My kids are very young but they are already too far ahead for these public school kids to ever catch them. My two year old can identify states, countries, planets, etc. Talks in complete sentences. But if they only had money for universal Pre-K, every public school kid would be talking like my kid! What a joke. It’s mostly demographics/IQ with some parenting thrown in there at the margin and to help with focus. But we are paying to educate Latin America’s lower classes.

* You are not going to get to the very top unless you have a lot of “Belmont” type places in your state (Belmont is literally in MA, a Boston suburb right next to #1 Lexington). That’s where you get a lot of synergies – lots of high IQ white (and increasingly Asian) kids from homes where education is highly valued, better credentialed teachers to teach them, wealthy school districts with lots of $ to spend/waste on fancy labs and programs and those teachers with high credentials, a competitive environment where kids try to outdo each other academically and being intellectual is not something that you try to hide from your peers so you don’t get beaten up, etc. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of Belmonts in Utah and Idaho.

In Pennsylvania, the state that I am most familiar with, if you look at the list of National Merit Scholars, probably 80% of the winners come from these Belmont type places – the rich suburbs that surround Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. These are also the schools with high NAEP scores that boost the state average.

Philadelphia itself is almost a black hole in relation to its population. Not just because the schools are mostly black (although that is a major factor) but also because the remaining whites fall mostly into categories that produce few if any National Merit types: first of all, childless whites – young hipsters, empty nesters, gays. 2nd, lower class Fishtown whites – literally, since the actual Fishtown is in Phila. (Fishtown itself is increasingly gentrified but again these are young hipsters who are mostly childless or whose kids are too young to be in high school). There are enough upscale whites with kids to support a couple of public magnet schools, but that’s a drop in the bucket in a city of 1.5 million (formerly 2M – between 1950 and 2000, half a million whites fled to the suburbs).

What was shocking (to me at least, when I saw it) is that once you take away the magnet schools and the private and Catholic Schools and look at the general enrollment public schools, the entire city produces ZERO National Merit Scholars – nada, none, zilch. Not one in the whole public school system. Even if you count all schools, the total # of semifinalists is very low in relation to population size. There is one suburban district (Tredyffrin/Easttown listed below as ” Berwyn -Conestoga High School”) with a total (not school, but total) population of 40,000 people that produces about as many merit scholars as the ENTIRE city of Phila. that has almost 40x as many people.

Nor does the rest of the state contribute a lot, despite being fairly white. The joke about Pennsylvania is that if you take away Philly and Pittsburgh and their suburbs, what is left is West Virginia. This is about right. If you cross out Phila. and Pittsburgh and their suburbs, the list gets VERY short.

* From my experience, Iowa and the Dakotas are somewhat unique in their mediocrity. And I say that as a compliment.

The middle and upper middle class kids from those states just aren’t that impressive academically when compared to East Coast states. (They’re also not a bunch of status-obsessed douchebags like so many East Coast kids.)

On the other end, poor and working class kids from those states generally don’t cause too many problems, do a bit of homework and generally score reasonably well for their class and IQ, while poor and working class whites on the East Coast seem to be falling apart. (Fishtown.)

Iowa and the Dakotas: Our highs aren’t too high, and out lows aren’t too low. Steady Eddies, just how we like it.

I wonder if migration patterns haven’t impacted Iowa and the Dakotas. They are nice enough places to live but not the most exciting. From my experience, the more ambitious and intellectually curious (not necessarily always the highest IQ though I’m sure there’s a fair amount of crossover), tend to leave for Minneapolis (somewhat ambitious), Chicago (more ambitious) or the East and West Coasts (the most ambitious), leaving behind capable but not outstanding middle and upper middle class young people. The working and lower-middle class kids stick around, keeping family and town/neighborhood ties intact, which is very helpful for the next generation of lower IQ kids.

* If we are going to have a genetic arms race then we are going to lose, badly. The Chinese are very unsentimental about this kind of stuff and are willing to abort for sex selection, etc. Whereas in America we will diddle along and take decades to approve it and many people won’t want to do it, either because it is “unnatural” or it violates their religion or yada yada yada and by the time (if ever) it is approved here the Chinese will have another 15 IQ points on us and it will be game over.

* “The achievement gap between white and minority students remains as big as ever in Minnesota schools, despite a “restorative justice” approach to student discipline designed to address the problem … student achievement has flatlined.. despite efforts to keep unruly minority students in school with a “restorative justice” discipline policy, a persistent achievement gap shows the approach has had little effect.”

LOL. This is what James Taranto of the WSJ Journal calls “The Butterfield Effect”, named for NYT reporter Fox Butterfield who wrote about “paradoxes” such as “Despite Drop in Crime, an Increase in Inmates” (this was literally the title of his story).

Whenever you see “despite” in a story written by liberals they have the arrow of causation backward 9 times out of 10. Michael Crichton called this “wet streets cause rain” in his description of the “Gell Mann Amnesia effect” – that when you read the paper about some topic about which you have personal knowledge (in Gell Mann’s case, physics), you immediately recognize that the reporters are clueless idiots that have everything totally backwards and could not possibly be more wrong (wet streets cause rain), but then you turn the page and read about international affairs or something else of which you have no personal knowledge and on those stories you suddenly develop amnesia and forget that the reporters are total fools and you actually believe what they have to say about those topics.

