Southern Poverty Law Center - Guilt by Association

SPLC eviscerated by Kevin Michael Grace (The Ambler). Here's a bit from Kevin's brilliant article on the Southern Poverty Law Center in the July 2004 Chronicles.

In Morris Dees’ America, night is always falling. It is a nation of ceaseless cross-burnings and lynchings, where minorities cower endlessly in fear, waiting helplessly for the next assault from the Klan, skinheads, the League of the South, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis and Chronicles, Peter Brimelow and VDare.com, David Horowitz and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the American Enterprise Institute . . . The American Enterprise Institute? Surely there must be some mistake. Not at all...

Clearly, by 1994, even the SPLC realized there was no longer much to fear from the KKK, that tiny band of bedraggled and government-infiltrated losers. Even so, according to the SPLC’s most recent The Year in Hate, “Buoyed by rising numbers of Skinhead and Klan groups, the American radical right staged something of a comeback last year, following a tumultuous period that saw the destruction or hobbling of some of the nation’s leading hate groups.”

So what is the connection between AEI and some of the nation’s leading hate groups? Well, you see, AEI “in recent years has sponsored scholars whose views are seen by many as bigoted or even racist.” You have to love that passive verb, seen. For example? “For example, Dinesh D’Souza.” He holds a fellowship there and also holds heterodox opinions on the civil-rights movement. (You might think that D’Souza shopping Samuel Francis to save his own skin and getting him fired from the Washington Times would score him points with the SPLC, but apparently not.) More “controversial” still is AEI fellow Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve, which cites research funded by the “racist” Pioneer Fund. Why is the Pioneer Fund “racist”? Because it endorses the idea of racial differences. It is a commonplace today for those that believe in the very idea of race to be condemned as “racist,” although it is hard to understand how such a thing as “racism” could exist in the absence of races...

The technique it uses to ferret out those “seen” as “racists” is one well known to aficionados of conspiracy theory: “consanguinity.” As the old song put it, “I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.” Or as Thomas Fleming put it, “If Congressman Tom Tancredo or [American Conservative executive editor] Scott McConnell has ever met anyone who met anyone who took money from the Pioneer Fund, they must be bigots.” By this measure, every person and organization to the right of the Southern Poverty Law Center is beyond the pale—which is precisely the point. Consanguinity is self-evidently a shoddy logical tool. Not so long ago, those on the right who employed it were accused of “McCarthyism.” Police departments and schools, however, make use of Dees’ smears and “Teaching Tolerance” materials. In 2001, Dees was the recipient of the National Education Association’s highest honor, the Friend of Education Award. And whenever any credulous member of the media wants the lowdown on “hate,” he gives the SPLC a call.

Other SPLC bête noires include “neo-Confederates”; Pat Buchanan; the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife Foundations; the Free Congress Foundation; the Council of Conservative Citizens; the Ludwig von Mises Institute; and the New Century Foundation, publisher of American Renaissance.

Those added to the SPLC’s enemies list are inclined to consider it a rather higher honor than any NEA gong. David Horowitz, however, was mortified. Horowitz was added for his opposition to reparations for slavery. Two howls of protest were published on Horowitz’s website, FrontPageMag.com. His own cri de coeur was an open letter to Morris Dees, which begged him not to lump him in with the real bad guys:

"You’ve made yourself a national reputation as a fighter against hate groups. Recently, however, you released a report called “Into the Mainstream” by a leftwing conspiracy theorist named Chip Berlet, which purports to show how “right wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” This report is so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself."

Where has Horowitz been? It is an old story: First, they came for the Pioneer Fund, and I did not speak out because I was not a eugenicist . . .

Movie buffs will recall that a TV movie was made about Dees. "Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story" was released in 1991. In a delicious irony, this hagiography starred Corbin Bernsen, best remembered as the slimy lawyer Arnie Becker from L.A. Law. [More...]

Kevin Michael Grace lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He runs the website TheAmbler.com

We live in an age when guilt-by-association is considered the highest form of reasoning.

By the way, for a benign example of consanguinist thinking, the wonderful journalist Alistair Cooke, who died recently at 95, made it a habit in recent years, according to Peter Robinson, to tell people who had just shook his hand for the first time: "You have just shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook hands with Lincoln."

The intermediary between Cooke and Lincoln was the famous Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). Damn, I wish my sons had had a chance to shake Cooke's hand. They could have carried this chain with just two intermediaries into the third century after Lincoln's death.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere:

I made the big time. Now I'm being smeared in a New York gossip column! The New York Daily News' professional tattletales Rush and Molloy (email them your thoughts on the subject at rushmolloy@edit.nydailynews.com) write:

Bad source code at NYT?

New York Times columnist David Brooks might want to do a background check on the next "expert" he quotes.

Brooks, the reigning conservative on the paper's op-ed page now that William Safire is leaving, is coming under fire for his recent column about Red State "natalism" and birth rates in which he quoted writer Steve Sailer's finding that President Bush "carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates."

Brooks doesn't mention that Sailer reportedly runs a Web discussion group whose members include white supremecists [sic] and anti-Semites.

Sailer also writes for vdare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a "hate group."

Brooks didn't immediately respond to our E-mail.

