I’m more of a big picture kind of guy, so true crime isn’t a favorite genre for me because I worry that spending a lot of time learning about one colorful crime isn’t that informative simply because the reason this one case is so interesting is because it’s so idiosyncratic.

But like Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside a decade ago, Murderland appears to be both true crime and social science. (As I mentioned in my obituary for geneticist J. Craig Venter, when I pointed out that his ex-wife Barbara Rae-Venter used genetic genealogy to catch the Golden State Killer, I’m a big fan of smart women who are into true crime.)

Baseball statistician Bill James read a huge number of true crime books for fun and then wrote a 2011 book about which patterns he’d observed. One of his more memorable assertions is that serial killing, while long existent, didn’t appear to be a big Thing until the late 1960s.

Somebody at Radford University kept a database of known serial killers showing a sharp rise in the 1960s-1970s and a peak in the 1980s before a decline:

A lot of things changed in American society in the later 1960s.

So, what’s Fraser’s theory?

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Notes on a non-profit indicted for bank fraud

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) • May 1st, 2026

To my shame, I have to admit I never heard of Patrick McKenzie before. But he reminds me of first reading Paul Graham 15 or 20 years ago.

The first half of his blogpost is about why you should never, ever, ever lie to any financial institution, such as a bank, about anything, no matter how tiny your little white lie might sound to you at the time.

According to McKenzie, the laws passed over the decades to block terrorists, narco traffickers, and white collar criminals from using the banking system mean that if the feds don’t like you (and who knows whether future Administrations will be on your side or not?), they can take you down for anything you told a financial institution that wasn’t exactly true.

Note: I’m not a lawyer, I’m just passing along here what McKenzie asserts. But … I have a pretty good track record of figuring out whether people sound like they are talking through their hat. And McKenzie’s command of logic sounds clear to me.

The second half of McKenzie’s blogpost is about how funny it is that the SPLC has gotten itself into this situation where it may well go down, hard, over violations that it spent much of the last decade trying to impose on people it hated.

That reminds me …

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Law and MBA graduates earn more if classes are racially diverse, study shows

Graduates from classes that had just one more racial minority student earned higher starting salaries, according to research in the journal Nature.

April 30, 2026 at 10:22 a.m.

By Todd Wallack

Racial diversity in professional schools has had an unexpected benefit: boosting starting salaries for graduates.

This was more or less the theory behind legalizing affirmative action up through 2023: the controlling decision in the Bakke decision of 1978 asserted without evidence that classroom discussion diversity would benefit students of all colors. The Bakke decision hypothesized:

“The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body”

Uh, sure … After all, who can forget the vastly intellectually productive intellectual ferment of the recent Cancel Culture era on campus?

I could imagine examples of that being true, such as in MBA marketing classes where discussions of different market segments’ prejudices could be useful: e.g., “We Hispanic men don’t like to be told what to do by black women, so don’t use them in your TV commercials. We especially hate Kamala Harris types, so don’t nominate her for President for God’s sake!”

Maybe somebody would have had the courage to say that in 1978, but a half century later?

Overall, I’ve seen very, very little research into actual pros and cons of diversity other than just McKinsey-quality hand-waving about how diversity must somehow bring valuable new perspectives, like astronaut Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) recently claiming that to have an all white male crew on the Space Shuttle would have been a disaster.

Kelly did have an all white male crew and no disaster ensued.

The vast amount of learning and decision-making involves technical questions that have little to do with racial diversity. For instance, it’s hard to imagine anything involving space travel at present in which racial diversity would be an obvious technical help (other than PR).

And, of course, what there seems to be much more evidence for is that affirmative action, by exacerbating the IQ racial caste system on campus, worsens educational race relations and makes discussions touchier and less informative.

For instance, I know a lot about the social science on diversity. But I almost never get invited to speak at colleges, and when I do it becomes an international controversy in The Guardian.

A new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday found that business and law school students from diverse classes generally earned higher starting pay when they graduated. Researchers found the increase benefited not only underrepresented students but classes overall.

“Different people bring different points of view, and that actually helps everyone,” said Debanjan Mitra, a business professor at the University of Connecticut.

The findings come as colleges and universities across the country have scaled back diversity recruitment and retention programs under pressure from President Donald Trump’s administration and in the wake of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that barred race-conscious admissions at most colleges.

The Trump administration has warned schools receiving federal money will face funding cuts if they engage in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or use “race preferences and stereotypes as a factor in admissions.” And the Justice Department has launched investigations into whether more than 70 universities, law schools and medical schools are considering diversity in their admissions process, according to a legal filing this month. The administration has sought data from colleges to ensure schools have stopped considering race in admissions, though a coalition of states is fighting those requests in court.

In the 2023 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. found the benefits of diversity were “inescapably imponderable.” But Mitra argues his study shows concrete evidence that the marketplace values students who study in a diverse class.

For a cohort of 100 students, researchers estimated that adding a student of color would boost salaries for a group of law students by almost $30,000 for the first year — or nearly $300 per student.

That’s a pretty small amount. Big Law starting salaries these days are $200,000+, while lesser legal starting positions average in the upper 5 figures.

The study found a smaller but significant gain for students seeking master’s degrees in business administration.

The MBA premium was $125.00.

And over the course of their careers, the benefit could add up to thousands of dollars per student (or millions of dollars for each cohort as a whole).

Or maybe not.

The study was based on data from 6,000 cohorts of graduate students at 200 law schools and 141 business schools over more than two decades.

Lots of data to arrive at a statistically significant result.

Mitra said he and a co-author from Dartmouth College tried to account for every factor they could (including examining cohorts of students who take classes together and controlling for the reputation of the schools).

“I’ve never found such a robust finding,” Mitra said. “We kind of beat at it in every way.”

Mitra said he was surprised by the findings because decades of research had found racial minorities historically had lower salaries than their White peers with similar education levels.

One issue is that this study counts all law school …

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The Black Caucus is the ‘conscience of Congress.’ Supreme Court ruling has it bracing for a big hit.

By Terry Tang

PUBLISHED: April 30, 2026 at 8:06 AM CDT

Black members of Congress are bracing for a crippling shake-up of their ranks after a Supreme Court ruling gutted a key section of the Voting Rights Act that had protected minority communities in political redistricting and helped boost their representation.

Wednesday’s decision clears the way for Republican-led states to redraw U.S. House districts without regard to race, potentially creating many more GOP-friendly seats.

Maybe.

The New York Times editorial board is similarly worked up:

The Justices Acted as Partisans in the Voting Rights Ruling

April 29, 2026

By The Editorial Board

… The effects will be significant. The ruling, in Louisiana v. Callais, makes it easier for states to draw districts for Congress, state legislatures and local councils that elect the candidates favored by white voting blocs. The officials who make the maps no longer need to worry much about whether they are sprinkling Black voters across many districts and eliminating majority-Black districts.

The reality is that in the name of disentangling race from politics, the Supreme Court has given white voters more power at the expense of racial minorities.

But perhaps Republicans have tended to benefit from the Voting Rights Act mandating lumping blacks, the most steadfast Democrats, into a few districts that are so Democratic-tilted that even black candidates can easily get elected?

This requirement to shovel large numbers of black voters into a few districts allows Republicans to spread out white voters into a lot more districts giving Republicans the upper hand in most elections.

The Votings Rights Act Amendments of 1982 first came into effect in creating guaranteed black districts after the redistricting after the 1990 Census. This got a lot more black elected to the House in 1992, as this NYT graph shows:

But … in 1994, the GOP won control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1952 midterms.

The New York Times itself reported in 1994:

THE 1994 ELECTION: VOTERS; Did Racial Redistricting Undermine Democrats?

By Steven A. Holmes

Nov. 13, 1994

As politicians and academics analyze the forces that created this year’s Republican tidal wave, another factor is taking its place alongside voter anger and President Clinton’s unpopularity: the creation of majority black Congressional districts.

In 1982 Congress amended the Voting Rights Act to require that blacks and other minorities be given an enhanced opportunity to elect one of their own to Congress and to state legislatures. To do that, Congressional and state legislative maps were redrawn after the 1990 Census, a process in which blacks and Republicans came together in an odd alliance to assure that minorities would constitute a majority in some districts.

Reapportionment produced a bumper crop of black elected officials in 1992, with Congress adding 16 black lawmakers. But at the same time, some scholars say, it sowed some of the seeds of the Democrats’ political misfortune this year.

Consolidating black voters, staunch Democrats for decades, into a few districts removed them from other districts, many of which had been held, with their help, by white Democrats. As a result, the white-majority districts that remained had a more Republican cast.

“The process of aggregating blacks into sometimes peculiar-looking districts meant leeching or bleeding blacks out of other districts,” said Richard Scher, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “That left Florida, for example, with a number of white suburban districts that were ripe for plucking, and that’s exactly what happened.”

Some scholars and political analysts say that the creation of majority black districts in 1990 may have played an important role in costing the Democrats control of the House of Representatives. They estimate that the Democrats may have lost 10 seats this year, mainly in the South, because of redistricting, on top of the 5 seats they feel were lost in 1992.

