Charlie Kirk’s Lieutenant Has Second Thoughts

Blake Neff helped make stars of Kirk and Tucker Carlson. Now he’s trying to rein in what he unleashed.

By Ian Ward

09/10/2026 05:00 AM EDT

Ian Ward is a former staff writer for POLITICO Magazine.

PHOENIX, Arizona — Five days a week, or sometimes more if news requires it, Blake Neff takes his seat behind a V-shaped plexiglass desk on the set of the Charlie Kirk Show. …

On a Tuesday morning earlier this summer, Neff, a bespectacled 36-year-old with a clean-shaven head and a naturally nerdy affect… Neff joined the staff of the Charlie Kirk Show in 2022 as a writer and producer, but since Kirk’s death, he has assumed full-time hosting responsibilities alongside Kirk’s longtime spokesperson Andrew Kolvet. His new role as the public face of the Charlie Kirk Show has come as something of a surprise — chiefly to Neff himself. A self-described “cultivated wordcel” with a passion for elaborate military-historical board games, Neff told me that he never expected to have a permanent on-air presence, having spent most of his career cranking out scripts for more telegenic bosses.

But in another sense, Neff’s new gig is just the latest unlikely twist in a career that has been unusually full of them. By his own admission, Neff has become a kind of Forrest Gump of the conservative movement, a little-known figure who, through a combination of dumb luck and sheer pluckiness, has found himself at the center of several pivotal moments in the recent history of the American right. In 2016, while working as an education reporter at the conservative website The Daily Caller, Neff was tapped to serve as the lead writer of the newly created Fox News show Tucker Carlson Tonight, which Neff helped transform into the leading organ of MAGA-style populism during President Donald Trump’s first term.

A few years later, in 2022, after resigning from Fox over a series of offensive internet posts, Neff linked up with Charlie Kirk, then a relatively minor conservative activist known for his combative debates with campus liberals. Within two years of Neff’s arrival, Kirk had reached the pinnacle of power within Trump’s GOP, making frequent trips to Mar-a-Lago and the White House to advise the second Trump administration. Trailing close behind him was Neff, who had assumed the role of personal intellectual consigliere to Kirk. “I can count on two hands the number of people who Charlie really trusted,” said Mikey McCoy, chief of staff at Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. “Blake was one of those people.”

Occam’s Razor might suggest that the reason both Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk surged to the top immediately after hiring Blake Neff to write for them is because Blake is the best conservative writer of his generation.

Indeed, this article then hints at that:

Yet Neff has played more than an accidental role in the transformation of the conservative movement under Trump. As a close collaborator to figures like Carlson and Kirk, he has served, in a roundabout way, as a primary author of MAGA’s new ideological playbook. “Along with Tucker, Kirk was probably one of the most important [people] to elevate these ‘online right’ ideas to the mainstream, and I think Blake played a huge role in that,” said Scott Greer, a former colleague of Neff’s at The Daily Caller and the author of a new book that traces the origins of MAGA ideology to the online ferment of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Scott Greer’s new book is entitled Whitepill.

“His own talent, his intelligence, and, frankly, being at the right place at the right time — all that helped him have this influence on both Tucker and Charlie Kirk.”

It’s not a coincidence, Greer added, that MAGA’s ideological posture bears a striking resemblance to Neff’s own political sensibility: contemptuous of the old pre-Trump Republican establishment; preoccupied with the cultural and “civilizational” effects of mass migration; scornful of “wokeness” and progressive cultural values; and, above all else, steeped in the irony-laden lingo and meme-heavy sensibility of the online right. “He played a part in taking these once-marginalized beliefs that were ignored by conservatism and bringing them to the mainstream,” Greer said.

Yet now, a year after Kirk’s death, Neff has found himself in a new and darkly ironic situation. In the months since Kirk’s death, Neff has become the target of the torrent of online conspiracies alleging that Kirk’s shooting was orchestrated by his allies at TPUSA — in some tellings, with the aid of Israel and other foreign governments. In response, Neff is now pursuing a starkly different objective: reconstructing some sort of barrier between the MAGA mainstream and the right’s online fringe. …

Neff was born in South Dakota to a conservative Catholic family. But he became himself, in all the ways that would matter for his career, on the online right.

Growing up in Sioux Falls, Neff realized early on that he was brighter and more bookish than many of his peers. In middle school, while his classmates were dabbling in the Harry Potter books, Neff tore through all 2,000 pages of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic Gulag Archipelago trilogy. In high school, he set his sights on attending Dartmouth College after reading the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s book Letters to a Young Conservative, which recounted D’Souza’s experience co-founding the conservative campus journal The Dartmouth Review.

At Dartmouth, Neff followed D’Souza’s path to the Review. He dabbled in the canon of conservative literature — Charles Murray’s 2012 book Coming Apart, about the decline of white working-class America, was a formative read — but his more important political education took place in the byzantine world of micro-blogs and anonymous messaging boards dedicated to edgy and sardonic right-leaning politics. “It was just a bunch of guys blogging on their WordPress site,” Neff recalled of his early days on the web. A personal favorite of Neff’s was Steve Sailer, the paleoconservative commentator whose writings on “human biodiversity,” a slightly sanitized spin on old-school race science, were quietly passed around like samizdat on right-leaning messaging boards and private chats.

It’s almost as if I were a huge influence on the best minds of the next generation.

… A few weeks after the 2016 election, Neff got a call from Carlson asking him to join his new show at Fox as the lead writer. …

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What’s my opinion? Well, I used to have lots of fairly well-informed opinions on AI back in the 20th Century. But as the 21st Century ground on and nothing too big was happening with AI, I started to figure it wasn’t going to happen during my lifetime. So, I lost interest.

And then all of a sudden, just after I’d totally dropped the thread, AI happened.

Well, this is going to be up to the next generation to figure out.

What can I do?

Perhaps I can help provide some historical perspective via analogies. For example, the rapid emergence of AI is reminiscent in some ways (but not in others) of the sudden emergence of nuclear technology from 1938 onward.

Note that we eventually worked out a strategy of mutual assured destruction that, so far at least, has provided some stability. But it took a couple of decades to fully figure it out.

One of the first attempts to think through the long run institutional implications of radioactive weapons was made by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein in December 1940, after discussions with his editor John W. Campbell and his friend, physicist Robert A. Cornog of Ernest O. Lawrence’s radiation laboratory at Berkeley. Cornog had been doing state of the art research with Luis Alvarez. (Heinlein dedicated his 1961 cult novel Stranger in a Strange Land to Cornog.)

The long short story that resulted, "Solution Unsatisfactory,” should not be seen as a prediction of any one outcome or endorsement of any one policy. But it remains an impressive early exercise in trying to work out the logical implications of a new world-historical technology.

Here are some excerpts:

SOLUTION UNSATISFACTORY

by Robert A. Heinlein

Finished December 24, 1940

Published May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction

In 1903 the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.

In December, 1938, in Berlin, Dr. Hahn split the uranium atom.

In April, 1943, Dr. Estelle Karst, working under the Federal Emergency Defense Authority, perfected the Karst-Obre technique for producing artificial radioactives.

So American foreign policy had to change.

Had to. Had to. …

I was not a professional military man when World War II broke out, and when Congress passed the draft law I drew a high number, high enough to keep me out of the army long enough to die of old age.

Not that very many died of old age that generation!

But I was the newly appointed secretary to a freshman congressman; I had been his campaign manager and my former job had left me. By profession, I was a high-school teacher of economics and sociology—school boards don’t like teachers of social subjects actually to deal with social problems—and my contract was not renewed. I jumped at the chance to go to Washington.

My congressman was named Manning. Yes, the Manning, Colonel Clyde C. Manning, U.S. Army retired—Mr. Commissioner Manning. … what I liked about him was that, though he was liberal, he was tough-minded, which most liberals aren’t. Most liberals believe that water runs downhill, but, praise God, it’ll never reach the bottom.

Manning was not like that. He could see a logical necessity and act on it, no matter how unpleasant it might be. * * *

… We drove over into Maryland the next day and Manning took charge of the Federal nuclear research laboratory, known officially by the hush-hush title of War Department Special Defense Project No. 347. I didn’t know a lot about physics and nothing about modern atomic physics, aside from the stuff you read in the Sunday supplements. Later, I picked up a smattering, mostly wrong, I suppose, from associating with the heavyweights with whom the laboratory was staffed.

Colonel Manning had taken an Army p.g. course at Massachusetts Tech and had received a master of science degree for a brilliant thesis on the mathematical theories of atomic structure. That was why the Army had to have him for this job. But that had been some years before; atomic theory had turned several cartwheels in the meantime; he admitted to me that he had to bone like the very devil to try to catch up to the point where he could begin to understand what his highbrow charges were talking about in their reports.

I think he overstated the degree of his ignorance; there was certainly no one else in the United States who could have done the job. It required a man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity.

Think of Colonel Manning as Matt Damon’s character in Oppenheimer: General Leslie Groves. Heinlein, however, probably didn’t know Groves, who was put in charge of the Manhattan Project in September, 1942, while writing this in late 1940.

No derogatory reference to the scientists is intended—by no means! We had all the genius in the field that the United States could produce, men from Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, M.I.T., Cal Tech, Berkeley, every radiation laboratory in the country, as well as a couple of broad-A boys lent to us by the British. And they had every facility that ingenuity could think up and money could build. The five-hundred-ton cyclotron which had originally been intended for the University of California was there, and was already obsolete in the face of the new gadgets these brains had thought up, asked for, and been given. Canada supplied us with all the uranium we asked for—tons of the treacherous stuff—from Great Bear Lake, up near the Yukon, and the fractional-residues technique of separating uranium isotope 235 from the commoner isotope 238 had already been worked out, by the same team from Chicago that had worked up the earlier expensive mass spectrograph method.

Someone in the United States government had realized the terrific potentialities of uranium 235 quite early and, as far back as the summer of 1940, had rounded up every atomic research man in the country and had sworn them to silence.

In real life, that more or less happened a couple of years later in 1942. The U.S. didn’t get a particularly fast jump on its Manhattan Project.

Atomic power, if ever developed, was planned to be a government monopoly, at least till the war was over. It might turn out to be the most incredibly powerful explosive ever dreamed of, and it might be the source of equally incredible power. In any case, with Hitler talking about secret weapons and shouting hoarse insults at democracies, the government planned to keep any new discoveries very close to the vest.

Hitler had lost the advantage of a first crack at the secret of uranium through not taking precautions. Dr. Hahn, the first man to break open the uranium atom, was a German.

Otto Hahn is a real German chemist, who won the 1944 Nobel Prize for his 1938 breakthrough.

But one of his laboratory assistants had fled Germany to escape a pogrom. She came to this country, and told us about it.

This “Estelle Karst” character is modeled after Lise Meitner.

We were searching, there in the laboratory in Maryland, for a way to use U235 in a controlled explosion. We had a vision of a one-ton bomb that would be a whole air raid in itself, a single explosion that would flatten out an entire industrial center. Dr. Ridpath, of Continental Tech,

Dr. Ridpath is functionally, pretty close to Ernest O. Lawrence, but it’s unclear if Heinlein knew of him in 1940. Also, think Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, and then Oppenheimer.

claimed that he could build such a bomb, but that he could not guarantee that it would not explode as soon as it was loaded and as for the force of the explosion—well, he did not believe his own figures; they ran out to too many ciphers.

The problem was, strangely enough, to find an explosive which would be weak enough to blow up only one county at a time, and stable enough to blow up only on request. If we could devise a really practical rocket fuel at the same time, one capable of driving a war rocket at a thousand miles an hour, or more, then we would be in a position to make most anybody say “uncle” to Uncle Sam.

We fiddled around with it all the rest of 1943 and well into 1944. The war in Europe and the troubles in Asia dragged on.

In “Solution Unsatisfactory,” finished about 12 months before Pearl Harbor, the United States doesn’t go to war directly, but instead maintains the ambiguous role it held in 1940 — as a noncombatant helping Britain strongly — all the way until the end of the war in 1945, which concludes more or less the same way as the real WWII did: with a U.S. radioactive weapon wiping out an Axis city.

After Italy folded up, England was able to release enough ships from her Mediterranean fleet to ease the blockade of the British Isles. With the help of the planes we could now send her regularly and with the additional over-age destroyers we let her have, England hung on somehow, digging in and taking more and more of her essential defense industries underground. Russia shifted her weight from side to side as usual, apparently with the policy of preventing either side from getting a sufficient advantage to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

The story was published in May 1941, before Germany’s June 22, 1941 attack on its ally (since August 23, 1939), the Soviet Union. Heinlein assumes that the Soviet Union, soon to be renamed the Eurasian Union after Stalin’s death in 1941, largely stays out of the war too.

People were beginning to speak of “permanent war.” * * *

I was killing time in the administrative office, trying to improve my typing—a lot of Manning’s reports had to be typed by me personally—when the orderly on duty stepped in and announced Dr. Karst. I flipped the interoffice communicator. “Dr. Karst is here, chief. Can you see her?”

“Yes,” he answered, through his end.

I told the orderly to show her in.

Estelle Karst was quite a remarkable old girl and, I suppose, the first woman ever to hold a commission in the Corps of Engineers. She was an M.D. as well as an Sc.D. and reminded me of the teacher I had had in fourth grade. …

She bristled and I thought she was going to make him stay in after school at the very least. “Colonel Manning, do you realize the importance of artificial radioactives to modern medicine?”

E.g., radiation is used on cancer tumors today.

“Why, I believe I do. Nevertheless, Doctor, our primary mission is to perfect a weapon which will serve as a safeguard to the whole country in time of war—”

She sniffed and went into action. “Weapons—fiddlesticks! Isn’t there a medical corps in the Army? Isn’t it more important to know how to heal men than to know how to blow them to bits? Colonel Manning, you’re not a fit man to have charge of this project! You’re a . . . you’re a, a warmonger, that’s what you are!”

I felt my ears turning red, but Manning never budged. He could have raised Cain with her, confined her to her quarters, maybe even have court-martialed her, but Manning isn’t like that. He told me once that every time a man is court-martialed, it is a sure sign that some senior officer hasn’t measured up to his job. …

They visit Dr. Karst’s laboratory.

“May I ask what that is, Doctor?”

“Oh, that? That’s an air conditioner.”

“Odd-looking one. I’ve never seen one like it.”

“It’s not to condition the air of this room. It’s to remove the radioactive dust before the exhaust air goes outdoors. We wash the dust out of the foul air.”

“Where does the water go?”

“Down the drain. Out into the bay eventually, I suppose.”

I tried to snap my fingers, which was impossible because of the lead mittens. “That accounts for it, Colonel!”

“Accounts for what?”

“Accounts for those accusing notes we’ve been getting from the Bureau of Fisheries. This poisonous dust is being carried out into Chesapeake Bay and is killing the fish.”

Manning turned to Karst. “Do you think that possible, Doctor?”

I could see her brows draw together through the window in her helmet. “I hadn’t thought about it,” she admitted. “I’d have to do some figuring on the possible concentrations before I could give you a definite answer. But it is possible—yes. However,” she added anxiously, “it would be simple enough to divert this drain to a sink hole of some sort.”

“Hm-m-m—yes.” He did not say anything for some minutes, simply stood there, looking at the box.

Presently he said, “This dust is pretty lethal?”

“Quite lethal, Colonel.” There was another long silence.

At last I gathered he had made up his mind about something for he said decisively, “I am going to see to it that you get Obre’s assistance, Doctor—”

Spectroscopist Obre is a good fit Alfred O.C. Nier or for Heinlein’s pal Cornog.

“Oh, good!”

“—but I want you to help me in return. I am very much interested in this research of yours, but I want it carried on with a little broader scope.” …

He left immediately, giving her no time to discuss it. He did not seem to want to talk on the way back and I held my peace. I think he had already gotten a glimmering of the bold and drastic strategy this was to lead to, but even Manning could not have thought out that early the inescapable consequences of a few dead fish—otherwise he would never have ordered the research.

No, I don’t really believe that. He would have gone right ahead, knowing that if he did not do it, someone else would. He would have accepted the responsibility while bitterly aware of its weight. * * *

1944 wore along with no great excitement on the surface. Karst got her new laboratory equipment and so much additional help that her department rapidly became the largest on the grounds. The explosives research was suspended after a conference between Manning and Ridpath, of which I heard only the end, but the meat of it was that there existed not even a remote possibility at that time of utilizing U235 as an explosive.

Of course, in real life the opposite proved true.

As a source of power, yes, sometime in the distant future when there had been more opportunity to deal with the extremely ticklish problem of controlling the nuclear reaction. Even then it seemed likely that it would not be a source of power in prime movers such as rocket motors or mobiles, but would be used in vast power plants at least as large as the Boulder Dam installation.

So, in this fictional timeline that Heinlein devised in 1940, the Hahn-Meitner breakthroughs in the late 1930s are used by the U.S. not to build the atomic bomb but to manufacture lethal radioactive dust from uranium. But both are similarly deadly strategic weapons with similar foreign policy implications.

After that Ridpath became a sort of co-chairman of Karst’s department and the equipment formerly used by the explosives department was adapted or replaced to carry on research on the deadly artificial radioactives. Manning arranged a division of labor and Karst stuck to her original problem of developing techniques for tailor-making radioactives. I think she was perfectly happy, sticking with a one-track mind to the problem at hand. I don’t know to this day whether or not Manning and Ridpath ever saw fit to discuss with her what they intended to do. * * *

… It was just before Christmas [1944] that Manning first admitted to me how much the implications of the Karst-Obre process were preying on his mind. He called me into his office over some inconsequential matter, then did not let me go. I saw that he wanted to talk.

“How much of the K-O dust do we now have on hand?” he asked suddenly.

“Just short of ten thousand units,” I replied. “I can look up the exact figures in half a moment.” A unit would take care of a thousand men, at normal dispersion.

They have enough radioactive dust to kill 10 million people.

He knew the figure as well as I did, and I knew he was stalling.

We had shifted almost imperceptibly from research to manufacture, entirely on Manning’s initiative and authority.

The Manhattan Project was a lot more colossal in scale than Heinlein anticipated.

Manning had never made a specific report to the Department about it, unless he had done so orally to the Chief of Staff.

“Never mind,” he answered to my suggestion, then added, “Did you see those horses?”

“Yes,” I said briefly.

I did not want to talk about it. I like horses. We had requisitioned six broken-down old nags, ready for the bone yard, and had used them experimentally. We knew now what the dust would do. After they had died, any part of their carcasses would register on a photographic plate and tissue from the apices of their lungs and from the bronchia glowed with a light of its own.

Manning stood at the window, staring out at the dreary Maryland winter for a minute or two before replying, “John, I wish that radioactivity had never been discovered. Do you realize what that devilish stuff amounts to?”