But on political magazine The American Prospect's blog TAPped, writer Garance Franke-Ruta asks, "Why is David Brooks promoting the work of a well-known eugenicist sympathizer who regularly indulges in racial stereotyping? ... [It's] journalism at its absolute shoddiest."

In reply, I wrote back:

Dear Rush and Molloy:

Speaking of the kettle calling the pot black, Part 1, you didn't mention that Ms. Franke-Ruta, amusingly enough, has herself been accused, at vast length, of racism by a civil rights activist organization who objected intensely to an article she wrote for The American Prospect.

To read the original indictment of Franke-Ruta's purported racism, go here and scan down to "Special Report: In Attack on Hispanics, American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta Is Accused of Journalistic Fraud." I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.

On the other hand, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.

Speaking of the kettle calling the pot black, Part 2, you pass on the absurd accusation of the Southern Poverty Law Center that the online publication VDARE.com is a "hate group." Yet, you make no mention that the SPLC has widely been documented to be mercenary and racially discriminatory. Click here for all the grisly details.

[Also, check out all the other organizations the SPLC has denounced for racism, such as the American Enterprise Institute!]

And to find out the kind of mainstream organizations that the SPLC denounces, click here.

So, why aren't you out digging up scandalous dirt on the SPLC? It's all over the Web, including some much more juicy stuff than this. It's a disgrace that the American media tends to treat a discredited, but vastly rich and powerful organization like the SPLC, as if it is run by Mother Theresa.

Finally, let's look at the nonsense Franke-Ruta writes.

She doesn't deny that the facts Mr. Brooks cited from my article "Baby Gap" in The American Conservative (http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_06/cover.html) are facts. Her behavior is a classic shoot-the-messenger attempt to help Democrats bury their heads in the sand. How is the Democratic Party ever going to put up an effective opposition to the Bush-Rove machine if they denounce those who tell them truth about the American voters?

The rest of her diatribe consists mainly of Joe McCarthyesque-guilt by associationism and out-of-context quotations from my hundreds of articles, none of which she attempts to refute.

The defining characteristic of anti-Sailerist diatribes like Franke-Ruta's is multitudinous quotations from my writings with no attempt at refutation of their truth. The reader is simply supposed to be shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would dare write such politically incorrect things.

A few times, Franke-Ruta gets so worked up she can't even be bothered to quote me out of context. I was particularly amused that she included my AmCon article's concluding paragraph in full:

"Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it's certainly more interesting."

Apparently, by letting slip that I believe that the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking, I've condemned myself in the eyes of all of polite society. No refutation of my shocking faux pas is needed. All bien-pensants can instantly see how much better it is to bask in reputable ignorance.

Franke-Ruta seems to be convinced that I drew a correlation between Bush's share of the vote by state and the total fertility of white women by state because I am a racist. No, I did it because I am interested in the facts.

[I of course also looked at the correlation of Bush's share and the total fertility of all the women in the state, but the r-squared of that nonracial correlation was only 37%, compared to 74% for the correlation between Bush's share and white fertility. For Franke-Ruta's benefit, let me point out that 74% is twice as big as 37%. As for explaining to her what an r-squared is, well, ...

The reality is that white fertility correlates with Bush's share of the vote better than total fertility or nonwhite fertility does.

Since I published my "Baby Gap" article, I've found a demographic factor that correlates even better with Bush's share of the vote by state: the average years married between the ages of 18 and 44 for white women. Here's the scatter plot, with it's spectacular correlation coefficient of r = 0.91:

Unlike with fertility, years married for all races correlates quite well with Bush's share of the vote, but still significantly less well than years married among white women. You can read all about this factor here. And you can read about a third factor that also correlates super strongly with Bush's share of the vote -- lack of housing price inflation -- here.

In 1943, George Orwell famously observed of this manner of thinking that puts all the weight on who says something and none on what he says:

"Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science.' There is only 'German Science,' 'Jewish Science,' etc… This prospect frightens me much more than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement."

Yet, there was an ironic and fortunate coda to Nazi disdain for objective truth that Orwell couldn't have known in 1943. Luckily, it was precisely the Nazis disdain for "Jewish science" that prevented them from investing enough to develop the most frightening of all bombs -- the atomic bomb. Historian Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: "Germany despite the scientific exodus, retained enough nuclear scientists to conceive a bomb. But to Hitler, the nuclear field was identified with Einstein and 'Jewish physics.'"

Anyone, whether Hitler or Franke-Ruta, who evaluates assertions of fact based on the political correctness of the speaker is bound to be self-defeating, .

The tragedy in this case of course is that liberal smear artists like Franke-Ruta are, despite their similar attitudes toward truth, far from Nazis, and understanding what motivates voters is not destructive information like the secrets of the atomic bomb, but constructive knowledge. America needs the Democratic Party to be on top of its game, not to be wallowing in politically correct ignorance. The Democrats are the only organized American opposition to the Bush dynasty. But if they don't want to understand why they lost, and prefer to slumber in self-congratulatory bigotry, they simply won't be able to provide the effective political competition our country desperately needs.

As for Franke-Ruta's Six-Degrees-of-Joe-McCarthy-guilt-by-association charges:

"Brooks doesn't mention that Sailer reportedly runs a Web discussion group whose members include white supremecists [sic] and anti-Semites."

[You really shouldn't smear people as "white supremecists" if you can't even spell the word right!]