They argue that reapportionment not only siphoned solid Democratic votes from white districts, but also helped Republicans attract higher-caliber candidates and raise more money by giving them a better shot at winning those districts. In addition, when black voters were removed from marginally Republican districts, the Democrats’ chances of winning such seats became that much slimmer.

“There is absolutely no secret that the South on a Congressional-district-by-Congressional-district basis got more Republicans in total because of minority districts,” said an official with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee who would speak only on the condition of not being identified.

For example, consider a made-up state with 10 seats in the House of Representatives. Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, that in a typical election, whites makes up 90% of voters and blacks 10%.

Blacks vote 90% Democrat and 10% Republican. Whites vote 54.4% Republican and 45.6% Democratic. So, statewide, Republicans and Democrats each get 50% of the votes.

Thus, in the state as a whole, 18% of Democrats are black and 2% of Republicans are black.

So, if districts are drawn wholly at random to each perfectly represent the racial and partisan breakdown of the entire state, then 82% of the voters in each Democratic primary would be white.

In the average election, what are the odds that at least one black gets one of the 10 seats in the House?

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J. Craig Venter was the hero of the Human Genome Project, the entrepreneur who lit a fire under the sleepy government effort the way Elon Musk has lit a fire under space exploration.

From the New York Times:

J. Craig Venter, Scientist Who Decoded the Human Genome, Dies at 79

A risk-taking outsider, he brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science’s biggest races.

By Nicholas Wade

It’s good to see Wade, age 87, getting a byline in the NYT even for an obituary he likely wrote long ago.

April 30, 2026, 12:29 a.m. ET

J. Craig Venter, a scientist and entrepreneur who raced to decode the human genome, died on Wednesday in San Diego. He was 79.

… In the 1990s, Dr. Venter, a risk-taker and intense competitor, made a bold move when he decided that the Human Genome Project, a $3 billion government program for decoding the human genome, was moving slowly enough that he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method.

His gamble paid off. In 2000, his company, Celera, made a joint announcement with a rival group saying that they had assembled the first human genomes, a landmark step toward uncovering the genetic basis of human disease and origins.

Dr. Venter had a powerful ego. That was clear when he let slip that the anonymous donor whose genome Celera had sequenced was none other than his own.

But his drive and management skills helped him inspire loyalty and assemble teams of exceptional scientists, including the Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist Hamilton O. Smith.

Venter helped bring a needed Big Data orientation to genetics in the 1990s.

The data demands of the human genome would have been hugely daunting in the 1980s, but Venter realized it would rapidly become manageable.

Was Venter The Man who figured everything out? Or was he The Manager who hired The Man or The Men?

Beats me.

But even just being The Manager who hires The Man and gives him room to run (or The Men) is certainly an honorable role, too.

Together, they achieved one landmark after another in the nascent field of genomics.

In 1995, Dr. Venter revolutionized microbiology when he published the sequence of DNA letters in the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae, the first bacterial genome to be decoded, along with annotations of all the organism’s genes.

The moment electrified science. For the first time, researchers could see all the genetic components of a free-living organism, giving microbiologists a manual for bacterium’s genetic tool kit. …

His team next turned to the fruit fly genome to test whether their approach, known as a whole-genome shotgun sequencing, could work on its biggest target: the human genome. …

Venter’s ex-wife Barbara Rae-Venter, a Ph.D. retired patent attorney, went on to more or less invent in 2018 modern amateur cold case genetic sleuthing. She used genetic genealogy techniques to identify the Golden State Killer, who was convicted in 2020 for 13 murders committed in the 1970s-1989s.

Extremely intelligent women, like Dr. Rae-Venter, who are into both true crime shows and family relationships have my whole-hearted support for their recent impressive track record of finally bringing vicious criminals to justice.

Decoding the human genome, Dr. Venter’s next big challenge, became the focus of a competition between his team at Celera against a consortium of academic rivals led by the United States and Britain. The National Institutes of Health, a major patron of the effort, refused to cooperate with Dr. Venter, who instead secured private funding from the Celera Corporation.

Dr. Venter’s whole genome shotgun method enabled him to erase his rivals’ head start. With ample time and money, he might have seized this greatest of scientific prizes. Instead, he agreed, reluctantly, to accept the consortium’s offer of a formal draw, with the trappings of a White House ceremony with President Bill Clinton.

My guess is that Venter’s 2000 White House ceremony speech was the origin of today’s “Race Does Not Exist” delusion.

As I wrote …

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After whom did they name it?

When you think to yourself that nothing ever gets better in this world, note that in 2017 they probably would have named it the Wendy Carlos Performing Arts Center, in 2019 the Susan Sontag Performing Arts Center, or in 2021 the Tupac Shakur Performing Arts Center.

But, in 2026, strikingly enough, there was no controversy about naming it after the white man who happens to be the school’s greatest alumnus, a Class of 1950 kid who at age 94 was still spry enough to show up to accept the honor today.

Who is this perfect choice for whom they named the new Performing Arts Center?

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Going to the movies is a 120 year old technology that was rolling along surprisingly strongly up through 2019. But, predictably, the habit of going to the show took a hit during covid from which it has yet to fully recover.

I could imagine the distant future of leaving the house to see a movie,will be rather like grand opera is today: each city will have one one or two unbelievable movie palaces, perhaps one a Sphere, perhaps the other with a traditional screen, each a lavish monument to civic pride, where they will put on, say, a dozen movies per year: some classics and some new movies with colossal budgets.

Donations from elderly rich movie-lovers hoping to inculcate movie appreciation in the younger generations will play a significant economic role in these enterprises.

Movies will …

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Don’t you know, the Great Replacement is a hate-filled conspiracy theory, you hateful subhuman!

You see, nobody planned to use immigration to change the racial balance of America for their own economic, political, and social benefit.

It was just an accident!

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Now, Werner Zagrebbi did a surname analysis of students at Columbia U., and discovered that Jewish surnames declined from 28% in 1982 …

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One of the the less expected social phenomenon of the last two generations has been the unstoppable growth of the National Football League draft of college players as a spectator event. The NFL draft visited Pittsburgh last week, and the first day drew 320,000 spectators to hear the names of the 32 first round picks being read off. It’s like a Woodstock-sized crowd showing up for a chess match … on a Thursday in April in Pittsburgh.

And over the last two days of the draft, when teams are getting deep into the weeds of selecting guys who might make a useful addition to the taxi squad in case somebody good gets injured, the NFL draft drew a combined 485,000 attendees, for a total of 805,000 spectators across the three days.

In case you are wondering, after the recent NFL success of white cornerbacks from the U. of Iowa, Cooper DeJean (first team All-Pro in 2025) and Riley Moss, all 27 cornerbacks picked in this year’s NFL draft appear to be black.

As Fortune 500 executives confided to each other 50-60 years ago, nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM. Similarly, if you bought a Control Data Corporation computer in 1970 but it messed up your inventory, you were in a lot more trouble than if you’d bought an IBM. Likewise, drafting a black cornerback in 2026 is a safer choice than picking a white or Samoan cornerback, even if your black pick gets burned for a touchdown in 2027.

Somewhat similarly, among NBA fans, watching regular season games apparently has become passé. Instead, the real action is now on discussion boards where fans hash out potential deals that could put together the perfect team, much like producer David O. Selznick kicking around whom to cast in Gone With the Wind with his agent brother Myron Selznick, George Cukor and Louis B. Mayer. It is all very Inside Basketball, but that’s the point: it’s more interesting to the 21st Century mind than is Real Basketball with its endless three-point shots.

To me, it seems kind of anti-blank slatist, anti-underdog, and subliminally racist for sports fans to be quite so open about how the really important thing is not how hard your athletes train or try during the game, but, simply, who they are when you pick them.

The NFL draft these days is like if 300,000 school test score fans showed up to hear the announcement of this year’s 5th graders’ test scores by school district: “And for the 37th straight year … Cupertino beats Compton!”

I mean, I’d go to cheer on Lexington, MA and Evanston, IL. I’d be there rooting for Frisco, TX to maintain its status as the top school district for African-American test scores (or will Frisco fall below the minimum number of blacks needed as it becomes increasingly South Asian?)

But, as you may have heard, I’m notoriously un-American.

In contrast, when I was a kid, there was less hoopla over selecting the best athletes and more over …

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The 2011 Sonata was an exceptionally lovely low-cost design, so I shall miss it:

So, it’s time for me to buy another car. What should I buy?

I’m 67, so I don’t care about a car making me look cool. I would preferably like a car that will last me into extreme old age.

I’m not good at taking care of a car so I want something reliable and rugged that even I can’t screw up.

My driveway is only one lane wide, so an electric car seems too complicated to manage at present.

On the other hand, I live in California where gasoline is currently $6 per gallon. So I’m leaning toward a hybrid as a well-established technology.

It never snows here, so I don’t need all-wheel drive, right?

I’m leaning toward a two-row of seats SUV.

New or used?