“Well,” I said, “it’s a weapon, about like poison gas—maybe more efficient.”

“Rats!” he said, and for a moment I thought he was annoyed with me personally. “That’s about like comparing a sixteen-inch gun with a bow and arrow. We’ve got here the first weapon the world has ever seen against which there is no defense, none whatsoever. It’s death itself, C.O.D.

“Have you seen Ridpath’s report?” he went on.

I had not. Ridpath had taken to delivering his reports by hand to Manning personally.

“Well,” he said, “ever since we started production I’ve had all the talent we could spare working on the problem of a defense against the dust. Ridpath tells me and I agree with him that there is no means whatsoever to combat the stuff, once it’s used.”

“How about armor,” I asked, “and protective clothing?

“Sure, sure,” he agreed irritatedly, “provided you never take it off to eat, or to drink or for any purpose whatever, until the radioaction has ceased, or you are out of the danger zone. That is all right for laboratory work; I’m talking about war.”

I considered the matter. “I still don’t see what you are fretting about, Colonel. If the stuff is as good as you say it is, you’ve done just exactly what you set out to do—develop a weapon which would give the United States protection against aggression.”

He swung around. “John, there are times when I think you are downright stupid!”

I said nothing. I knew him and I knew how to discount his moods. The fact that he permitted me to see his feelings is the finest compliment I have ever had.

“Look at it this way,” he went on more patiently; “this dust, as a weapon, is not just simply sufficient to safeguard the United States, it amounts to a loaded gun held at the head of every man, woman, and child on the globe!”

“Well,” I answered, “what of that? It’s our secret, and we’ve got the upper hand. The United States can put a stop to this war, and any other war. We can declare a Pax Americana, and enforce it.”

“Hm-m-m—I wish it were that easy. But it won’t remain our secret; you can count on that. It doesn’t matter how successfully we guard it; all that anyone needs is the hint given by the dust itself and then it is just a matter of time until some other nation develops a technique to produce it. You can’t stop brains from working, John; the reinvention of the method is a mathematical certainty, once they know what it is they are looking for. And uranium is a common enough substance, widely distributed over the globe—don’t forget that!

“It’s like this: Once the secret is out—and it will be out if we ever use the stuff!—the whole world will be comparable to a room full of men, each armed with a loaded .45. They can’t get out of the room and each one is dependent on the good will of every other one to stay alive. All offense and no defense. See what I mean?”

I thought about it, but I still didn’t guess at the difficulties. It seemed to me that a peace enforced by us was the only way out, with precautions taken to see that we controlled the sources of uranium. I had the usual American subconscious conviction that our country would never use power in sheer aggression. Later, I thought about the Mexican War and the Spanish-American War and some of the things we did in Central America, and I was not so sure— * * *

It was a couple of weeks later, shortly after inauguration day, that Manning told me to get the Chief of Staff’s office on the telephone. …

Manning was ushered into the Oval Office almost at once and I was left cooling my heels and trying to get comfortable in civilian clothes. After so many months of uniform they itched in the wrong places.

The thirty minutes went by. …

Two more hours went by.

Manning appeared at the door at last and the secretary looked relieved. But he did not come out, saying instead, “Come in, John. The President wants to take a look at you.”

I fell over my feet getting up.

Manning said, “Mr. President, this is Captain DeFries.” The President nodded, and I bowed, unable to say anything. He was standing on the hearth rug, his fine head turned toward us, and looking just like his pictures—but it seemed strange for the President of the United States not to be a tall man.

I had never seen him before, though, of course, I knew something of his record the two years he had been in the Senate and while he was Mayor before that.

Heinlein envisioned that the President in 1945 would be 5’2” New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, a liberal Republican who supported FDR in the 1930s.

The President said, “Sit down, DeFries. Care to smoke?” Then to Manning, “You think he can do it?”

“I think he’ll have to. It’s Hobson’s choice.”

“And you are sure of him?”

“He was my campaign manager.”

“I see.”

The President said nothing more for a while and God knows I didn’t!—though I was bursting to know what they were talking about. He commenced again with, “Colonel Manning, I intend to follow the procedure you have suggested, with the changes we discussed. But I will be down tomorrow to see for myself that the dust will do what you say it will. Can you prepare a demonstration?”

“Yes, Mr. President,”

“Very well, we will use Captain DeFries unless I think of a better procedure.” I thought for a moment that they planned to use me for a guinea pig! But he turned to me and continued, “Captain, I expect to send you to England as my representative.”

I gulped. “Yes, Mr. President.” And that is every word I had to say in calling on the President of the United States. * * *

After that, Manning had to tell me a lot of things he had on his mind. I am going to try to relate them as carefully as possible, even at the risk of being dull and obvious and of repeating things that are common knowledge.

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“Batting average” was the premier statistic for evaluating hitters from the 1870s, becoming an official National League stat in 1876, until roughly the turn of the millennium.

It was worked out by sportswriters Henry Chadwick (starting from cricket stats) and Herve Dobson as hits divided by at-bats.

All hits, from a single to a four-bagger, were treated as one hit. Walks were not counted as either a hit or an at-bat. Batting average was an easy stat for people to calculate with pencil and paper.

The hitter with the highest batting average in his league each year was declared the Batting Champion.

Rules of thumb emerged:

.200 was bad
.250 was mediocre
.300 was good
.350 was great
.400 was legendary

And American youths memorized many famous batting averages such as Joe Jackson’s .408 in 1911, Rogers Hornsby’s .424 in 1924, and Tony Gwynn’s .394 in 1994.

Over time, however, reasonable criticisms of batting average emerged, especially after the Babe Ruth Revolution around 1920. Ruth introduced slugging homers as a conscious strategy, which suddenly made batting average a less useful measure for comparing players.

Clearly, Ruth’s home runs were more important toward winning baseball games than were Eddie Collins’ singles.

In response to Ruth, in 1923 the National League made “slugging average” an official stat: total bases (with a homer counting for four bases, a triple for three, etc.) were divided by at bats. For some reason, the American League, home to most of the famous sluggers, didn’t officially adopt slugging average until 1946.

Also, because pitchers were afraid to throw the ball down the middle to him, Ruth got on a first base a huge amount via walks and came around to score an enormous number of times. This pointed out that the 19th Century assumption that a walk was more to be thought of as a detriment to the pitcher, like a fielder’s error, than a credit to the hitter was misleading.

Branch Rickey wrote a Life article in 1954 endorsing “on-base percentage” (hits plus walks divided by at-bats plus walks) as better than batting average.

In 1984, Pete Palmer and John Thorn invented the “OPS” statistic of on-base percentage plus slugging average. You just added the two existing stats together. It was easy and it made sense. Standards slowly emerged:

.600 was weak
.700 was routine
.800 was good
.900 was very good
1.000 was great
1.100+ was historic

The criticisms of batting average as a means for comparing players are well-known and persuasive.

For example, Luis Arraez, recently traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, is leading the National League with a .318 batting average, probably heading toward his fourth batting championship. In contrast, Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Chicago Cubs is batting .281, but is the runaway front-runner for the National League most valuable player award because virtually every one of his statistics other than singles-hitting is better than Arraez’s:

PCA Arraez

Batting Average .281 .318|
Homers 41 6
Runs 111 66
Walks 77 29
Total Bases 325 239
OnBase Percent .376 .350
Slugging Avg. .570 .430
OPS .946 .780

You can go on to note that PCA has stolen 36 bases compared to ten for Arraez. And Crow-Amstrong is one of the two or three best defensive outfielders in baseball, while Arraez is mediocre in the field.

All in all, Arraez is an above average major league starting player. But Crow-Armstrong is a few times as valuable as Arraez is this year. For example, the synthetic black box Wins Above Replacement stat in its Baseball Reference incarnation, bWAR, says PCA is worth 9.2 more wins in 2026 than the typical replacement-quality nonentity that the Cubs could have gotten off the waiver wire, while Arraez is worth 3.1 more wins. FanGraphs has Crow-Armstrong at 10.0 fWAR and Arraez at 4.3.

Modern baseball analytics are optimized toward getting hired by baseball front offices to choose future talent, which is a perfectly reasonable career ambition.

So, what’s my defense of the usefulness of having a bunch of old baseball statistics stuck in your long-term memory?

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A striking difference between right and left conspiracy theories in the 2020s is in the degree of specificity.

For example, an entrepreneurial rightwing influencer like Candace Owens might hint that (if I have this straight) Charlie Kirk was assassinated by Egyptians perhaps working with the French Foreign Legion (presumably on orders from Monsieur Macron, who is suing Candace for saying Madame Macron is a man).

Well, that sounds awfully improbable. But it is colorful in all its random details. Egyptians! French Legion!

In contrast, on Friday almost five dozen leftwing Congresspersons publicly implied that there is a wave of whites lynching blacks in the South.

From The Grio:

EXCLUSIVE: In letter, Democrats demand DOJ investigate Black Americans found hanging from trees

Led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, nearly 60 lawmakers cite the nation’s history of lynching and call the growing number of deaths a “national crisis.”

By Gerren Keith Gaynor

Sep 10, 2026

A group of Congressional Democrats is demanding that the U.S. Department of Justice investigate the alarming number of Black Americans found hanging from trees in recent years across mostly the U.S. South, theGrio exclusively reports.

In a letter led by U.S. Rep.Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), the group of Democrats, largely from the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Progressive Caucus, call on U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel to conduct thorough, transparent, and comprehensive federal investigations into the numerous incidents of Black people found hanging.

“The series of deaths raises significant suspicion of foul play, given the role of lynching in our nation’s history,” reads the letter signed by nearly 60 Democrats, including U.S. Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Yvette D. Clarke (D-N.Y.), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), and Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). “Each of their deaths should be treated with the utmost seriousness and investigated without bias by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).”

The letter continued, “We know there is a long history of neglecting to prevent or investigate deaths of Black individuals. For decades, the DOJ and FBI ignored widespread lynchings, which motivated more killings. Inaction by the federal government is tantamount to complicity. This is part of the legacy of racial terror in the United States, and this neglect has long-term consequences.”

Congresswoman Pressley, who has introduced bills to restore President Joe Biden’s orders on diversity, equity, inclusion, and H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study U.S. slavery and create reparation proposals, told theGrio of the letter, “In this moment of anti-Blackness and emboldened white supremacy, we cannot stand idly by while the strange fruit of Black bodies hang from trees across the country.”

She added, “The federal government must conduct thorough and transparent investigations and get these families the answers and healing they deserve.”

In 2026 alone, there have been at least 10 reported hangings of Black people, several of which have been reported by theGrio. Those individuals include: Demetrius Eugene Fleming, 38, in North Carolina; Juliana Nzita, 16, in North Carolina; Tasia Fortune, 29, in Mississippi; Kyle Bassinga, 21, in Georgia; and Jerard “Jay” Jackson, 28, in Michigan.

In 2025, other high-profile cases included Delta State University freshman Demartravion “Trey” Reed, 21, found hanging from a tree near campus; Earl Smith, 58, found hanging from a tree at a downtown intersection in Albany, N.Y.; and Torrance “Tory” Medley, 39, found hanging from a tree in the affluent suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin.

As the letter from Democrats notes, “The growing number of Black people found hanging in public is a national crisis.” It cites the Crimson Report, published by JULIAN, which found that there have been more than 70 modern-day lynchings in the United States between 2000 and 2025.

The letter notes that in 2022, Congress passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which President Biden signed into law. Named after 14-year-old Emmett Till, who was kidnapped and lynched in 1955 by a white mob in Mississippi, the law clearly defines a lynching beyond someone being hanged from a tree, but as a conspiracy to commit a hate crime that results in death or serious bodily injury. Democrats say it is “incumbent upon” the DOJ and FBI to use the law that has empowered them to “fully investigate suspicious deaths and hold individuals accountable.”

“At a minimum, each federal investigation, with permission of the decedents’ families, should include an independent autopsy, an audit of local and state law enforcement investigations, review of physical and testimonial evidence, and a final report submitted to Congress explaining the agency’s findings,” reads the letter. “Additionally, there must be robust data collection that tracks the hanging deaths of Black people in a transparent and systematic manner.”

The group of Democrats encouraged the DOJ and FBI to connect with their teams at “regular, scheduled intervals” to share updates, feedback, and “concerns from the broader community, as appropriate.”

But there’s no specificity about the motives or mechanisms. It’s all just handwaved as being due to “the legacy of racial terror.”

Clearly, it’s the fault of systemic racism. You don’t need to explain how structural racism works, it just does. Haven’t you been to college? If you can’t trust personal injury lawyer Ben Crump, who can you trust? We know it’s due to history since 1619 (but not a minute before 1619 — that would be scientific racism!) Maybe it’s ghosts or hoodoo haunting the South? In any case, nobody knows anything other than we can be sure it’s the fault of white people, who must pay.

Seriously, keep in mind that in 2026, the big liberal media institutions aren’t yet promoting this Congressional letter. Looking in Google News, I see mostly black media promoting it and rightist media scoffing at it. The New York Times and Washington Post haven’t touched it yet.

The Establishment press got burned so many times by believing Black Twitter going back to Trayvon Martin in 2012 that they appear to have learned a few things.

On the other hand, I suspect the editors and reporters who have learned are terrified to put their lessons learned in writing. I doubt if anybody dares put out a newsroom-wide memo saying:

In my painful experience, any time Black Twitter is up in arms about how white racists murdered a black man and then Ben Crump gets involved, it’s going to turn out to be a big POS involving lowlifes acting lowlifey. Rightwing Twitter will eventually end up having a field day when all the facts finally come out. So let’s not tee up easy meat for them.

Of course not. So nobody gets the memo because nobody writes it.

So the old-time journalists can keep the latest nonsense out for awhile, but one day they are off duty and some true believer runs the story.

Even CNN, which has been serving all summer as lawyer Ben Crump’s PR service, hasn’t run this Congressional letter story yet.

In fact, they just ran a story this afternoon about the one hanging case that might have been a murder:

Mississippi police make arrest in Tasia Fortune case after medical examiner rules death a homicide

By Dalia Faheid

Police in Jackson, Mississippi, have arrested a man in the case of Tasia Fortune, the 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree outside an abandoned house last month, following the state medical examiner ruling her death a homicide.

Jarques Ratliff, 51, has been charged with murder in connection with Fortune’s death, police said Friday. CNN is working to determine if he has legal representation.

“Last night, the medical examiner’s office officially classified Miss Fortune’s death as a homicide. With that determination, our investigators moved quickly,” Chief RaShall Brackney said at a Friday news conference.

CNN even runs a mug shot of Jarques Ratliff:

If there really have been a lot of blacks found hanging from trees, it is vastly more likely related to the rise in the black suicide rate over the last decade.

As I’ve been pointing out for over a year, the black suicide rate, which has traditionally been well below the white suicide rate, started climbing in the middle 2010s:

Why?

The increase in the white suicide rate from 2000 to 2018 is one of the three Deaths of Despair along with drug overdose and cirrhosis.

Much of the marketing of prescription opioids and Mexican black tar heroin in the early 2000s was aimed at working class whites. The Mexican cartels had a policy of avoiding shooty black inner cities as likely to draw attention and instead focusing on selling heroin in places like Kentucky that nobody who is anybody cares about.

So, after crack, blacks got a much-needed respite from the drug plagues of the early 21st Century.

But then around 2015, fentanyl and a different kind of meth started to show up in inner cities, which seemed to lead to a big increase in homelessness. I can recall how optimistic everybody was around 2014 about how, finally, Downtown Los Angeles was going to take off. But then the homeless population exploded.

So, that might be one cause of the big rise in black suicides.

When I try to look up Establishment explanations for the increasing black suicide rates, however, I tend to see theories like …

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Each major 9/11 anniversary, journalists rehash the horrible events from every imaginable angle, except one that’s just not part of any respectable Narrative: Did George W. Bush’s campaign against racial profiling of Arabs by airport personnel let Mohamed Atta and company get away with 9/11?

Here’s an article I wrote for UPI on October 23, 2000, a little less than a year before 9/11 and shortly after Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush called in his second debate with Al Gore for less airport security scrutiny of Arab passengers for terrorist tendencies:

Arab and Armenian Immigrants Gaining Political Clout

by Steve Sailer

UPI, October 23, 2000

With violence flaring in the Middle East and domestic electioneering reaching a climax, America is witnessing the increasing difficulties of formulating an international policy that’s both activist and coherent in an era when mass immigration is giving an ever-widening array of American ethnic groups their first taste of real political power.

At a time when America’s support of Israel has inflamed anti-American passions in many Muslim lands,

October 2000 was at the beginning of the Second Intifada in Israel and Palestine. On September 28, 2000, Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon had provocatively marched to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a holy site for both Jews and Muslims. This set off Palestinian riots and violent Israeli repression.

The following year saw an increase in suicide bombings of buses and pizza parlors in Israel, and the suicide-murder of ~3,000 in America on 9/11.

a bipartisan majority of the House of Representatives came within minutes on Thursday evening of passing a symbolic resolution to please Armenian-Americans that would have insulted Turkey, the most pro-Western nation in the Islamic Middle East.

Another ethnic interest group with a similar-sounding name was also flexing its muscles in the closing weeks of the election campaign. To gratify Arab-American voters in the swing state of Michigan, in the October 11th Presidential debate Republican nominee George W. Bush called for weakening two counter-terrorism policies. “Arab-Americans are [racially] profiled in what’s called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that,” Governor Bush said. “My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republic Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that . . . Arab-Americans are treated with real respect.”

Although Governor Bush conflated two issues, Arab Americans appreciated the gesture. According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, their highest domestic priority is the repeal of the “secret evidence” section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. To prevent terrorist gangs from murdering U.S. government secret informants, this law allows the government to provide evidence from unidentified moles in the immigration hearings of foreigners suspected of terrorist links. The government has deported or detained a number of Arabs hoping to immigrate to the U.S. due to testimony by witnesses they were never allowed to confront.

Similarly, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. This is because the secret “profiles” given security workers advising them whom to watch most closely are believed to refer to the fact that a disproportionate number of hijackers and bombers have been Arabs.

The day after Governor Bush’s remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush’s calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14th. Ironically, on October 20th an Egyptian-born immigrant Ali A. Mohamed plead guilty in Federal District Court to helping Osama Bin Laden plan the 1998 bombing of the America Embassy in Kenya.

These two fast-growing immigrant groups are challenging America’s traditional pro-Turkey and pro-Israel policy.

New York mayors have long conducted their own foreign policy revolving around the traditional Three I’s -- Ireland, Italy, and Israel. The 1965 Immigration Act, however, opened the door to a host of new nationalities with ancient conflicting interests in the Old World. Today, these new ethnic groups are coming of age politically, complicating the foreign policy landscape.

