The Pentagon Is Neither Woke Nor Based
By Laurie Calhoun | The Libertarian Institute | November 1, 2022
The U.S. military has in recent times been making a big show of its “wokeness,” not only by changing the names of institutions to comply with the demands of race activists who wish to expunge from history all traces of the Confederacy, but also in its affirmation and encouragement of persons who lead alternative lifestyles. For nearly twenty years, beginning in 1993, the military maintained a “don’t ask, don’t tell,” policy on homosexuality. Since 2011, however, openly gay persons have been permitted to serve in the armed forces.
Given this context, some were surprised to learn that the Department of Defense has explicitly specified that transgender women must register for the Selective Service, while transgender men need not. The official website states:
Selective Service bases the registration requirement on gender assigned at birth and not on gender identity or on gender reassignment. Individuals who are born male and changed their gender to female are still required to register. Individuals who are born female and changed their gender to male are not required to register.
Through the Selective Service and Training Act, registration of men was first required in 1940 so as to make it possible for the government to locate potential soldiers in the event of a military draft. The law was amended as the Elston Act (aka the Selective Service Act) in 1948, and is still in place nearly seventy-five years later. There has been no draft called since the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, from 1964 to 1973, but the option remains open to the war-making authority, the executive branch of the government, at the pinnacle of which stands the politician who managed to be elected as president. Since 1940, males eighteen years of age have been required by law to register with the Selective Service; females have not.
Traditionalists (and students of biology) stand firm in their belief that the possession of a Y chromosome in every cell of one’s body properly identifies a human being as a biological male, whatever his lifestyle choices and preferences may be, and whatever surgical changes he may undertake to remove or alter body parts. Laypersons who in the era of “woke” dare to make such claims, what seems to many to be a matter of common sense, have been known to be denounced as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) by angry mobs online. Will the U.S. military now be subjected to similar barrages of anger?
Despite the military’s “woke” rhetoric regarding race and critical race theory, and its accommodating policies toward homosexual persons, it does look as though the Department of Defense has boldly affirmed the reality of biological sex, through its explicit assertion that a biological male is and always will be a biological male, even if he chooses to pump his body with estrogen, have his genitals surgically removed, wear makeup and don miniskirts. I include the latter two attributes because of the many trans-caricatures of femininity currently on display, as exemplified by Dylan Mulvaney, a twenty-five-year-old trans-activist who on day 222 of claiming “womanhood” was granted an interview with President Biden. Many of the very public, and often melodramatic, displays of transgenderism found not only on TikTok but also in commercial advertisements reduce women to the ditzy, superficial, and degrading stereotypes of decades past. If we are to believe transwomen such as Dylan Mulvaney, the “gentler sex” spends the bulk of their creative energy and time in endeavors such as painting their nails and shopping for new clothes.
In this somewhat astonishing cultural development, men who transition are thus allowed to indulge in outright misogyny, by overtly ridiculing women through conducting themselves in ways reminiscent of and entirely analogous to the racist portrayal of African Americans by white persons in blackface. Transwomen have also been permitted to compete alongside biological females in sports, with the predictable outcome that girls and women are being denied what would otherwise be their opportunity for success in athletics, and as a result do not enjoy the recognition, awards and scholarships which some of them surely deserve for their prowess.
Whatever sins of sexism transwomen may be permitted, they will not, the Pentagon has made clear, be able to evade the military draft. Yes, despite the reigning insanity on the transgender issue, propelled forward by misogynistic ad campaigns by companies such as ULTA, the U.S. military’s Selective Service registration policy is holding the line: a female is and always will be a biological female, even if she chooses to have some of the muscle in her leg transformed into a prosthetic penis, undergo a double mastectomy, and suffuse her body with testosterone in order to bulk up her muscles, lower her voice, and be able to grow a beard. The military powers that be have sided with traditionalists in asserting that, no matter how many surgeries they may undergo, “transmen are not really men,” and “transwomen are not really women,” because the former lack Y chromosomes, while the latter do not.
The Selective Service statement may look like a “gotcha” to those keen on calling a halt to the biology-denying madness. But just as earlier efforts to appear “feminist” arguably betrayed only the Pentagon’s concern to increase flagging enrollment, I strongly suspect that this bold proclamation of the reality of biological sex is part of a broader effort to force Selective Service registration upon every person, whether or not they possess a Y chromosome. By broaching the question of biological sex at all, the reignited debate about the requirement upon men, but not women, will likely be used to provoke lawmakers to “update” the requirement. It is obviously to the Pentagon’s advantage—and indeed, I am suggesting, it is their intent—to double the number of persons required to register and thus be prepared for future conscription in one of the many wars brewing on the horizon. Perversely enough, it will be yet another show of “wokeness” when the administration begins to insist that fairness and equity require that all persons, no matter their gender, be treated the same. In other words, the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for this sort of argument:
If biological males are required to register for Selective Service, then, because biological females are of equal value and worth to males, they, too, should be required to register. To hold any other position would be to claim that the sexes are not equal, to deny that females have the same worth and value as do males.
Lawmakers seem unlikely to abolish the Selective Service requirement for the same reason that they rubber stamp every single new military budget, prioritizing war over all other things. Indeed, Republican and Democratic lawmakers may disagree on every other possible allocation of taxpayers’ funds, but they form a united, virtually impenetrable front, the War Party duopoly, in supporting any and every initiative characterized, however implausibly, as a matter of national defense.
The Selective Service registration requirement has remained in place for so many decades because it is facilely depicted as a matter of necessary preparedness for the eventuality of conflicts such as World War II. But because every military intervention abroad is portrayed as a matter of defense—even the ongoing border dispute between Ukraine and Russia has been cast as a necessary defense of “democracy”—there is little reason to believe that lawmakers would agree to abolish the Selective Service registration requirement when it comes time to decide whether or not to include females alongside males. Instead, so-called liberals will be seduced by pseudo-feminist and “woke” rhetoric to insist much more enthusiastically than their “based” colleagues that the requirement be expanded, not abolished. Such unwitting dupes will no doubt be enlisted to help disseminate the Pentagon propaganda line according to which the affirmation of equality of all persons mandates that everyone of military age be required to register.
The Pentagon has been plagued by dwindling voluntary enlistments ever since the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. A series of atrocities committed by troops and private contractors throughout the “Global War on Terror” no doubt exacerbated the problem, by progressively chipping away whatever illusions of nobility prospective enlistees may have formerly associated with soldiering. Evidence that the recruitment crisis remains pressing in 2022 includes tweets from the Selective Service Twitter account (@SSS_gov), such as the one from October 7, in which parents are informed that even if they have only one son, he must register for the Selective Service.
On its face, this seems a bizarre announcement to make out of the blue. Except that it is not out of the blue, for all of these ploys are, again, plausibly part of the Pentagon’s gambit to increase the number of persons available for the wars which they are actively planning and fomenting, whether with Russia, China, Iran, the interminable “Global War on Terror” throughout the Middle East and Africa, or—why not?—yet another deadly meddling effort in Haiti.
As evidence of the ultimate aim of the Selective Service transgender policy, some of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s recent proclamations have been telling:
While I am encouraged to see a decrease in the suicide rate in our Active Component, we recognize we have more work to do. Every death by suicide is a tragedy that impacts our people, our military units, and our readiness.
Patriotism knows no gender, and neither does courage. Men and women hear the same call to serve our great country, and American women have always, always answered.
The U.S. military recently announced that it will pay for the travel of female troops who wish to terminate a pregnancy but are not located in a state where (post-Dodd) abortions are legal and therefore can be undertaken safely. It may sound cynical to suggest that females who carry their pregnancies to term, too, diminish the number of active troops, but in view of the scandalous epidemic of military rapes and sexual abuse endured by female enlistees in all branches of the armed forces in recent decades (see The Invisible War, a 2013 documentary film directed by Kirby Dick), it is not at all an implausible explanation for the accommodating stance of the DoD toward women seeking abortions.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s exuberant pro-war tweets regularly appear in my Twitter feed, and other users may have noticed in recent months an upsurge in the appearance of tweets from accounts not being followed. Significantly, these are not paid advertisements, but texts which are prioritized for dissemination and are all connected to the government in some way. Along with Austin, examples include NATO administrators, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Samantha Power (of USAID, which is well known to be a CIA front), among other figure heads, up to and including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the president himself, Joe Biden. War is the media topic of the day, but during the COVID crisis, I recall having been “treated” to a non-stop stream of tweets by vaccine entrepreneur Bill Gates—until I muted him.