I’m also concerned about not hitting anybody in my dotage. Charles Murray swears by his new Tesla’s Full Self Driving system. I don’t mind keeping my hands on the steering wheel 100% of the times, but what’s the best mid-priced vehicle at present at keeping me from screwing up?

How big of an advance is the new Toyota Safety-Sense 4.0?

How much of the premium of Lexus over Toyota is due to brand name premium (which I don’t care about) and how much due to Lexus being more reliable and comfortable than Toyota (which I do)?

How Did Black Music Take Over the World? Let Melvin Gibbs Explain.

Since the late ’70s, the bassist has worked to map a musical route that mirrored the trans-Atlantic slave trade and birthed nearly all of American popular music.

By Hank Shteamer

April 7, 2026

One day in the late 1970s, the bassist Melvin Gibbs was walking through Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood when he heard loud music playing. Following the sound, he came upon a speaker set up outside the African Record Centre, a shop he’d never noticed, playing music he’d never heard.

“I was kind of like, ‘What’s that? It sounds like James Brown, but what is it?’” he said in mid-February, standing inside the same Nostrand Avenue establishment, still stocked robustly with African music.

When he had stepped inside around 50 years ago, he learned it was Fela Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat pioneer. That chance encounter helped fuel a lifelong quest: mapping a musical route that mirrored the trans-Atlantic slave trade and birthed nearly all of the popular music that we now take for granted, including rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop. After decades of research as both a scholar and performer, he’s sharing his findings in a revelatory new book, “How Black Music Took Over the World,” out April 14. …

But that got me thinking about an alternative question: How Come African (As Opposed to African-American) Music Hasn’t Taken Over the Word?

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while trying to get his indie video game developer career off the ground.

Here’s Allen’s game Bohrdom.

He’s not a public school teacher. C2 Education appears to be a for-profit test prep and tutoring agency.

Racially, Allen appears to be pretty standard for Torrance in the South Bay of the Los Angeles area (e.g., Tiger Woods is from further down the freeway): fairly mixed race, with what looks like both white and black ancestry, plus a Hispanic middle name.

He’s second from the left in this picture of a Caltech battling robot’s competition ten years ago.

Sounds kind of downwardly mobile for a Caltech engineering grad. Maybe he got in to Caltech under affirmative action, or maybe he subsequently had some mental health problems?

From Rob Pyers:

The shooter appears to have assembled a long gun and then shot a Secret Service agent manning a metal detector in the chest. Fortunately, the agent’s bulletproof vest saved his life. The shooter was then overwhelmed by law enforcement. There are conflicting reports on whether he is dead or alive with the more credible recent ones suggesting the shooter is alive and in custody.

Note that there are a lot of people of his age named “Cole Allen” and a lot of older people named “Allen Cole,” so try not to get him confused with random strangers with similar names.

Ideologue or schizo? Stochastic terrorist? What do you think?

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When I search on BlueSky for “Trump” and “staged,” here are the top posts:

‪Bob‬ ‪@psychobob4q2.bsky.social‬

· 17m

Another staged ‘poor pitiful me’.

Fuck Trump. .

‪Eat the Rich 🏴‍☠️🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇨🇦‬ ‪@sburr741600.bsky.social‬

· 1d

If you believe Epstein and friends raped, trafficked and potentially killed thousands of young women, why is it so difficult to believe Epstein was murdered AND Trump staged the Butler shooting?

‪Cynthia J Krueger‬ ‪@cynthiakrueger.bsky.social‬

· 31m

Replied to

Jon Cooper

Another fake assassination staged by Trump to deflect from Iran and Epstein.

‪Petal Lu Ⓥ 💚🌱💙🌎‬ ‪@petallu.bsky.social‬

· 31m

Replied to

Jon Cooper

I bet it’s staged. Trump not even surprised.

‪ᕼᗴᗪᗩ 🩵 🐶 🇺🇦✌️‬ ‪@hedahunter.bsky.social‬

· 23m

Knowing wouldn’t be able to stay awake through his speech, Trump staged another assassination attempt #WHCA

www.tmz.com/2026/04/25/s...

Shooter Killed in Lobby at White House Correspondents’ Dinner

UPDATE: The Dinner will resume shortly ... the President and other left the ballroom -- it’s unclear if he’s coming back

www.tmz.com

‪Craig R. Brittain‬ ‪@craigbrittain.com‬

· 20m

Trump is reportedly coming back, he definitely staged this, just like Butler.

‪Michelle Muse‬ ‪@michellemuse.bsky.social‬

· 1d

Replied to

BeSmart 🦋🇺🇸🧢

It all looked so staged from the beginning. If Trump was actually shot at, the guy that hid in a bunker during the George Floyd riots (Trump), would have cowered and whimpered like a little girl. He definitely wouldn’t have stood up and pumped his fist defiantly. Completely staged bullshit!!!

‪Christopher Webb‬ ‪@cwebbonline.com‬

· 7m

Shots fired, the Secret Service rushes in, and they let Trump continue to sit there? And now they’re going to resume the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and Trump still plans to deliver a speech?

I’m not saying this was staged to boost Trump’s tanking approval numbers, but it looks odd.

0:08 / 0:25

‪🌮 Old Salt‬

What do you think?

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The U.S. also had a second string of National Monuments, which tended to be a grab bag of ancient Indian dwellings, historic forts, famous guys’ homes, and, mostly, natural wonders that just weren’t quite wonderful enough to be National Parks.

For example, Death Valley National Monument, the lowest, hottest place in the U.S. is pretty great (in spring, but mostly just Germans go there in summer), but was it really in the same class as the three National Parks in the Sierras: Yosemite, Kings Canyon, and Sequoia?

Nah.

And Joshua Tree National Monument near Palm Springs was fun with all its boulders to clamber up, but it was obviously another tier below Death Valley.

National Forests are the third tier: they allow some logging and mining.

There are also National Wildernesses which are even more persnickety about development than National Parks. For example, there are a few hotels and lodges in the National Parks of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. (Frequently, just inches outside the border of a National Park are motels, 7-11s, water slides, miniature golf courses, and Taco Bells.)

But the Sierra National Parks run from the western foothills to the crest of the Sierras, so the ultra-spectacular, near-vertical East Side of the Sierras is instead covered by National Wildernesses, such as John Muir National Wilderness, which don’t allow any buildings or roads or ski-lifts whatsoever.

But, today, a whole lot of old National Monuments have been promoted to National Parks, and we seem to be well into diminishing returns. Below are all 63 National Parks with their dates-founded along with the USN&WR ranking of the two dozen best National Parks. (I’m not promising that the extinct newsmagazine offers an infallible list, just that it seems reasonable, and its list wasn’t invented to prove me right or wrong.)

I’ve also added for my own edification the year in brackets when I visited that National Park. I definitely have visited 21 and may have skimmed the edges of a few more.

1872 Yellowstone, Wyoming — #1 in the USN&WR hierarchy [I visited Yellowstone in 1980 for a day with a Caltech astronomy professor]

In the 1960s, my parents owned a camping trailer:

You don’t see trailers much anymore.

Are they dangerous to tow? I wouldn’t risk it. But my dad was a much better driver than I am.

So we went on numerous trailer trips in the 1960s.

1890 Yosemite, California (Yosemite Grant 1864) — #3 [I visited the Valley in the late 1960s for a week, I went high country backpacking out of Tuolomne Meadows in 1974 when my father and I got chased up a boulder by a bear, and went back to the Valley with him in October 1986]

1890 Sequoia, California — #10 [Late 1960s, c. 1999, 2001]

1899 Mount Rainier, Washington — #19 [never]

1902 Crater Lake, Oregon — not in Top 24 (from now on, if I never visited the park, this space will be usually be blank)

These first national parks were super-spectacular.

1903 Wind Cave, South Dakota [never]

I’m guessing this was of sentimental value to Teddy Roosevelt. Besides the cave, it was also set aside to preserve the rapidly vanishing buffalo prairie.

1906 Mesa Verde, Colorado — #24 [2017]

It was realized around 1900 that grave-robbing looters were dismantling a lot of Ancestral Puebloan cliff-dwellings in the Southwest. So Congress took two steps in 1906. It made the 700 year old Mesa Verde apartment building of 150 rooms a National Park. (National Parks are only created by acts of Congress.) And Congress passed the Antiquities Act of 1906 allowing the President to create National Monuments by executive fiat.

Teddy Roosevelt quickly turned some other ancient Indian structures into National Monuments. He also created the Devil’s Tower National Monument. (Devil’s Tower in Wyoming is the giant rock sentinel that Richard Dreyfuss sculpts out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind). This established the precedent that smaller properties with one memorable feature would tend to become National Monuments, while larger properties with both memorable features and entire ecosystems (like giant Yellowstone National Park) would be designated National Parks.

1910 Glacier, Montana — #2 [I’ve never been there — but I recall with envy my cousins’ slides of their visit about 55 years ago. My guess is that the very best national parks in North America are just north of there. When I seemed likely to die of cancer in 1997, my wife asked me where I’d like to go that summer. I said: Banff, which is unusual in having both superb mountain scenery and a superb Stanley Thompson golf course. Fortunately, the monoclonal antibody worked, so I just went to old SoCal favorites like Pismo Beach and Catalina Island.