* The high cost of living keeping out the students who would otherwise force the high-scoring students into private schools.

Once upon a time, those who ran the public schools understood this dynamic and so kept the disruptive students from driving out the high scorers, but nowadays the “elites” prevent them from doing so, not coincidentally preserving their own relative position thereby.

* Dysfunctional minorities can remain very isolated because nobody wants their genes, but where the larger society does not impose barriers, even the most resistant successful minorities will break down over time. We are now seeing the dissolution of the American Jews in this way (a few generations of 70+% intermarriage rates for non-Orthodox Jews and there will be none) but it took 50+ years from the time that the societal barriers fell. Kaling herself dates B.J. Novak , a non-Indian (Jewish) guy. The Indians are a few generations behind the Jews but they will suffer the same fate. The Indian community will make valiant efforts to keep their kids from intermarrying (a tradition of arranged marriage helps) but in the long run it will be a losing battle.

Posted in America, California, Education, Hawaii | Comments Off on WEHT To Hawaii?

I wish I knew where the Washington Post stood on Donald Trump

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Luke Ford

From WashingtonPost.com right now:

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Top left:

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From WashingtonPost.com July 22:

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Posted in Washington Post | Comments Off on I wish I knew where the Washington Post stood on Donald Trump

Steve Sailer: Pope Pretty Much Plagiarizes Lennon’s “Imagine”

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Luke Ford

Comments:

* He’s an old man in a dress….

Should we really be surprised that an organization of drag queens is like this?

* “Having condemned borders, the Pontiff then returned to his walled compound.”

I visited the Vatican last summer and there are US Air Force bases that are easier to get into.

* Isn’t it a bit selfish to live in the luxurious walled compound that is the Vatican? There’s plenty of space in there, why not turn it into a dormitory for Muslim migrants? Just give them the run of the place; I’m sure they would return it in kind when they get back on their feet and start enriching their new society. You could sell off all those pieces of art for a pretty penny and donate it to charities designed to bring sub-Saharan Africa out of poverty. That way you could still cherish Christian tradition without being small-minded. Isn’t it un-Christian to sit in a palace while children in other areas of the world are starving?

* I think the logic, such as it is, is analogous to the practice of buying carbon credits.

Al Gore buys carbon credits that represent tree-planting in the rain forest and solar-power-installation elsewhere that absorbs CO2 (or prevents its release) to a degree sufficient to offset the CO2 he produces to fly by private jet and air condition his mansion in the Tennessee summer.

In analogy, the Pope lives in his refugee-poor walled city but offsets that by planting refugees elsewhere.

* It’s always nice when those with the power and means to escape the negative consequences of their actions lecture those who can’t escape that the latter just must buck up and take it.

* Average people are far more at risk and have far less means to prevent Muslim attacks than the Pope. Examples: the thousands of young girls forced into prostitution and raped by Muslims in England, the women raped by Muslims in Germany and Austria (they don’t call them rapefugees for nothing); the people at Nice.

The Pope is not going to be raped by Muslims the way say, ten year old girls in England are, to say the least. Muslims do like them very, very young — Mohammed “married” a nine year old. Recently a Muslim man cut off his first wife’s nose for complaining about the age of second wife — six years old.

* The pope’s native Argentina, in forty years, will be one of the few white-majority countries left in the world. The USA certainly won’t. Western Europe will be a mix of black/brown majority countries (Netherlands, Belgium, England, Sweden), but with a few places where elderly Gen-X whites provide for a thin white majority (Italy, Spain, Austria).

Argentina has the right mix of leftism that stops the super-rich from importing a ton of cheap non-white foreign labor, strong unions, and high taxes that stop the country from being too rich or attractive for imported labor. It is the same mix that is protecting the people of Eastern Europe from demographic replacement. While it is far from Africa, there are millions of blacks in nearby Brazil and Indians in Bolivia.

* At least Hitler rode in an open car.

* These days it’s not so hard to be more Catholic than the pope.

* Let me help you out here so you can understand what Steve’s point is. Steve is a very busy guy so he can’t waste time energy and space spelling out in cartoon diagrams every logical step in his proposition.
He isn’t saying that every individual Pole needs the same level of personal protection as a celebrity like the Pope. He is saying that Poland, or any other nation, as a collective is entitled to the same level of security that the Pope enjoys, yet wants to deny to others.
The Pope lives in a walled compound with security controlling who enters. Poland is entitled to the same level of border control.
The Pope decides to keep dangerous people out of the Vatican. You have to go through metal detectors and bag searches to enter St. Peter’s or the museum and grounds. Poland is entitled to vet who enters and block threats from getting in.
You don’t get into the Vatican Museum by just walking in. You have to have a reservation and buy a ticket. Poland also has the right to decide who comes in, and under what circumstances, as opposed to simply strolling across the border.
The Pope decides who gets to live in his little country. When he flew back with those refugees, he didn’t resettle the in Vatican City, he tossed them over to the Italian authorities with a “they’re all yours suckers”. Poland should also get to decide who lives there.
The Pope decides how people behave in Vatican City, and that they conform to the place’s cultural norms. You don’t get to wander around St. Peter’s in a bikini or suddenly decide you want to worship your God by carrying out voodoo animal sacrifices under Bernini’s canopy. Poland should have the same rights.