Any number of less well known propagandists now appear to be paid specifically to promote war, and their slogans and exhortations also pop up in “the latest tweets” more frequently than even paid advertising. Meanwhile, accounts known to promote “dangerous” antiwar messages are shadowbanned, with tweets not even included in the feeds of their very own followers. (Anecdotally, I have determined from the analytics bar that Twitter allows my own tweets to appear in the feed of twenty-two persons.) Accounts with an antiwar “bias,” as the Disinformation Governance Board might characterize it, are capped so as to limit the number of followers. And of course anyone with an antiwar blog or website needs only to attempt to locate its articles through Google search to see how difficult they are to find.
All of this is to say that the government has commandeered social media as a vehicle for the promotion of its own propaganda. Governments have always attempted to control the narrative, but this trend has become especially glaring in the years since the ratification of the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, which lifted restrictions against propagandizing U.S. citizens by the government itself using (what else?) taxpayers’ own money to do so. In fact, that the U.S. government has exerted influence over Twitter is not all that surprising, given what we already knew about Facebook and YouTube.
The purchase of Twitter by self-proclaimed free speech champion Elon Musk may or may not improve the situation. It is worth remembering the recent report that the U.S. government intended to investigate Musk, which appeared shortly after he made the “mistake” of suggesting that the Ukraine-Russia conflict should be settled through negotiation. Musk has been providing internet access to the Ukrainian government through his Starlink company, but he crossed the MIC line when he dared to opine that negotiation might be preferable to nuclear holocaust. If Musk’s takeover of Twitter was greenlighted by the U.S. government, then it may well have been as a result of some sort of accommodation on his part.
In any case, regardless of what happens to Twitter, the Pentagon’s propaganda machine is so vast and powerful that self-styled liberals have already been swindled into supporting the allocation of massive funding to a border dispute—over a line drawn thirty years ago by a small committee of men—between a non-nuclear and a nuclear power. This infusion of billions of dollars into the conflict between Ukraine and Russia serves no purpose beyond lining the pockets of war profiteers, while diminishing rather than enhancing the security of those who foot the bill, by increasing the likelihood of a devastating conflict between two nuclear powers. It is striking that so-called progressives, who claim to care about the domestic problems currently faced by their constituents—the cost of healthcare, the housing and homelessness crisis, the drug overdose epidemic, elevated grocery and gas prices caused by inflation, etc.—have signed off on bills to print and dole out billions of dollars to Ukraine rather than address the pressing problems with which the nation itself is undeniably beset.
A recent letter by thirty lawmakers, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus led by Representative Pramila Jayapal, urged President Biden to pursue a negotiated solution to the Ukraine-Russia crisis and thus appeared to offer a glimmer of hope, albeit tardily. After six months of silence on the issue, it seemed that progressives were finally going to act as progressives, perhaps spurred on by the upcoming election and push back from voting constituents. To the great disappointment of sane people everywhere, however, the group abruptly withdrew the letter by the very next day, claiming (implausibly enough) both that it had been written months before and that it was sent out by a staffer in error. (It seems safe to say that prevarication is not Representative Jayapal’s forte.) One thing is clear: the saber-rattling Democratic Party no longer permits antiwar dissenters in its ranks, for it is obvious that someone was taken out to the woodshed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi or one of her operatives.
These are troubling times for free thinkers and peace-loving people, and given the capture of both mainstream and social media by the military’s propaganda machine, it is sadly predictable how “progressive” congresspersons will vote when faced with the Selective Service registration issue. For if the choice is that either everyone or else no one must be prepared to defend the nation, we can expect self-styled human rights savvy progressive lawmakers to insist that the Selective Service requirement be expanded, not abolished. Indeed, the most vociferous supporters of expanding the Selective Service requirement will be found among the progressive “woke” camp, who will insist that the issue is a matter of human rights.
In truth, mandatory conscription is the very antithesis of upholding human rights, for draftees are the moral equivalent of slaves, and slaves are people from whom all rights have been stripped away. Any person, whether male or female, heterosexual or homosexual, is free to enlist in the military. The pertinent question, then, is whether it is fair for only men to be subject to enslavement by the government. But of course it is never “fair” to strip human beings of their freedom. The answer to the question is that no one, neither men nor women, should be transformed into slaves. Governments are erected and exist to serve the people. Any institution or administration which undermines or usurps the interests and rights of citizens should be defunded and disbanded, having transmogrified into the antithesis of what it purports to be. To borrow a term which has become popular in “woke” circles, a government which perpetrates such abuses of power should be cancelled.
Laurie Calhoun is the author of We Kill Because We Can: From Soldiering to Assassination in the Drone Age, War and Delusion: A Critical Examination, Theodicy: A Metaphilosophical Investigation, You Can Leave, Laminated Souls, and Philosophy Unmasked: A Skeptic’s Critique, in addition to many essays and book chapters.
Concerns About Western Weapons Flowing to Ukraine Growing Louder
Samizdat – 01.11.2022
The US and its allies have earmarked nearly $100 billion in security and economic aid to Ukraine so far this year. Last month, the White House asked Congress for a $11.7 billion top-up. Where is this money going? Who’s benefiting from Western taxpayers’ generosity? And why are some US officials suddenly so concerned?
As the Ukrainian security crisis enters its ninth month and the seemingly bottomless pit of Western military and economic support for Kiev continues to expand, some US media and lawmakers have expressed growing weariness about the prospect of shoveling even more cash into the conflict in the weeks and months to come.
On Monday, the editors of Bloomberg, the New York-based financial and business media empire, sent a signal to America’s business community through a rare collective editorial requesting more “transparency” from the Biden administration about where American aid to Ukraine is going.
“The scale of the aid effort is unprecedented. In just seven months, the US has provided Ukraine with nearly double what it gave all of Western Europe on an annual basis during the Marshall Plan in real terms. Support for Ukraine’s military this year equals what the US provided Israel, Egypt and Afghanistan combined in 2020,” the business outlet stressed, calculating that Washington’s support accounts for $60 billion, or two thirds of all Western support for Kiev this year.
At least $27.5 billion of that is for military needs, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy’s Ukraine Support Tracker.
Pointing out that Kiev hasn’t exactly been a paragon of good governance and anti-corruption, even before the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, Bloomberg made the unprecedented admission that there’s “the possibility, however slight, that US-made weaponry could fall into the wrong hands or be sold to actors outside Ukraine.” Accordingly, the outlet asked Washington to appoint a special watchdog on Ukraine aid, similar to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction created in 2008.
The effectiveness of such an appointment would be questionable at best, and futile at worst. Last year, Brown University’s Costs of War project calculated that the United States spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan, equivalent to over $300 million per day for 20 straight years. Still, the effort to turn the war-torn West Asian nation into a model of Western-style governance and democracy collapsed like a house of cards in August 2021, when the Taliban* smashed the country’s NATO-trained army in ten days as US and allied forces evacuated. The inspector general’s appointment seems to have done little in stopping or even stemming the largess of spending on the war in Afghanistan.
Nevertheless, even the mere admission that US arms could destabilize the situation and cause a spike in weapons flows to international black markets and criminal groups is significant, as it echoes concerns that Russian officials from the president to the foreign and defense ministries have been expressing for many months.
“This is not a question only of small arms; there are risks of more powerful weapons falling into the hands of criminals, including man-portable air defense systems and high precision weapons,” President Vladimir Putin said at a recent meeting with regional security officials.
Last month, Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whose party appears poised to take the House and possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, expressed opposition to giving Ukraine a never-ending “blank check” of American aid as ordinary Americans suffer the consequences of a recession. President Biden admitted that he was “worried” about McCarthy’s rhetoric, accusing the GOP of not “getting” that Washington’s assistance to Kiev wasn’t about Ukraine, but about Eastern Europe, NATO, and “really serious, serious consequential outcomes.”
As domestic weapons stocks show signs of running low and amid US media reports citing behind-the-scenes grumbling from the military and government over the issue continue to mount, it bears repeating the question about where Western arms support for Ukraine is actually going.
Where are the Weapons Zelensky?
It turns out the White House and the Pentagon don’t actually know where the aid goes, with sources telling US media back in April that the Pentagon has “zero” clue where most of the arms end up after they drop into the “big black hole” of the conflict. This is especially the case with small and compact arms like Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense missiles, which can’t be tracked via satellites and “with nobody on the ground” to keep a lookout.
From time to time, moments of clarity poke through the fog of war.