And here I am.]

Was this the last place National Parks were okay?

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Here’s a hypothetical question:

The following is widely believed to be a doomsday scenario, a disaster of Biblical proportion.

But would it be?

Let’s say that tomorrow, one of the prestigious scientific journals such as Nature or Science, publishes a huge new study using breakthrough techniques and/or a superb new source of data that firmly shows that hereditary genetics accounts for half of the white-black gap in average IQ.

This causes a large controversy with numerous scientists suggesting ways to retest this question. Over the next decade, however, the next half-dozen major studies all replicate this finding that nature, as well as nurture, plays a substantial role in the white-black average IQ gap.

After ten years, it’s widely admitted in the mainstream media and academia that there is an average IQ gap and that genetics is one cause of it. For example, if in 2036 you ask a big commercial AI if it’s plausible that genetics might not affect racial differences in average IQ, it responds:

“While the nurture-only explanation of racial differences in average IQ was once widely believed, even by some scientists, the huge scientific advances of 2026-2035 appear to have ruled out the plausibility of only nurture causing the persistent IQ gaps seen between the races. The 100% nurture belief is now largely seen by contemporary science as an extremist delusion of the recent past.”

Would that really bring about the apocalypse?

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There are 30 MLB teams and they typically carry two catchers each. If lefthanders are 10% of the population on average, they should comprise 6 of the 60 or so MLB catchers at any one point. But instead they have been nonexistent back to the 1990s.

And yet, nobody seems to care.

Lefthanders are one of those apparent identity groups, such as albinos, that nobody much cares about.

This is not to say that baseball overall is prejudiced against lefthanders.

In the early 20th Century, many progressive scientists believed that society should socially deconstruct left-handedness … for reasons … that scientists then found convincing, but that now seem pig-headed.

For example, Ronald Reagan was the first of three straight Presidents who were natural left-handers. But Reagan was arduously socially constructed in his childhood into a right-hander.

In contrast, his successors, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton were out of the closet lefties. I can recall the 1992 Presidential debates at which Bush, Clinton, and Perot were all taking notes left-handed.

Personally, I’m a righty. But the decline of anti-lefty bigotry in 1992 struck me as a good thing at the time because anti-lefty prejudice seems stupid.

Why did America become less bigoted against left-handers in the first half of the 20th century?

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From Taki’s Magazine in 2019:

Morris Dees’ Mesoaggressions

Steve Sailer

March 27, 2019

It was a bad week for polite society’s most respectable conspiracy theories, with the debunking of the Trump-Putin collusion allegation and more implosions among the conspiracy-theory-mongers at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Shortly after suddenly firing Morris Dees, the SPLC’s living-legend cofounder, president Richard Cohen, himself quit unexpectedly.

Why?

There’s the macro reason: As has been repeatedly documented by disillusioned SPLC employees, Morris is basically a Southern TV-evangelist type, but one who long ago figured out that rich Northern liberals have more money to give him than do poor Southern fundamentalists.

But the micro reason explaining why now, after all these decades of impunity, remains obscured.

The New York Times, which has long conspired with the SPLC to promote hate hysteria, such as in its ill-fated “This Week in Hate” column, dispatched ten reporters. They returned with a decorous account of modest #MeToo mesoaggressions: Morris has occasionally put his hands on the shoulders of female staffers and once supposedly said, “I like chocolate” in the presence of a black woman.

One conspiracy theory is that the current purges of the SPLC’s Old Guard are the result of a conspiracy by unnamed parties to get their hands on the nearly half-billion dollars in assets that supersalesman Dees has piled up in the SPLC’s onshore and offshore accounts over his 48 manic years of always-be-closing fund-raising.

Which is getting us deeper into conspiracy theorizing than even I want to go…

So let’s step back and think about “conspiracy theory” in the current conceptual vocabulary.

The term “conspiracy theory” is largely a pejorative about the social standing of those offering the theory.

After all, very little gets done in this world without people plotting together to take action, contrivances that at least some hostile outsiders would consider nefarious. So conspiracies, broadly defined, are everywhere.

Interestingly, powerful insiders, such as Hillary Clinton, tend to see conspiracies, narrowly defined, everywhere.

In 21st-century America, however, to call something a “conspiracy theory” is to say that the kind of person to whom the idea appeals, such as Randy Quaid’s not-quite-right-in-the-head Vietnam-vet character in Independence Day (or Randy Quaid in real life lately), is disreputable.

Not all cultures associate conspiracy theorizing with addled burnouts. In Turkey, for example, he who comes up with the most byzantine conspiracy theory is admired for being the most intelligent.

In 1970s Hollywood movies, sexy rebels played by Warren Beatty and Robert Redford battled malevolent conspiracies. Up through the winter of 1992, when it looked like Oliver Stone’s JFK might sweep the Oscars, the cultural prestige of conspiracy theorizing persisted. But the serious press lashed back at JFK, and ever since conspiracy theories have been seen as the province of the lower orders.

Hence, the theories about conspiracies between Trump and Putin to steal the election from poor Hillary that were endlessly offered by well-groomed talking heads on CNN and MSNBC couldn’t possibly be “conspiracy theories,” because, well, because they don’t let conspiracy theorists on the better sort of networks.

Similarly, Dees’ lucrative conspiracy theory about how America is under siege from an ever-vaster shadowy network of “hate groups” is seldom labeled a “conspiracy theory.”

After all, Dees is vastly respectable. He holds nearly two dozen honorary degrees, has been played by Corbin Bernsen in a TV movie, and is a member of the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame. And, no doubt, not all of Morris’ four ex-wives hate him quite as much as some of them do.

In reality, though, rightist hate groups are close to the least of our troubles.

America does have a problem with Lone Wacko shooters, some of whom have rightist motivations. But virtually none of the right-wing terrorist attacks after Oklahoma City in 1995 involved more than one criminal. They didn’t have anybody to conspire with.

Rightist Lone Wackos do tend to be more effectual at racking up big body counts than do leftist Lone Wackos, like the gay-rights terrorist who tried to shoot up the Family Research Council after reading on the SPLC’s website that the FRC was a hate group. The gay-marriage gunman shot the front desk guard, Leo Johnson, in the arm, but Johnson still wrestled him down one-handed.

In contrast, some cities in Blue State America have had an ongoing problem with sizable, violent Antifa hate groups who attempt to beat up dissidents demonized by the SPLC, such as Charles Murray. After a leftist hate mob attacked Murray in 2017, hospitalizing a woman professor, the Associated Press reported that Murray had it coming because:

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”

After all, as comic-book writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has proved, American history is an immense conspiracy among people who think they are white to plunder black bodies.

In this era of video and facial-recognition technology, it’s not particularly hard for the police to deter would-be Eric Clanton-style masked marauders by enforcing old anti-KKK laws against wearing masks in public. These days, if you wreak violence on your political enemies unmasked, you will likely be identified, as Zachary Greenberg recently found out.

But in some towns, such as Berkeley and San Jose, the politicians are on the side of the SPLC and the violent hate groups, and thus keep the cops from keeping the peace.

“Projection” was one of Freud’s best insights: It’s tempting to accuse our enemies of our own foibles. For example, the SPLC has been ranting for decades about how an ophthalmologist in Petoskey, Mich., named John Tanton is the evil “puppeteer” who manipulates American citizens into having any doubts at all about immigration.

My guess is that Morris’ minions project their own guilty awareness of the truth about Dees, a roguish junk-mail genius, the Elmer Gantry of liberalism, onto Tanton.

It’s often argued that conspiracy theories couldn’t possibly be true because once somebody inside the organization leaked the truth, the whole world would instantly know.

But it doesn’t actually work that way. For instance, Theranos had scores of disillusioned ex-employees. But for a decade the world wanted to believe that Elizabeth Holmes was proving that a sexist conspiracy was all that held women back from making their deserved billions in Silicon Valley.

Similarly, various investigative reporters have revealed the ignominious truth about the SPLC for a quarter of a century now, going back to the in-depth Montgomery Advertiser series in 1994.

But virtually nobody noticed. Instead, millions wanted to believe that Morris Dees was a hero single-handedly battling the rising tide of Hate for us.

Bogus as the SPLC is, its mythmaking is extremely useful to the Democratic Party, furnishing the KKKrazy Glue that holds the Coalition of the Fringes together by telling them that a vast right-wing conspiracy, from the KKK to Charles Murray, is holding down everyone who isn’t a straight white male.

Hence, the SPLC has recently gone from one triumph to another, taking in heaps of money ($129 million in contributions and grants in fiscal year 2017, $70 million more than it spent) and conspiring with tech monopolies such as Amazon to decide who would be denied service due to their political views.

Amazon, by the way, is run by the world’s richest man, who recently accused the National Enquirer of conspiring with Trump and Saudi Arabia to obtain pictures of his shortcomings.

But it turned out that the source was Mr. Bezos’ girlfriend’s brother.

You see, not all conspiracy theories are true.