If there are any anti-Semites on the discussion group, they would be vastly outnumberd by the Jewish intellectuals and scientists who are members.

As for white "supremecists" (sic), the group includes East Asians, blacks, South Asians, and about 10% of the whites have non-white spouses.

And get a load of what Ruta-Franke calles me: a "eugenicist sympathizer?" Ooooooh! Sounds bad! But what the heck is that supposed to mean? Anybody who sympathizes with Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, or George Bernard Shaw would be a "eugenicist sympathizer" because they were all staunch advocates of eugenics back in the day.

What's particularly bizarre is that in the article of mine she cites http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pioneer.htm, I explicitly discuss my deep worries that new medical technology is increasingly making do-it-yourself eugenics, such as sex selection, available to parents. The potential social impact of this new free market eugenics concerns me greatly, and so I call for intensive study before we decide to let this cat out of the bag.

[Indeed, Franke-Ruta's list of out-of-context quotes from me draws from a lot of my most liberal arguments! For example, she quotes my criticism of conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan for his attacks on blacks for practicing ethnocentrism and identity politics. She is also shocked by my article presenting evidence from 30 social science studies that male homosexuals do not choose to be homosexual, but instead generally exhibit gay traits long before puberty. I could go on at great length in this vein, as could anyone who follows the links in her smear to my articles.]

As for indulging in "racial stereotyping," I am a science and sociology journalist whose work has been recognized by the highest scientific authorities. For example, Steven Pinker of Harvard, the superstar cognitive scientist who wrote the bestseller The Blank Slate, picked my "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" article, which originally appeared in American Conservative, for inclusion in his new anthology The Best Science and Nature Writing 20004. My article from early 2003 predicted, accurately, that nation-building in Iraq would be far more difficult than the Bush Administration was assuming because the Iraqi tendency to inbreed (half marry their first or second cousins) makes nepotistic corruption inevitable and makes it hard for Iraqis to cooperate beyond their intensely loyal inbred extended families.

In summary, you have aided Franke-Ruta in perpetrating "journalism at its absolute shoddiest."

Yours truly,

Steve Sailer

If you have anything to add, you can write to Rush and Molloy at rushmolloy@edit.nydailynews.com. Please be polite and avoid wide-ranging controversies.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Marriage Gap Correlations with Red-Blue State Voting

My important sequel to "Baby Gap" is up at VDARE.com. Please make sure to read the message from Peter Brimelow. (Don't forget to mention to him how much you value my contributions to VDARE.com.)

Here are a couple of graphs that didn't make it in the initial version of the article, but really show what an outrageously strong correlation with the 2004 state-by-state election results I've found.

What a remarkably close fit for a single demographic variable!

When you do a multiple regression model using Years Married and Babies per Woman, you get a linear formula that gets the actual vote 88% right:

Interestingly, you get this 88% r-squared for accounting for Bush's share of the states' total votes when looking at the marriage and fertility among whites, rather than total population. When you look at marriage and fertility rates for the whole population, the r-squared of the multiple regression is only 80%.

A reader writes:

As always, your latest VDARE piece is brilliant. I did a quick search on my univiersity's periodical databases and didn't find a single study on white fertility/marriage and voting patterns. It simply does not appear to be on the radar screen of political scientists and sociologists in spite of its explanatory power. I made a contribution to VDARE and told them I was doing so because they publish your stuff.

By the way, I blasted what's-her-name from TAPPED in an e-mail the other day.
Keep driving the PC crowd crazy! Here's one from me that will get them:

Merry Christmas!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Safire's Replacement on the NYT Op-Ed Page

Jack Shafer in Slate writes about who might take over William Safire's slot on the New York Times op-ed page when William Safire shortly retires:

Safire's impending departure prompted New York magazine to handicap the field for his replacement, tossing out the names of David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, Christopher Caldwell, Richard Brookhiser, Fred Barnes, and Robert Kagan. But the leading candidate, the magazine said, was John Tierney, who has already visited four stations of the cross at the Times as a metro reporter, feature writer, city columnist, and Washington reporter. Tierney's good humor, kinetic prose style, contrarian nature, wide-ranging interests, and rumored ability to attend congressional hearings would make him a fine replacement for Safire. I also like that he's a libertarian or, at the very least, a fellow traveler.

Tierney would be a great choice. Shafer goes on:

Without disparaging the Tierney nomination, here are a few candidates who have a demonstrated ability to report and would drive respectable opinion crazy:

Heather Mac Donald: A non-practicing lawyer (the best kind), Mac Donald flings dead cats into the temple of liberalism from her sinecure at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-libertarian stink tank. Unlike Safire, she isn't on a first-name basis with Ariel Sharon and doesn't write about foreign policy, so we wouldn't be getting a one-for-one replacement. But she outwings Safire by such a margin on domestic issues that she makes him look like a McGovernite. I'd love to see the Times' liberal readers squirm as they read her heavily reported pieces on racial profiling (for it), cops (she loves them), illegal immigration (against it), graffiti "artists" (they're vandals), domestic security (loves the Patriot Act), crime ("Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens"), privacy (who cares?), and welfare (must you ask?). Conservative Mac Donald could match liberal Paul Krugman cannonball for cannonball. Sulzberger wouldn't have to worry about offending the sensitive types in the Washington bureau by hiring Mac Donald because she lives in New York City and would happily work out of the newspaper's Times Square offices and offend the sensitive types there.