On Sunday, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation reported that weapons sent to Ukraine had somehow found their way into the hands of local motorcycle gangs, as well as criminal groups in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Earlier this year, Sputnik Arabic plunged into the seedy recesses of the so-called dark web, finding a Ukraine-based arms dealer willing to ship US-made M4 assault rifles to the conflict zone in Yemen via Poland and Portugal, for a fee.
Separately, in August, a major US television network posted and then quietly scrubbed an investigative feature which revealed that as little as “30 percent” of the Western military aid sent to Ukraine was actually reaching the frontline.
Some Western-dominated regional and international security cooperation agencies have also given an indication (mostly underreported by the mainstream media) on the danger of sending weapons to Kiev.
Europol, the European Union criminal policing agency subordinated to Brussels, continues to resist admitting the scale of the weapons smuggling problem, assuring in July that it is “working with Ukrainian officials to mitigate the threat of arms trafficking into the European Union” and that it has “full confidence” in Kiev’s “measures to monitor and track these firearms.”
However, Interpol, Europol’s older and more respected cousin, has urged the international community to brace for weapons that have been sent to Ukraine ending up in criminal hands. Agency secretary general Juergen Stock warned in June that “the high availability of weapons during the current conflict will result in the proliferation in illicit arms in the post-conflict phase.” Criminal groups are already preparing. “This will come, I have no doubts,” Stock said.
Given the scale of the Ukrainian crisis, and the shady nature of criminal weapons smugglers’ activities to begin with, the real extent and scope of illicit arms smuggling operations, and just how far up the totem pole of Ukrainian and Western administrative power it goes, has yet to be revealed, and probably won’t be revealed, until years or even decades from now.
During the 1980s Soviet War in Afghanistan, the Central Intelligence Agency ran ‘Operation Cyclone’, a drugs and weapons running operation which armed the Afghan Mujahedeen with over $3 billion in US- and European-made weaponry, including Stinger missiles and other sophisticated equipment.
In the decades that followed, Washington discovered how difficult it is to recover these arms from the Afghan ‘freedom fighters’, who eventually morphed into the Taliban, and fought a two decade-long war against the US and NATO occupation, including using weapons sent in the 1980s. In the meantime, Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who served as one of the Arab commanders in Afghanistan in the 1980s, wound up declaring a holy war against the US, with Washington ultimately fingering his terrorist group for the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 and in other attacks.
Kanye: My Lawyer Told Me I’ll Lose Custody of My Kids If I Keep Up The ‘Anti-Semitic Rhetoric’
By Paul Joseph Watson | Summit News | November 1, 2022
Ye said Sunday night on Parler that he was told by his custody lawyer Bob Cohen that he will lose custody of his children if he keeps up his “anti-Semitic rhetoric.”
“On my last and final meeting with Bob Cohen he told me ‘if I keep up anti-Semitic rhetoric you’ll loose custody of your children,’” Ye said.
“So let me get this straight,” he continued. “If I complain about Jewish business practices it’s considered anti Semitic So my custody lawyer was basically telling me If you complain about getting done wrong in business You will loose custody of your children And this was the guy on my side.”
“Bob Cohen was my custody lawyer,” Ye said in another post. “On our first meeting he had a black woman there I asked him why she was here He replied Chris Rock told me I needed to hire someone black He didn’t say She was a great lawyer He simply said I hired her cause she was black.”
The Jewish activist group StopAntisemitism called for Ye to lose custody of his children earlier this month.
TMZ’s Harvey Levin also suggested that Ye’s “anti-Semitic rants” and “mental illness” should be a factor in denying him custody of his children.
“To me, at the very least, I could see a judge saying at this point that there’ll be visitation [rights] but it’s going to be supervised,” Levin said.
Ye said in another post on Parler that he was suspended from Instagram “for telling Russel Simmons that I was going to make ‘you know who’ have better contracts and business practices.”
Simmons can be seen in the text urging Ye to “be the hero” in this situation by bashing white people instead of his “Jewish brothers.”
“[L]et’s be the hero in this it’s very possible you can be the bridge and fight white supremacy while getting out the frustrations that blacks have with their jewish brothers in a digestible way,” Simmons said.
“I’m staying in America,” Ye responded. “I gotta get the Jewish business people to make the contracts fair Or die trying.’
Simmons said last week that Blacks and Jews should unite against “white supremacy” and urged Ye to apologize to the Jewish community.
“We have common enemies, the blacks and the Jews, and great purpose together … we are joined at the hip in our fight against white supremacy,” Simmons said.
Moscow Wants Answers Over Truss’ Alleged ‘It’s Done’ SMS to Blinken Moments After Nord Stream Blasts
Samizdat – 01.11.2022
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wants answers regarding the mysterious “It’s done” iPhone message allegedly sent by then-Prime Minister Liz Truss to the US secretary of state moments after the sabotage attacks against the Nord Stream network in late September.
“To be honest, I don’t care who got this information and how. I’m interested in London’s answer to the following question: Did Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain send a message to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the Nord Stream gas pipeline was blown up with the words ‘It’s done’?” Zakharova asked in a Telegram post Tuesday.
The spokeswoman suggested that “millions of people around the world” were waiting for answers to the question of how the planet’s energy security was undermined, “and what role the Anglo-Saxons played in this terrorist attack.”
On Monday, a US defense and national security news outlet reported that among the information suspected to have been leaked from Truss’s “hacked cell phone” was the aforementioned text message between the now former UK leader and the US top diplomat.
Internet entrepreneur and free speech activist Kim Dotcom mentioned the “It’s Done” message in a Twitter thread Sunday, shortly after British media ran a piece on Truss’s hacked phone.
“iCloud admin access rocks,” sarcastically Dotcom wrote, referring to the Apple service allowing for iPhone text messages, files, photos and other information to be saved ‘to the cloud’ and accessed by authorized computers (thus making user files vulnerable to hacking). “It’s not just the Five Eyes that have backdoor admin access to all Big Tech databases,” Dotcom added, referencing the intelligence alliance of Anglosphere nations including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. “Russia and China have sophisticated cyber units too.”
“The funny thing is Govt officials with top security clearance still prefer using iPhones over their NSA & GCHQ issued encrypted shit-phones,” Dotcom wrote.
A series of explosions knocked out three of the four strings of the Nord Stream network on September 26. Western officials and media immediately began singing in unison that Russia blew up its own $20 billion pipeline infrastructure for reasons unknown. The Kremlin accused the West of an “unprecedented act of state terrorism” involving Nord Stream, but did not name any specific states, with President Vladimir Putin only hinting involvement by the “Anglo-Saxons” (typically a reference to Brits and Americans in Russian usage).
After a month-long investigation, the Russian Ministry of Defense revealed Saturday that Britain’s Royal Navy took part in the planning, organization and carrying out of the Nord Stream attack.
The damage to the Nord Stream network has robbed Central and Western Europe of a major traditional source of natural gas ahead of the winter heating season. Yamal-Europe and Soyuz, two major Russian overland pipelines delivering natural gas to Europe, have also been halted, or experienced a major drop in usage, sparking questions about the region’s energy security. Late last month, French President Emmanuel Macron complained that Paris’s American allies had jacked up the price on natural gas deliveries to Europe, and that Europeans were being made to pay “3-4 times” more than Americans for the same gas. “That is unfair. These are double standards,” Macron complained.
Challenging Racial Discrimination at Harvard The Supreme Court Reconsiders Affirmative Action
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 31, 2022
On Monday morning, the U.S. Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on a potentially momentous case challenging the use of race in admissions decisions at Harvard University and our other academic institutions.
Over the last half-century, our system of Affirmative Action—preferences based upon race—has become an increasingly powerful and entrenched aspect of American society, so much so that any notion of rolling it back had long since been regarded as quixotic. But a small group of determined opponents persevered in their efforts, so many now believe that a legal victory might finally be at hand. No one had ever expected that Roe v. Wade would be overturned after nearly fifty years, and perhaps Bakke and its epigones may suffer a similar fate.
This legal challenge to Harvard admissions policy had centered upon the strong evidence of racial discrimination against Asian applicants. When the trial began in Boston federal district court four years ago, I published a long article analyzing the case and noting the close connection to my own original Meritocracy article published in late 2012, whose own tenth anniversary is now almost at hand.