The SPLC’s board promised the world in 2019 an in-depth report on Morris’s high crimes and misdemeanors, but seven years later, no such report has yet been seen.

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From Taki’s Magazine, six months later in 2019:

Memory Holing Morris Dees

Steve Sailer

September 04, 2019

It’s widely assumed in thriller movies that if ever the truth is allowed to leak out about a powerful institution’s fundamental corruption, then its reputation must come crashing down once and for all.

But in real life, multiple disgraces can have negligible impact on an organization’s reputation in the prestige press as long as it continues to serve its function in furthering The Narrative.

I notice that among intelligent but naive young people of a scientific bent, there is a recurrent assumption that once the facts get out, then everything will change. If the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment about the speed of light turns out negative, then the Newtonian model is shattered and eventually there must be a paradigm shift to Einsteinian relativity.

But that’s not the way it works in public affairs, where control of The Megaphone is what matters because most people can’t remember much. You have to repeat the facts over and over and over to have any chance of ever moving the needle.

For example, since the 1990s close observers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s most profitable nonprofits (endowment in fiscal year 2018 was $471,000,000, up from $319,300,000 just two years earlier), have recognized that it is America’s most lucrative hate organization.

The SPLC’s legendary founder Morris Dees (currently on his sixth wife) is basically a sleazy Southern TV preacher type, but one who long ago figured out that poor Southern Baptists had less money to send him than rich Northern liberals. This junk-mail genius realized he could monetize the regional, ethnic, and class hatreds directed against his own people.

But isn’t it a little crass to whip up hatred of poor white Southerners among rich white Northerners? Morris had the perfect answer: He’s not the hater; it’s the people he hates who deserved to be hated because they are the haters.

This logic, such as it is, proved utterly convincing to the mainstream media, who anointed the SPLC as the grand arbiter of whom to hate. As the satirical Babylon Bee reported in 2018:

Southern Poverty Law Center Adds Itself To List Of Hate Groups

…After the announcement, major media outlets accepted the SPLC’s new distinction without question, but immediately ran into a catch-22—how to malign the newly-anointed hate group without citing the newly-anointed hate group. At publishing time, the press was still unsure how to deal with the paradox.

The SPLC suffered a disastrous March 2019 with three consecutive scandals exposing the SPLC, seemingly once and for all, as a clownishly transparent fund-raising operation that whips up hate for cash.

Yet, just a few months after all the bad publicity, there are no noticeable effects on how the wire services and The New York Times treat the SPLC as the objective authority on who are the Bad Guys you are obligated to hate. They simply assume most people won’t remember that the SPLC humiliated itself last March.

As you may recall, however, back in mid-March SPLC president Richard Cohen fired Dees for unspecified reasons, but which were rumored to be racism and sexism.

Cohen announced that Michelle Obama’s chief of staff Tina Tchen had been engaged to sniff out any remaining unwokeness in the organization.

But Cohen was soon out the door as well.

And within another week it turned out that it was Tchen who had made the phone call to Chicago DA Kim Foxx to tell her to let hate-hoaxing actor Jussie Smollett walk.

To have your founder disgraced could be seen as a misfortune, but to have your founder, CEO, and designated savior all shamed in two weeks bespeaks of venality.

You might think that these events would leave the SPLC permanently tarred with adjectives such as “scandal-plagued” or at least “controversial.”

But no, a few months later, it’s as if the SPLC has a spotless history, at least judging from all twelve New York Times articles published in August that cite the SPLC.

Here are the dozen:

U.S. House Targets Convergence of Mass Shootings, Hate Crimes

By Reuters, Aug. 30, 2019

…The number of hate crime groups rose 30% from 2014 to 2018, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It’s not as if the SPLC has a financial interest in stoking hate hysteria, right?

The next Times article gave the SPLC the final word on freedom of speech: It is bad.

Tech Firms Struggle to Police Content While Avoiding Bias

By The Associated Press, Aug. 28, 2019

…“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Keegan Hankes, research analyst for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s intelligence project, who focuses on far-right extremist propaganda. But, he added, Twitter is essentially arguing “that hate speech can be in the public interest. I am arguing that hate speech is never in the public interest.”

And if you can’t trust the SPLC to sum up, who can you trust?

U.S. to Seek Death Penalty for Accused Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooter

By Reuters, Aug. 26, 2019

…The mass shooting followed a rise in the number of hate crimes and the number of hate groups in the United States, according to separate reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Southern Poverty Law Center….

And then there was this hilariously stupid brouhaha:

Justice Department Newsletter Included Extremist Blog Post

By Christine Hauser, Aug. 23, 2019

A Justice Department newsletter that is distributed to federal immigration judges and other employees contained a blog post this week from an extremist group that included an anti-Semitic reference, a national union for the judges said….

On Monday, the newsletter summarized and linked to a post from VDare, a website that regularly publishes white nationalists, according to the 440-member union, the National Association of Immigration Judges. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies VDare as an anti-immigration hate website.

The VDare post described the Justice Department’s recent efforts to decertify the judges’ union. It published photographs of two judges, one of Iranian descent and one of Pakistani descent, and referred to them as “kritarch.”

Kritarch is another Greek term like oligarch. Kritarchy means “rule by judges.” Wikipedia lists historical examples, such as the Book of Judges in the Old Testament, ancient Ireland, the medieval Iceland beloved by libertarians, 16th-century Frisia, and modern Somalia. It is not anti-Semitic.

Earlier, The New York Times Magazine ran yet another long article about the Mounting Slavery Crisis of 2019 relying upon an SPLC operation to convince the gullible that what American students really need right now is more Slavery Literacy:

‘We are committing educational malpractice’: Why slavery is mistaught—and worse—in American schools

By Nikita Stewart, Aug. 19, 2019

…In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that researches and monitors hate groups, pored over 12 popular U.S. history books and surveyed more than 1,700 social-studies teachers and 1,000 high-school seniors to understand how American slavery is taught and what is learned. The findings were disturbing: There was widespread slavery illiteracy among students.

Besides the Growing Slavery Emergency, there’s the White Supremacy at the Farmers’ Market Menace:

Amid the Kale and Corn, Fears of White Supremacy at the Farmers’ Market

By Jack Healy, Aug. 18, 2019

…The rumors of white supremacy amid the stalls of clover honey and sweet corn left farmers and shoppers reeling…. Deep in the 200-page document was a 2018 F.B.I. interview in which Mr. Brewer briefly mentioned meeting with “Sarah and Douglas,” and reported that the woman had been posting as “Volkmom” on a chat board of Identity Evropa, which the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center call a white nationalist or white supremacist group….

And then there’s the NYT assisting in the SPLC’s mania for personally demonizing everyone, living or dead, who ever dared disagree with them:

THE NEW NATIVISTS: Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out

By Nicholas Kulish and Mike McIntire, Aug. 14, 2019

The newspaper printed an elaborate graph sourced to the SPLC depicting how the late Cordelia Scaife May (1928–2005) funded Dees’ bête noire, the late John Tanton, the patriotic small-town eye doctor upon whom Morris appears to have projected his own guilty conscience.

Here’s the only sentence all August admitting that not everybody is wholly persuaded of the SPLC’s fairness and accuracy:

The Center for Immigration Studies sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for designating it a hate group, a label the law center has also applied to FAIR.

The above were all supposedly “News.” But here’s a rare piece actually labeled “Opinion”:

El Paso Was a Massacre Foretold

By Jorge Ramos, Aug. 10, 2019

Mr. Ramos is a contributing Opinion writer.

…Hate-group activity is on the rise, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Now back to so-called News:

Tucker Carlson was amused by the transcript of NYT editor Dean Baquet explaining to his depressed minions that while their conspiracy to dump Trump by hyping the Russian conspiracy theory had disastrously cratered, the Times already had a new conspiracy theory ready to roll out: racism! Not surprisingly, the Times was not amused at Tucker’s laughing at their expense:

FACT CHECK: Tucker Carlson of Fox Falsely Calls White Supremacy a ‘Hoax’

By Emily S. Rueb and Derrick Bryson Taylor, Aug. 8, 2019

…Bob Hopkinson, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, said tracking membership numbers is “extremely difficult.”… Precise numbers aside, the center says hate crimes and hate groups are on the rise in America.

Sure, they are. Just look at how a certain hate group has added over $150,000,000 to its endowment in two years.

The El Paso Screed, and the Racist Doctrine Behind It

By John Eligon, Aug. 7, 2019

…The ideas espoused in the great replacement build on the most popular white supremacist talking point—the false notion that white people are at risk of genocide, said Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And:

Shootings Renew Debate Over How to Combat Domestic Terrorism

By Sabrina Tavernise, Katie Benner, Matt Apuzzo and Nicole Perlroth, Aug. 5, 2019

…David Neiwert, who has long reported on extremism in the Northwest and has worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he sees the threat of the Northwest’s racist groups returning to levels of the 1980s, when neo-Nazi elements around the country had moved into the Northwest in a bid to create a white ethnostate.

Finally, here’s an article that makes the concession that the SPLC is “liberal.” That’s not exactly the first adjective I would use for the SPLC, which is in the racket of labeling other organizations hate groups so that they will be hated. But once in the month of August the NYT admitted that the SPLC has a point of view.