* How is the normal and healthy desire of Europeans to keep their countries, lands and cultures unchanged and intact a bad thing? The Pope is just another instrument for western disintegration.

Posted in Catholics | Comments Off on Steve Sailer: Pope Pretty Much Plagiarizes Lennon’s “Imagine”

Donald Trump and the American Crisis

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Luke Ford

John Marini writes for the Claremont Review:

Since the end of the Cold War, American leaders have understood their offices in terms of global and administrative rule, rather than political rule on behalf of the American people and the sovereignty of the American nation. Yet those offices were established on the foundation of the moral authority of the people and their Constitution. Once elected or appointed, politicians and bureaucrats have utilized their will, in both domestic and foreign policy, in an unrestrained manner on behalf of bureaucratic rule. They govern on the implicit premise of elections as plebiscites, but it is no longer clear who confers the legitimacy of an electoral mandate. Bureaucratic rule has become so pervasive that it is no longer clear that government is legitimized by the consent of the governed. Rather it is the consent of the various national—and often international—social, economic, political, and cultural interest groups that determine the outcome of elections. True political rule requires, at a minimum, the participation of citizens in their own rule, even if not in government itself. But this is possible only when people understand themselves as citizens and when the regime recognizes them as citizens. This requires distinguishing American citizens from all others and identifying them as one people.

American elections have increasingly been framed by Washington professionals. Social scientists, media pundits, and policy professionals may tilt liberal or conservative and may differ in their party preferences, but they are united in their dependence upon intellectual authority, derived from empirical science and its methodology, in their understanding of politics and economics. At the same time, historicism or (critical theory) has established itself as the closest thing to a public philosophy when it comes to understanding history, society, and culture. Applied to elections, the empirical method required that politics be understood in terms of measurable and quantifiable aggregates. This proved compatible with the positivist understanding of law and interest group liberalism. Critical post-modern theory established personal autonomy and group diversity as central to what is morally defensible in terms of public policy. As a result, political partisanship and analysis has focused on race, class, gender, and other such demographics, to provide the kind of information that has become central to the shaping and predicting of elections and to legitimize dividing the electorate into categories that came to be understood in moral terms. Consequently, political campaigns have made a science of dividing the electorate into groups and reassembling them as voting blocs committed to specific policies and issues denominated by the demographic categories themselves. This strategy requires the systematic mobilization of animosity to ensure participation by identifying and magnifying what it is that must be opposed. Appeals to the electorate are strategically controlled by the experts. Which issues are allowed to be raised seems to be more important than the manner in which they are packaged and sold to the electorate.

Understood in this way, what is central to politics and elections is the elevation of the status of personal and group identity to something approaching a new kind of civil religion. Individual social behavior, once dependent on traditional morality and understood in terms of traditional virtues and vices, has become almost indefensible when judged in light of the authority established by positivism and historicism. Public figures have come to be judged not as morally culpable individuals, but by the moral standing established by their group identity. Character is almost unrecognizable and no longer serves as the means by which the people can determine the qualifications for public office of those they do not know personally. As a result, it is difficult to establish the kind of public trust that made it possible to connect public and private behavior, or civil society and government. When coupled with the politicization of civil society and its institutions, the distinction between the public and the private or the personal and the political has almost disappeared. Anything and everything can become politicized, but things can only be understood and made intelligible—or made politically meaningful—when viewed through the lens of social science and post-modern cultural theory. In short, the public and private character of American politics has been placed in the hands of the academic intellectuals.

Kesler focuses his defense of Trump on the observation that Trump alone has succeeded in making political correctness a political issue. Kesler knows that political correctness poses a problem not only for politics, but for intellectual life as well—that it is a problem for the university as well as for civil society. Regardless of his motives, therefore, Trump has gone to the heart of the matter and made a political issue of these intellectual and social crises. Trump has not attempted a theoretical justification for doing so. That remains to be made by the thinkers. Such a justification begins by recognizing that when progressivism was confident of itself, it understood the past as rational and as providing light for the way to a glorious future. When progressive intellectuals lost confidence in the idea of progress and Enlightenment reason, they abandoned the hope of a future good and began to revise the meaning of the past. When Nietzsche analyzed the malady posed by historicism’s abandonment of its rationality, he came to realize that “the excess of history has attacked the plastic powers of life; it no longer understands how to avail itself of the past as hearty nourishment.” The politics of our time is dependent upon how we avail ourselves of the past—whether as “hearty nourishment” or as a life-threatening poison. Read on.

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