Running a complex and intrusive foreign policy has always been easiest for dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin. The adeptness with which the British Empire managed a Byzantine overseas policy in the late 19th century shows that in a parliamentary system, foreign affairs are most effectively governed by oligarchic elites answering to a nation with few immigrants. With few non-British ethnics allowed to vote, the British government could run its empire with cold-eyed expedience. In contrast, the most stable multiethnic republic, Switzerland, has prudently chosen to have no foreign policy whatsoever. To prevent civil war among its German, French, and Italian-speaking citizens during European wars, Switzerland espouses absolute neutrality backed by a well-entrenched defensive military.

Until this year, Armenian-Americans and Arab-Americans have enjoyed quite different track records of effectiveness in Washington. Americans of Armenian descent number only somewhat over one million, and boast but a single member of Congress. Still, they’ve organized a Congressional Caucus that at last count included 96 of the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Armenians, especially after they’ve spent a few decades in America, tend to become prosperous business owners and professionals. English novelist Evelyn Waugh called them “a race of rare competence.” Not surprisingly, they tilt Republican on taxes and regulation. The most successful Armenian-American politician was George Deukmejian, two-term Republican governor of California. About half live in that state, with the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale as their hub. Still, they are open to wooing by Democrats on Armenian issues, since they’re deeply devoted to the welfare of their fellow Armenians. For example, entertainment mogul Kirk Kerkorian recently gave more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help strengthen Armenia, which only regained it’s independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The Armenian lobby’s highest priority has been a nonbonding resolution instructing the President to refer to the 1915 massacre of Armenians living under the Turkish-run Ottoman Empire as a “genocide.” This election year it roared through the House International Relations committee on a 24-11 vote. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said that he believed it “would have enjoyed support among the majority of the House.” Moments from coming up for a vote, however, Hastert blocked it from consideration. He announced, “The President believes that passage of this resolution may adversely impact the situation in the Middle East and risk the lives of Americans.”

While disappointed at the setback, Ross Vartian, executive director of the Armenian Assembly of America said in an interview, “Time is definitely on our side on this issue.”

Although Arab-Americans outnumber Armenian-Americans roughly three to one, Arabs had been an under-achieving middleweight in ethnic pressure group politics. In contrast, they’ve done fairly well as individual politicians, achieving exactly the same representation in Congress as in the population. Currently, there is one Arab-American U.S. Senator, Republican Spencer Abraham of Michigan, and six members of the House, including John Sununu Jr., the son of the former New Hampshire Governor and Chief of Staff in George Bush’s White House. Arab-Americans have traditionally favored the Democrats on civil rights, since they often perceive themselves as victims of discrimination. They’ve preferred the Republicans on taxes, however, since they are somewhat more prosperous than the national average. Four of the seven Arab members of Congress are Democrats.

The majority of Arab Americans are Christian, as are all seven members of Congress. Muslims, whether Arab or not, may face something of a glass ceiling. Although Muslims and Jews are now fairly equal in the U.S. population with around six million each, no Muslim has yet made it above the state legislator level.

Christian Arabs, however, have assimilated so well into the American melting pot that a list of famous Arab-Americans might appear to simply be a random selection of American celebrities. Many might not notice that rock legend Frank Zappa, quarterbacks Doug Flutie and Jeff George, disk jockey Casey Kasem, Health and Human Services cabinet secretary Donna Shalala, pollster John Zogby, and Indianapolis 500 winner Bobby Rahal are all Arab-Americans. Even Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek is half Lebanese.

Yet, despite all this individual accomplishment, as a group Arab-Americans have lagged far behind their rivals in clout. In a modern America enthralled with multiculturalism, however, American-born Christian-Arabs may blend in too well to achieve much group power.

Peter Abajian of the Armenian Assembly of America is a sympathetic observer of Arab-Americans’ struggle for political power. He says Armenians tend to be grateful to Arabs. After the massacres of 1915, many Armenians found refuge in Arab lands that were also rebelling against Turkey’s Ottoman Empire.

The most important cause of the difference in lobbying effectiveness, Abajian believes, is that the Arab-American community doesn’t come from any one place. In contrast, the Armenians of America come, originally, from one compact nation. The Arab homelands range from Morocco in the West to Iraq in the East and from Lebanon in the North to Yemen in the South. Arabs are also divided into Muslims and Christians, with further subdivisions into Protestant and Roman, Orthodox and Coptic Catholic. In contrast, most Armenians belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Abajian offers this advice to any ethnic lobby: “Put forward issues you believe are in America’s best interest.”

Guler Koknar, a spokeswoman for the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, adds another reason Armenians have done so well in rallying Congress. Turkish-Americans are a tiny and politically inactive immigrant group. There are only about one fourth as many Turks as Armenians in America. Turkish mass blue-collar emigration has gone to Europe, leaving only a well-educated elite to head for America. Here, they’ve spread out across the country too much to obtain critical mass in any one district. Also, the U.S. State Department has long endorsed Turkey, our fellow ally in NATO, as a model for what the U.S. hopes the rest of the Islamic world will someday become. Therefore, Koknar says, “Turkish-Americans didn’t feel much need to organize.”

If the Armenian-American lobby is a hard-punching bantamweight dominating a listless Turkish featherweight, the Arab-American interest group was long an underachieving middleweight that barely ever laid a glove on the undisputed heavyweight champion of ethnic lobbies. Fortune Magazine’s 1999 survey of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington listed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as number four. No other ethnic or foreign-oriented organization made this list of 114.

Anti-Arab prejudice was so strong that in 1984 Democratic Presidential nominee Walter Mondale actually returned campaign contributions from Arab-Americans to avoid alienating Jewish-Americans. Interestingly, Senator Joseph Lieberman is respected by Arab lobbyists for playing a key role in getting the 1992 Clinton campaign to treat Arab Democrats with respect.

Nonetheless, the Jewish Vice Presidential nominee’s place on Democratic ticket appears to be undermining Al Gore’s appeal to the Arab-American rank and file. Although Clinton won handily among Arabs in 1996, Gore trails Bush 40% to 28% in the latest Zogby poll. This poll was conducted even before Bush’s now famous appeal to Arabs. Ralph Nader, the son of Lebanese immigrants, is third with 16%. Only 50% of those who say they voted for Clinton last time think they’ll vote for Gore in 2000.

Osama Siblani is the publisher of the Arab American News in Dearborn, Michigan, the capital of Arab America. “Lieberman’s culture and religion are embedded,” he comments. “Lieberman is already committed to Israel in his soul.”

Why does this long dismissed minority suddenly matter? The spasm of interest in Arab-Americans stems from their being concentrated in states with large numbers of electoral votes. One third of all Arab-Americans live in California, New York, and Michigan. In Michigan they make up about 4% of the vote. There’s even a remote chance that in an extremely tight election, Michigan’s Arab community could decide who is the next President.

The influence of Arab-Americans is likely to fade temporarily after the election, when Michigan is no longer the center of the political universe. Nonetheless, the continued influx of Arab immigrants means that in the words of Daniel Pipes, the Jewish editor of the Middle East Quarterly, “The vector of Arab-American power is up, and fast.”

The success of Arab-Americans this year in rallying heavyweight politicians against “secret evidence” may mark a turning point in the long, previously one-sided political struggle between Arabs and Jews in the U.S. Arab-Americans seem to be on the verge of wining on an issue opposed by leading Jewish powerhouses. On May 23, the Anti-Defamation League gave testimony before Congress, co-signed by the American Jewish Congress and B’nai B’rith, in favor of keeping some version of secret evidence.

There is some room for compromise on secret evidence and airport profiling. A Jewish counter-terrorism researcher suggested, for example, that airport security personnel should be trained to be more courteous. Nonetheless, anti-terrorism policy remains essentially a zero-sum contest between Arab-Americans and Jewish-Americans. The stronger the measures, the more innocent Arabs who will be harassed. The weaker the measures, the more Jews who are threatened by political violence.

Besides their ever-increasing numbers, Arab-Americans are gaining power because they’ve now mastered the traditional liberal Jewish vocabulary that elevates what might seem like practical clashes in power politics into tests of moral principle. On secret evidence and airport profiling, Arab lobbies have put Jewish organizations in the uncomfortable position of championing law and order over civil liberties, racial equality, and immigrants’ rights.

As mass immigration makes America more multicultural, the number and strength of new ethnic lobbies grows. This will have long-term consequences for the interests of traditional top dogs. Jewish-Americans are especially likely to lose a certain amount of power. The American Jewish Committee forecasts that the Jewish-American population will fall by one third over the next 80 years, reducing Jews to well under 1% of a population swelling to over 500 million due to immigration

Pipes, a fervent supporter of Israel, argues that the globalization of the American population will work to make American policy toward Israel more like the world norm. “Internationally, the anti-Israeli forces have been stronger. Domestically, the pro-Israeli forces have been stronger. That balance will be challenged in the future.”

Some of these predictions from 2000 seem pretty prescient in describing the post-October 7, 2023 world of Zohran Mamdani and America’s war with Iran.

While it’s conceivable that America might respond to multiculturalism by adopting the Swiss solution of not pestering anyone abroad in order to maintain tranquility at home, the trend seems to have been in the opposite direction. Further, the end of the Cold War has meant that the organizing logic behind American foreign interventions is gone, leaving foreign policy up for grabs among competing power groups. As America’s population becomes more of a scale model of the world’s, all of humanity’s conflicts will have their passionate partisans within the U.S. It should make for interesting times.

Then three days later on October 26, 2000, I put on my polemical hat for VDARE:

Bore vs. Gush on Racial Profiling

Steve Sailer

10/26/2000

Something that was said during the October 11 Bush-Gore Debate II struck me profoundly.

Well, actually, that’s a bald-faced lie. Barely anything either candidate said during the entire debate has even lodged in my memory.

But Peter Brimelow insisted I read what the two candidates had to say about racial profiling. And here are excerpts from their scintillating slam-bang exchange:

Tweedledee: “Because, imagine what it, what it is like for someone to be singled out unfairly, unjustly and feel the unfair force of law simply because of race or ethnicity.”

Tweedledum: “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be singled out because of race and stopped and harassed.”

This debate over racial profiling shows how utterly divorced American political discourse has become from personal reality. Every single person who lives in a diverse part of the country racially profiles every other pedestrian as he walks down the street at night. Jesse Jackson notoriously admitted that he does exactly that – and sighs with relief when he finds that the footsteps following him don’t belong to a young black male.

The reason we all do this is simple: African Americans commit far more violent crimes than anybody else. For example, according to official Clinton Administration statistics, in 1998 on a per capita basis blacks were seven times more murderous than whites. And this ratio is down significantly from the early nineties when the black crack wars were blazing. [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm]

Indeed, the black-white ratio would be even higher if the FBI didn’t insist upon counting most Hispanics as whites. This obfuscatory tactic makes it hard to break out precise crime figures for Hispanic groups. Most estimates place their rates of violence as well below those of African Americans – but well above those of whites. For example, Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times on August 10, 2000 that Hispanics are imprisoned at a rate three times higher than “Anglo” whites.

Actually, now I come to think about it, I do recall meeting one (1) man who never engaged in racial profiling. At a wedding reception in 1985, I got to talking with someone from Grant’s Pass, Oregon. He was most upset by how whites (other than himself) worried more about black muggers than muggers of other races. “That’s pure racism!” he insisted.

I proposed to him a thought experiment. Say your wife’s car runs out of gas in the middle of the night in a desolate neighborhood. She has no idea which way to walk to find a gas station. However, if she walks one way she has to pass by a half dozen black youths lounging on a corner. If she walks the other way, she would have to pass by a half dozen Indian immigrant youths. Which way would you prefer she went?

“I would be completely indifferent,” he replied.

“Well, then, for your sake, I’m glad you live in Grass Pants, Oregon.”

“Where I live is irrelevant!” he responded triumphantly. “I’ve already been mugged three times!”

I was quite defeated by his logic.

The plain fact is that cultural diversity and human biodiversity are decisive in predicting who will commit crimes. Men are an order of magnitude more likely to commit crimes than women. Old people and children commit enormously fewer than post-pubescents. Blacks are a couple of orders of magnitude more likely to commit violent crimes than Japanese Americans. Etc. etc.

Thus there are only two alternatives to “racial profiling.”

• The cops could abandon proactive attempts to prevent suspicious characters from committing crimes. Instead, they could retreat to a completely reactive posture.

• Or they could institute racial quotas. They could randomly stop whites and East Asians whom they are confident are no threat to the public safety in order to be allowed to occasionally stop the most dangerous-looking blacks and Hispanics.

In either case, the upshot will be the same: the long decline in crime rates, brought about by some fairly brutal in-your-face policing and a doubling of the number of jail inmates, is just about over. Thus the crime rate has already shot up in Los Angeles since the Ramparts “civil rights” scandal hamstrung the LAPD.

Whoever gets elected in November, the same “solution” is coming to your town.

And, of course, here’s the article I wrote for UPI on the evening of September 11, 2001, which I often repost on round number anniversaries of 9/11:

Bush had called for laxer airport security

by Steve Sailer

UPI, September 11, 2001

With the surfeit of events, it was actually published a few days later. But I wrote it the evening of 9/11.

LOS ANGELES, Sep. 11 -- Ironically, in an attempt to appeal to the growing number of Arab-American and Muslim voters, exactly eleven months ago George W. Bush called for weakening airport security procedures aimed at deterring hijackers.

On Oct. 11, 2000, during the second presidential debate, the Republican candidate attacked two anti-terrorist policies that had long irritated Arab citizens of the U.S.

At present [i.e., the evening of 9/11], of course, there is no definite evidence that Arabs or Muslims were involved in today’s terrorist assaults. Many incorrectly assumed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that Middle Easterners were involved. Nor is there direct evidence that Bush’s attack on airline safety procedures made the four simultaneous hijackings easier to pull off.

Bush said during the nationally televised debate, “Arab-Americans are racially profiled in what’s called secret evidence. People are stopped, and we got to do something about that.” Then-Governor Bush went on, “My friend, Sen. Spence Abraham [the Arab-American Republican Senator from Michigan], is pushing a law to make sure that, you know, Arab-Americans are treated with respect. So racial profiling isn’t just an issue at the local police forces. It’s an issue throughout our society. And as we become a diverse society, we’re going to have to deal with it more and more.”

Bush’s plug for Senator Abraham was intended to help Abraham in close re-election battle, which he ultimately lost. (Abraham is now the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Energy.) More important personally to Bush was the swing state of Michigan’s 18 electoral votes, which Al Gore eventually won narrowly. Arab-Americans, centered in Dearborn and Flint, make up about four percent of the population of Michigan, the most of any state.

In the debate, Bush conflated two separate policies that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans felt discriminate against them: the heightened suspicions faced by Middle Eastern-looking travelers at airport security checkpoints and the government’s use of “secret evidence” in immigration hearings of suspected terrorists. Yet, despite Bush’s confusion, Arab-Americans appreciated his gesture. Four days after the debate, the Arab-American Political Action Committee endorsed Bush.

The day after Bush’s remarks, 17 American sailors died in a terrorist attack in the Arab nation of Yemen. The bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, however, did not stop Vice President Al Gore from echoing Bush’s calls to end these two anti-terrorist techniques in a meeting with Arab-American leaders on October 14, 2000.

According to a spokesperson for a leading Arab-American organization, people of Arab descent are stopped and searched at airports more often than many other ethnic groups. Some refer to this as Flying While Arab or Flying While Muslim. These terms are intended as plays on the popular phrase “Driving While Black,” which is widely used to criticize police departments for stopping more black than white motorists.

This year, both Bush and his Attorney General John Ashcroft have called for an end to racial profiling.

The Federal Aviation Administration provides airline and airport personnel with the Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening system to help them identify suspicious travelers. It relies on a secret profile of the characteristics of typical hijackers and terrorists.

Bush’s Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has said that “the security procedures are not based on the race, ethnicity, religion or gender of passengers” Yet, the system is widely believed to use other information - such as whether the traveler is going to or coming from the Middle East - that tends to “disparately impact” Arab and Muslims.

None of the ethnic rights groups, however, has offered any data to dispute the widespread assumption that in the three decades since the Palestine Liberation Organization invented skyjacking, a disproportionate number of hijackers and plane bombers have had Middle Eastern ties.

Nonetheless, the Bush Administration publicly agrees with the civil rights organizations that even a nonracial airport profiling system that had merely a disparate impact on Arabs and Muslims would be objectionable. Secretary Mineta said, “We also want to assure that in practice, the system does not disproportionately select members of any particular minority group.” Of course, if Arabs and Muslims are disproportionately more likely to hijack airliners, and the profiling system does not end up disproportionately targeting them, then system wouldn’t work very well at preventing hijackings.

To ensure that no disparate impact is occurring, the Bush Administration carried out in June a three-week study, first planned by the Clinton Administration, of whether or not profiling at the Detroit airport disparately impacts Arabs.

The results of the study have not been released. Nor is it known whether the secret profiles have been relaxed - they are kept secret in order to keep hijackers guessing.

However, on June 6th Attorney General Ashcroft told Congress, “We want the right training, we want the right kind of discipline, we want the right kind of detection measures and the right kind of remediation measures, because racial profiling doesn’t belong in the federal government’s operational arsenal.”

Besides airport profiling, Arab-American activists long demanded the repeal of the “secret evidence” section of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. To prevent terrorist gangs from murdering U.S. government secret informants, this law allows the government to provide evidence from unidentified moles in the immigration hearings of foreigners suspected of terrorist links. The government has deported or detained a number of Arabs hoping to immigrate to the U.S. due to testimony by witnesses they were never allowed to confront.

Although Abraham’s bill repealing the use of secret evidence died in 2000, during his confirmation hearing, Ashcroft endorsed the ban on secret evidence. He told Congress in June that the Bush Administration has not used secret evidence.

As the practice has come under increasing attack, the number of Arab immigrants detained on secret evidence has dropped sharply. Hussein Ibish of the American Arab Anti-discrimination Committee told UPI in June, “Two years ago there were 25 in prison,” he said. “Now we’re down to only one.”

I dunno, but 25 years later, this article still strikes me (at least) as fairly relevant when thinking about several of the major events and issues of the 21st Century, such as 9/11, Mayor Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy in New York that appears to have lowered crime there long-term, and Black Lives Matter. But practically nobody ever remembers this Bush Administration anti-racial profiling policy that Bush promised in a debate with Al Gore that was watched by tens of millions.

Then, about five years later, we heard from the airport ticket clerk who checked in Mohamed Atta for his initial flight on 9/11 out of Portland, Maine.