NEWS ANALYSIS: El Paso Shooting Suspect’s Manifesto Echoes Trump’s Language

By Peter Baker and Michael D. Shear, Aug. 4, 2019

Along the way, Mr. Trump has empowered groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which has been designated a hate group by the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center.

In summary, The New York Times ran a dozen articles in August citing the Southern Poverty Law Center as the expert authority on who deserves to be hated.

One of the twelve articles mentioned that the SPLC is “liberal,” while another one deigned to report that some of the hate groups singled out for hate by the SPLC disagreed with that attribution.

But the other ten articles admitted no question of the SPLC’s credentials.

And none of the dozen stories brought up the three scandals in March, much less the quarter century of investigative journalism revealing the dark side of the SPLC.

Just mentioning the SPLC’s many disgraces might lead to an undesirable chain of thought: “Are we the baddies?”

But we live in an age of intellectual inertia when what dominates is who has the biggest megaphone for shouting the loudest that they are the Good Guys and the people they hate are the Bad Guys.

From Taki’s back in 2017, here’s an article where I posted the first half behind the paywall yesterday, but didn’t post the second half, which contains links to some of the investigative journalism about the SPLC going back to 1994:

SPLC 2: The Search for More Money

Steve Sailer

March 08, 2017

It was a bad week for the Southern Poverty Law Center, America’s self-appointed witch-sniffers-in-chief. For decades, the SPLC, despite its comic history of money-grubbing and out-of-control vilification, has been treated by the mainstream media as the unquestionable authority about who the Bad Guys are.

Finally, however, doubts have been allowed to surface about an organization that is in reality America’s richest hate group (with financial assets of $302,800,000).

Since the American people elected Donald Trump, the SPLC has been doing what the SPLC does best — whipping up fear and loathing among both violence-prone young thugs and elderly, affluent, easily confused Jewish donors nervous that the Cossacks will soon be riding through the streets of Brookline.

But the SPLC stumbled into two embarrassments last week.

After months of promoting hysteria over anti-Semitic terror threats by supposed Trump supporters, the news that a black leftist journalist had been arrested for sending eight bomb threats to Jewish community centers was excused by the SPLC as “not necessarily anti-Semitism as such.”

Almost simultaneously, masked anti-First Amendment vigilantes assaulted social scientist Charles Murray and professor Allison Stanger (who had offered to question him).

Murray’s crime? Daring to try to give a speech at expensive Middlebury College in Vermont’s ski country. A student group justified the assault by claiming, “Professor Stanger’s hair was not intentionally pulled but was inadvertently caught…”

Obviously, Murray was exercising his White Male Privilege of being bald, so the Blackshirts had to send the female scholar to the hospital instead.

The reason there is so much rage and violence against Charles Murray is because, 23 years after The Bell Curve was published, it’s pretty obvious that Murray and his late coauthor Richard Herrnstein were largely right about how the world works. As I pointed out in Taki’s Magazine on the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve, their predictions have largely panned out.

There’s nothing that elicits more hate than being right.

And nobody is more talented at stirring up hate than Morris Dees, cofounder of the SPLC.

The Associated Press and The Washington Post initially wrote up the Middlebury riot as the 74-year-old Murray getting what was coming to him:

The Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white nationalist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”

But mainstream media types for once took issue with the SPLC being assumed to be an objective authority. Brit Hume, for instance, tweeted in response to the AP/WP article:

No way a claim by the leftist Southern Poverty Law center belongs in the lead of this story. Bias, pure & simple—>

Perhaps the tide started to turn in February when even The New York Times treated skeptically the SPLC branding the genteel environmentalist organization Californians for Population Stabilization as a hate group:

Benjamin Zuckerman, the group’s president, vehemently objected to the characterization. The organization’s objectives, he said, are twofold: environmental conservation and fairness to working Americans who are harmed by “over immigration.” I consider us pretty much just ordinary people,” said Dr. Zuckerman, who is also an astronomy professor at U.C.L.A.

Accusing a Jewish environmentalist astrophysicist of leading a hate group might seem a little implausible to you or me, but the SPLC doesn”€™t worry much about credibility. “If it feels good, smear them” has been its de facto motto.

I don’t feel all that sorry for the SPLC because it has enjoyed a most remunerative last 46 years.

You may recall the SPLC backing its first president, Martin Luther King Jr., in its heroic civil rights battles of the 1950s.

(Except, technically, that wasn’t the SPLC, that was the SCLC: Southern Christian Leadership Conference.)

Or you may remember the brave black radicals of the SPLC, such as John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, fighting bigoted Southern sheriffs in the 1960s. (Except that wasn”€™t precisely the SPLC either, that was the SNCC: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.)

The oddly named Southern Poverty Law Center was actually founded in 1971, well after the great victories of the Civil Rights Era had been won, by two white guys, Joseph J. Levin Jr. and Morris Dees, the latter a member of the Direct Marketing (i.e., junk mail) Association’s Hall of Fame.

It’s not all that clear what the SPLC has to do with “poverty,” other than in helping to erase the last trace of it from Mr. Dees’ gaudy lifestyle. But it likely hasn’t hurt fund-raising that the acronym SPLC is easily mistaken for the legendary SCLC and SNCC.

Perhaps the confusion is just a coincidence. On the other hand, it’s reminiscent of the movie Boiler Room, a predecessor of The Wolf of Wall Street, in which the penny-stock peddlers work for a firm named “J.T. Marlin” to get the readily perplexed to mistake it for J.P. Morgan.

For about three decades now, investigative journalists have looked into the SPLC’s machinations and come away shaking their heads. I want to take this opportunity to make available in one place links to many years of research into the sainted SPLC.

Here’s the rest of this column I left out yesterday:

For example, Jim Tharpe, the deputy metro editor of The Atlanta Constitution, remarked at a Harvard conference in 1999 about his experiences editing a Pulitzer-nominated series on the SPLC for the Montgomery Advertiser:

I had no idea how sophisticated they were, how much money they raised, and how little access you have to them as a reporter….

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

The center was building up a huge surplus…. 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.

Ironically:

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.

In the end:

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.

Similarly, Ken Silverstein wrote in Harper’s in 2000 in “The Church of Morris Dees:”

Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees… “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti-death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don”€™t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.”

Silverstein noted:

The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC’s most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants. But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered “hate crime” with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of “armed Klan paramilitary forces” and “violent neo-Nazi extremists”…

As Mencius Moldbug observed in 2013:

In a country where witch-hunting is a stable and lucrative career, and also an amateur pastime enjoyed by millions of hobbyists on the weekend, we know there are no real witches worth a damn.

Morris has dredged up so much money fighting the barely existent KKK that the SPLC has built in downtown Montgomery the “Poverty Palace,” which looks like a six-story trailer crossed with a secret police academy from the movie Brazil.

Yet the SPLC still goes out of its way to tar worthy scientists and conservationists, such as three-time Democratic governor of Colorado Richard Lamm. Dees gives the impression that he can’t control his own urges to pander and slander no matter how obviously devious his actions seem to objective observers.

Now 80, Morris is, at last report, onto his fifth wife.

Perhaps the first large-scale article on the SPLC to capture just how funny it is that this junk-mail-monger is treated seriously by the press was Charlotte Allen’s “King of Fearmongers” in The Weekly Standard.

Morris’ lavishly funded operation has been out to ruin my career for more than a dozen years now, but I have to say that I find him a likable knave. He’s both a force of nature and a tasteless buffoon, as the 60-photo lifestyle spread on his luxury estate in the Montgomery Advertiser illustrated. Ironically, Dees makes Trump seem as careful as Charles Murray.

Over the years, Morris’ racket has come to resemble Mel Brooks’ title for a proposed sequel to his Star Wars parody, Spaceballs:

Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money.

Here’s a 2014 article from Taki’s Magazine about the quality of person that much of the SPLC’s hate is directed against. The SPLC is out there paying a neo-Nazi insider a million dollars, but then it turns around and uses the good will it generates by harassing white prison gangs and other lowlifes to defame leading scientists:

The Scientist vs. the SPLC

Steve Sailer

April 06, 2016

Henry Harpending

The dumbing down of the establishment left is amusingly illustrated by how the Southern Poverty Law Center, America’s most lucrative hate group, put the great scientist Henry Harpending (1944-2016) on their “Extremist Info” blacklist as a “White Nationalist” on the grounds that

Henry Harpending is a controversial anthropologist at the University of Utah who studies human evolution and, in his words, “genetic diversity within and between human populations.”

(Do you ever get the feeling that SPLC staffers are just going through the motions for the money, or perhaps even intentionally trolling their own racket?)

Henry, who died over the weekend, was the rare college professor whose career justified the concept of tenure. The holder of a chair at the U. of Utah in anthropology, the subject perhaps most emasculated by political correctness, he enjoyed a double-sided career as a cultural researcher in the field and as a quantitative genetic theorist at the whiteboard.