Heather would be a great choice too,. So, I'd be shocked if either got the nod. (And not shocked, SHOCKED, just plain shocked.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Marriage Gap

My sequel to "Baby Gap" will be up on VDARE late Sunday night. It's hot stuff ... if you are interested in understanding what drives the blue-red gap in election results. I've now found a demographic factor that correlates even better with Bush's share of the vote by state than total lifetime fertility of white women does. (It's not a terribly different factor than fertility, so don't expect a huge surprise.)

When you put the new mystery factor together with fertility in a simple multiple regression model, you get an r-squared of 88%, which is bizarrely high. That means that if you have just these two demographic measures for each state (in fact, those just for the white residents, weirdly enough), you can come up with a model where only 12% of the variation in Bush's share is unaccounted for. And it worked almost as well in 2000.

Think about all the reasons that pundits gave for why Bush or Kerry would do well in a particular state -- the strength of the state's economy, whether or not the candidates platforms would be good or local interests, the popularity of Gov. Schwarzenegger in California or the unpopularity of the scandal plagued GOP in Illinois, or the number of visits the candidates paid to the state, or yada yada yada. All trivial, accounting in sum for 12% of the variation, compared to the two big demographic factors that nobody mentioned. Granted, they are still very important, but you can see why all the campaign resources were poured into the small number of battleground states where the demographic factors put them on the cusp.

Most strangely, the racial makeup of the state doesn't much matter in this model. Because blacks gave 88% of their vote to Kerry, while whites gave him only 41%, common sense says that the percentage of voters in a state who are black would play an important role in determining Bush's share of the vote. Yet, you can get to an r-squared of 88% without inputting the black share of the state's voters. Remarkably, how large a share of the state's populace is black apparently influences the state's white fertility and the white mystery demographic factor enough to account for the varying black influences on the state's voting outcome. (I will, however, eventually input each state's racial makeup and see if that makes the model even more accurate. But the fewer factors in a model the better, on the whole. You want to make it as simple as possible, but no simpler, as Einstein might have of said.)

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

In defense of Underperformin' Norman Mineta:

My airline expert writes:

I still do not see what is so irrational about what the no-racial-profiling policy has, in practice, turned out to be in air travel. In practice, it means we don't check only Arabs. The TSA, airport and, especially, the airline people, are not crazy or suicidal. They are going to check very closely any unknown Arab passenger. And then they are going to do a thorough check on a randomly selected old DAR lady in a wheel chair or a retired Marine general with a walker to 1) avoid having it look like racial profiling and 2) prevent the Arab from feeling too bad about the search. As in, "see, we're all in this together."

Given the choices, is that so bad? You get the security benefit of the Arab check, but maintain some atmosphere of fairness and shared minor sacrifice. We do have an interest in not unnecessarily ticking off the law-abiding Arabs. There is an efficiency cost, but, hell, it's a government program. There is the annoyed big-shot cost, but a lot of them need a little annoyance.

There are a lot of other places, for example drug traffic on I-95, where trying to avoid looking for the obvious ethnic suspects does impose big and unnecessary costs, in either money or lost arrests. But air travel is so unique, in its various aspects, that I think a little benign dishonesty is not so intolerable.

By the way, the popular phrase "Underperformin' Norman Mineta" was invented a couple of years ago by John Derbyshire, but the Bush Administration appears to be impervious to witticisms, as shown by Bush's re-appointment of Mineta.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Secretary of Transportation

Underperformin' Norman Mineta asked to stay in Cabinet by Bush! The architect of the system of airport security system whereby a 94-year-old retired Marine Corp general and former Montana governor is given the third degree because his Congressional Medal of Honor set off the metal detector while security workers are banned from giving extra attention to Arabs will be back as Secretary of Transportation, one of only three Cabinet officers to serve since the beginning of Bush's first term.

It's widely believed that because Mineta was interned as a lad during WWII, he refuses to incorporate ethnic profiling in airport security.

Mineta said Thursday that his childhood experience had nothing to do with his position. He was simply following the lead of Bush, who declared shortly after the attacks that Arab Americans would not be targeted, and the advice of security professionals, who said racial profiling was not effective.

And at age 73, he's not exactly going to get any better at his job. All this makes him Bush's kind of Cabinet Secretary!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

War Nerd on Kashmir

The War Nerd on the highest battlefield in the world -- Gary Brecher reviews the 1999 fighting at 18,000 feet in Kashmir between India and Pakistan. The topic sounds as thin as the air, but, as usual, Brecher finds something important to say about it:

In tactical terms, Kargil meant very little. The battlefield was one of the least-valuable bits of real estate on the planet. If it had fallen, nothing would have changed down on the hot flatlands where the Indians and Pakistanis actually live.

But war these days isn't about tactical victory. It's about morale, and propaganda. In those terms, Kargil was a huge, huge victory for India and a big defeat for Pakistan. It did more for Indian nationalism than cricket, and that's saying a lot. It's damn hard finding anything everybody in India can rally behind. Almost everything there is the exclusive property of one particular tribe, or religion, or caste. Remember, India nearly tore itself apart twelve years ago over whether the Muslims or the Hindus had a right to build a shrine on some extra-special piece of holy turf in Ayodhya.