- American Pravda: Racial Discrimination at Harvard
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 22, 2018 • 10,300 Words
Last Sunday, just before the legal proceedings began, the Times ran a major article explaining the general background of the controversy, and I was very pleased to see that my own past research was cited as an important factor sparking the lawsuit, with the reporter even including a direct link to my 26,000 word 2012 cover-story “The Myth of American Meritocracy,” which had provided strong quantitative evidence of anti-Asian racial quotas. Economic historian Niall Ferguson, long one of Harvard’s most prominent professors but recently decamped to Stanford, similarly noted the role of my research in his column for the London Sunday Times.
Two decades ago, I had published a widely-discussed op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on somewhat similar issues of racial discrimination in elite admissions. But my more recent article was far longer and more comprehensive, and certainly drew more attention than anything else I have ever published, before or since. After it appeared in The American Conservative, its hundreds of thousands of pageviews broke all records for that publication and it attracted considerable notice in the media. Times columnist David Brooks soon ranked it as perhaps the best American magazine article of the year, a verdict seconded by a top editor at The Economist, and the Times itself quickly organized a symposium on the topic of Asian Quotas, in which I eagerly participated. Forbes, The Atlantic, The Washington Monthly, Business Insider, and other publications all discussed my striking results.
Conservative circles took considerable interest, with Charles Murray highlighting my findings, and National Review later published an article in which I explained the important implications of my findings for the legal validity of the 1978 Bakke decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
- Racial Quotas, Harvard, and the Legacy of Bakke
Have three decades of Supreme Court support for affirmative action been based on fraud?
Ron Unz • National Review • February 18, 2013 • 800 Words
There was also a considerable reaction from the academic community itself. I quickly received speaking invitations from the Yale Political Union, Yale Law, and the University of Chicago Law School, while Prof. Ferguson discussed my distressing analysis in a lengthy Newsweek/Daily Beast column entitled “The End of the American Dream.”
Moreover, I had also published an associated critique suggesting that over the years my beloved Harvard alma mater had transformed itself into one of the world’s largest hedge-funds with a vestigial school attached for tax-exempt purposes. This also generated enormous discussion in media circles, with liberal journalist Chris Hayes Tweeting it out and generously saying he was “very jealous” he hadn’t written the piece himself. Many of his colleagues promoted the piece with similarly favorable remarks, while the university quickly provided a weak public response to these serious financial charges.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to myself or other outside observers, Harvard itself launched an internal investigation of the anti-Asian bias that I had alleged. Apparently, the university’s own initial results generally confirmed my accusations, indicating that if students were admitted solely based upon objective academic merit, far more Asians would receive thick envelopes. But Harvard’s top administrators buried the study and did nothing, with these important facts only coming out years later during the discovery process of the current Asian Quotas lawsuit.
Only the first part of my very long article dealt with the question of anti-Asian racial discrimination in elite college admissions, but it attracted vastly more attention than any other element.
For many years, there had been a widespread belief within the Asian-American community that such discriminatory practices existed, a sentiment backed by considerable anecdotal evidence. But the university administrations had always flatly denied those claims, and the media had shown little interest in investigating them. However, my powerful new quantitative evidence proved very difficult to ignore…
But my most dramatic finding relied upon an even simpler analysis of public data, which had previously remained unnoticed. As I wrote in my New York Times column:
Just as their predecessors of the 1920s always denied the existence of “Jewish quotas,” top officials at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and the other Ivy League schools today strongly deny the existence of “Asian quotas.” But there exists powerful statistical evidence to the contrary.
Each year, American universities provide their racial enrollment data to the National Center for Education Statistics, which makes this information available online. After the Justice Department closed an investigation in the early 1990s into charges that Harvard University discriminated against Asian-American applicants, Harvard’s reported enrollment of Asian-Americans began gradually declining, falling from 20.6 percent in 1993 to about 16.5 percent over most of the last decade.
This decline might seem small. But these same years brought a huge increase in America’s college-age Asian population, which roughly doubled between 1992 and 2011, while non-Hispanic white numbers remained almost unchanged. Thus, according to official statistics, the percentage of Asian-Americans enrolled at Harvard fell by more than 50 percent over the last two decades, while the percentage of whites changed little. This decline in relative Asian-American enrollment was actually larger than the impact of Harvard’s 1925 Jewish quota, which reduced Jewish freshmen from 27.6 percent to 15 percent.
The percentages of college-age Asian-Americans enrolled at most of the other Ivy League schools also fell during this same period, and over the last few years Asian enrollments across these different universities have converged to a very similar level and remained static over time. This raises suspicions of a joint Ivy League policy to restrict Asian-American numbers to a particular percentage.
This statistical finding was illustrated in a simple graph, demonstrating that over the last two decades enrollment of Asian-Americans had gradually converged across the entire Ivy League, while sharply diverging from the rapidly increasing Asian-American population, with only strictly meritocratic Caltech continuing to track the latter.
It would be difficult to imagine more obvious visual evidence of an Asian Quota implemented across the Ivy League, and this chart was very widely circulated among Asian-American organizations and activists, who launched their lawsuit the following year. If they do succeed in winning their current case in federal court, the history books may eventually record that the wealthiest and most powerful university in the world was brought low by a single striking graph.
My extremely long 2012 article ran more than 26,000 words plus several quantitative appendices, and only the first part dealt with the issue of Asian Quotas in the Ivy League. This was a matter of deliberate strategy on my part since I assumed that most casual readers would grow weary and stop at some point, long before they reached the central core of my material, which was even more controversial.
Among American journalists and academics, matters touching upon Jewish sensitivities constitute the deadly “third rail” of their professions and the quantitative analysis I presented was probably one of the most explosive published anywhere in many decades. As I explained in the closing paragraphs of my 2018 article:
The current high-profile trial in Boston is widely portrayed by the media as a conflict between Asian-American groups, whose educational interests suffer under the current subjective and opaque admissions system, and black and Hispanic groups, whose numbers might be sharply reduced under some proposed changes. Whites are largely portrayed as bystanders, with Harvard indicating that their numbers would scarcely shift even under drastic changes in admissions policy. But the term “white” encompasses both Jews and Gentiles, and thus may conceal more than it reveals.
The implications of my 2012 Meritocracy analysis are certainly well-known to all of the prominent participants and observers in the ongoing legal battle, but the fearsome power of the ADL and its media allies ensures that certain important aspects of the current situation are never subjected to widespread public discussion. Asian advocates rightly denounce the unfairness of the current elite academic admissions system, but remain absolutely mute about which American group actually controls the institutions involved.
Throughout the enormous media controversy surrounding the Harvard trial in Boston, all sides are doing their utmost to avoid noticing the 2% elephant in the room. And that fact provides the best proof of the tremendous size and power of that elephant in today’s American society.
- The Myth of American Meritocracy
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • November 28, 2012 • 26,200 Words
For decades the primary pipeline for joining America’s political, media, financial, or academic elites has been represented by Harvard and our other elite colleges, and I demonstrated that the distribution of their students sharply diverged from that of our society as a whole or its highest performing segment. I discussed the striking ethnic skew:
The evidence of the recent NMS semifinalist lists seems the most conclusive of all, given the huge statistical sample sizes involved. As discussed earlier, these students constitute roughly the highest 0.5 percent in academic ability, the top 16,000 high school seniors who should be enrolling at the Ivy League and America’s other most elite academic universities. In California, white Gentile names outnumber Jewish ones by over 8-to-1; in Texas, over 20-to-1; in Florida and Illinois, around 9-to-1. Even in New York, America’s most heavily Jewish state, there are more than two high-ability white Gentile students for every Jewish one. Based on the overall distribution of America’s population, it appears that approximately 65–70 percent of America’s highest ability students are non-Jewish whites, well over ten times the Jewish total of under 6 percent.
Needless to say, these proportions are considerably different from what we actually find among the admitted students at Harvard and its elite peers, which today serve as a direct funnel to the commanding heights of American academics, law, business, and finance. Based on reported statistics, Jews approximately match or even outnumber non-Jewish whites at Harvard and most of the other Ivy League schools, which seems wildly disproportionate. Indeed, the official statistics indicate that non-Jewish whites at Harvard are America’s most under-represented population group, enrolled at a much lower fraction of their national population than blacks or Hispanics, despite having far higher academic test scores.
When examining statistical evidence, the proper aggregation of data is critical. Consider the ratio of the recent 2007–2011 enrollment of Asian students at Harvard relative to their estimated share of America’s recent NMS semifinalists, a reasonable proxy for the high-ability college-age population, and compare this result to the corresponding figure for whites. The Asian ratio is 63 percent, slightly above the white ratio of 61 percent, with both these figures being considerably below parity due to the substantial presence of under-represented racial minorities such as blacks and Hispanics, foreign students, and students of unreported race. Thus, there appears to be no evidence for racial bias against Asians, even excluding the race-neutral impact of athletic recruitment, legacy admissions, and geographical diversity.