These days it’s hard to remember that in the mid-20th century anthropology was a subject of considerable glamour, with its two competing wings of physical/genetic anthropology (as exemplified by Francis Galton) and cultural anthropology (Franz Boas) both adding to its prestige. The Darwinians (such as Carleton Coon) argued in favor of nature and the Boasians (such as Margaret Mead) in favor of nurture, and there’s nothing much more interesting to debate.

The ‘60s, however, proved disastrous to anthropology, as the left grew increasingly hysterical, seeing a balanced perspective giving weight to both nurture and nature as concomitant to Hitlerism. At Stanford, eventually, the war within the anthropology department grew so heated that provost Condi Rice resorted to splitting the baby into two departments: anthropological sciences versus cultural and social anthropology, which seemed more a branch of postmodern literary criticism.

Not surprisingly, as noticing the broad patterns of similarity and difference among humans increasingly required career-endangering courage, the public lost interest in anthropology.

And yet the study of man couldn’t help but attract some of the most adventurous intellects. Harpending, a country boy from the northern Appalachians, spent close to four years in Africa living with tribes of hunting Bushmen and herding Herero.

Henry fell in love with Africa. He seriously considered leaving academia to take up being a Great White Hunter safari guide so he could stay in Africa.

Famous anthropologists tend to elicit or impress their own personalities upon their subject tribes in a sort of Heisenbergian process. Mead, for example, reported back that Samoan teenagers were sexually adventurous, rather like herself, while the macho Napoleon Chagnon found that the Yanomami of South America were as fierce as he was.

In Henry’s accounts, the Bushmen and Herero of the Kalahari Desert tended to be, as he was, cheerful, witty, insightful, and brave.

But they were also, he pointed out, quite different, a perception that cultural anthropologists were increasingly unwilling to recognize.

The small, yellow-brown Bushmen, hunters who mated more or less for life and put much effort into feeding their nuclear families, reminded Henry of his upstate New York neighbors. If fathers didn’t work, their children would go hungry.

In contrast, the Bantu Herero (distant relatives of American blacks) were full of surprises. In general, black African men seemed less concerned with bringing home the bacon to provision their children than did Bushmen dads.

In black African farming cultures, women do most of the work because agriculture involves light weeding with hoes rather than heavy plowing. Men are less expected to contribute functionally to their children’s upkeep, but are expected to be sexy.

Among the herding Herero, though, the men labored like American cowboys (but to support their mothers, sisters, and nieces rather than their wives and children), while the women gossiped, schemed, and slept around. Henry noted:

My own cynical perspective on it is that the Herero are a nearly perfect 1970s feminist version of Stepford Wives with the sexes reversed. The women pull all the strings and pursue their own interests while the men are droids run by the women, occupied mostly with mumbo-jumbo like witchcraft and the ancestor cult.

What Africans call “witch doctors,” anthropologists now call “traditional healers,” which is rather missing the point about the purpose of the dark arts. As Henry observed, “… semantic cleansing has led to the loss of a lot of knowledge about human cultural diversity.”

On his West Hunter blog, Henry observed how the most distinctively African aspect of the widespread belief in witchcraft is that a rival can project malevolent forces vast distances against you without his even consciously willing it:

A colleague pointed out a few weeks ago, after hearing this story, that if [a belief in witchcraft] is nearly pan-African then perhaps some of it came to the New World. Prominent and not so prominent talkers from the American Black population come out with similar theories of vague and invisible forces that are oppressing people, like “institutional racism” and “white privilege.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates should be proud of how deeply African his style of thinking is.

This Bushmen vs. Herero illustration of the plasticity of human behavior would likely have delighted Boas. But such insights are much too interesting for contemporary cultural anthropologists, since they are only interested in blaming whites, and men, and white men.

In 1999, I started an email group to discuss human biodiversity. Fortuitously, my project happened to bring Henry into contact for the first time with the physicist Gregory Cochran, who had developed an interest in applying and extending evolutionary theory. Together, they went on to set off sparks that might someday be recognized as the leading intellectual development of the early 21st century.

Their overarching breakthrough was the realization that the rapid development of human culture since the invention of agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago doesn’t mean that Darwinian evolution slowed down, as was nearly universally assumed in the late 20th century. Instead, the development of new and different cultural pressures on different continents implied that selection must have sped up, increasing the biodiversity of humanity.

In 2005, they illustrated their general thesis with a stunning paper on “The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence.” One of the great scientific papers of the age, it elicited admiring attention from Steven Pinker and Nicholas Wade. Henry and Greg noted that the proliferation of European Jewish genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs and torsion dystonia are likely offshoots of selection pressure for literacy and numeracy in white-collar occupations in medieval Europe. Just as black Africans are more prone to sickle-cell anemia because it’s a quick and dirty malaria-fighting mutation, European Jews may have evolved IQ-boosting mutations that extract a medical price.

Harpending and Cochran followed with a mass-market book, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, which featured their prediction that modern humans would have some DNA descended from the otherwise extinct Neanderthal species. This was soon confirmed, although to their surprise it turned out that sub-Saharan Africans lacked whatever useful genes the rest of humanity had acquired from Neanderthals.

In 2013, Harpending and Cochran drafted a paper on how the Amish have been evolving over the ten generations they’ve been in America toward “plainness.” While it was formerly assumed that Amish culture would collapse under the blandishments of American consumer society, the opposite appears to be happening: The rate of Amish young adults abandoning their arduous faith is, if anything, dropping. Harpending and Cochran calculated that the Amish have been here long enough for a significant fraction of the DNA that would incline them to join the general population to have “boiled off,” leaving a more concentrated set of genes adapting the rapidly growing remainder toward the Amish lifestyle.

One of Harpending’s most interesting mathematical solutions was calculating just how much individuals of different racial groups differ. The Leninist biologist Richard Lewontin had famously observed in the 1970s that only about 15 percent of genetic variation among humans could be attributed to racial differences.

Lewontin, however, didn’t provide the public with a scale for evaluating how large that figure is. After all, there is considerable genetic diversity even among siblings who aren’t identical twins, and yet the Arabs politically organize their cultures around the maxim: “Me against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world.”

Henry long dismissed the concept of ethnic nepotism, until he finally sat down to do the math in the early 2000s. Then he discovered that the similarity within racial groups was comparable to the degree of relatedness between an uncle and his nephew…which is where the word “nepotism“ comes from.

In other words, on average, people are as closely related to other members of their subracial “ethnic” group (e.g., Japanese or Italian) versus the rest of the world as they are related to their nephew versus the rest of their ethnic group.

When you stop and think about it, that sounds about right. As Henry pointed out, he’d have a hard time identifying a nephew he’d never met from a group of white children, while he’d have no problem identifying a white child in a group of nonwhite children.

Henry was as brave at defying cowardice in the classroom as at hunting Cape buffalo in Botswana.

The SPLC’s hate campaigns against leading scientists like Henry Harpending, Charles Murray, Ray Blanchard, Michael Bailey, etc. have real world consequences in shutting down intelligent discourse because the Mainstream Media, despite all the SPLC’s scandals and stupidities, continues to cite them as a legitimate authoritative source.

For example, in 2019, New York Times neocon columnist Bret Stephens wrote a boastful column “The Secrets of Jewish Genius,” that linked to the great Cochran-Harpending paper.

But because the SPLC hated Henry for his scientific insights, the New York Times then deleted the link and posted this craven Editor’s Note:

Editors’ Note:

An earlier version of this Bret Stephens column quoted statistics from a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the paper’s authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors’ views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent. He went on instead to argue that culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements and that, as he put it, “At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they aren’t. They are representational.” We have removed reference to the study from the column.

By the way, the SPLC long hated me in part because I hinted in 2003 that golfer Annika Sorenstam was enjoying the greatest season in Ladies Professional Golf Association history because she had suddenly added massive musculature, as so many athletes like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Barry Bonds were doing back then before steroid testing got more serious. I wrote:

So, the real problem for women’s golf in America is that young girls don’t think it makes them look sexy, and I’m not sure that Annika pumping herself up to look like Hans and Franz is going to solve that.

Five years later, the SPLC was still sore about that bit of noticing, complaining:

Sailer’s website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles and claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look “less masculine” than other men.

The SPLC tried hard to get transgender mania rolling in 2003-2005, but Morris Dees’ spidey-sense for making money was too far ahead of its time for once, so World War T didn’t take off until 2013-2015. I wrote in Taki’s Magazine in 2022:

The second and in some ways more socially important type [of transgenderism] is the male-only disorder of late-onset gender dysphoria. This is frequently (and perhaps always) related to a rather comic sex fetish called autogynephilia in which at puberty, a normally masculine boy begins dressing up in his mother’s lingerie and masturbating in front of the mirror, imagining himself as the beautiful girl he desires.

For reasons that I’ve never seen completely explained, those with the late-onset syndrome tend to be highly intelligent; ambitious in their stereotypically masculine careers (e.g., Tur insisted on being called “Chopper Bob”); fans of hard science fiction (with Robert Heinlein a favorite); and, often, not very nice. They tend to be highly insistent that others validate their sex fantasy about themselves and relentless trouble to those who won’t.