And that's where losing 400 men in a high-profile, harmless little war like Kargil comes in handy. Those websites I mentioned list the names of every single Indian soldier killed up there. When you consider how many Indians die every day, with nobody giving a damn at all, it's pretty amazing that these 400 dead guys get so much adoring press.

When you look at the list of names, you see why. Some of the names are obviously Sikhs (Sikhs love armies), but there are plenty of Hindu names, Muslim names -- for all I know there are Zoroastrian names in there too. It's a chance to sob together over those dead integrated units -- like those good old corny WW II movies where every platoon has this melting-pot roll call: "OK, lissen up, Bernstein, deNapoli, O'Brien, Kowalski, and Running Bear!" And naturally the most harmless ethnic sidekick in the platoon gets killed and everybody cries, and feels patriotic. I haven't even seen the Bollywood movie they made out of Kargil but I'm willing to bet it has a scene like that in it.

By losing 400 men up there where there are no mosques, Hindu temples, Untouchables or sacred cows, India got a huge nation-building boost at zero cost -- a strategic victory out of a minor skirmish. [More...]

The War Nerd writes war reviews for the same reason I write movie reviews: because thinking hard about anything can teach you a little more about how the world works.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Hispanic Vote

"NRO Rebunks Bush’s Hispanic Share Myth" -- My new VDARE.com column is up. An excerpt:

National Review Online ran an article yesterday (Dec. 8th, 2004) by Richard Nadler entitled "Bush’s 'Real' Hispanic Numbers: Debunking the debunkers."

It’s supposed to be an attack on my interpretation of the 2004 presidential election results. But a close reading shows that it largely supports my contention: the President's unlimited open borders plan would both be bad for the Republican Party (by importing more future Democrats than Republicans) and would not make the GOP more popular with current Hispanic voters...

The simplest model of white, Hispanic, and black voting behavior is that voters (at least those who are less than well-to-do and are family-oriented) are on average torn between the Democrats' tax-and-spend policies and the Republicans' family values stances. The poorest ethnic group of voters, blacks, feels they can't afford to waste their vote on semi-symbolic family values issues when they need direct help on bread-and-butter issues. In contrast, the wealthiest ethnic group of voters, whites, can afford to vote for Republicans—both because some are so wealthy that GOP policies like eliminating the inheritance tax are in their self-interest; and because, for the majority, they can afford to vote for family values.

Hispanic voters fall in the middle. Hispanics, overall, are quite poor. But those who are citizens and regular voters tend to be a little better off than blacks, and somewhat more upwardly mobile. They are tempted by the GOP's family values rhetoric. But a large majority feel their pocketbooks demand they vote Democratic.

This suggests that Hispanics are most likely to become Republican voters when, on average, they aren't so poor. The most straightforward way to raise Hispanic average incomes is to stop taking in so many extremely poor Hispanics from south of the border.

(This also has the secondary effect of cutting out the depressing effect on Hispanic wages of the constant arrival of what Marx called "the reserve army of the unemployed" from Mexico.) [More...]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Oceans' Twelve"

An excerpt from my review in the Jan. 3, 2004 American Conservative (available in full to electronic subscribers on Saturday)

Today ought to be a new golden age of movies. Special effects, cinematography, and sound are all steadily progressing. Audiences can now absorb more rapid editing. Budgets are bigger than ever, averaging $64 million in 2003, so sets and costumes are better than ever. Able character actors are everywhere, and today's big stars have broader skills than their glamorous but repetitious predecessors.

Still, judging from 2004's festival of ineptitude, Hollywood is drifting ever farther from consistent competence. The weak links have been halfbaked scripts. Would-be screenwriters throng workshops, so there should be abundant talent available. Sadly, writers and the producers who hire them have worked themselves into self-defeating ruts.

Most remakes fail because producers commission updatings of over-achieving films, such as Frank Sinatra's "The Manchurian Candidate," where everything clicked. In promising contrast, Sinatra's "Ocean's 11" was a notorious under-achiever. The Rat Pack signed on to play WWII commandos reuniting to knock over five Las Vegas casinos so they could film during the day and croon in the stage shows at night. But they forgot to schedule any snooze time, so they sleepwalked through their roles.

Still, the core concept of an action-comedy caper showcasing male camaraderie was appealing. After Ted Griffin penned a sharp new script for "Oceans Eleven," veteran producer Jerry Weintraub and ace director Steven Soderbergh, an Oscar-winner for "Traffic," had little trouble assembling a killer cast. "Ocean's Eleven" was one of the biggest hits of 2001 with adult audiences, who appreciated its 1940s Howard Hawks feel.

The visual chemistry of the gang's leaders was memorable because Brad Pitt exemplifies the scruffy, boyish-looking stars of post-Sixties pop culture, while George Clooney, who is only three years older but appears to hail from an earlier generation, is a throwback to Clark Gable's era of glamour, when actors tried to look like grown men.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Across Difficult Country

An Acquired Taste: The new blog "Across Difficult Country" is hard to describe: perhaps, you could try to imagine Jorge Luis Borges, the War Nerd, and Manhattan Transfer teaming up to impersonate a travel writer. Not work safe, not libel safe, not sanity safe. But funny.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Ahmad Chalabi

"The Neocon's Man in Iraq:" I finally put up my never-before-online July 5, 2004 American Conservative article about why the neocons fell so disastrously in love with Ahmed Chalabi.