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After all, the Clinton, Obama, and Biden Administrations all had the opportunity to instruct the Census Bureau that, as proved by The Science, Race Does Not Exist. So stop counting people by race.

Yet, they passed up that opportunity.

Now, however, the Trump Administration’s Commerce Department has more or less called the Race Does Not Exist crowd’s bluff by announcing it will be instructing the Census Bureau to stop including race and ethnicity check boxes on the 2030 Census.

From the New York Times news desk:

Trump’s Census Overhaul Would Exclude Some Immigrants and Remove Questions on Race

The proposals for 2030 are among significant changes that would upend a process for helping allot congressional seats and shape policies that address disparities.

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs

Zolan Kanno-Youngs covers the White House. He reported from Washington.

Sept. 9, 2026, 6:42 p.m. ET

The Trump administration on Wednesday proposed to no longer count immigrants without green cards in the 2030 census or ask about race and ethnicity, part of an overhaul that would redefine who counts as a U.S. resident in the eyes of the federal government.

The sweeping measures would upend a process that helps determine the allotment of congressional seats, billions of dollars in federal funding and policies to address systemic disparities.

The proposed regulation, published online on Wednesday, would not count noncitizens without green cards in the 2030 census, a significant departure from the process stipulated by the Constitution to occur every 10 years. Historically, the census has asked Americans about their race and ethnicity and counted all U.S. residents regardless of their immigration status.

The overhaul also would bar the U.S. census from asking Americans about their sexual orientation.

The decennial Census has not asked about sexual orientation, just about domestic partnerships. But the Biden Administration was planning to add sexual orientation questions to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.

The Washington Post news report argues that, hey, wait Race Does Exist when it comes to health, so we need to count it:

Civil rights and public health groups have also warned against the removal of questions about race and ethnicity from the Census, saying doing so would hamper officials’ ability to address health disparities, starting with how to appropriately allocate federal funding.

“If you change what the census counts, then you change where the money can help most,” Vi D. Le and Melanie Klein of the Federation of American Scientists wrote last week.

“Removing race and ethnicity data does not make health disparities go away,” they wrote. “It merely makes them harder to find, harder to measure, and harder to fix.”

The Commerce Department argues:

Separate from these aforementioned [apportionment] mandates, the decennial census questionnaires historically have also been used as a vehicle for collecting demographic information about the population of the United States. … in general, the more questions that are included on the decennial census questionnaire, the lower the overall response rate. …

Furthermore, each demographic question that is included on the decennial census increases the likelihood that the data of certain people who do respond will be identifiable in the resulting published data, in violation of their privacy and the law. … The more data that the Census Bureau publishes, the higher the risk that a particular respondent’s data can be identified, and the more uncertainty the Census Bureau must introduce into the data to reduce risk.

For example, the CDC mortality database that I frequently make graphs out of has a rule that it won’t report any number less than 10 to keep Nosey Parkers from using it to look up whether their neighbor’s death was a suicide or a drug overdose or a died of cirrhosis or whatever. I believe you could get around this restriction with enough work, but it probably discourages the great majority of privacy invasions. (Of course, in the age of AI, I could imagine somebody in the future selling TMZ on a system for looking up the official cause of death of every celebrity.)

In addition to disclosure risk, the Census Bureau also is considering the (potentially) sensitive nature of questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Substantial doubts about the meaning, significance, and impact of attempting to categorize persons by race and ethnicity, in particular, have featured prominently in our national discourse and have been reflected in shifts in the law. See, e.g., Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181, 276–77 (2023) (Thomas, J., concurring) (describing race as a “social construct” based on “ephemeral, socially constructed categories” that “are little more than stereotypes”);

This is from Clarence Thomas’s eloquent concurring opinion in the 2023 Supreme Court decision in which Harvard’s affirmative action policies were outlawed. Thomas wrote in 2023:

Applicants denied admission to certain colleges may come to believe—accurately or not—that their race was responsible for their failure to attain a life-long dream. These individuals, and others who wished for their success, may resent members of what they perceive to be favored races, believing that the successes of those individuals are unearned.

What, then, would be the endpoint of these affirmative action policies? Not racial harmony, integration, or equality under the law. Rather, these policies appear to be leading to a world in which everyone is defined by their skin color, demanding ever-increasing entitlements and preferences on that basis. Not only is that exactly the kind of factionalism that the Constitution was meant to safeguard against, see The Federalist No. 10 (J. Madison), but it is a factionalism based on ever-shifting sands.

That is because race is a social construct; we may each identify as members of particular races for any number of reasons, having to do with our skin color, our heritage, or our cultural identity. And, over time, these ephemeral, socially constructed categories have often shifted. For example, whereas universities today would group all white applicants together, white elites previously sought to exclude Jews and other white immigrant groups from higher education. In fact, it is impossible to look at an individual and know definitively his or her race; some who would consider themselves black, for example, may be quite fair skinned.

And yet Americans have relatively few controversies or scandals over who qualifies as black for affirmative action purposes, unlike Brazilians, or unlike the large number of white academics who have claimed to be American Indians with zero or negligible DNA evidence, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Yet, university admissions policies ask individuals to identify themselves as belonging to one of only a few reductionist racial groups. With boxes for only “black,” “white,” “Hispanic,” “Asian,” or the ambiguous “other,” how is a Middle Eastern person to choose?

The traditional Census instruction has been:

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From Chalkbeat:

U.S. moves up in PISA test score rankings because other countries are doing worse

By Matt Barnum and Erica Meltzer | September 8, 2026, 12:31am PDT

In the early 2000s, politicians and pundits were swept up in anxiety about U.S. performance on a key international test known as PISA. Delegations traveled to learn from high-achieving countries like Finland. Journalists and researchers wrote books on the topic. Leaders like President Obama bemoaned the country’s dire results.

From 2013 onward, I pointed out that the U.S. did pretty well on PISA scores, adjusted for racial results. U.S. Asians tended to score as well as northeast Asian countries, U.S. whites tended to score at least as well as European countries, and U.S. Hispanics and blacks tended to scores better than Hispanic and black countries.

The good news from the latest PISA results, released Tuesday, is that the U.S. has gained relative standing in recent decades. Today, U.S. students score well above average in science and reading. Math scores, long America’s weakest subject, are now on par with other developed countries.

The bad news is how this happened. The U.S. has steadily moved up largely because other countries’ scores have deteriorated faster than ours over the last decade. A bevy of data points show American students are learning less than they used to. Even U.S. PISA scores in math and reading are at or near their lowest level.

Tuesday’s international release suggests student achievement is not something that only the U.S. is struggling with. Whatever factors are driving down scores here — and academics aren’t sure what those are — might also be affecting children elsewhere.

“There’s an ongoing global decline, and it seems like the pandemic has a long, long tail,” said Tracey Burns, chief of global strategy and research at the National Center on Education and the Economy, an organization that studies education systems globally.

The declines in reading proficiency are particularly concerning, Burns said, due to the role reading plays “not just in scholastic and later life success, but also democracy and civic participation.”

Scores have declined across the globe with smaller dips in U.S.

PISA is an international test administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to 15-year-olds from countries across the world. Thousands of American students from dozens of schools sat for the exam last year. PISA tests problem solving skills in math, reading, and science. Each test is scored on a scale of 0 to 500, with roughly 60-70 points representing the difference between proficiency levels.

U.S. scores were reported with an asterisk — literally. OECD chose to report the U.S. results but warned that because of incomplete responses from schools, it “is not possible to rule out bias in PISA performance results, nor to determine its most likely direction.” That means U.S. students might be doing better or worse than the test results suggest.

While many countries have some issues with sampling, only Albania’s results were flagged with a similar level of uncertainty this year.

If you can’t do better than Albania …

In most countries, math and reading scores fell sharply between 2022 and 2025, which follows similar drops between 2018 and 2022.

“Learning outcomes have stagnated or declined in many countries, in some cases for well over a decade, and gaps in achievement persist across socioeconomic groups,” wrote OECD’s Andreas Schleicher.

Singapore, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada were among a handful of countries that scored better than average on all four tests.

In the U.S., reading scores fell, but math and science results were essentially flat between 2022 and 2025. Seventy-four percent of American 15-year-olds reached basic proficiency in reading, compared to 69% among 38 relatively affluent countries that are part of the OECD. In math, U.S. proficiency was 65%, the same as the OECD average.

These are more encouraging proficiency rates than those reported by the U.S. federal government on the widely cited NAEP test. This reflects the subjective nature of measuring mastery.

U.S. students scored above average on a new test measuring computational problem solving skills in the digital age. American students were also less likely than those in other countries to hastily respond to questions, indicating that most 15-year-olds here took the exam seriously.

By some measures, the U.S. has unusually unequal educational results. The gap between the top and bottom performers in science and reading was larger in the U.S. than most other countries.

Ya kidding me?

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An Award for Scholars Who Tell the Truth

The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage will honor social scientists who face unjustified attacks.

By Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman

Mr. Fryer, a Journal contributor, is a professor of economics at Harvard, a founder of Equal Opportunity Ventures and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Ackman is CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management.

Dr. Fryer was for awhile the highest paid professor at Harvard College (some of Harvard’s professional schools have higher pay) because he’d bring in lots of funding for research projects from hard-headed rich guys like Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But a lot of people at Harvard found him a loose cannon who’d report findings that didn’t agree with Black Lives Matter orthodoxy. He got Me-Tooed and suspended without pay for two years by Claudine Gay.

Sept. 7, 2026 4:22 pm ET

One of us (Mr. Fryer) released a study in 2016—later published in the Journal of Political Economy—finding that police aren’t more likely to shoot black Americans than white Americans, after accounting for the relevant context.

My impression is that planned-ahead suicide-by-cop is more of a white thing than a black thing, so whites get shot by cops disproportionately more often than whites shoot cops or civilians.

Colleagues who read the draft warned him not to publish: “You’ll ruin your career.” The paper was denounced on social media within minutes of release, and Mr. Fryer needed armed protection for more than a month. Privately, scholars who read the study called it rigorous, honest work. Publicly, many of the same scholars said nothing. No single study settles a question this large—but silence isn’t how science advances.

That silence is the problem—a cultural and an economic one. When the professional cost of publishing an unwelcome finding exceeds the cost of suppressing it, rational scholars suppress it. The result is that social-science literature reflects what researchers are permitted to say rather than what they actually discover. The scope of the problem is difficult to measure, because its most important effects are invisible—though the data we have suggest it is getting worse. In a 2024 survey of more than 6,000 professors by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 35% said they had toned down their written work for fear of controversy—roughly four times the share of social scientists who admitted the same at the height of McCarthyism.

Over the past decade, Mr. Fryer has met with hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students—careful, talented, serious scholars—who came not to discuss what they had found but to ask whether they were allowed to say it. “Can I publish this?” has become a common question. So has “Can I say this in public?”

These students had results. They had run the regressions, conducted the robustness checks, and done the work. What they lacked was confidence that those results would be received as anything other than a provocation, with their motives impugned. Some buried the findings. Some chose different dissertation topics entirely. We can’t calculate the discoveries that never happened. The papers that were never written. The policies that were never corrected because someone decided the cost of honesty was too high. Deciding which answers are acceptable before the investigation begins isn’t solidarity. It is sentimentality. And sentimentality has never closed an achievement gap, reduced an infant mortality rate, or lifted anyone out of poverty.

Mr. Fryer raised the alarm about suppression of inconvenient findings in a November 2024 Wall Street Journal essay. He called for something like a MacArthur Fellowship or an X Prize for academic truth-telling. The prize should be large enough to matter, prestigious enough to serve as a public credential for scholars who were right when it was costly to be right. Shortly after that piece ran, we found each other and decided to launch the Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage.

The prize awards $1 million each to as many as five social scientists a year who have demonstrated intellectual independence, published findings that were attacked rather than answered, and been validated by the evidence—despite the professional cost. The selection criteria are designed to distinguish courage from contrarianism: Nominees must show a sustained commitment to following logic and evidence regardless of pressure, a willingness to ask questions others avoid, and work that has shifted academic debate, public discourse or policy—often despite being misread, mischaracterized or vilified at the time of publication.

The inaugural prize is limited to the social sciences; in future years we hope to broaden it to additional disciplines and to add a category for institutional leadership. Nominations are open through Nov. 1, and the first winners will be announced in early 2027.

… The scholars we want to honor include the researcher who finds that systemic racism is the primary driver of a given disparity and is dismissed by colleagues who don’t want to hear it. They include the health economist whose data on genetics and disease are weaponized by people she never meant to arm. They include anyone whose careful social-science work, wherever it leads, has been met with organized suppression rather than organized rebuttal. The test isn’t the conclusion. The test is the quality of the work, the hostility of the reception, and the verdict of the evidence over time.

We have tried to make this structurally resistant to capture from either direction. The selection committee spans the ideological spectrum. Members include the Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Eric Maskin, the Johns Hopkins sociologist Stefanie DeLuca and the Brown University economist Glenn Loury. Many of them have paid a professional price of their own for following evidence to uncomfortable places. They don’t share politics. They share an epistemology: that a finding isn’t made wrong by being unwelcome and isn’t made right by being convenient. Mr. Fryer chairs the committee; no one on it is eligible for the prize, and Mr. Ackman, who funds it, has no vote on winners. A prize that requires consensus among people who disagree about nearly everything is harder to pull toward any one agenda than a prize administered by allies. We view this as a feature, not a complication.

… But we deeply agree on the most important principle: You can’t help people you don’t understand. Bad data have victims, and they are rarely the professors. They are the families who can’t buy their way out of a failing school or an unsafe street. The scientific method isn’t a political position. Treating it as one is how America loses.

We are under no illusion that a prize can change culture overnight. What it can do is change the career calculus at the margin—for the graduate student wondering whether a question is too risky, the junior professor deciding whether to submit a finding that will generate angry emails, the senior scholar who has quietly stopped asking the questions he once did. We aren’t telling them to be brave. We are trying to make doing their jobs less expensive.

Here are the selection criteria:

The Prize is bestowed by an independent committee of leading scholars according to the following criteria:

Intellectual Independence: A proven commitment to following logic and evidence wherever they lead, regardless of academic or political pressure.

Non-Conformist Ideas: Originality and boldness of research agenda. Willingness to ask questions that others avoid—whether uncomfortable, underfunded, or unfashionable.

Impact and Vindication: Work of excellent quality that has shifted academic debate, public discourse, or policy. Evidence that ideas criticized at the time have proven—through data, replication, or influence—to possess enduring value.

Process:

The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage will take a nominee’s life’s work into account. Scholars who are earlier in their careers might be considered for a smaller prize.

Nominations for the Prize can be submitted through the Nomination Portal, linked above. Nominators will be asked for short statements on candidates’ fitness as outlined by the selection criteria. Nominators may submit multiple candidates for consideration. Candidates may not nominate themselves.

The scope of the academic work considered for the inaugural 2027 Prize will be limited to the social sciences. The Committee will seek external experts as needed to properly evaluate submissions.

Only living nominees will be considered. Candidates must be citizens or legal residents of the United States.

You can nominate somebody here.

Nominations close November 1, 2026.

Who deserves a prize?

Off the top of my head, I’d say that sexologist Ray Blanchard deserves a prize for making a major discovery of what’s behind much of transgenderism — autogynephilia — for which he has been subjected to decades of abuse by autogynephiliacs trying to keep the public ignorant of the truth.

(Ray is American-born but has been at the U. of Toronto for a long time, so I don’t know if he qualifies. I’d argue that courage in social scientists is rare enough these days that the clause restricting the winners to American citizens or legal residents might be overly restrictive.)

Who would you nominate? List your suggestions in my comments.

If you feel strongly about your candidate, go ahead and nominate him or her to the Carob Trust.

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It happened on network television, so it ought to have been obvious, even to intellectuals.

It appears that up through the 1960s, American journalists focused instead on black achievements in sports as simple triumphs of equality of opportunity.

But then blacks kept on keeping on getting better, which raised more difficult questions about what came to be called in the 1990s human biodiversity. When I asked Google Gemini, it pointed me toward a January 1971 article in Sports Illustrated by Martin Kane as an early landmark in serious thinking about black superiority in American sports.

It’s hard to find Kane’s article in SI online, so I’ll post it in its entirety here. Then I’ll follow it after the paywall with a 1977 mainstream article on the same topic.

I can’t recall if I ever read this 1971 Sports Illustrated article. I was a fanatical SI subscriber from about 1972-1976, and I may have read this article in the stacks in my high school library. Or I might not have. But it’s reasonably representative of my intellectual development.

From Sports Illustrated 55 years ago:

Jan 18, 1971

AN ASSESSMENT OF ‘BLACK IS BEST’

Is the black athlete a long stride better than his white counterpart? And if not, what accounts for the immense success of the black in American sport during the past two decades? Scientists are searching for the answers to such questions and, as they probe for true racial distinctions, fascinating theories have evolved, many of them controversial.

Martin Kane

Kane was an editor for Sports Illustrated who also reported on boxing, especially Muhammad Ali, and fishing. He retired the year he wrote this article, so this might have been a swan song where he didn’t worry about having his career cancelled.

The success of the black athlete in America is even greater than Branch Rickey thought it might be on that day in the 1940s when he was inspired to introduce to baseball’s cloistered world the very special skills of Jackie Robinson. Until then the black man had won sporting prestige primarily in prizefighting and in track, and not too much in track, because college coaches then were recruiting few black athletes.

But consider what has happened since Jackie Robinson jogged out to first base at Ebbets Field:

•In basketball three of the five players named to the 1969-70 All-NBA team were black, as were all five of the players named to the All-Rookie team. Blacks have won the league’s Most Valuable Player award 12 times in the past 13 seasons.

•In pro football all four 1969 Rookie of the Year awards for offense and defense were won by blacks.

•In baseball black men have won the National League’s MVP award 16 times in the past 22 seasons.

The National League lagged behind the American League in talent from Ty Cobb’s arrival in 1905, so it integrated faster after WWII. Over the same time period, the AL’s first African-American MVP was Elston Howard in 1963, followed by Frank Robinson, newly arrived from the NL, in 1966. The mixed race Zoilo Versailles was the AL’s first Latin MVP in 1965.

•Twenty-six years ago there were no blacks on any of the big-league basketball, football or baseball professional team rosters, though on rare occasions in the past, basketball, baseball and football had used black players. Today there are 150 blacks out of 600 players in major league baseball, 330 out of 1,040 in football and 153 out of 280 in basketball. Of the players on the professional leagues’ 1969-70 all-star teams, 36% in baseball were black, 44% in football and 63% in basketball.

It is clear that the black community in the U.S. is not just contributing more than its share of participants to sport. It is contributing immensely more than its share of stars. Black athletes accounted for all eight Olympic records set by U.S. runners at Mexico City in 1968, which led a European coach to observe: “If not for the blacks, the U.S. team would finish somewhere behind Ecuador.”