However, if we separate out the Jewish students, their ratio turns out to be 435 percent, while the residual ratio for non-Jewish whites drops to just 28 percent, less than half of even the Asian figure. As a consequence, Asians appear under-represented relative to Jews by a factor of seven, while non-Jewish whites are by far the most under-represented group of all, despite any benefits they might receive from athletic, legacy, or geographical distribution factors. The rest of the Ivy League tends to follow a similar pattern, with the overall Jewish ratio being 381 percent, the Asian figure at 62 percent, and the ratio for non-Jewish whites a low 35 percent, all relative to their number of high-ability college-age students.
Just as striking as these wildly disproportionate current numbers have been the longer enrollment trends. In the three decades since I graduated Harvard, the presence of white Gentiles has dropped by as much as 70 percent, despite no remotely comparable decline in the relative size or academic performance of that population; meanwhile, the percentage of Jewish students has actually increased. This period certainly saw a very rapid rise in the number of Asian, Hispanic, and foreign students, as well as some increase in blacks. But it seems rather odd that all of these other gains would have come at the expense of whites of Christian background, and none at the expense of Jews.
Based on these figures, Jewish students were roughly 1,000% more likely to be enrolled at Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League than white Gentiles of similar ability. This was an absolutely astonishing result given that under-representation in the range of 20% or 30% is often treated by courts as powerful prima facie evidence of racial discrimination.
Several charts and graphs effectively presented these remarkable findings:
These charts demonstrated the hidden reality that white Gentiles were heavily under-represented at elite colleges not merely with regard to their fraction of highest-performing students but even relative to their share of the college-age population. Academic administrators might publicly fret that blacks or Hispanics were not enrolled proportional to their national numbers, but the under-enrollment of non-Jewish whites was actually far more severe. To a considerable extent, the student bodies of our top colleges constitute the next generation of our national elites in embryonic form, and during recent decades white Gentiles had been increasingly excluded from that important pool.
All these meritocracy statistics were originally compiled ten years ago, but when I’ve occasionally updated them, I noticed that little had changed except that they had sometimes grown even more extreme. As mentioned, legal discovery eventually revealed that an internal Harvard study had largely confirmed my analysis of Asian discrimination but had been suppressed. Meanwhile, my much more explosive analysis of massive Jewish over-representation had never been significantly challenged despite the angry fulminations of a few agitated Jewish activists, but the topic had unsurprisingly disappeared from any public debate.
Faced with such seemingly insurmountable institutional and media obstacles, in 2016 I undertook a bold plan to rectify all these matters at a stroke, organizing the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard slate of candidates for the university’s Board of Overseers. Headed by longtime progressive icon Ralph Nader, we proposed that the stupendously wealthy university should abolish its undergraduate tuition while providing greater transparency in admissions, and if we had won and gained effective control of Harvard University, academic dominoes would have swiftly tumbled nationwide. But we lost.
- American Meritocracy Revisited
Elite Admissions, Asian Quotas, and the Free Harvard/Fair Harvard Campaign
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 4, 2022 • 28,400 Words
Although our campaign failed, it may have had some longer-term consequences. Although neither our own slate nor that of our bitter opponents ever raised the issue of Jewish numbers, the front-page story in the New York Times announcing our effort must surely have reminded activist groups of the explosive contents of my original 2012 paper, and the risk that the astonishing facts I presented might eventually slip past the media blockade and reach the American public, perhaps with fateful consequences.
All my enrollment figures had been drawn from the public estimates annually provided by Hillel, the nationwide Jewish campus organization, whose numbers had been used for decades by academic researchers and media outlets. My article had noted that even slight declines in Jewish enrollment had sometimes provoked enormous public controversies and demands that they be immediately reversed. As I wrote in 2012:
Meanwhile, any hint of “anti-Semitism” in admissions is regarded as an absolutely mortal sin, and any significant reduction in Jewish enrollment may often be denounced as such by the hair-trigger media. For example, in 1999 Princeton discovered that its Jewish enrollment had declined to just 500 percent of parity, down from more than 700 percent in the mid-1980s, and far below the comparable figures for Harvard or Yale. This quickly resulted in four front-page stories in the Daily Princetonian, a major article in the New York Observer, and extensive national coverage in both the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. These articles included denunciations of Princeton’s long historical legacy of anti-Semitism and quickly led to official apologies, followed by an immediate 30 percent rebound in Jewish numbers. During these same years, non-Jewish white enrollment across the entire Ivy League had dropped by roughly 50 percent, reducing those numbers to far below parity, but this was met with media silence or even occasional congratulations on the further “multicultural” progress of America’s elite education system.
Yet the year after our unsuccessful Harvard Overseer campaign, the Hillel website reported a massive, sudden collapse in Jewish enrollment at Harvard and every other American university, a decline of more than 50% that was totally ignored by both the national media and normally alert Jewish activist organizations, and this striking disappearance of Jews at elite colleges has continued down to the present day. However, I quickly determined that this shift seemed merely to be one of redefinition, with students apparently only counted in that category if they declared themselves to be practitioners of the Jewish religion, a change that had an enormous impact, as I explained in 2018:
These arguments based on general plausibility are strongly supported by quantitative evidence, and ironically enough, it is Baytch herself who provided it. Around the time she produced her lengthy and unpublished document, Harvard Hillel was claiming a Jewish undergraduate enrollment of 25%, and near the beginning of her text, she claimed that figure was obviously false by citing a Harvard Crimson survey indicating that only 9.5% of the Class of 2017 were Jewish. However, she failed to notice that the survey referred to being religiously Jewish, which is entirely different than being Jewish in the broader ethnic or ancestral sense, especially since Jews are among the most secular populations in American society and a full 42% of the Harvard students described their religious beliefs as atheist, agnostic, or “other.” Indeed, a worldwide survey finds that only 38% of (ethnic) Jews follow the Jewish religion. So if the Crimson survey were correct and Harvard Jews were typical in their religiosity, this would imply that 9.5% / 0.38 = 25%(!!!) of Harvard freshman were ethnically Jewish, exactly the figure claimed by Harvard Hillel. Fanatic ideologues such as Baytch sometimes have a tendency to score game-ending own-goals without even realizing what they have done.
In general, Jewish classification has a rather protean nature, with somewhat overlapping definitions based on religion, ethnicity, and full or partial ancestry, allowing it to be drastically expanded or contracted for various reasons. I suspect that Baytch’s confusion on this matter was entirely sincere, related to the obsessive tendencies she exhibited in real life. But others may employ these shifting definitions based upon more pragmatic considerations.
It is well known that for many decades the American Communist Party and especially its top leadership were overwhelmingly Jewish, even at a time when Jews were just 3% of the national population. But Jewish community leaders were not pleased with this situation, and they sometimes flatly denied the reality, insisting that there were actually no Jewish Communists whatsoever—how could there be, when Communists were hostile to all religious belief?
Similarly, my findings that Jews were apparently enrolled at Harvard and other elite colleges at a rate some 1,000% greater than white Gentiles of similar academic performance must surely have set off alarm bells within the leadership of Jewish activist organizations, who wondered how best to manage or conceal this potentially dangerous information. With a high-profile Asian discrimination lawsuit wending its way through the courts and my own unsuccessful 2016 attempt to run a slate of candidates for the Board of Harvard Overseers, the likelihood of growing public scrutiny surely loomed very large.
Baytch’s apparent confusion between having Jewish ancestry and practicing the Jewish religion would have been well-known in these circles, and offered an obvious solution. If Jewish numbers were suddenly narrowed to only include those students who claimed to follow Jewish religious practices, the flagrant over-representation of Jews on elite campuses would be greatly reduced. Meanwhile, large numbers of lesser-qualified applicants of Jewish ancestry but no religious belief could continue to gain unfair admission by writing essays about their “Holocaust grandmas” with America’s 98% Gentile population being none the wiser.
For whatever reason, Hillel seems to have recently adopted this practice, drastically reducing its published estimates of the Jewish enrollment at Harvard and other elite colleges, thus eliminating a glaring example of ethnic bias by a simple act of redefinition. For example, the Hillel website now claims that merely 11% of Harvard undergraduates are Jewish, a huge reduction from the previous 25% figure, and a total suspiciously close to the Crimson survey of a few years ago which counted Jews only based upon their religious beliefs. The Hillel figures for Yale, Princeton, and most other elite colleges have experienced equally sudden and huge declines.