One of the many conundrums revolving around Ahmed Chalabi, that International Man of Mystery, is why so many neoconservatives took seriously his assertions that he was devoted to democracy. In the Wall Street Journal, for example, Seth Lipsky extolled the convicted embezzler as a "democratic visionary." Why did it never occur to them that Chalabi might simply be blowing smoke? More broadly, why hadn't it dawned upon the neocons that their obsession with this kind of ideological declaration is outdated?

Hadn't liberals been embarrassed by megalomaniacal Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutionaries who orated passionately about democracy while they were hiding in the hills, but once in power quickly came to feel: "Hey, we didn't spend all those years in the jungle living on fried iguanas just to be voted out in some maricon election." Hadn't conservatives been burned by the thuggish Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel who said all the right things about elections and free enterprise, but whose murderous behavior seemed to be based on the personal philosophy that: "I am the biggest Big Man, and therefore anyone who gets in the way deserves to step on one of my landmines."

Last February, an Oxford Research survey found that only 0.2 percent of Iraqis consider Chalabi the "leader they trust the most." Yet, the neocons long assumed that a majority in Iraq would vote for a man on the lam from a sentence of 22 years in neighboring Jordan for fraud in the collapse of the Chalabi family's Petra Bank. While the assembled intellects at the American Enterprise Institute might buy Chalabi's rationalization that Saddam framed him, what mattered is that the common people in Jordan, some of whom lost their life savings, didn't. From Jordan, Chalabi's reputation as "Ahmed-the-Thief" filtered into Iraq.

What does Chalabi really want? The simplest guess is that he wants what too many ambitious Iraqis want these days: to be a trillionaire. [More...]

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

I finally started the new novel about a freshwoman at a Duke-like university. I had some trepidation since the quality of Wolfe's writing fell off so drastically in the last 100 pages of A Man in Full after the masterful body of the book, presumably due to Wolfe's coronary bypass surgery and his subsequent depression. But Wolfe seems in fine form, not ascending the heights of his amazing "In the Breeding Barn" chapter in A Man in Full, but quite serviceable so far.

And his exultation over finding this great topic -- student life in a modern university -- that nobody important had touched is palpable. A dozen years ago when date rape was a hot topic, I did some research to write a debunking article, but found that naive little me was in over my head, so nothing came of it. One thing I discovered was that the girls most likely to be abused are freshmen living away from home for the first time who want to party with football and basketball players and the top fraternities, but who don't belong to a sorority. Sorority girls, in contrast, have sisters to look out for them when they get drunk and traditions of behavior that can protect them to some extent. Poor Charlotte Simmons, from a hillbilly village in the Blue Ridge mountains, appears to fit this model of a girl headed for trouble.

Also, having a teenage girl for the main character solves Wolfe's old problem that while his fascination with and knowledge of fashion and decorating is hugely important to his books, in the manly men he normally writes about, it always seems a little, ahem, gay. Back in the 1960s, Wolfe wrote some brilliant essays about young women, but in the 1970s he became obsessed with physical courage (e.g., The Right Stuff) and lost touch with his ability to write about women, leading to the rather underdeveloped female characters in his two novels. I haven't read enough to see if he's back in touch with his feminine side, but he seems to be off to a good start.

Here's John Derbyshire's NRO article on the book.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The "Natalist Movement" Explained:

David Brooks' NYT column on "natalism" left me scratching my head: "It's strange that having enough babies to keep the species going needs its own name. What's next? 'Breathingism?'"

The term "natalist" goes back at least to 19th Century France, where the government was correctly worried that the low birth rate of the French was going to put them at a disadvantage on the battlefield against the more fecund Germans. The French government has implemented "pro-natalist" policies ever since. But, obviously, there is virtually nothing in the way of an organized natalist "Movement" in the U.S., as there was in 3rd Republic France. Instead, there is a lot of lower-case movement around the country as people call up moving vans and move to places they hope are better suited for what they want out of life. And it turns out that feelings about having babies are one of the more important sorting mechanisms for where people live and how they vote.

A reader explains:

David Brooks comes up with the word for two reasons: publicity and Internet searching.

People may well forget that you identified the relationship first. Especially since you noticed the white aspect of it. But Brooks has labeled it.

You identified a phenomenon. Brooks identified a "movement". "Movements" get press.

Expect Time or Newsweek to talk about the "natalist movement" if your meme has legs (leggy memes, hmmm).

Since Brooks is the one who identified it and gave it a name, however, he is likely to be the one who gets the press when someone performs a Lexis/Nexis or Internet search on "natalism". I can just see him jockeying for position at an editorial meeting, trying to get play for "The New Natalist Movement", and a front-page byline for himself.

As we both know, Brooks is twisting the truth a bit. There is no natalist movement. There is no natalist organization. There is no natalist consciousness. Some folks just like to make babies. That fact, however, is a commonplace, and commonplaces don't sell papers. "The New Natalist Movement" does, however. And David Brooks is the Faith Popcorn of the movement. He will get the credit as the one who first spotted "the movement" in the wild. In his paper will get credit for cracking the story first.

You are not quite old enough, but I remember "The Movement", which to most outsiders was a bunch of college kids smoking dope, dropping out, doing acid, and screwing like bunnies. The guy who labeled it "The Movement" probably got a fair amount of press and bylines.