Interestingly, American 100m sprint men won Olympic gold in 1952 and 1956 and silver in 1960 (SF 49er superstar running back Christian McCaffrey’s grandfather Dr. Dave Sime). But since 1964, no white American has been one of the 3 American Olympic qualifiers in the 100 meters.

Hence, while in retrospect, the domination of NFL rushing by Jim Brown in the late 1950s and much of the 1960s seems obvious evidence of black athletic supremacy, at the time Brown seemed more like an idiosyncratic fluke, no more than Babe Ruth’s batting records seemed evidence of German-American supremacy.

In contrast, O.J. Simpson’s spectacular college career at USC in 1967-68 seemed like the herald of the era of black supremacy.

As American black athletes have achieved world recognition they have stirred competitive instincts in their ancestral Africa. Africa’s first Gallup-type poll was taken in 1965. Seven thousand Africans were asked what man—politician, writer or sportsman—would they consider as African of the Year. Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila, first black African ever to win an Olympic gold medal—he won the marathon in 1960 and ‘64—was elected. Now he has lots of victorious company. In the 1968 Games, Ethiopia’s Mamo Wolde won the marathon, and three Kenyans—Kipchoge Keino, Naftali Temu and Amos Biwott—took gold medals in the 1,500 meters, the 10,000 meters and the steeplechase respectively.

The 1968 Olympics were held in Mexico City at 7,200 feet of elevation, about the same height as in the Kenyan highlands. In the 1500m, Kip Keino outraced the greatest American miler, Jim Ryun. I would guess that Ryun would have won at a more reasonable altitude, but Keino’s victory excited Kenyan runners and depressed American runners for decades.

By the way, white American men runners have been doing impressive stuff in the 2020s, e.g., winning both Olympic golds in the 1500m, the 2024 race in perhaps the greatest race since Dave Wottle’s 800m gold in 1972.

Last I checked, five white Americans have sprinted under 10.00 seconds in the 100 meters, a huge improvement versus before this decade.

In the 1960 Games the emerging nations won one gold and one silver medal. In 1964 they took one gold and three bronze. In 1968 they won four gold, seven silver and three bronze medals. Indeed, at Mexico City only four men won more than a single medal in individual track events, and three of them were from black Africa—Keino, Wolde and Temu. The other was Mohamed Gammoudi of Tunisia. Overall, in men’s track and field, black runners and jumpers from Africa, the Americas and Europe accounted for 40 of 90 medals (including the relays), and they won 11 of the 24 events.

In only one sport, thoroughbred racing, has the role of the American black declined over the years. This was the first sport in which any considerable number of blacks became prominent. The first Kentucky Derby, run in 1875, had 15 jockeys, 14 of them black. In the first 28 runnings of the Derby black jockeys brought in 15 winners. The first jockey ever to win back-to-back Derbies was a Negro, Isaac Murphy, in 1890 and ‘91. His total of three Derby victories was unequaled for 39 years and unsurpassed for 57. Other noted black jockeys were Willie Simms, who won the Belmont in 1893 and ‘94, the Derby in 1896 and ‘98 and the Preakness in 1898, and Jimmy Winkfield, who won the Derby in 1901 and ‘02 and finished second and third in his other two rides.

Today there are no top American black jockeys and very few of any ranking. This has happened in part because, as one trainer puts it, “they have become too big.”

Slaveowners tried to hustle new mothers back into the cotton fields by having them wean their babies early. The 1970s book Time on the Cross suggested this meant blacks up through the Civil War tended to grow up to be fairly small.

It also happened because horse racing, a socially exclusive sport, at some point decided to exclude black riders from its hierarchy. Latin American jockeys are tops in thoroughbred racing now.

Despite Charlie Sifford, Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, golf and tennis have seen few outstanding black athletes—there is a marked shortage of country clubs in ghettos.

The Williams sisters of Compton, Venus and Serena, were conceived to be better than white women tennis players:

Nor does the young black have a significant opportunity to learn skiing, sailing, swimming or hockey. Environmental factors have a great deal to do with excellence in sport.

But so do physical differences, and there is an increasing body of scientific opinion which suggests that physical differences in the races might well have enhanced the athletic potential of the Negro in certain events.

This is not so much a matter of height and weight as of body proportions. Researchers have found that the black American, on the average, tends to have a shorter trunk, a more slender pelvis, longer arms (especially forearms) and longer legs (especially from the knees down) than his white counterpart. His bones are denser, and therefore heavier, than those of whites. He has more muscle in the upper arms and legs, less in the calves. There is reason to believe that his fat distribution is patterned differently from that of the white man—leaner extremities but not much difference in the trunk. And there is a trifle of evidence—this aspect has been studied so little that it still is in the highly speculative state—that the black man’s adrenal glands, a vital factor in many sports, are larger than the white man’s.

At the Rome Olympics in 1960, and previously at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in 1958, Dr. J. M. Tanner measured, photographed and X-rayed 137 track and field athletes and a number of weight lifters and wrestlers. His findings were reported in The Physique of the Olympic Athlete (George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., London). They concluded that “Amongst competitors in both track and field events there were large significant racial differences in leg length, arm length and hip width.”

Black sprinters, Tanner’s team found, averaged 86.2 centimeters in leg length while white sprinters averaged 83. Similar differences were noted in arm length, but the sitting height of the blacks averaged 92.5 compared with the whites’ 93.5. The blacks’ hip width averaged 26.8 centimeters, and the whites’, 28.5. “The ratio of leg length to sitting height for sprinters, 400-meter runners and high jumpers averaged 0.88, 0.92 and 0.93 in whites, and 0.93, 0.97 and 1.01 in Negroes,” they reported. “Evidently the Negroes have longer limbs and narrower hips than the whites, even at approximately the same overall size. In the comparison of Negro and white weight lifters exactly the same three differences occurred.”

Tanner’s group also discovered a “distinct difference in the composition of the Negro calf compared with that of the white, in both sprinters and 400-meter men. The Negroes have wider bones and narrower muscles. In the 400-meter competitors, for example, the Negro tibia breadth averages 4.5 centimeters compared with the white’s 4.2 cm.; in calf muscle breadth the Negroes average 7.4 cm. and the whites 7.9 cm. In fat also the Negroes are lower.

“In total arm circumference Negroes are just significantly greater than whites, and in total subcutaneous fat they are significantly less.

“Thus there are clearly racial differences in measurements, and we must not lump these different populations together,” Tanner reported.

Without reference to race, the study found that 400-meter men are large and marathon men small. Middle-distance runners tend to have long legs, marathoners short legs. Like their white counterparts, black sprinters are also relatively short-legged compared with black middle-distance runners.

“A short leg can be moved more rapidly than a long one,” the study observed. “Alternatively, the short legs may not be directly associated with the high speed but, indirectly, through an association with the large muscles also characteristic of the sprinter. In an analysis of the body measurements of ordinary students, we found that men with big muscles had relatively short legs. This comes about during growth as a result of muscular boys maturing and ceasing growth slightly earlier than others. As the legs are growing relatively faster than the trunk just before puberty, an early puberty deprives them of further increments more than it does the trunk. It is for the physical educationist to analyze whether the lever effect or the large muscle size is of greater importance in sprinting; practically, the two go together.

“This explanation would not hold for the long-distance runners; here it seems certain that short legs confer some mechanical and physiological advantage. The walkers also have short legs, and perhaps the speed of movement of the ankle is of first importance to them as to the sprinter. A long-legged man spends too much time with his feet in the air. The few 110-meter hurdlers, be it noted, do not have the short legs of their flat-racing companions. The hurdler has to clear the hurdles, and a center of gravity high above the ground is imperative for him. Only a very large hurdler indeed could afford to have short legs relative to his trunk. This is an event where one might expect, and within limits, one obtains, Negro predominance.”

Other studies found further physical differences in the races. Albert Damon of Harvard University’s department of anthropology, writing in Human Biology, reported on an anthropometric survey undertaken at Fort Devens, Mass. with respect to lung function. The study covered 529 Army drivers.

“On forced expiration,” the article reported, “the vital capacity of some 30 soldiers approached or exceeded the six-liter limit of the recording machine. Surprisingly, none of these 30 pulmonary athletes was a Negro, although at least five Negroes might have been expected, since 17% of the soldiers were Negroes and since the Negroes as a group seemed to try as hard as the whites, [and] were no smaller and were actually more muscular and stronger.”

While stressing the importance of social, cultural and motivational factors that have kept the black man from excelling in some sports, Dr. Edward E. Hunt Jr., professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, has noted that the black athlete has “hyperextensibility—or what the layman might call being double-jointed.”

“The Negro has more tendon and less muscle than the white,” he said. “The black man’s heel doesn’t protrude as much and his leg and foot give him tremendous leverage for jumping.”

On the other hand, since the black athlete tends to have less body fat, Dr. Hunt observed, his muscles tend to get chilled sooner in cold climates, and this might affect his performance in such sports as ice hockey, or football when played in extreme northern areas.

Then there is the theory of Lloyd (Bud) Winter, the former San Jose State track coach, who holds that black athletes “have a distinctive ability to relax under pressure.”

“Their antagonistic muscles—the muscles that extend—stay loose,” he says. “I remember one of my quarter-milers, Thelmo Knowles. I kept saying to him, automatically, to stay loose. One day Thelmo answered, ‘Coach, if I relax any more I’m going to fall in a heap.’

“What heritage or heredity brought the black athlete this ability to keep out tension, no one knows. Yet, prior to the big day the black athlete, as a rule, can go through his daily motions or his sleep period normally, and when the big moment comes he can react normally. In white athletes the conscious mind often takes over and the tensions mount.”

Winter makes the quite obvious point that black athletes differ from each other physically quite as much as whites do, regardless of the averages, which are what scientific studies are concerned with. He notes that Ray Norton, a sprinter, was tall and skinny with scarcely discernible hips, that Bobby Poynter, also a sprinter, was squat and dumpy with a swayback and a big butt, that Dennis Johnson was short and wiry, that Tommie Smith was tall and wiry, and so on. What they had in common, in Winter’s experience, was “that looseness and limberness.”

“I don’t mean agility here,” he explains. “I mean the quality of remaining limber, as you can note in the way they dance. A limber athlete has body control, and body control is part of athletic skill. It is obvious that many black people have some sort of head-start motor in them, but for now I can only theorize that their great advantage is relaxation under stress. As a class the black athletes that have trained with me are far ahead of the whites in that one factor—relaxation under pressure. It is their secret.”

A similar concept is held by Coach Stan Dowell of Silver Creek High School in San Jose, Calif., a man who has worked with Lee Evans, John Carlos, Tommie Smith and Clifton McNeil, among others.

“The black athletes,” he says, “have an ability to let their bodies go—you know, they hang everything loose. They walk loose, they dance loose, they are loose. You see it easily in their dancing. Their knees aren’t stiff.

“I’ve discussed this with Lee, Carlos and Smith—about letting their bodies go. I think it is linked with the suppressed life of the black man in America. Their emotions come out in their bodies, and we notice this kind of expression develops body muscle control. Have you noticed how, when they’re dancing or playing games, their heads seem to flop around? It’s magnificent.

“White kids haven’t had to live under an oppressive burden, but white kids are so much more aware of conventional things, of Emily Post and timetables and being right, or of being checked on by parents or teachers about doing right.”

In short, many authorities say that there are marked physical differences among athletes in the various sports and that blacks differ significantly from whites in some aspects—including the motivational and cultural—which permit them to exceed whites athletically in certain events.

Some extensive work in this area has been done by Dr. Robert M. Malina, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas. On the point of physical proportions Dr. Malina cites well-known findings which suggest that animals living in hot climates tend to have longer extremities and a lesser body mass in order to dissipate heat. With their long legs and arms, blacks have a greater surface area from which to dissipate heat through the skin.

(A striking example is to be found in the ear size of various types of foxes living in different climates. The Arctic fox has tiny ears, the common fox of the temperate zones slightly larger ones and the desert fox has very big ears, permitting him to radiate heat faster.)

Dr. Malina makes the point, too, that the American black is a member of a relatively recent taxonomic group that came into existence some 300 to 350 years ago. In speaking of differences between peoples, many anthropologists do not refer to races. They talk of populations. The so-called Negro race, a term now out of fashion, actually consists of many different kinds of peoples, ranging from the Watusi to the pygmy. Some break down the African populations into three groups: north of the Sahara, the 1,500-mile-wide arc south of the Sahara (black Africa) and the southern tip of the continent.

The black Africans on the east coast—the Ethiopians, Kenyans and others—have a genetic mix.

Keino is a man with black skin and many white features.

So is Bikila.

There were probably at least two In-To-Africa events since the last Ice Age with Middle Easterners bringing their herds south along the Rift highlands of East African and blending genetically with the locals. Since King Solomon’s Mines in 1885, English-speakers were interested in East Africans as their distant cousins.

It is a cliché in American track to say that black runners are good only in the sprints and the shorter runs, which is where they have distinguished themselves. This is not true of blacks from East Africa—but the American black’s ancestors came mostly from the west coast, where there was little genetic contact from outside. This area of Africa is pretty much isolated by ocean and desert. The American black athlete’s breeding is different from that of the East Africans, who often excel at distance running.

Altitude helps in distance running.

John Velzian, the British coach of the Kenya track team a few years ago when Keino was just coming into prominence, has noted (SI, Dec. 19, 1966) that there are not only physical but environmental differences among the tribes of Kenya, and these differences greatly affect an athlete’s ability to perform. But one thing they all have in common is severe living conditions.

The same is true of the bulk of American black athletes and their ancestors, both in this country and in Africa. Calvin Hill, black Yale graduate and Dallas Cowboys running back, puts it this way:

“I have a theory about why so many pro stars are black. I think it all boils down to the survival of the fittest. Think of what the African slaves were forced to endure in this country merely to survive. Well, black athletes are their descendants. They are the offspring of those who are physically and mentally tough enough to survive.”

My favorite Calvin Hill story: In the mid-1960s, he’s leading the Yale football team around on the first day of classes, looking for easy courses. In one classroom, he sees W.

Hill tells his teammates: “Hey, look, there’s George Bush! This class has gotta be a piece of cake.”

Lee Evans, Olympic and world 400-meter record holder, agrees. Asked why black Americans have produced so extraordinarily disproportionate a number of the highest-class athletes in the world, he replies:

“We were bred for it. Certainly the black people who survived in the slave ships must have contained a high proportion of the strongest. Then, on the plantations, a strong black man was mated with a strong black woman. '

We were simply bred for physical qualities.”

So that’s where Jimmy the Greek got his theory: from 400 m man Lee Evans!

Nah, American slaveowners didn’t micromanage marriages for breeding purposes. That would have caused trouble and running away.

It might be that even without special breeding the African has a superior physique. A British medical journal, The Lancet, published an article by a World Health Organization team reporting that healthy Uganda infants had muscular development patterns “equal to that of European children twice or three times their age.” Out of 107 black babies, averaging three days in age, 90 were able to prevent their heads from falling back when they were drawn up to a sitting position. European infants could do this only when they reached the age of eight to 12 weeks.

Other tests also have shown that the black newborn is more advanced than the white. For example, Dr. Richard A. Berger, member of the department of health, physical education and recreation of Temple University, and Major Robert L. Paradis, who teaches in the ROTC program at Texas Tech University, collaborated on a study of 30 white and 30 black students matched in age and socioeconomic level. Their findings, published in The Research Quarterly of the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation, were that the average performances of black students indicated a higher fitness level than those of the white students “on all test items and on the composite fitness score.”

“However,” they added, “the only means [averages] which were significantly different were shuttle run, 50-yard dash, 600-yard run and composite fitness score in favor of the black students.”

D. G. Barker and N. A. Ponthieux of Texas A & M University, testing grade-school youngsters, found that “Negro boys’ fitness scores remained significantly higher with respect to pull-ups, standing broad jump, 50-yard dash, softball throw and 600-yard run-walk.” Negro schoolgirls surpassed white girls to a significant extent on five of the seven fitness tests.

Such research comparing black and white children is surprisingly limited, but the notion that the black child has a stronger early physical development is gaining support. Dr. Malina conducted a study in Philadelphia on children between the ages of 6 and 12 and found that blacks ran faster and were better in the standing broad jump, but there were no differences in throwing ability. Other studies have found that black children are stronger in gripping, pushing and pulling. Dr. Malina observes that one grim factor behind the apparent precocity of black children might well be the higher infant mortality rate among blacks—the weak die off. leaving the strong or more mature to survive.

But what of the measurable physical differences between blacks and whites that could affect their competitive performances? Since American blacks are generally linear in build, with longer arms and legs, a narrower pelvis and more slender calves, says Dr. Malina, they may have special advantages in some events. Mechanically speaking, a black athlete with legs identical to those of a white athlete would have a lighter, shorter and trimmer mass to propel. This implies a greater power-to-total-weight ratio at any given size. Such a ratio would be advantageous in events in which the body is propelled—the sprints and jumps, for example. These require relatively short bursts of muscular power rather than a prolonged expenditure of energy. (However, the greater weight and density of the black skeleton might tend to offset this advantage.)

Such things might indicate that the black should do well in the pole vault, as he does in the jumping events. As a matter of fact, Dr. Tanner, author of The Physique of the Olympic Athlete, wrote: “The pole vault, too, should be particularly attractive, as the length and power of the arms would add to the advantage already present in the weight relations; but here the American Negro does not particularly excel, perhaps only for reasons of tradition.”

Looks like Lawrence Johnson, silver medalist in the 2000 Olympics, is the only African-American pole-vaulting medalist.

My guess is that it helps to have a big backyard with your own pole vaulting pit, which is expensive. Also, I don’t think African Americans are enthusiastic about getting higher off the ground than they can jump. Blacks tend to be rare in rock climbing and X game events and other sports where you can fall a long ways.

There is at least one sport in which the black appears to be at a physical disadvantage. No Negro has done really well at swimming. Perhaps because of the greater density of their bone and muscle, the distribution of their fat and their smaller lung capacity certain blacks have difficulty in learning to swim. Such individuals are what swimming coaches call “sinkers.” The late Fred Lanoue, Georgia Tech swimming coach and author of Drown-proofing, A New Technique for Water Safety, notes that “the variables of the body as far as floating is concerned are fat. bone and muscle; and if the body is living, air.”

“All fat floats,” he wrote, “and, generally speaking but not always, the amount of fat present is what determines whether one floats or not. The location of concentrations of fat has a lot to do with the angle at which a person floats. All muscle sinks, even a $5 steak, though not quite so fast as a 60¢ steak because of the amount of fat in the former. All bones sink, and the harder the work the bone has had to do, the more dense it is and the faster it sinks. The only other variable that applies to people floating is the amount of air they can cram into their lungs. The difference between floating and sinking for a great many people is only a handful of air.”