One very strong clue regarding this new definition of Jewish enrollment comes from Caltech, an elite science and engineering school which is quite unlikely to attract Jews professing religious faith. According to the Hillel website, the Jewish enrollment is 0%, claiming that there absolutely no Jews on campus. Despite this, the website also describes the vibrant Jewish life at Caltech, with Caltech Jews involved in all sorts of local activities and projects. This absurd paradox is obviously due to the distinction between individuals who are Jewish by religion and those who are Jewish by ancestry.
As the 1999 media firestorm engulfing Princeton demonstrated, in the past even slight and gentle declines of Jewish enrollment over a fifteen year period would provoke massive controversy and angry denunciations from Jewish organizations. The absolute lack of any organized response to the recent sudden disappearance of nearly 60% of Harvard’s Jews certainly suggests that little more than a mere change in definition had occurred.
My own Meritocracy analysis was viewed hundreds of thousands of times, but such numbers represent merely a tiny sliver within the vastness of the Internet, and after a few months my explosive Jewish findings had permanently vanished from any secondary coverage or other public discussion. So although well-informed individuals interested in Jewish matters or elite college admissions must be aware of my results, the complete silence of the broader media has ensured that everyone else remained entirely ignorant.
As an example of this, a few days ago a friend of mine pointed me to a Tablet podcast series on Jews in the Ivy League entitled “Gatecrashers” and hosted by Mark Oppenheimer, an Orthodox Jewish journalist who often focuses on religious matters. Although I listened to the episode “Harvard and the End of the Jewish Ivy League,” I found Oppenheimer’s obvious lack of quantitative skills or any true understanding of the issues involved rather disheartening.
However, the podcast page did provide a link to a very helpful article in the Harvard Crimson, presenting the results of four years of Freshman surveys on a variety of lifestyle issues, including religious faith. During 2013-2016, there had been a very sharp decline in most religious affiliations, with the percentage of Catholics and Protestants together dropping from over 42% to less than 35% in just four years, and a corresponding, even stronger decline in followers of Judaism, while the combined category of Atheists, Agnostics, and “Other” grew from under 42% to nearly 53%. We can safely assume that a very substantial portion of the adherents in those latter categories are Jewish by ethnicity.
Freshmen who were religiously Jewish had dropped to just 6.3% in 2016, but during the other three years the percentage had closely clustered around 10%, which is also the figure currently reported for Harvard on the Hillel website. So if we assume that Harvard College attracts Jews who are average in their religious faith, this indicates that the ethnically Jewish fraction of the undergraduate population would be roughly 25% or perhaps a bit higher.
If this estimate is even remotely correct, the implications are quite astonishing, and we can easily understand why switching from ethnicity to religion was employed as a subterfuge to conceal this reality. Since 1980 every college and university in America has had to report the demographic characteristics of its student body to the National Center for Education Statistics. Our own website provides this public data in a highly-convenient form, allowing easy examination of the historical trajectory of all our thousands of undergraduate academic institutions. The 2021 numbers are not yet out, but I am able to provide a table showing the changing enrollment at Harvard College since 2012:
| Year | White | Black | Hispanic | Asian | Foreign |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 45.1 | 6.4 | 9.2 | 17.8 | 11.2 |
| 2013 | 44.9 | 6.5 | 9.3 | 18.1 | 11.5 |
| 2014 | 43.8 | 6.8 | 9.9 | 18.6 | 11.2 |
| 2015 | 42.7 | 6.3 | 10.4 | 19.2 | 11.7 |
| 2016 | 41.2 | 7.0 | 11.2 | 19.6 | 12.0 |
| 2017 | 40.4 | 7.6 | 11.6 | 20.2 | 11.5 |
| 2018 | 39.1 | 8.3 | 11.2 | 20.2 | 12.4 |
| 2019 | 37.6 | 8.6 | 11.1 | 21.0 | 12.3 |
| 2020 | 34.2 | 11.0 | 12.3 | 21.7 | 11.7 |
One of the most striking facts is that during the last five years the percentage of black students grew from 6.3% to 11.0%, a remarkable rise of 75%, certainly the most rapid increase in Harvard’s history. Moreover, the more recent numbers will surely be much higher, given that blacks were 14.8% of the students admitted in 2020 and a whopping 18% of the 2021 admissions.
The Iron Law of Arithmetic demands that percentages must sum to 100, so during this same period, Harvard’s white enrollment dropped more than 10 percentage points, steadily falling from 45.1% in 2012 to just 34.2% in 2020; perhaps this year it barely exceeds 30%. And if, as seems likely, ethnically Jewish students are in the approximate range of 25%, the inescapable conclusion is that although white Gentiles are 60% of the American population and probably over 65% of our highest-performing students, they have now been reduced to a single digit presence at our most elite college. As I noted in my original 2012 article, Harvard has long enrolled American blacks at a considerably higher rate than non-Jewish whites, but the former are now likely larger in absolute numbers even though the latter are more than four times more numerous in our society.
These shocking conclusions must be carefully hedged with a couple of caveats. It is possible that for some reason Jews at Harvard are far more religious than the Jewish population as a whole, which would impact our ethnic estimates. There also seems to be some anecdotal evidence that the lure of Affirmative Action admissions has increasingly persuaded some white students to falsely claim non-white status, and perhaps those numbers have become large enough to impact Harvard’s official statistics. But aside from these two possible factors, both quite difficult to evaluate, the astonishing conclusions I have drawn seem irrrefutable.
The increasing elimination of non-Jewish whites from Harvard and other top colleges is real, but the underlying factors responsible are far from certain. However, I should quote a relevant paragraph from my 2012 article, which noted the close historical parallel presented in Jerome Karabel’s magisterial volume The Chosen:
It would be unreasonable to ignore the salient fact that this massive apparent bias in favor of far less-qualified Jewish applicants coincides with an equally massive ethnic skew at the topmost administrative ranks of the universities in question, a situation which once again exactly parallels Karabel’s account from the 1920s. Indeed, Karabel points out that by 1993 Harvard, Yale, and Princeton all had presidents of Jewish ancestry,[80] and the same is true for the current presidents of Yale, Penn, Cornell, and possibly Columbia, as well as Princeton’s president throughout during the 1990s and Yale’s new incoming president, while all three of Harvard’s most recent presidents have either had Jewish origins or a Jewish spouse.[81]
When I published that article a decade ago, probably half of the eight Ivy League colleges had Jewish presidents, and that figure is higher today, with these including the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton; the ratio had been even greater last year before Amy Gutmann left the presidency of Penn to become our ambassador to Germany.
Relatively few Americans ever consider applying to Harvard or the other elite Ivy League schools. Indeed, I suspect that much of our citizenry probably regards the composition of those student bodies as totally irrelevant, far less significant than the identities of our top professional athletes or pop music stars. Yet as I have repeatedly emphasized, those educational institutions tend to provide the next generation of America’s ruling elites, and this applies to the world of politics as well as many other sectors.
Consider, for example, the leading figures in our current Biden Administration, who are playing a crucial role in determining the future of our own country and the rest of the world. The list of Cabinet departments has wildly proliferated since Washington’s day, but suppose we confine our attention to the half-dozen most important, led by the individuals who control national security and the economy, and then also add the names of the President, Vice President, and Chief of Staff. Although “Diversity” may have become the sacred motto of the Democratic Party, the background of the handful of individuals running our country appears strikingly non-diverse, especially if we exclude the two political figureheads at the very top.
- President Joe Biden (Jewish in-laws)
- Vice-President Kamala Harris (Jewish spouse)
- Chief of Staff Ron Klain (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Jewish, Harvard)
- Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (Jewish, Yale)
- Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III (Black)
- Attorney General Merrick Garland (Jewish, Harvard)
- Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines (Jewish)
- Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas (Jewish)
In 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Moscow’s Jewish Center and noted in his remarks that 80-85% of the first Bolshevik government was Jewish. Although that statement was probably somewhat exaggerated, it does seem a very reasonable characterization of today’s American government, despite Jews constituting less than 2% of our population.
When a nation’s top leadership is drawn from such a narrowly insular, almost incestuous circle, in which standards of strict meritocracy have long since been replaced by shared ideological beliefs and perhaps even widespread implicit ethnic nepotism, enormous problems may develop. Our current inflation rate is now the highest in forty years, and a few days ago, prestigious Foreign Affairs, mouthpiece of the American political establishment, carried a major article discussing the looming possibility of a simultaneous war against both Russia and China and how we could successfully triumph in such a difficult conflict. Since my infancy, no American president has seriously contemplated a war with either Russia or China, but our current national leadership seems quite eager to embroil us in a global war with both of them at the same time.
My original article had closed with a strongly cautionary note:
Following the 1991 collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, some observers noted with unease that the United States was left as about the only remaining large and fully-functional multi-ethnic society, and the subsequent collapse and disintegration of ethnically diverse Yugoslavia merely strengthened these concerns. China is sometimes portrayed by the ignorant American media as having large and restive minority populations, but it is 92 percent Han Chinese, and if we exclude a few outlying or thinly populated provinces—the equivalents of Alaska, Hawaii, and New Mexico—closer to 95 percent Han, with all its top leadership drawn from that same background and therefore possessing a natural alignment of interests. Without doubt, America’s great success despite its multiplicity of ethnic nationalities is almost unique in modern human history. But such success should not be taken for granted.
Many of the Jewish writers who focus on the history of elite university admissions, including Karabel, Steinberg, and Lemann, have critiqued and rebuked the America of the first half of the Twentieth Century for having been governed by a narrow WASP ascendency, which overwhelmingly dominated and controlled the commanding heights of business, finance, education, and politics; and some of their criticisms are not unreasonable. But we should bear in mind that this dominant group of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—largely descended from among the earliest American settlers and which had gradually absorbed and assimilated substantial elements of Celtic, Dutch, German, and French background—was generally aligned in culture, religion, ideology, and ancestry with perhaps 60 percent of America’s total population at the time, and therefore hardly represented an alien presence.[119] By contrast, a similarly overwhelming domination by a tiny segment of America’s current population, one which is completely misaligned in all these respects, seems far less inherently stable, especially when the institutional roots of such domination have continually increased despite the collapse of the supposedly meritocratic justification. This does not seem like a recipe for a healthy and successful society, nor one which will even long survive in anything like its current form.
Power corrupts and an extreme concentration of power even more so, especially when that concentration of power is endlessly praised and glorified by the major media and the prominent intellectuals which together constitute such an important element of that power. But as time goes by and more and more Americans notice that they are poorer and more indebted than they have ever been before, the blandishments of such propaganda machinery will eventually lose effectiveness, much as did the similar propaganda organs of the decaying Soviet state. Kahlenberg quotes Pat Moynihan as noting that the stagnant American earnings between 1970 and 1985 represented “the longest stretch of ‘flat’ income in the history of the European settlement of North America.”[120] The only difference today is that this period of economic stagnation has now extended nearly three times as long, and has also been combined with numerous social, moral, and foreign policy disasters.
Over the last few decades America’s ruling elites have been produced largely as a consequence of the particular selection methods adopted by our top national universities in the late 1960s. Leaving aside the question of whether these methods have been fair or have instead been based on corruption and ethnic favoritism, the elites they have produced have clearly done a very poor job of leading our country, and we must change the methods used to select them.
Related Reading:
ICAN OBTAINS SHOCKING NEW V-SAFE DATA
The Highwire with Del Bigtree | October 27, 2022
Del revisits the momentous case ICAN took against the CDC and reveals the data they withheld from their own Covid-19 vaccine injury reporting system, V-Safe.
Alberta’s New Premier Under Attack For Refusing To Associate With WEF
By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | October 31, 2022
Recently noted as an opponent of vaccine and mask mandates, new Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is breaking previously established ties with the World Economic Forum, which has been deeply involved in a “health consulting agreement” revolving around the province’s covid response.
“I find it distasteful when billionaires brag about how much control they have over political leaders,” Smith said at a news conference Monday after her new cabinet was sworn in. “That is offensive … the people who should be directing government are the people who vote for them.”
The United Conservative Party premier said she is in lockstep with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who has stated he and his caucus will be having nothing to do with the World Economic Forum. Earlier this month, on her first day as premier, Smith stated that people not vaccinated against covid are the most discriminated group she has seen in her lifetime.
In response, the Canadian mainstream media is pursuing a thorough hatchet campaign against Smith, consistently referring to all opposition to the WEF as being based in “conspiracy theory.” As they say, if you want to know who is really in power, all you have to do is find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
After two years of authoritarian lockdowns and attempts to enforce vaccine passports in Canada, Alberta was one of the only regions in the country that asserted political opposition to executive dictates. This helped to support the anti-passport protests by truckers and other Canadians, and led to Justin Trudeau using provisions for terrorism to confiscate donations to the movement. Alberta’s covid averages in terms of infections and deaths are no worse than provinces with strict mandates, proving once again that the mandates achieved nothing in terms of safety, but everything in terms of control.
The Canadian Press and other media outlets claim that criticism of the WEF is built on “online conspiracy accusations, unproven and debunked, that the forum is fronting a global cabal of string-pullers exploiting the pandemic to dismantle capitalism and introduce damaging socialist systems and social control measures, such as forcing people to take vaccines with tracking chips.”
Every “conspiracy” noted in that statement is true – none of them have been “debunked” except perhaps the “tracking chip” claim, which is unnecessary because the WEF was already encouraging governments to use cell phone tracking apps to monitor the vaccine status and movements of their respective populations. Many of these apps were approved by the CDC in the US, and in countries like China they are mandatory.
The World Economic Forum, acting as a kind of globalist think-tank for future policy initiatives, was instrumental in promoting many of the failed restrictions used by various national governments during the pandemic.
WEF head Klaus Schwab specifically mentions in his writings that the institution saw covid as a perfect “opportunity” to implement what he calls the “Great Reset” which includes the concept of the “Shared Economy,” a global socialist technocracy meant to replace free markets and end capitalism as we know it. As the WEF states, you will “own nothing, have no privacy” and you will like it.
This is not conspiracy theory. This is openly admitted conspiracy fact. It is undeniable.
The use of the “conspiracy theory” label is generally a tactic designed to circumvent fair debate based on facts and evidence. If the Canadian Press was forced to defend their position based on the information at hand, they would lose. So, they instead try to inoculate their readers to opposing arguments by calling them “conspiracy theory” in the hope that those readers will never research the information further.
The Canadian media then cites quotations that specifically argue that not working with the WEF would put the Alberta public at a disadvantage because it would cut them off from information that the WEF provides.
It’s important to mention that there is no evidence that the WEF has provided any life saving health information to date concerning the covid pandemic. In fact, there is no evidence that the WEF is useful to the Canadian public in any way. The mainstream media’s bizarre and antagonistic reaction to Smith’s shunning of a foreign organization of elitists that has no loyalty to the Canadian citizenry suggests that they may be operating from a foundation of bias.
Danielle Smith’s bravery in cutting off WEF influence from Alberta is being met with a dishonest media response, but in the long run, she is making the best decision possible. Taking advice from a potential parasite is not good leadership.
Senator Klobuchar uses Paul Pelosi attack to call for internet regulation
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | October 31, 2022
Senator Amy Klobuchar said she doesn’t Trust Elon Musk to run Twitter. She also slammed social media companies for profiting from amplifying “misinformation” and made some statements about internet regulations that completely ignore the First Amendment.
On NBC News “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning, Klobuchar was asked by host Chuck Todd if she trusts Musk.
She responded, “No, I do not.”
“Elon Musk has said now that he’s going to start a content moderation board. That was one good sign, but I continue to be concerned about that. I just don’t think people should be making money off of passing on this stuff that’s a bunch of lies,” Klobuchar said. “You couldn’t do that on your network, Chuck.”
Todd responded that his network has “real rules,” and news organizations are required to verify the information they publish.
“That is not a requirement of these companies. And we have to change the requirements on these companies. They are making money off of us. They are making money off of this violence,” Klobuchar said. “I think that it’s one thing if someone is posting stuff on the internet, it is another when they’re making money amplifying it.”
Referring to the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, at his home, Klobuchar said social media companies should be held responsible for condoning political violence. Some reports allege that the man who broke into Pelosi’s home and attacked him with a hammer was looking for the House Speaker.
Other reports have linked the suspect with “QAnon conspiracy theories” and accused him of bigotry and antisemitism. In other reports he has been described as “hippie collective” and “left-leaning, nudist drug abuser.”
“When you look at what this guy was looking at, he was looking at just horrendous things you don’t even want to talk about on your show. He was posting antisemitic tropes, he was showing memes that showed violence and all of this election-denying, pro-Trump, MAGA crowd rhetoric. That’s what we’re dealing with here,” Klobuchar said.
She also listed her priorities following the assault of Pelosi, including prosecuting “this perpetrator who committed a violent, violent crime” and increasing security for elected officials.