Hell, if Morris Dees tried to drum up money to get rid of a handful of redneck cranks living in the sticks of Idaho, he wouldn't have gotten a dime. He gets millions, though, for haranguing folks about "The Militia Movement" and "The White Identity Movement".

To satisfy your curiosity, do a search right now for "natalist" on Google. Track the word each day for the next month. See how many times "Brooks" appears in conjunction with "natalist". See how many times "Sailer" appears in conjunction with "natalist". The results would be interesting.

In my corporate career, I was a good marketing researcher but a lousy marketer. Obviously, nothing much has changed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Garance Franke-Ruta vs. Steve Sailer

Anti-Sailerism: There's a classic example of anti-Sailerism over at TAPPED, the blog of The American Prospect by somebody named Garance Franke-Ruta who is in a deep tizzy that David Brooks polluted the pages of the New York Times by citing my "Baby Gap" article.

The defining characteristic of anti-Sailerist diatribes is multitudinous quotations from my writings with no attempt at refutation of the truth of any of them -- the reader is simply supposed to be shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would dare write such politically incorrect things.

Sometimes, Franke-Ruta can't even be bothered to quote out of context. I particularly liked that my concluding paragraph was quoted in full:

"Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it’s certainly more interesting."

Obviously, by contending that the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking, I've condemned myself by my own words in the minds of all of polite society. No refutation of my shocking faux pas is needed.

Everyone can instantly see how much better the world was back when it basked in reputable ignorance on the question of what drives the red-blue divide.

Franke-Ruta seems to be convinced that I drew a correlation between Bush's share of the vote by state and the total fertility of white women by state because I am a racist. No, I did it because I am interested in the facts. I of course also looked at the correlation of Bush's share and the total fertility of all the women in the state, but the r-squared of that nonracial correlation was only 37%, compared to 74% for the correlation between Bush's share and white fertility. For Franke-Ruta's benefit, let me point out that 74% is twice as big as 37%. As for explaining to her what an r-squared is, well, ...

The reality is that white fertility correlates with Bush's share of the vote better than total fertility or nonwhite fertility does.

By the way, last weekend I found another demographic factor that correlates even better with Bush's share of the vote. It correlates strongly with fertility, of course, but a simple two factor multiple regression model of white total fertility and the new mystery factor has an astonishing r-squared of 87% with Bush's share. I'll try to write it up for this weekend. Franke-Ruta will be even more aghast.

If you want to see some completely apoplectic reactions, check out Atrios. I hope nobody had a stroke. Not a lot of members of the reality-based community there. As far as I can tell, just members of the hate-based community.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Garance Franke-Ruta Accused of Racism!

Amusingly, Franke-Ruta has herself (himself?) been accused, at vast length, of racism by a civil rights activist organization, who objected intensely to an article she wrote for The American Prospect. (This was discovered by the blog Across Difficult Country.)

To read the original indictment of Franke-Ruta's purported racism, go here and scan down to "Special Report: In Attack on Hispanics, American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta Is Accused of Journalistic Fraud." I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.

On the other hand, as Across Difficult Country asks, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.

Well, it being the Christmas season, I shall give Franke-Ruta the benefit of the doubt anyway.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Jim Tharpe vs. Southern Poverty Law Center

Scam Watch -- By the way, the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the official Scam Watch of iSteve.com. See Ken Silverstein's Harper's article "The Church of Morris Dees: How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance" for the basics on Morris Dees' money machine. And here's leftist Alexander Cockburn's column on the SPLC's money-hungry machinations.

Lately, as Morris's moneymaking ambitions have expanded, he has turned to attacking people of the quality of Richard Lamm, the Democratic former three term governor of Colorado. I'm proud to be on Gov. Lamm's side of the ethical chasm between him and Mr. Dees, a member of the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame.

Here's something important I hadn't seen before: the revealing statement of Jim Tharpe, the Deputy Metro Editor of the Atlanta Constitution, which he made during a Harvard panel discussion about his experience editing a massive Pulitzer-finalist investigative series on the Southern Poverty Law Center during his days at the Montgomery Advertiser:

I’d never done any reporting on nonprofits, I thought they were all good guys, they were mom-and-pop, bake-sale, raise-money-for-the-local-fire-department type operations. I had no idea how sophisticated they were, how much money they raised, and how little access you have to them as a reporter, some of which has already been covered here.

Summary of Findings

Our series was published in 1995 after three years of very brutal research under the threat of lawsuit the entire time.

Our findings were essentially these:

The [Southern Poverty Law] center was building up a huge surplus. It was 50-something million at that time; it’s now approaching 100 million, but they’ve never spent more than 31 percent of the money they were bringing in on programs, and sometimes they spent as little as 18 percent. Most nonprofits spend about 75 percent on programs.

A sampling of their donors showed that they had no idea of the center’s wealth. The charity watchdog groups, the few that are in existence, had consistently criticized the center, even though nobody had reported that.

There was a problem with black employees at what was the nation’s richest civil rights organization; there were no blacks in the top management positions. Twelve out of the 13 black current and former employees we contacted cited racism at the center, which was a shocker to me. As of 1995, the center had hired only two black attorneys in its entire history.