It’s important to note that there is no female equivalent to late-onset gender dysphoria. Instead, rapid-onset gender dysphoria in which conventionally feminine little girls hit the emotional turmoil of puberty and decide that the cause of their unhappiness must be that they have always been transgender is a new thing spread by social and legacy media in recent years. It’s a fad, a catastrophic fad.

The existence of the late-onset type among some males is well-known among scientific specialists in the field, but has been almost completely covered up in the mainstream media due to furious campaigns by hyper-aggressive men in dresses to hush up the embarrassing news about their fetish.

Almost twenty years ago, I interviewed Northwestern U. psychologist J. Michael Bailey about his book The Man Who Would Be Queen, which brought down upon me the wrath of a small group of ex-men such as the brilliant libertarian economic historian Donald-Deirdre McCloskey and computer scientist Lynn Conway. Man for man, these guys were the Seal Team Six of proto–cancel culture.

They aligned with Southern Poverty Law Center cofounder Morris Dees, who is not, so far as I know, an ex-man—he was on his sixth wife last I checked. Morris is a junk mail genius and thus accurately anticipated that the madness of the times would eventually make transgenderism the Next Big Thing for him to raise funds over. But sometimes even a maestro can get too far out ahead of his era. So America wasn’t quite ready back in the 2000s for their Baileyian Jihad.

From my blog in 2010:

Friday, August 6, 2010

Morris Dees’ Poverty Palace

The Montgomery Advertiser has a 60-photo lifestyle spread on “The home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala.” Mr. Dees is, of course, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and poverty has been very, very good to him, judging by the staggering amount of expensive bric-a-brac he and Ms. Starr have accumulated.

I’m not precisely sure what Morris’ wife is wearing in this photo (Barbarella’s coronation gown? Or, as a reader suggests, a shower curtain trimmed with fake fur?), but the caption reads “Susan Starr models a jacket she made in her studio at her home in Montgomery, Ala.”

This shiny thing-a-mabob with the #20 on it is described as “A poolside rickshaw at the home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala,” because nothing screams Equality! like a fancy rickshaw.

It would probably not occur to you to acquire what might possibly be a matador’s outfit to hang next to the washstand in an office bathroom of your compound, but then you aren’t the main man behind America’s most lucrative poverty organization, now are you?

This white and beigeish picture is described as “Guest house living area at the home of Morris Dees and Susan Starr in Montgomery, Ala.,” but the contents remain enigmatic. What exactly is on the coffee table? A nest of writhing snakes? A ton of old horseshoes? And what’s that spherical object behind the fuzzy couch? A giant ball of twine?

And then there’s this objet d’art. I wonder how much hate Morris had to spew and foment to get the donations to pour in to pay for that?

For some reason, the article accompanying the 60 pictures seems to have largely vanished, but it began:

Mediterranean living: Couple’s renovated showplace reflects owners’ world travels, varied tastes

It is hard to believe the home Susan Starr and Morris Dees purchased upon their marriage 11 years ago was once a very small cottage originally built in 1923.

Nah, by this point, I can believe anything about Morris.

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Southern Poverty Law Center charged with defrauding donors with payments to extremist informants

By COLLIN BINKLEY, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and REBECCA BOONE

Updated 5:42 PM PDT, April 21, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.

The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with more than $3 million paid to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. Prosecutors allege some of the money was used by extremists to carry out other crimes, but court papers did not include specific examples.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.

Here’s an SPLC FAQ:

Q. Who can forget when the SPLC was founded in 1957 by Dr. Martin Luther King, who who gave his life in 1968?

A. Well, actually, that was the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Q. Oh, well, but who can forget when the SPLC went on the Freedom Rides in 1961 with it leaders John Lewis, James Lewis, and Stokely Carmichael?

A. Well, actually, that was SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

Q. Huh?

Well, actually, the SPLC was founded by two white men, Morris Dees and Richard Levin, in 1971 after most of the heavy lifting of the Civil Rights era had already been done. This is not to say SPLC co-founder Morris Dees wasn’t a brave man, but let’s just say that in the 1991 TV movie hagiography about him, Morris was played by Corbin Bernsen, Arnie on L.A. Law and third baseman Roger Dorn who won’t get his uniform dirty in Major League:

The similarity between SPLC and SCLC and SNCC is no doubt utterly a coincidence.

Morris Dees, a junk mail genius, a Direct Marketing Hall of Famer, no doubt came up with an acronym reminiscent of the heroic age of the civil rights movement totally by accident.

Q. How many times has SPLC co-founder Morris Dees been married?

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That line of course is from Kenny Rogers’ hit song “The Gambler,” with lyrics and music by Don Schlitz, who died at 73 this month after composing 20 number one country hits.

Anyway, that got me thinking again about a question: What was last-written poem without music to become well-known in the English-speaking world?

Is poetry more alive in other languages than in English? (English-language popular music has been world-conquering over the last 100 years.)

More broadly, have songs (and quasi-songs like raps) completely overwhelmed the popularity of poems without musical accompaniment?

But how much has the quality of lyric-writing declined due to the needs of music?

There seemed to be a general trend in the rock era away from professional specialists in lyric writing like composer Richard Rodgers’ partners Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. The Grateful Dead and Elton John used lyric specialists who didn’t perform, but they were increasingly rare exceptions. Gerry Himes wrote in Paste in 2014:

[Gerry] Goffin [Carole King’s ex-husband and lyricist] died on June 19 at age 75. Coming on the heels of Hal David’s death in 2012 and Jerry Leiber’s in 2011, Goffin’s passing highlights the near extinction of a once-common role in pop music: the non-performing lyricist. Through the late ‘60s, lyricists such as Goffin, David, Leiber, Cynthia Weil, Eddie Holland, David Porter, Willie Dixon, Doc Pomus and Tony Asher willingly handed over their words for someone else to sing. They knew what they were good at—and what they weren’t. And American music was better for it.

Today, almost all lyrics are written by the lead singer of the original recording.

This is less true in Nashville, where specialized professionalism is still honored as well as Dylanesque authenticity.

A question that comes to mind is: Would “The Gambler,” clearly one of the better-crafted lyrics of the post-Beatles age, have been a hit poem in 1900 if it had never been a song?

On a warm summer’s evening
On a train bound for nowhere,
I met up with a gambler.
We were both too tired to sleep.
So, we took turns a-staring
Out the window at the darkness,
‘Til boredom overtook us
And he began to speak:

He said, “Son, I’ve made a life
Out of reading people’s faces
And knowing what their cards were
By the way they held their eyes.
So, if you don’t mind my saying
I can see you’re out of aces.
For a taste of your whiskey
I’ll give you some advice.”

So, I handed him my bottle
And he drank down my last swallow.
Then he bummed a cigarette
And asked me for a light.
And the night got deathly quiet
And his face lost all expression,
Said, “If you’re gonna play the game, boy
You gotta learn to play it right

You got to know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to run.
You never count your money
When you’re sitting at the table.
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the dealing’s done.

Every gambler knows
That the secret to surviving
Is knowing what to throw away
And knowing what to keep.
‘Cause every hand’s a winner
And every hand’s a loser,
And the best that you can hope for
Is to die in your sleep.”

And when he finished speaking,
He turned back toward the window,
Crushed out his cigarette,
And faded off to sleep.

And somewhere in the darkness,
The gambler he broke even.
But in his final words
I found an ace that I could keep:

You got to know when to hold ‘em,
Know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away,
And know when to run.
You never count your money
When you’re sitting at the table.
There’ll be time enough for counting
When the dealing’s done

For contrast, here’s an advice poem written in c. 1895 that was published in 1910: Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” composed in tribute to Leander Jameson, leader of the Jameson Raid in South Africa. In a BBC poll in 1996, it was the runaway winner for Britain’s favorite poem:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too:

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

⁠And never breathe a word about your loss:

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

⁠Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

⁠And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

Kipling’s advice sounds even harder to implement than “The Gambler’s” advice.

What do you think? How much better is “If” than “The Gambler” purely as a poem for reading and speaking aloud?

Not surprisingly, Kipling’s “If” has been set to music several times. But I’m not aware of a famous musical adaptation.

In general, there have been very few new musical adaptations of old verses that have become famous during the rock era. (T.S. Eliot’s light verse Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats provided the lyrics that Andrew Lloyd Webber set to music in 1981’s huge hit musical Cats, but that’s from an older musical tradition.)

The Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” from the Book of Ecclesiastes is perhaps the best known exception. Also, “Golden Slumbers” from Abbey Road was composed by Paul McCartney from old lyrics. Sitting down at his sister’s piano, he found the sheet music for an old song entitled “Golden Slumbers.” Paul couldn’t read music, but, being 20-something Paul McCartney, he simply invented on the spot a now famous new melody to fit the old words.

There are a number of deep cuts like Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” that combine old words with new music. But my guess is that dozens of teen metal bands have started to try to set Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to music, only to realize there’s no verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure to work with.

So, back to my earlier question: What is the last plain poem (no music) to get really famous?

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