“Number three is to make sure we’re not electing more election deniers who are following Donald Trump down this road. And then number four, yes, once we get some people in who care about our democracy, we have to do something about this amplification of this election-denying hate speech that we see on the internet,” Klobuchar said.
Klobuchar added that she would “reduce” the immunity Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act affords social media companies, so that they can be prosecuted for “making money off of amplifying election falsehoods and hate speech.” Klobuchar neglected to mention that companies would still be protected by The First Amendment.
Emily Oster proposes “a pandemic amnesty”
Suggests that “we need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID”
eugyppius – a plague chronicle – october 31, 2022
I don’t know much about the American pandemic pundits, but I gather that Brown University economist and “parenting guru” Emily Oster is far from the worst of them. Her Twitter timeline suggests she spent the early months of the pandemic terrified about the virus until school closures took their toll on her kids, at which point she repositioned herself as a kind of lockdown moderate, opposing the worst of the hystericist excesses while validating their central premises whenever possible to save face with friends and colleagues.
“Employer mandates” mean firing people who don’t share your medical and political opinions.
Emily Oster’s latest act of moderation is the suggestion that we forgive and forget all the disastrous policies inflicted on us by terrified wealthy urbanites, clueless technocrats and mad scientist vaccinators since 2020, because, hey, these were just honest mistakes, anybody could’ve messed up like that, it’s all good.
April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks. Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”
These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.
The thing is, Emily Oster, that we did know. We’ve studied respiratory virus transmission for years. All the virologists and epidemiologists who aren’t total morons knew your 2020 mask routine was crazy and they just didn’t care. They wanted you to do it anyway, because they thought that if they got you to act paranoid and antisocial enough, your insane behaviour might have some limited effect on case curves. Joke’s on you, and it’s sad you still haven’t realised.
[T]here is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information. Reasonable people—people who cared about children and teachers—advocated on both sides of the reopening debate. …
No, reasonable people could see already in March 2020 that SARS-2 posed no measurable threat to children. There was never any honest debate to be had about this.
The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. …
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty. … [W]e need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go. We need to forgive the attacks, too. Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk, I was called a “teacher killer” and a “génocidaire.” It wasn’t pleasant, but feelings were high. And I certainly don’t need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
I’m sorry somebody called you genocidal, Emily Oster. That must’ve been tough for you. You know what’s also tough? Getting your head kicked in by riot police because you had the temerity to protest against indefinite population-wide house arrest.
Or being fired from your university job and banned in perpetuity from the premises because you uploaded a video to social media complaining about the onerous and expensive testing requirements imposed upon unvaccinated staff. Or being confined to your house and threatened with fines because of personal medical decisions that had no chance of impacting the broader course of the pandemic in the first place. But somebody called this woman genocidal in French and she’s ready to move on, so it’s all good.
Emily Oster may have said a few reasonable things in the depths of her pandemic moderation, but she can take her proposal for pandemic amnesty and shove it all the way up her ass. I’m never going to forget what these villains did to me and my friends. It is just hard to put into words how infuriating it is, to read this breezy triviliasation of the absolute hell we’ve been through, penned by some comfortable and clueless Ivy League mommyconomist who is ready to mouth support for basically any pandemic policy that doesn’t directly affect her or her family and then plead that the horrible behaviour and policies supported by her entire social milieu are just down to ignorance about the virus. We knew everything we needed to know about SARS-2 already in February 2020. The pandemicists and their supporters crossed many bright red lines in their eradicationist zeal and ruined untold millions of lives. That doesn’t all just go away now.
Where’s Walensky? – A Rebound update
The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | October 31, 2022
CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky first tested positive for Covid on 21 October. This was weeks after getting her fifth jab. This is the same Rochelle who assured us that the vaccinated don’t carry the virus and don’t get sick. My Post – A picture is worth a thousand words highlighted her journey to Covid infection.
Well the vaccinated clearly do carry the virus.
And they clearly do get sick. Although Walensky only had mild symptoms she took a course of the antiviral pill Paxlovid. Paxlovid, on rare occasions, causes a COVID rebound, i.e. you start testing positive again. This is so rare, Jill Biden rebounded, Joe Biden rebounded and Anthony Fauci rebounded. They just all must be really unlucky.
People were getting worried about Walesnky. She had gone quiet for longer than expected. 10 days had passed and she had only been seen on the odd video. Where had she gone?
You’ve guessed it, after taking Paxlovid, Walensky has also rebounded. After testing negative, mild symptoms returned on Sunday and she is isolating at home again.
Paxlovid seems to return symptoms quicker than the Speed of Science.
The question is, why are they all so keen to tell us that their safe and effective vaccines and drugs are no longer effective? They could easily disappear for a few weeks and nobody would be any the wiser that they had rebounded or even contracted mild Covid in the first place. There is clearly a nudging agenda going on.
Netanyahu says to ‘neutralise’ Lebanon maritime deal
MEMO | October 31, 2022
Israeli leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Monday he will “neutralise” a recent maritime border deal with Lebanon if he is elected prime minister.
“I will behave as I did with the Oslo Accords,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Army Radio.
He said that the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians “were not cancelled, they were neutralised.”
The former premier, however, did not detail his specific intentions for the border agreement with Lebanon during his Monday’s interview.
Last week, Israel and Lebanon signed a US-mediated deal to demarcate maritime border between the two countries. The deal covers an area in the Mediterranean Sea, which contains part of the Karish gas field and Qana, a prospective gas field.
Netanyahu had termed the maritime deal as “illegal”, saying he would not be bound by it. He argued that Prime Minister, Yair Lapid, and Defense Minister, Benny Gantz, “didn’t want to extract the gas in the first place, but now they want to surrender it to Hezbollah.”
Israeli voters will go to polling stations on Tuesday in the country’s 5th legislative election in less than four years.
Opinion polls suggest that Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party, could come within a single seat of an outright majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament).
UK-Aided Ukrainian Attempt at Sabotaging Grain Deal to Backfire, Expert Says
Samizdat – 31.10.2022
MOSCOW – Ukraine attacked Russian naval ships that escorted vital grain exports in an attempt to escalate the hunger crisis for the world and blame it on Russia, but the move will likely backfire to make Africa and the Middle East wary of the West and more trustful of Moscow, French political commentator Charles Gave told Sputnik.
Russia quit the UN- and Turkey-brokered grain shipping deal on Saturday after its Black Sea naval ships and civil vessels were attacked in a drone strike that it said was coordinated by the UK. Russia, a leading global grain producer, promised to supply up to 500,000 tonnes of grain to the poorest countries free of charge in the coming months to offset shortfalls from Ukrainian exports.
“The only reason for this drone attack, which is a provocation that really threatens to stop altogether the delivery of grain from Ukraine, is the will to sabotage the grain agreement and present Russia as the arch-villain in the conflict,” Gave said.
He believes, however, that the opposite will likely happen.
“In the end the boomerang effect will probably be that African and Middle East countries will be made much more aware that they can count on Russian grain and that the West, by disrupting the export of grain through the Black Sea, is to blame for this new negative development,” he said.
The attack caused wheat and corn to trade higher on the global stock markets on Monday after the July grain deal saw cereal and vegetable oil prices drop to pre-conflict levels.
Gave, the founder of TVLibertes news channel, said Russia only stood to benefit from the Ukrainian drone strike because it would inflate its grain revenues, while its offer of free grain to those in need would strengthen its image as a reliable partner among the developing countries.
He also called Ukraine’s behavior irresponsible because it risked a deal that had been painstakingly negotiated by Turkey to stage a “public relations exercise and a provocation to create the buzz.”
“I see Russia gaining more and more capacity to influence ‘the rest of the world’ and turn developing countries away from the West,” Gave said. “The consequences are very bad for the countries of destination of the grain export. The West should stop involving itself more and more as a co-belligerent in the conflict and actively support negotiations,” he cautioned.
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The Forgotten Terrorist Pretext of the Vietnam War
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | February 16, 2023
Since 9/11, terrorism has become the ultimate entitlement program for America’s political elite. Whether it is illegally spying on Americans or blowing Somali dissidents to pieces, invoking terrorism provides all the cover needed for Washington policymakers. But the disastrous results of granting politicians a blank check to fight terrorism should have been undeniable almost 60 years ago.
Back in the 1960s, terrorism was what the communists did. Anti-terrorist moral fervor and ideological blinders propelled the U.S. into its biggest foreign policy blunder since World War II. … continue
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