Lanoue reported that at predominantly white Georgia Tech, of some 1,000 freshmen put through a swimming program each year, no more than 2% were sinkers. On the other hand, Dr. James Haines, professor of physical education at predominantly black Morehouse College, found that he had a high percentage of sinkers. Invited to check the results, Lanoue confirmed that 30% of the Morehouse blacks were in the sinker classification. The difference between blacks and whites was statistically vast. Similar differences have been noted between white and black women swimmers.

The importance of buoyancy in competitive swimming has not, however, been clearly established.

My guess is that races with more buoyancy will be more into water play as a cultural matter. But world class short sprint swimmers will likely be less buoyant than average. So, an African-American of superb athleticism who is obsessed with swimming might well excel at swimming.

But, few are.

Chet Jastremski, who held all world records in the breaststroke, had “very poor buoyancy,” according to James E. Counsilman, Indiana University and U.S. Olympic coach at Tokyo. He explains that buoyancy is just one of the variables among many that contribute to success in competitive swimming. “There is also coordination, strength, flexibility, organic capacity [endurance] and what we call power,” he says. “Strength and power are different. Strength is how much resistance you can overcome at a given time. With power you bring in a time factor—not only the resistance you can overcome, but the time in which you can do it.

“I think power is the key to the black athlete’s success. For instance, in 1968 the eight Olympic finalists in the 100-meter dash were all blacks. In the U.S. the black athletes dominate the sprints and don’t do as well in the distances.

“The vertical jump is a good measure of power. Generally speaking, sprinters, high jumpers and pole vaulters have a high vertical jump. Distance runners have a low one. By high I mean 30 to 31 inches. Low is around 20. You find few sprinters at 20 inches. Distance runners are around 20.

“I believe that the black athlete has more white muscle fibers. Oversimplifying it, every muscle has two types of fibers—white fibers and red fibers. The white muscle fibers are adapted for speed of movement, otherwise power. The red muscle fibers are adapted for endurance. White muscle fibers enable you to jump high, throw a good knockout punch or anything that entails power. Red fibers enable you to run a long way.

“I’m the only one who will say this for publication. The physiologists agree with me on the side, but they won’t go into print.

“I think the difference in muscle fibers is the reason the black athlete is a better sprinter. There’ll be people who’ll say, ‘Well, what about Kip Keino?’ He’s an exception. [As noted before, he is also of a different physiological heritage than the West African blacks who came to America.]

“The black athlete is more adapted to speed, and that accounts for his superiority in sports. Football, baseball, boxing, basketball, sprinting, high jumping, broad jumping—these involve speed.

“I’m not saying the black man is inferior or superior. I’m just saying that he is better adapted for speed and power. And I’m not saying every black man. It’s just that the average is higher in the blacks.”

The big reason that there are no outstanding black swimmers, Counsilman says, is primarily socioeconomic. “One, he has not had the opportunity to be a good swimmer. Two, there is just a lack of money. There are not enough pools in their areas. Swimming can cost quite a bit of money. And what good does it do them to be swimmers? There are no professional swimmers. They can’t elevate themselves socially or economically in swimming. In other sports there is the possibility of big contracts. In track there is the chance for a lot of publicity. Swimming, as yet, does not get that kind of valuable publicity.

“A third factor in the socioeconomic area is that there has never been a great black leader in swimming, a winner of a national title. Swimming needs a Jackie Robinson figure. The door is open, but they just haven’t gone in. We need that first national or Olympic black champion. I would certainly like the first one who wins a national title to swim for Indiana.”

There have been a number of black Olympic swimming medalists since then, but not a large number.

Counsilman does have a black swimmer, John Tunstall, a junior and free-styler, but he had never swum competitively until last year. “Unfortunately,” the coach says, “it’s going to be difficult to help him. Swimmers have to start early—10, 11, 12. It’s interesting to note that if you went to a swimming meet five years ago you didn’t see any black swimmers. To discover a great swimmer like Mark Spitz you’ve got to have 100,000 trying. The blacks don’t have enough numbers yet.”

Of all the physical and psychological theories about the American black’s excellence in sport, none has proved more controversial than one of the least discussed: that slavery weeded out the weak. Without doubt, the slaves were brought across the Atlantic under the most inhuman conditions. Lee Evans and Calvin Hill did not exaggerate the hardships. Only the strongest survived the passage, the “seasoning” process which followed and the rigors of labor in the New World, though most had been strong to begin with.

It has been estimated that 5% of the slaves captured in Africa died on the march to the coast or in the barracoons they were cooped up in until a slave ship arrived to trade for them. Another 13% died during the passage and some 30% died during seasoning—the three-to-four-year period during which a slave was broken to work in the fields or elsewhere. Thus for every two condemned to slavery, only one lived to labor in the New World. The majority were warriors captured from other tribes, therefore physically superior, but some were sold by their own chiefs for violation of one taboo or another. The traders, naturally, dickered for the fittest.

Even after slavery ended, a black child in America had very little to which he could aspire. Eventually sports opened a door, and now, as Elvin Hayes’ former coach, Melvin Rogers, said in The Black Athlete—A Shameful Story (SI, July 1, 1968 et al.), “A white kid tries to become President of the United States...a black kid tries to become Willie Mays.”

The West African black was brought across the Atlantic, at first to the West Indies, in large part because plantation owners were disappointed with the native Indians. As slaves the Indians were hopeless. At the start of the 17th century, one Antonio de Herrera, a historian, contended that the work of one Negro was more than equal to that of four Indians. On the other hand, he caustically noted, “These Negroes prospered so much in the colony that...as yet none have been known to perish from infirmity.”

Indians, though, as one Spanish planter complained, “died like fish in a bucket,” partly because they were less resistant to European diseases—like smallpox and measles—than the blacks.

Some African slaves died by their own hands. Suicide was a particular characteristic of members of the Ibo tribe, many of whom either escaped their chains and threw themselves into the sea or hanged themselves on their chains. To this day a folk saying in Haiti observes that the Ibo is prone to hang himself. Some slaves were encouraged to kill themselves by a belief that their souls would then return to Africa, where they would be reunited with their families and friends.

A theory quoted by Arnold Toynbee holds that the black man surpassed the Indian as a slave because he came from a superior culture. Certainly the West African was no savage. He created an architecture of respectably high standards. He was a skilled and artistic weaver. No white men had to teach him to smelt iron or make brass. And he was a highly competent woodworker. He was a good herdsman of cattle, sheep and goats. He used the donkey as a beast of burden. He was a fine farmer, considering what he had to work with. When the European introduced the musket he was able to copy it and make his own. He had not, though, for the most part, reached that fine stage of civilization in which he was able to make gunpowder. And, as Mannix and Cowley point out in Black Cargoes, a History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, he never invented the wheel and the plow.

With the skills he had and the ability to learn new ones, the Negro became a very valuable piece of property in America and was treated as such once he passed the seasoning test. Though many slaves died aboard ship, even there it was not too unusual for the slaves to be better fed than the white crewmen, who were considered expendable and often were marooned in the Indies once the westward passage was completed. The idea was that a sailor could be shanghaied in London and abandoned in Jamaica at a bit of extra profit to the captain and the owners. There are tales of compassionate black slaves sharing their rations with starving white sailors.

The extreme exigency of being a sailor during during the Age of Sail is largely forgotten.

Once at work ashore, properly trained and much more valuable than he was when bought on the African West Coast, the slave was sometimes given less arduous and hazardous work than gangs of Irish and German laborers, whose services were leased out by contractors to the plantation owners. One Virginia planter, asked why he should pay Irishmen to dig drainage ditches when he could have it done by black slaves, explained that it was dangerous work “and a Negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a Negro dies it is a considerable loss, you know” (as much as $2,500 in the currency of the day). Similarly, a traveler in the South observed that when a boat was being loaded with cotton from a high bluff on the Alabama River, Irish deckhands were given the perilous job of remaining below, there to deal with crazily bounding bales pitched down a chute to them by black slaves from the bank above….

The slave had not known much of sport in Africa, where he had little time or incentive for it. The idea of exertion and competition for the fun of it was generally unknown in tribal culture. Sport is a product of leisure. Dancing was fun for the African, but it had meaning, too, often of a religious nature. And it was not competitive.

There were some sports, to be sure. Lutte, which still survives and is very popular in Senegal, is a ritualistic form of wrestling rather like the Japanese sumo. It begins with singing, dancing, boasting and the hurling of insults to the rising beat of drums. Then there is a flash of action and one of the participants is knocked off his feet. That ends it. The winner need not pin his man. And there is an Ethiopian game called genna, which resembles field hockey.

For their own amusement the slave owners taught their blacks to compete against each other in racing and a primitive form of boxing, just as the owners raced their horses in plantation vs. plantation competition. This was the start of the black athlete’s eventual preeminence in boxing. In 1890 bantamweight (later featherweight) George Dixon became the first black to win a world championship. For a while it was not considered fitting for a white prizefighter to oppose a black. But that attitude began to break down, and around the start of the present century there emerged such fine fighters as Jack Johnson and Sam Langford, dubbed the “Boston Tar Baby.” In the 1930s came Joe Louis and Henry Armstrong, the only fighter ever to hold three world titles simultaneously, and black men have dominated the sport in America since.

Needless to say, not all the successes of the black man in boxing, or in other sports for that matter, have been entirely due to physical characteristics. Motivation is a vital factor. Sport is a way out of the despair of the slums, a route to social prestige among one’s peers and sometimes a way to quick wealth. Few other roads to fame and financial reward have been open to the young black. Show business used to be the only other one of consequence, and even in that field the black was relegated to roles of low comedy or faithful servitude. It took a long time for Dixieland jazz to come up the river to Chicago, and when it did, white orchestras picked up the beat.

But sport in recent years has opened some very special doors. Every male black child, however he might be discouraged from a career with a Wall Street brokerage firm, knows he has a sporting chance in baseball, football, boxing, basketball or track. He might even make it in other sports. Since there is now a substantial chance for success, motivation is all the stronger. The black youngster has something real to aspire to when he picks up a baseball bat or dribbles a basketball. He has the examples of Willie Mays and Bill Russell, of Frank Robinson and Lew Alcindor to inspire him.

Other doors will surely open.

And from …

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For example, progressive education was in fashion in the 1950s. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, snobbish European pedophile Humbert Humbert is only marginally impressed by the sales pitch of Mrs. Pratt, the headmistress of the Beardsley School:

“We are not so much concerned, Mr. Humbird, with having our students become bookworms or be able to reel off all the capitals of Europe which nobody knows anyway, or learn by heart the dates of forgotten battles. What we are concerned with is the adjustment of the child to group life. This is why we stress the four D’s: Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts. Your delightful Dolly will presently enter an age group - where dates, dating, date dress, date book, date etiquette, mean as much to her as, say, business, business connections, business success, mean to you, or as much as [smiling] the happiness of my girls means to me. Dorothy Humbird is already involved in a whole system of social life which consists, whether we like it or not, of hot-dog stands, corner drugstores, malts and cokes, movies, square-dancing, blanket parties on beaches, and even hair-fixing parties! Naturally at Beardsley School we disapprove of some of these activities; and we rechannel others into more constructive directions. But we do try to turn our backs on the fog and squarely face the sunshine. To put it briefly, while adopting certain teaching techniques, we are more interested in communication than in composition. That is, with due respect to Shakespeare and others, we want our girls to communicate freely with the live world around them rather than plunge into musty old books. We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. We think, Dr. Humburg, in organismal and organizational terms. We have done away with the mass of irrelevant topics that have traditionally been presented to young girls, leaving no place, in former days, for the knowledges and the skills, and the attitudes they will need in managing their lives and - as the cynic might add - the lives of their husbands. …

Dr. Hummer, do you realize that for the modern pre-adolescent child, medieval dates are of less vital value than weekend ones [twinkle]?

But on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Sputnik satellite terrified Americans, who resolved that they ought to make sure the next generation learned some math and science.

Sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein, who followed Nabokov’s career closely, likewise satirized 1950s schooling, but from a STEM point-of-view, in his 1958 young adult novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel:

You see stories about boys, poor-but-honest, who go to the top because they’re smarter than anyone in the county, maybe the state. But they’re not talking about me. I was in the top quarter of my graduating class but they do not give scholarships to M.I.T. for that — not from Centerville High. I am stating a fact; our high school isn’t very good. It’s great to go to — we’re league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday. Lots of school spirit.

But not much studying.

The emphasis is on what our principal, Mr. Hanley, calls “preparation for life” rather than on trigonometry. Maybe it does prepare you for life; it certainly doesn’t prepare you for CalTech.

I didn’t find this out myself. Sophomore year I brought home a questionnaire cooked up by our group project in “Family Living” in social studies. One question read: “How is your family council organized?”

At dinner I said, “Dad, how is our family council organized?”

Mother said, “Don’t disturb your father, dear.”

Dad said, “Eh? Let me see that.”

He read it, then told me to fetch my textbooks. I had not brought them home, so he sent me to school to get them. Fortunately the building was open—rehearsals for the Fall Blow-Out. Dad rarely gave orders but when he did he expected results.

I had a swell course that semester — social study, commercial arithmetic, applied English (the class had picked “slogan writing” which was fun), handicrafts (we were building sets for the Blow-Out), and gym … All in all, I was doing well in school and knew it.

Dad read all my textbooks that night; he is a fast reader. In social study I reported that our family was an informal democracy; it got by — the class was arguing whether the chairmanship of a council should rotate or be elective, and whether a grandparent living in the home was eligible. We decided that a grandparent was a member but should not be chairman, then we formed committees to draw up a constitution for an ideal family organization, which we would present to our families as the project’s findings.

Dad was around school a good bit the next few days, which worried me — when parents get overactive they are always up to something.

The following Saturday evening Dad called me into his study. He had a stack of textbooks on his desk and a chart of Centerville High School’s curriculum, from American Folk Dancing to Life Sciences. Marked on it was my course, not only for that semester but for junior and senior years the way my faculty advisor and I had planned it.

… “Why, Dad, Center is a swell school.” I remembered things they had told us in P.T.A. Auxiliary. “It’s run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists, and-”

“-and paying excellent salaries,” he interrupted, “for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital, meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I’ve talked with Mr. Hanley. Mr. Hanley is sincere — and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than is any other state save California and New York.”

“Well … what’s wrong with that?”

“What’s a dangling participle?”

I didn’t answer. He went on, “Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?”

Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. “If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book.”

… “Son, Centerville High is a delightful place, well equipped, smoothly administered, beautifully kept. Not a ‘blackboard jungle,’ oh, no!-I think you kids love the place. You should. But this-” Dad slapped the curriculum chart angrily. “Twaddle! Beetle tracking! Occupational therapy for morons!”

So, America got serious about education for awhile.

But then came the Sixties, which mostly happened in the Seventies. By the early Seventies, junior high school for my class increasingly consisted of sitting in a circle on the floor and listening to Abbey Road and Crosby, Stills & Nash and then discussing with the teacher how it made us feel.

Which tended to be: Groovy!

In 1981, the Reagan Administration set up a National Commission on Excellence in Education to look into trends in K-12 schools. The Mormon chancellor of the U. of California, David Pierpont Gardner, picked worthies like Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti (actor Paul’s dad, the future commissioner of baseball) and Nobel physicist Glenn T. Seaborg.

The Commission’s 1983 report A Nation At Risk was widely seen as a wake-up call to America to get more serious about schooling after the dopey and doped-up 1970s.

I don’t know that that many of its specific recommendations were adopted. But the report did set off a vibe shift toward seriousness.

The 2000s saw an interesting hybrid of seriousness and silliness: there was a fair amount of emphasis on make schooling better, especially among tech zillionaires. But the goal tended to be that quintessential embodiment of silliness: to finally Close the Gap in test scores among the races.

During the early 2010s, the seriousness vanished but the silliness remained as education got woker. Obviously, Closing the Gap was impossible, so why work so hard?

Covid exacerbated slacking and added massive grade inflation, and then, combining covid with George Floyd, colleges had an excuse to abolish admission testing.

The post-Woke / second Trump Era vibe shift has brought back a certain amount of seriousness: MIT was the first to reinstate admission testing, and Harvard is going to toughen grading.

But, we can’t just bring back testing, we’ve got to fix it.

By testing I mean both standardized testing like the SAT and LSAT, and informal classroom testing like next week’s 4th grade spelling test.

There are two big problems with testing, one new and one several decades old.

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A year ago, Nate Silver, whom I find to be an admirable statistical analyst, unveiled his new pro football career ranking system for quarterbacks, QBERT, that goes back to 1950. They’re trying to throw everything they can think of into the ratings, including rushing/scrambling and a weather adjustment (it’s easier to complete passes indoors or in San Diego than outdoors in Foxboro, MA).

From 1980 to 2020, enhancement was particularly predictable, with a sort of steady Moore’s Law of about 0.55% improvement per year in QB play. (Some of that is due to rule changes better protecting quarterbacks and receivers from injuries.)

Adjusted QBERT takes this bettering into account, so that you can see that your grandpa wasn’t lying to you about Johnny Unitas being a great quarterback (for his era). Same with your dad raving about Fran Tarkenton, even though their raw stats were ho-hum by current standards. Here’s Silver’s data through 2024:

The highest average performance career per play, adjusted for era, belongs to 1990s San Francisco 49er Steve Young. The BYU star (a direct descendant of Brigham Young and one of his couple of dozen wives), was superb both at throwing and running. He had a fairly short career, playing first for the upstart/doomed United States Football League for two seasons, then two for a bad Tampa Bay Bucs NFL team, then four as the back-up for all-timer Joe Montana. And his last game was at age 37 due to recurrent concussions. So most of his stats comes from his early 30s prime. (And note that Young’s replacement, the then-obscure Jeff Garcia, went on to put up some big numbers of his own. This suggests that the system that Bill Walsh built with the 49ers might have been the biggest advance in the offensive state of the art since Paul Brown’s with Otto Graham in the late 1940s.)

Number 2 per play is Montana, and Number 3 is Roger Staubach, who seems kind of forgotten these days despite being obviously the best QB of the 1970s. Like Young, his stats are concentrated in his early 30s prime, after serving four years in the Navy (including, at his insistence, in Vietnam) and then sitting on the bench with the Dallas Cowboys behind Craig Morton.

Number 4 is Peyton Manning, while Tom Brady is Number 10.

In contrast, guys who got to play a lot of QB relative to their production without ever being all that great include Eli Manning, Joe Flacco, Drew Bledsoe, Kerry Collins, 1996 GOP Vice Presidential nominee Jack Kemp, Kerry Collins, Blaine Gabbert, Zach Wilson, and Josh Rosen.