Questionable Fundraising

We also found some questionable fundraising tactics. One of the most celebrated cases the center handled was the case of a young black man, Michael Donald, who was killed by Klansmen in Mobile, Alabama, and his body suspended from a tree, a very grotesque killing. The state tried the people responsible for the murder and several of them ended up on death row, a couple ended up getting life in prison.

The center, after that part of the case took place, sued the Klan organization to which they belonged and won a $7 million verdict. It was a very celebrated verdict in this country. The problem was the people who killed this kid didn’t have any money. What they really got out of it was a $51,000 building that went to the mother of Michael Donald. What the C enter got and what we reported was they raised $9 million in two years using the Donald case, including a mailing with the body of Michael Donald as part of it.

The top center officials, I think the top three, got $350,000 in salaries during that time, and Morris got a movie out of it, a TV movie of the week. I think it was called, "The Morris Dees Story." [Actually, "Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story" with, appropriately enough, Corbin Bernsen (who played sleazy lawyer Arnie Becker on "LA Law") as Morris.]

As I said, being the editor on this series really raised my eyebrows. I never knew anything about nonprofits before this. I thought we would have complete access to their financial records; we didn’t. We had access to 990’s, which Doug mentioned earlier, which tell you very little, but they are a good starting point.

Organizations Monitor Nonprofits

I also learned that there are organizations out there that monitor nonprofits. A couple of these that might be worth your time are the National Charities Information Bureau, the American Institute of Philanthropy, and the Charities Division of the Better Business Bureau. They have rather loose guidelines, I think, for the way nonprofits operated, and even with those guidelines, they had blasted the center repeatedly for spending too little on programs, for the number of minorities in management positions, just very basic stuff that they’d been criticized for but nobody had reported.

The relationship with sources on this story was pretty interesting, because like I said, most of these people were our friends, and as somebody mentioned earlier, these were the disillusioned faithful. They were people who didn’t resign. As I said, most of their jobs simply ran out, but they left the center very disillusioned and very willing to talk about it, although most of them wanted to talk off the record.

That presented a number of problems for us. We did not publish anything in the series unless it was attributed to somebody, but we went beyond that. I think if we had stuck with that tack as the only thing we did in the series, we would have ended up with people at the center could have easily dismissed as disgruntled employees.

By looking at 990’s, what few financial records we did have available, we were able to corroborate much of that information, many of the allegations they had made, the fact that the center didn’t spend very much of its money that it took in on programs, the fact that some of the top people at the center were paid very high salaries, the fact that there weren’t minorities in management positions at the center.

If I had advice for anybody looking into a nonprofit it would be this: It’s the most tenacious story. You have to be more tenacious in your pursuit of these things than anything else I’ve ever been a part of. These guys threatened us with a lawsuit from the moment we asked to look at their financial records.

They were very friendly and cooperative, up until the point where we said, "We want to see the checks you write," and they turned over their 990’s and said, "Come look at these." We said, "We don’t want to see those, we know what those are and we’ve seen them. We actually want to see the checks you write," and they said, "Well, there’s 23,000 checks we’ve written over two years, you don’t possibly have time to look through all those," and we said, "Yes, we do, and we’ll hire an auditor to do it."

First Threats, Eventually No Response to Questions

At that point, they hired an independent attorney. They’re all lawyers, you’ve got to understand. They hired an attorney who began first by threatening me, then my editor, and then the publisher. "And you better be careful of the questions you ask and the stories you come up with," and they would cite the libel law to us. So we were under threat of lawsuit for two years, basically, during the research phase of the series.

They initially would answer our questions in person, as long as they could tape-record it. After we asked about finances, they wanted the questions written down and sent to them in advance, and then finally they said, "We’re tired of you guys, we’re not answering anything else," and they completely cut us off.

We published the series over eight days in 1994, and it had very little effect, actually. I think the center now raises more money than it ever has. [Laughter]

The story really didn’t get out of Montgomery and that’s a real problem. The center’s donors are not in Montgomery; the center’s donors are in the Northeast and on the West Coast. So the story pretty much was contained in Montgomery where it got a shrug-of-the-shoulders reaction. We really didn’t get much reaction at all, I’m sad to say.

One of our editorial writers had an interesting comment on it. I think he stole it from somebody else, but his comment was this: "They came to do good and they’ve done quite well for themselves, and they’ve done even better since the series was published." I’m not sure what the lesson in that is, but don’t assume because a nonprofit has a sterling reputation it’s not worth looking into, and don’t assume when you start looking into it that it’s going to be easy to get the information, because it’s not.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Roe Effect

James Taranto claims that he knew all about the relationship between white fertility and Republican voting. See, it's the Roe Effect -- future Democrats get aborted, he says.

The only problem with this popular idea is that there's little evidence that abortion has a big effect on white fertility -- a 2000 Rand Corporation study found:

The white TFR where abortion is legal and Medicaid funding for the procedure available is estimated to be 1.81. Ending Medicaid funding would increase the TFR for whites by 2 percent. Klerman estimates that making abortion illegal would increase white fertility by an additional 3 percent, still below replacement levels.

If abortion wasn't convenient, people would have a lot fewer unwanted pregnancies. They really aren't all that hard to avoid.

It makes you wonder what the point of legalized abortion is if the great majority of aborted fetuses wouldn't have been conceived without abortion being legalized.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer