A Matter of Preference

My new Taki's Magazine column ponders why Trump's all-out attack on DEI racial preferences has been so successful.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

A Matter of Preference
Steve Sailer
July 02, 2025

… The liberal establishment view has been that civil rights laws exist not to benefit all American citizens like they appear to read, but solely to benefit nonwhites, even at the cost of injustice to individual whites. But anyway, whites can’t be the victims of racism today because their ancestors were powerful in the past and, therefore, today’s whites racially deserve to be the victims of discrimination….

In contrast to elites, the public has, on the whole, never appreciated the morality of discriminating against living whites to make up for discrimination against dead blacks. Thus, in liberal California at the peak of the racial reckoning in 2020, the people voted against racial preferences 57–43.

Why is this?

Most Americans without graduate degrees find it difficult to conceive of justifications for discriminating on the basis of race.

And it’s pretty obvious that the woke are motivated by racist animus against whites, which most working-class non-whites find distasteful.

For example, the typical mestizo Mexican-American male voter can imagine a future in which his hard work and that of his children leads to his grandchildren being, due to earning good marriages, notably whiter than he is. In any case, if he’s ever heard of Nikole Hannah-Jones, he despises her for winning $625,000 from the MacArthur Foundation for being a purported “genius.”

The hardworking Hispanic men who voted half for Trump in 2024 really don’t like semi-black women like Hannah-Jones blaming whites for the troubles of black layabouts.

For example, consider golfer J.J. Spaun, who won the U.S. Open at blue-blooded Oakmont last month:

Spaun looks like the prototypical SoCal muny golfer of the 21st Century: about 15 ponds overweight and ethnically ambiguous. Indeed, I’ve played at Griffith Park and Simi Valley with UPS drivers who look like him.

And Spaun is from San Dimas, an L.A. suburb better known for

Paywall here.