I watched Rosen at UCLA. He had a lot of technique and a lot of heart, but he was built like a skinny tennis player, just as his wealthy parents had wanted him to be. His rival at USC, Sam Darnold, had a terrible throwing motion, but was a hugely wide guy who looked like he might be able to survive NFL poundings. (Darnold won last season’s Super Bowl, while Rosen went to Wharton for an MBA.)

Here are the 20 best careers by average play:

On the other hand, Tom Brady played at a very high level up through age 45.

For total career Wins Above Replacement, …

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There’s a huge amount of talk about generations lately, although it’s not obvious that there is much of a generation gap in reality. The Generation Gap rose and fell from about 1964 to 1976:

The semi-popular names for age cohorts are practically impossible to remember:

Fortunately, I have a simple plan for reforming what I call Astrology for MBAs.

From the Washington Post opinion section a half decade ago:

Generation labels mean nothing. It’s time to retire them.

July 7, 2021

By Philip N. Cohen

Philip N. Cohen is a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and author of, most recently, “The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change.”

Consider these facts: The tennis champion Williams sisters are a generation apart, according to the Pew Research Center. Venus, born 1980, is part of “Gen X”; Serena, born 1981, is a “Millennial.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump and Michelle Obama are both in the same generation. The former was born in 1946 while the latter was born in 1964, making them both “baby boomers.“

Before you start wracking your brain to cram these diverse personalities into generational stereotypes, let me stop you there: Just don’t. That’s the position I and about 150 other demographers and social scientists have taken in an open letter to the Pew Research Center, urging them to stop promoting the use of generation labels (the Silent Generation, baby boomers, Generation X, millennials and now Generation Z).

Generation labels, although widely adopted by the public, have no basis in social reality. In fact, in one of Pew’s own surveys, most people did not identify the correct generation for themselves — even when they were shown a list of options.

This is not surprising since the categories are imposed by survey researchers, journalists or marketing firms before the identities they are supposed to describe even exist. Instead of asking people which group they feel an affinity for and why, purveyors of social “generations” just declare the categories and start making pronouncements about them. That’s not how social identity works.

The practice of naming “generations” based on birth year goes back at least to the supposed “Lost Generation” of the late 19th Century.

More like to Hemingway’s big year of 1926:

According to Hemingway’s posthumous memoir A Movable Feast, he got it from Gertrude Stein kvetching about the poor quality of postwar auto mechanics.

“Baby boom” emerged in the 1940s, and became omnipresent after the baby boom was over in the 1970s. But “baby boomer” only emerged around 1984.

But as the tradition devolved into a never-ending competition to be the first to propose the next name that sticks, it has produced steadily diminishing returns to social science and the public understanding.

The supposed boundaries between generations are no more meaningful than the names they’ve been given. There is no research identifying the appropriate boundaries between generations, and there is no empirical basis for imposing the sweeping character traits that are believed to define them. Generation descriptors are either embarrassing stereotypes or caricatures with astrology-level vagueness. In one article you might read that Millennials are “liberal lions,” “downwardly mobile,” “upbeat,” “pre-Copernican,” “unaffiliated, anti-hierarchical, [and] distrustful” — even though they also “get along well with their parents, respect their elders and work well with colleagues.” …

Millennials will meet a mysterious stranger, then go on a long, challenging, but ultimately rewarding journey.

There are lots of good alternatives to today’s generations. We can simply describe people by the decade they were born. We can define cohorts specifically related to a particular issue — such as 2020 school kids.

Of course, bad as our current generation designations are, we aren’t going to get rid of them. We have to come up with something better to replace them.

So, here’s my suggestion:

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Dan Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics at Duke business school and author of nine books, several of them in the high-selling self-help genre. Back in 2023, NBC made his book Predictably Irrational into a murder mystery TV show called The Irrational about a Dan Ariely-type professor (except he’s now black) who solves crimes via his vast knowledge of Malcolm Gladwell-reading-Daniel-Kahneman-studies of how to manipulate stupid human behavior:

As I wrote three years ago:

In The Irrational, the Ariely character played by Jesse L. Martin routinely makes up explanations for how his face was burned because he’s hiding that he’s the only survivor of a white nationalist firebombing of his black church that killed 13. …

The problem with the TV show is that it would be more fun if the main character was the real Dan Ariely: a charming but utterly untrustworthy blowhard.

Now that I think about it, that’s actually a good premise for a detective show. Detectives are typically moral paragons like Columbo or men driven by their code of honor to ends-justify-the-means transgressions of normal regulations like Dirty Harry.

But what if the guy called in to solve the kind of insurance fraud murders (one spouse kills another for that sweet, sweet $115,000 life insurance payout) that are the meat and potatoes of true crime docudramas was just as much of a liar as the suspects? But he’s still, sort of, the good guy because unlike one of them, he doesn’t kill people?

Back in 2021, the Data Colada blog had raised severe questions about a popular 2012 paper co-authored by Ariely, Francesca Gino, et al about how if you make people sign that they are being honest at the beginning of a paperwork form, they’ll be more honest in filling it out than if you don’t make them sign until the end of the form.

That doesn’t sound too implausible. But then a lot of plausible sounding ideas don’t actually work out.

The data in the study appears faked, perhaps by more than one co-author (which is pretty hilarious).

Gino was fired from her tenured chair by Harvard last year.

Ariely is still at Duke (at the moment), but the Data Colada folks have now …

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For a century or more, reporters would call up professors to get free quotes for their articles. In return, professors would get to see themselves called “experts” in the newspapers. Everybody was happy.

Now, though, academia, or at least the huge number of DEI hires employed within it, remains at war with the press over the Arday fiasco.

Britain’s top dog media spokesmagazine for academia, Nature — the British science journal most famous for publishing this concluding understatement in Crick and Watson’s 1953 paper announcing their discovery of the DNA double helix: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material” — gives academia’s view in an editorial this week:

The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection

02 September 2026

Universities and media organizations need to scrutinize their roles in the events that led to this tragedy.

“The years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement.”

These were the words of Jason Arday when he resigned as professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, UK, on 5 August, amid claims of research misconduct. He explained that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”.

Nine days later, Arday died after relentless media coverage of his professional and personal life.

It was very sad. I was looking forward to Dr. Arday making a worthy life for himself going forward as a high school Physical Education coach, the job his skills were suited for, the way George Psalmanazar, who had similarly hoaxed English high society for a few years in the early 1700s by claiming to be a blond-haired, blue-eyed Taiwanese aristocrat went on, after renouncing his lies, to live a long life of obscure hard work as a Grub Street ink-stained wretch, impressing his young friend Samuel Johnson a half century later as one of the best men he’d ever known.

But Arday lacked Psalmanazar’s strength of character. Arday took what he saw as the easy way out, further confirming the allegations against him, obviously.

The appropriate next step would be a major inquiry into how deep the rot goes in academia. Was Arday just a one-off, an entrepreneurial chancer like Psalmanazar? Or was he merely the funniest, most artless embodiment of long-term trends during the affirmative action era of academia filling up with plagiarists, frauds, and other BS artists?

It is an enormous tragedy for his family, friends, students and colleagues. It is also a catastrophe for the research community. The death of an autistic Black scholar who inspired a generation is shocking.

Oh, boy …

By the way, how much evidence is there, other than Arday’s worthless word, that Arday was ever autistic, as opposed to just generally low IQ?

As a journalist, for decades I’ve relied on the reputation of Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen as the expert on autism. But the knighted boffin’s credulous behavior over his friend Arday calls that into question.

The persistent media attention, the racism that pervaded much of that coverage and the plagiarism allegations against Arday, and the University of Cambridge’s handling of his case all raise difficult questions. These are concerns not only for the institutions involved, but for everyone in higher education and the media.

Two questions

In this Editorial, we focus on two issues in what is a complex and evolving situation. One is how academic institutions should treat investigations into research misconduct amid unrelenting media attention. Investigations need to be carried out according to transparent processes with appropriate confidentiality for those involved, including whistle-blowers, whose testimony is often central to the outcome. These processes exist to ensure that all concerned are treated fairly and protected from harm, but were they followed? The other, related issue is how the media should ensure fairness when reporting on research misconduct and how it can do so without causing harm.

Uh, the only way for the press to not cause harm to fraudsters is to never expose their frauds.

Arday’s fate is distressing, and especially so for Black scholars and those from other communities that are under-represented in academic research, many members of which report feeling vulnerable and unsupported at this time.

Presumably, a lot of DEI hires in fields like Arday’s Sociology of Education obtained their Ph.D.s on the assumption that nobody human would ever go through the skull-crushing boredom of comparing their dissertations to the countless equally tedious ones on similar subjects just to find the one they copied from.

For example, here’s the abstract of a woman’s Ph.D. dissertation for which Professor Arday served as an external examiner. The lady interviewed her aunt and five friends about their feelings of being oppressed, and, for added excitement, did some Me-search into her own feelings .

Rebecca Loy, University of Liverpool, 2023.

Searching for Critical Consciousness; in the Pursuit of Freedom

“This thesis will illuminate and add to a deeper understanding of the pervasive and suffocating nature of oppression experienced by people racialised as Black in the Liverpool 8 community. The framework of critical consciousness given by Freire will be analysed, embedded and developed through the literature to understand the nature of oppression and how actors transform their state of oppression from a place of conscientisation. To understand the nature of oppression structural and symbolic violence will be delved into through a variety of literature. The literature will incorporate topics such as racial capitalism, zero sum thinking, and dog whistle politics to evidence that evolution of structural violence over centuries to maintain a system of dominance over people racialised as Black in the Anglophone West. Symbolic violence will be evidenced through historical memory education, the politics of shame, and the phenomenology of the body to illustrate that symbolic violence is a political tool of oppression utilised to dehumanise marginalised groups as deviant to societal norms, leaving them in an objectified state of oppression. Black feminist thinkers building upon the work of Freire will espouse the route to liberation through a critically conscious, reclamation of radical subjectivity. Analysis with activists from the Liverpool 8 community and case study will highlight the necessity of radical subjectivity to be embodied. A theory of the experiential journey of transforming from objectivity to subjectivity will be positioned as Critical Subjective Black Phenomenology, a practise in the pursuit of freedom.”

Do you really think Jason Arday read this woman's entire dissertation about how she and her friends feel victimized?

I bet that on p. 2, Professor Arday put on his favorite Oasis album.

On p. 3, he turned the stereo up loud.

On about p. 4, he probably snuck off down to the pub to play some snooker and watch the footer on the telly.

(By the way, judging from his popular music tastes, you can’t say that Arday, the son of Ghanian immigrants, failed to assimilate into Regular English Blokehood. I should look into the broader phenomenon: it seems like England has (or had, I’m not up to date) a lot of blacks like Arday who assimilated pretty enthusiastically into the indigenous working class culture. In contrast, American blacks were seldom into, say, Van Halen and watching baseball.)

But, all of sudden, along came AI. Tireless robots will now track down your sins.

That must be worrisome.

There is systemic racism in academia.

Lately, against white men.

It is an unwelcoming place for many who enter it through hardship and struggle, as Arday’s story illustrates.

No, Arday was welcomed with absurd enthusiasm.

It is not acceptable that these barriers persist. On top of this, scholars from Black and other under-represented communities fear that the intensity of attention Arday faced could one day be focused on them. The question many are asking is: ‘Could I be next?’

Well, how guilty is your conscience?

In February 2023, when the University of Cambridge appointed Arday, it issued a statement that included a description of him as the youngest Black professor in its history, news that became a global media event.

So, when 2023’s global media event turned out to be a hilarious hoax, it became 2026’s global media event.

In his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, published last week, Arday wrote: “I was thrust into the public eye in a way that someone can’t really prepare for or predict. If I’m being honest, it’s something I’m still getting used to.” He also began to report incidents of racism and hate speech directed at him after his arrival at Cambridge.

And if you can’t trust Jason Arday’s reports of incidents of racism and hate speech against him at Cambridge, like the Pig’s Head Story, who can you trust?

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I’d stack up the newspapers and I’d flatten the aluminum beer cans with a sledgehammer.

That was about it for recycling 55 years ago. Back then, we weren’t as advanced, technologically and morally, so that’s about all we recycled.

Now, all these decades later, there is barely any newsprint, but recycling aluminum cans still makes lots of sense. Vagrants will take beer cans out of your garbage pails for free if you don’t watch out.

But, for some reason, homeless dudes won’t take the rest of your recyclable junk away.

Other recycling … well, there are Doubters. From Works in Progress:

Just bury your trash

Alex Chalmers & Rob Wiblin

1st September 2026

What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land forever.

What if that picture is wrong? What if landfill, properly done, is actually one of the cleanest, cheapest, and most environmentally sensible things we can do with our waste? It turns out that for much of what we throw away, the humble landfill beats the recycling bin.

This reminds of the Great Landfill Shortage of the 1990s. The Atlantic Monthly, a.k.a. the Journal of Genteel Foreboding (I’m still shaking over an Atlantic cover story about how if the Gulf Stream stopped flowing, there’d be another Ice Age and then London and Paris would be covered by mile-thick glaciers), used to run terrifying articles about how we had practically filled up every possible landfill site in America.

Soon, we’d be knee-deep in garbage.

Finally, The Atlantic published one last article, in effect apologizing for the previous ones, saying they’d discovered that this had all just been a cunning PR offensive by Waste Management Inc. to buffalo cities into paying them higher fees by pretending America was running out of places to dump garbage. In reality, it turns out, America is a huge country with countless potential dump sites.

So why are so many people really into recycling?

Somebody named @londinburgh offers an interesting theory about the psychological appeal:

I have this weird idea about recycling. In the 90s and early 2000s images of impoverished people picking through rubbish dumps in the third world were incredibly ubiquitous. I suspect they influenced people’s attitudes to recycling in the west.

India’s ragpicker cities are indeed memorable. From Borgen Project:

Indian Rag Pickers Live in Landfill Slums

… In the New Delhi 70-acre Ghazipur landfill alone there are an estimated 350,000 scavengers, or ‘rag pickers’. Living in filth, people spend their days sorting the endless trash into towering mountains, searching for items they can sell.

Plastic bags go for 5¢ a pound, and human hair fetches $18 a pound.

Sheikh Habibullah, has built a dirt-floor hut for his family of six by hanging rice-bags for walls, palm-leafs as a roof, and a Bollywood poster board for the door. The family collectively earns $60 a month, half of which pays a local boss for rent and the electricity to power a single light bulb.

For most, a doctor is out of the question and with boundless toxins leaking into the landfill from local dairies, slaughterhouses and a crematorium, cancer and birth defects are common.

Nevertheless 60-year-old Sheikh Abdul Kashid claims he’s “much freer here…I’ve given four children some education. I could never do that back home.”

– Lydia Caswell

@londinburgh speculates:

The mechanism is one of two things

1. People were made to feel guilty about throwing out their rubbish because of the association with the depredation of the worlds poorest

2. people came to believe that sorting rubbish was moral as it brought them closer to the worlds poor

It may have been an oblique combination of the two, whereby people indirectly imagined that by picking through their own rubbish, they would somehow relieve the worlds poor of having to do it.

Something notable I think we forget is how saturated by images our world has become in the last twenty years. In 1995, you may have seen one picture of some children picking rubbish and that would be your only impression of the world’s poor.

But I have a slightly different take on the influence of photos of ragpickers on recycling ideology from my own thought processes: …

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As I may have mentioned, the single most important event in the evolution of modern American trash culture over the last third of a century was the O.J. Simpson white Bronco chase on June 17, 1994. It began at the Encino, CA home of the Kardashians (yes, those Kardashians) and ended in O.J.’s driveway in Brentwood. It was followed by 22 helicopters and 95 million TV viewers; it jet-propelled a remarkable number of careers as celebrities.

One participant, however, has kept his mouth shut: the white Bronco’s driver, Al Cowlings, O.J.’s best friend from third grade, high school football, the USC Trojans, and the Buffalo Bills of the NFL.

A.C., now age 79, hasn’t talked.

This doesn’t mean he never thought about cashing in. Back in the 1990s, Cowlings’ agent circulated a book proposal. But then A.C. withdrew it and has stayed silent ever since about what O.J. (who died in 2024) might have told him during their ride about the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.

A.C. was arrested along with O.J., and charged with aiding a fugitive. But then the charge was dropped a few months later for lack of evidence.

I’d say there was evidence that A.C. was driving O.J.’s white Bronco — D.A. Gil Garcetti could have called 95 million witnesses.

But would all 12 jurors vote to convict him for helping his best friend make a run for the Mexican border?

It sounds like Garcetti put Christopher Darden on the Cowlings case to get A.C. to roll over on O.J.. But they eventually realized that wasn’t going to happen. From the Washington Post on November 8, 1994:

Garcetti said Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden, who led the Cowlings investigation, will move to the Simpson prosecution team, a transfer immediately criticized by Simpson’s attorneys. Since the Cowlings inquiry began, they had maintained the prosecutor’s office investigated Cowlings only to gain more information about Simpson. …

Simpson attorney Johnnie L. Cochran called the Cowlings investigation a “charade.” He said Darden’s addition to the prosecution was “for the wrong reasons” and appeared to be a reaction to the recent selection of a predominantly African American jury.

Race has been an issue throughout this trial because Simpson is black and the victims were white. Darden would be the first African American on the prosecution’s team.

“Now we see {Darden} pop over to this case,” Cochran said. “So. Gee. What does that seem like to you? ... It seems like we were right all along. All along he was planning on working on the O.J. Simpson case. Now why is that? After we have eight African Americans, I don’t know.”

That reminds me: when I was at UCLA in 1981, I knew a fellow who’d been an All-American football player for UCLA. When the topic of USC’s 22-21 victory over UCLA came up, he explained why USC was better than UCLA: “Because the Trojan players know that if they win, they will be rewarded. They know they … will … be … rewarded.”

Speaking of being rewarded, there’s now …

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Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem

To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis

Nathan Cofnas

Jan 02, 2024

Attributions of low intelligence are considered insults—something we lob at our enemies, not our friends. So why should I, who am committed to the defeat of leftism, say that my own side is the dumb one? I cannot shame my political allies into having higher IQs. Talking about the right’s intellectual limitations seems demoralizing and mean. What’s wrong with letting conservatives view themselves as intellectually superior to the “libtards” who invent vaccines and run academia, big tech, and our major corporations?

If the intelligence deficit among conservatives—and right wingers in general—is real, there are at least two reasons why we need to talk about it. First, although IQ may not be under our control, being smart is to some extent a choice. Behaviors like doing “physiognomy checks” on X or getting all of your information from Internet memes are not genetically determined. It is sometimes possible to shame people into living up to their intellectual potential. Second and more important, the fact that an ideology fails to attract smart people is an indication that there is something wrong with the ideology, which needs to be corrected. If smart people overwhelmingly choose wokism over right-wing alternatives, we need to understand why.

… Instead of striking out on our own, the right needs to figure out how to turn smart people away from the left.

I’ll review several lines of direct and indirect evidence that the left has a crushing intelligence advantage over the right, especially among the elites. Then I’ll consider why this is the case, and explain the strategic implications.

To explain the appeal of leftism—which increasingly takes the form of wokism—you have to explain what wokism is. I argue that wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously, given a background of Christian morality. Both the mainstream left and right believe that innate cognitive ability and temperament are distributed equally among races, and probably the sexes, too. (Mainstream conservatives acknowledge the existence of physical sex differences, but they rarely chalk up disparities in, for example, mathematical achievement to differences in innate ability—at least not publicly.) As I will explain, wokesters correctly follow the equality thesis to its logical conclusion, whereas conservatives fail to recognize the implications of their own beliefs. Smart people are disproportionately attracted to wokism in large part because it offers a more intellectually coherent explanation for the major issue of our time, which is the persistence of racial disparities.

And yet … the inevitable problem with a religion whose most fundamental tenet is that blacks are just as smart as Jews is that you now wind up being told to read Kendi and Arday in 2020s rather than Gould and Lewontin in the 1970s. It was more fun for bright people to read Gould and Lewontin, while today’s Woke intellectuals are a drag.

I will show why my explanation of wokism is superior to Rufo’s wokism-as-philosophy theory and Hanania’s wokism-as-law theory. Wokism needs to be attacked from philosophical and legal angles, and Rufo and Hanania provide important guidance on how to do that. Ultimately, however, the woke system can only be brought down by exposing the Big Lie upon which it is based (the equality thesis), thereby giving elites a reason to change their minds and defect to the right. Wokism will end when the right becomes smart enough to attract the people who matter.

Liberals Are Smarter: The Evidence

One of the most robust findings in social psychology is “stereotype accuracy.” The stereotype that Jews are rich or Jamaicans are good sprinters reflects statistical realities about the distribution of money and fast-twitch muscle fiber, and is not based entirely on irrational prejudice. There are many individual exceptions—many poor Jews and fat, slow Jamaicans—but on average there are differences between populations in the direction of stereotypes. (After writing this I Googled “richest person in Jamaica.” Surprise—up popped a picture of a Jew. The fastest man in Israel is Ghanaian.)

Stereotype accuracy is bad news for conservatives and right wingers, who are stereotyped as low-IQ rubes—and not only by liberals. It was a conservative Republican Senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson, who nicknamed the Republican Party “the stupid party.”

Liberal John Stuart Mill said much the same about the Tories in 1861:

“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it. Suppose any party, in addition to whatever share it may possess of the ability of the community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of its constitution, be the stupidest party; and I do not see why honorable gentlemen should see that position at all offensive to them, for it ensures their being always an extremely powerful party. I know that I am liable to a retort, and an obvious one enough; and as I do not wish to allow any honorable gentleman the credit of making it, I make it myself. It may be said that if stupidity has a tendency to Conservatism, sciolism [a pretentious display of superficial knowledge or the practice of talking and giving opinions on subjects one knows very little about], or half-knowledge, has a tendency to Liberalism. Something might be said for that, but it is not at all so clear as the other. There is an uncertainty about sciolists; we cannot count upon them; and therefore they are a less dangerous class. But there is so much dense, solid force in sheer stupidity, that any body of able men with that force pressing behind them may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party has gained through that power”

Back to Cofnas:

… There is no definitive study on the IQs of self-identified liberals vs. conservatives or Democrats vs. Republicans. The best data we have come from the General Social Survey (GSS), which every other year surveys a representative sample of Americans. Participants in the GSS answer questions about their political identity, take a ten-item vocabulary test called WORDSUM, a test of probability knowledge, and a test of verbal reasoning.

WORDSUM is of course biased toward wordcels over shape-rotators.

The interviewer also assesses the respondent’s ability to understand the survey questions. The GSS’s intelligence tests and the interviewer’s assessment of the subject are not proper IQ tests, but scores can be used to estimate IQ. Noah Carl found that, when all of these measures of intelligence are converted to IQ, Republicans have a 1–4 IQ-point advantage over Democrats.

However, the results are skewed by the large number of lower-average-IQ minorities who vote Democrat. When Emil Kirkegaard restricted the analysis to whites (still the most culturally influential demographic) and considered ideological rather than party identification, he found a substantial difference favoring liberals in WORDSUM IQ. “Extreme liberals” score the highest at 107, followed by “liberals” at 105. They were trailed by “conservatives” at 101, and “extreme conservatives” at 98.5. Only people who reported that they “don’t know” their political orientation scored worse than extreme conservatives. …

An 8.5 IQ-point gap between extreme liberals and extreme conservatives might not be conspicuous on an individual level. To put it in context, the average sibling pair differs by 12 IQ points, and it’s often hard to tell which sibling is smarter. But, on a population level, an average 8.5-point difference has far-reaching implications. …

The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) ranks the world’s universities based on objective criteria such as the number of publications they produce in Nature and Science and how many of their alumni have won Nobel Prizes or Fields Medals. It gives more weight to achievement in the hard sciences, which conservatives consider “real subjects,” than in the humanities. According to the ranking, 5 of the top 20 universities in the world are in California—the bluest and gayest state in America. In the top 50, there are 28 American universities, of which 23 are in blue states. The five in red states are UNC Chapel Hill (ranked 21st in the US), Duke (22nd in the US), Washington University in St. Louis (17th in the US), the University of Texas at Austin (25th in the US), and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas (27th in the US). All five of these red-state universities are located in solidly blue cities, and none of them are conservative institutions—in fact, they are about as woke as their blue-state counterparts. The only relatively conservative university in the US that’s even listed on the ARWU is Brigham Young University, whose global ranking is in the 501–600 range. I say BYU is “relatively conservative” rather than “conservative” because it still leans liberal, with 61% of its political donors giving to liberal rather than conservative causes. If conservatives are just as smart and intellectual as liberals, why have they failed to create even a single major conservative-friendly university that is remotely competitive with the top liberal universities?

The right has a handful of think tanks that in some cases employ scholars who are as good as, or better than, those at elite universities. But these are relatively small operations. The annual expenditures at the conservative American Enterprise Institute are less than $50 million. At the Manhattan Institute, they’re less than $20 million. If conservatives seriously cared about building elite institutions of learning and scholarship, they could do better than this. The fact that they don’t is further evidence that they are not as intellectually oriented as liberals.

Tucker Carlson recently said: “Let’s keep dumb people and crazed partisan demagogues away from our financial system and our power grid. They can keep the sociology department—have fun. But why don’t you stay away from the fundamentals that keep the country running.” A liberal commentator would never say something like this, because most liberals understand that culture is influenced by ideas, and surrendering idea-generating institutions to the enemy is a bad strategy. Carlson himself is far more intelligent than most professors of sociology. But he knows that, to his conservative audience, the notion of studying social phenomena in a scholarly way (what sociology is supposed to be) is literally a punchline. The fact that conservative leaders often express this kind of attitude is evidence that the average conservative doesn’t get why ideas are important.

Journalism is another area in which conservatives display less intelligence and competence than liberals. In a moment of lucidity at the 2009 CPAC convention, Tucker Carlson lamented the fact that conservatives have been unable to create institutions like the New York Times. Over boos from the audience, he noted that “yes they are liberal, yes they twist it. But they are still out there finding the facts and bringing them to people.” He said that “conservatives need to mimic that in their own news organizations.” They should “not just interpret things they hear in the mainstream media but gather the news themselves.” And yet, 14 years later, after Carlson was fired from Fox News and the fetters were off, he started trumpeting fake news about UFOs and Barack Obama’s gay affair. He was ultimately pulled down to the level of his conservative audience.

In Tucker’s defense, my strong impression is that he talks a lot about UFOs because he’s really interested in UFOs.

One could argue that the Wall Street Journal is the conservative New York Times, but I think this is a mistake. … Two months after George Floyd’s death, the Journal announced it would start capitalizing “Black” but not “white”! In any case, the Journal does not have the kind of influence on the right that the Times has on the left. A 2012 survey found that Journal readers are more likely to identify as Democrat than Republican (31% vs. 20%), though they leaned conservative over liberal (32% vs. 21%). A post-Great Awokening 2014 survey found that Journal readers lean slightly left, with consistent liberals (20%) and mostly liberals (21%) outnumbering consistent conservatives (13%) and mostly conservatives (22%).

The right’s lack of appreciation for intelligence is reflected in the fact that it provides no clear career path for right-leaning intellectuals, especially if their work is not directly related to hot-button policy issues like immigration, taxes, or gender ideology. Most young scholars who were kicked out of academia for challenging liberal orthodoxy, such as sociologist Noah Carl and psychologist Bo Winegard, were not picked up by establishment conservative institutions. (Carl and Winegard are both currently employed at the new magazine Aporia.) Sometimes serious scholars are hired by conservative institutions, but then fired after liberals complain. That was the fate of Jason Richwine, whose Harvard dissertation mentioned facts about race that made liberals upset. Harvard rebuffed calls to revoke his degree, but the conservative Heritage Foundation fired him. As a philosopher on the right, it’s literally easier for me to be hired by the University of Cambridge than it is to publish in National Review or the American Conservative. The fact that the left rewards its intellectuals while the right chases them away supports the view that those on the right are not as interested in ideas.

I don’t want to exaggerate the intelligence or integrity of the left, which can be almost as stupid, conspiratorial, and mendacious as the right.

Or more so, but the left’s conspiracy theorizing is more academic and respectable. For instance, we live in a society in which hatred of whites is more fashionable than pointing out that there is a lot of hatred of whites.

Hanania calls conservatives “gullible morons” because a small number of them were supposedly taken in by a liberal parody account on X that would, for example, defend affirmative action by saying, “no Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system.” But when liberal outlets reported that a pregnant white nurse tried to steal a bicycle from a group of young black men—a story straight out of the Twilight Zone—tens of thousands of liberals accepted this at face value.

This was an insane whoop-tee-doo of May 2023.

According to an article published in REVOLT and reprinted in outlets including Yahoo! News: “A white woman in New York City has earned the nickname ‘Citi Bike Karen’ after a video went viral of her trying to steal a Black youth’s rentable bicycle.” In a tweet that got at least 21.9 thousand likes before being deleted, Civil Rights attorney Ben Crump wrote: “This is unacceptable! A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC.” The woman’s employer, Bellevue Hospital, thought that this narrative was plausible enough to place her on leave. NBC News ran a segment edited to portray the white woman as a racist villain, even sending a camera crew to knock on her door in an attempt to confront her, and filming the front of her building so that everyone can know where she lives. The NBC report concluded with an interview with a neighbor saying: “It’s clearly like a Karen....She thinks that she’s viewed as [a] victim because she’s white....That’s obvious in this America that we all live in.” It took the New York Times two-and-a-half months to publish an op-ed cautiously defending the “Citi Bike Karen.” The Times then published several letters from readers, some of which were against the “Karen,” including one by a Hunter College sociology professor. The equally preposterous Jussie Smollett hoax was widely taken at face value by the establishment media. I’m not saying conservatives aren’t gullible morons who wouldn’t believe an absurd hoax that supports their own prejudices. But it’s not obvious that liberals are superior in this respect.

The liberal mainstream media retailed a huge number of hate hoaxes …

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Judging from the trailer, Ali G: Who Is I doesn’t look very good.

But that’s not surprising. People usually get pretty sick of even the funniest movie comedians after maybe a half dozen years.

For example, Buster Keaton was indisputably a comic genius. But the peak of his career lasted from 1923-1928.

Charlie Chaplin extended his career by slowing down to a snail’s pace, making The Gold Rush in 1925, The Circus in 1928, his masterpiece City Lights in 1931 (for which he filmed an excruciating 342 takes of the Tramp meeting the blind flower girl), Modern Times in 1936, and The Great Dictator in 1940.

But Sacha Baron Cohen, the Jewish comic actor, who spent part of most years growing up in Israel with his grandmother, is especially out of fashion these days for his Jewishness/Zionism. From Variety:

Aug 28, 2026 5:46am PT

Ali G Movie Backlash Intensifies in the U.K. as Campaigners Try to Get Film Pulled From Cinemas

However, claims that one major chain has already agreed not to screen “Ali G: Who Iz I?” are inaccurate

By Alex Ritman

Ali G’s grand return has not exactly been met with widespread celebration.

That’s at least the case from various corners of his home soil in the U.K., where the first big screen outing for Sacha Baron Cohen‘s famed faux rude boy in more than two decades has been hit with a campaign aimed stopping it from reaching cinema screens.

Following the release earlier this week of the trailer for Amazon MGM‘s “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” a new mockumentary following the satirical character and due for release on Oct. 23, backlash against the film has steadily intensified. Many have taken to social media to accuse Ali G, who in clips is seen wearing fake dreadlocks and a Rastafarian hat and discussing his desire to be an “absent” father, of being an “outdated” and “racist” caricature.

On Wednesday, NewsCord — a news comparison and media monitoring platform — started a campaign urging cinemas around the world to refuse to screen the film, emailing major chains with the request on behalf of those who register. As of Friday, it claims to have been instructed to send more than 36,000 emails.

The campaign accuses Cohen of using satire as a “cover for enforcing racist stereotypes,” citing a newspaper report from 2000, just two years after Ali G first landed on British TV screens, in which Black British comedians claimed the character was an “alibi for racism.”

Originally launched by Cohen in 1998 as part of Channel 4’s “11 O’Clock Show,” Ali G was created as a dim-witted white man imitating urban British hip-hop and Jamaican culture, the joke being that his deliberately offensive nature poked fun at his own ignorance and cultural appropriation in general.

No, Ali G in 2000 was a dim-witted Pakistani wigger, an early example of what Drukpa Kunley calls YooKay culture. Ali had an Uncle Jamal who owns the Taj Mahal curry restaurant.

As Muslim terrorism was becoming a bigger worry, for the obscure 2002 movie Ali G Indahouse, the character was retconned into a white Englishman named Alistair Graham. Uncle Jamal was phased out.

He became an instant hit, soon landing his own show and launching Cohen’s career in the process.

But in the 2000 article, the comedian Felix Dexter argued that the character “allows the liberal middle classes to laugh at Black street culture in a context where they can retain their sense of political correctness” — views now echoed by many 26 years on and repeated as part of the NewsCord campaign. Meanwhile, Jeanette Winterson added: “I don’t know what the difference is between him and the Black and White Minstrels.”

Other than he’s Pakistani?

In a new Substack post, British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch asserted that, as offensive as she found Ali G in her youth — “I just knew he was mocking us,” she wrote — the character was now widely out of sync with today’s times.

“Black people don’t dress like that anymore. Even white people imitating Black people don’t talk like that anymore. Sexualizing black women and casually mocking working class women is not accepted anymore,” she wrote. “Baron Cohen’s so-called ‘humor’ is a crude compound of all these things.” …

While it’s unknown whether Cohen expected the level of backlash to “Ali G: Who Iz I?” that has arisen, it’s clear he at least anticipated some negative retaliation. In a tweet linked to the trailer for “Ali G: Who Iz I?,” he wrote: “In an age when a single comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back.”

It’s not terribly complicated to understand the roots of Sacha Baron Cohen’s humor:

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The Arday-Cofnas whoop-tee-doo has revived old time disputes over race, with elites asserting their talking point that Race Does Not Exist because genetic differences are purely clinal. For example, the northern European plain is close to dead flat and well-watered from the English Channel to the Ural Mountains, so you can easily walk from Calais to the Urals, assuming you are a persuasive guy. And if you bother to cross the Urals, you are just in Siberia, so what’s the point?

Not surprisingly, the Dutch and Russians look different, but not too different.

Of course, 21st Century DNA data demonstrates that geographic barriers to gene interchange very much do exist, such as the Sahara desert, the Himalayas and other central Asian mountain ranges, the Wallace Line in southeast Asia and so forth. For example, this map shows that migration between northern and southern Egypt along the Nile has been about 10,000 times greater than migration across the Sahara.

In particular, the Sudd swamp in Sudan had formed a barrier between brown and black peoples.

On the other hand, this map is just of the Old World and leaves out two vast barriers to gene flow, the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean.

Before October 12, 1492, nobody had crossed the Atlantic between sub-Saharan Africa and South America in many tens of thousands of years, if ever.

Modern races are determined by where ancestors lived in 1492.

From Molecular Biology and Evolution:

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From Reuters:

US tells schools not to alter discipline policies to reduce racial disparities

By Kanishka Singh

August 19, 2026

WASHINGTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. Education Department ​has issued guidance urging schools to stop what it calls “racial balancing” ‌in student discipline policies, prompting concerns that the Trump administration is making it harder to address longstanding racial disparities in school discipline.

Federal civil rights data has shown Black students are ​disciplined at disproportionately high rates. An Education Department report released in 2023 ​found Black public preschool children received out-of-school suspensions at a rate ⁠nearly twice their enrollment.

As everybody knows, preschool teachers are notoriously suffused with racist hate for Toddlers of Color!

The new guidance says schools cannot modify discipline policies ​simply to reduce such racial disparities.

A school’s decision “to change its discipline policies with ​the purpose of avoiding or reducing racial disparities in discipline constitutes race discrimination,” the Education Department’s office for civil rights said in a letter.

It said schools must ensure students are not treated ​differently because of race and that “racial balancing” constitutes discrimination.

The guidance follows the ​department’s decision last month to remove several “disparate impact” regulations that for decades have prohibited policies and practices ‌with ⁠discriminatory effects that are often unintended.

Such as holding all races to the same standards.

… Eric ​Duncan, education equity ​advocacy group EdTrust’s ⁠director of P-12 policy, criticized the latest guidance.

“You cannot address racial disparities in school discipline by telling schools to ignore ​race,” he said. “Black students have long faced some of the ​harshest discipline ⁠in our nation’s schools.”

Data from the 2023 report also showed that Black boys were nearly twice as likely as white boys to receive an out-of-school suspension or ⁠expulsion ​in K-12 public schools while Black girls were ​nearly twice as likely to receive one or more in-school suspensions, one or more out-of-school suspensions, and ​expulsions than white girls.

Wow, what could possibly explain black youths getting suspended or expelled nearly twice as much other than the vicious hate-filled racist evil of white schoolteachers? I mean, it’s not as if young black men get murdered (largely by other young black men) twice as often.

What? They die by homicide 20 times as often?

From the Obama Administration’s

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