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.
miniature golf excellence and water parks than country clubs, as George Carlin explains in the opening monologue of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure:
Hi. Welcome to the future. San Dimas, California, 2688 and I'm telling you it's great here. The air is clean. The water's clean. Even the dirt is clean. Bowling scores are way up. Mini-golf scores are way down. And we have more excellent water slides than any other planet we communicate with. I'm telling you this place is great. But it almost wasn't. 700 years ago, the two great ones ran into a few problems. So now I have to travel back in time to help them out. If I should fail to keep these two on the correct path, the basis of our society will be in danger.
Spaun has a German-American father and a half-Filipino and half-Mexican mother. But unlike Keanu Reeves, he didn’t get quite as obviously as triumphant of a combinations of genes, so he’s had to plug along having his potential underrated until this year at age 34 when he lost a playoff for the #5 tournament, the TPC, to superstar Rory McIlroy, and then won the national championship at the prototypical U.S. Open course, Oakmont.
Spaun got a rough start to his final round,
as Golf Digest reported:
“She [youngest daughter violet] had a stomach bug and was vomiting all night long,” Spaun said. “I was just like, ‘OK, my wife was up at 3 a.m., and she's like, Violet is vomiting all over. She can't keep anything down. It was kind of a rough start to the morning. I'm not blaming that on my start, but it kind of fit the mold of what was going on, the chaos.”
Spaun, who played in the second to last pairing and was one shot back of leader Sam Burns, made bogeys on five of his first six holes Sunday and seemingly played his way out of contention. But then a rain storm forced a 96-minute stoppage of play, allowing Spaun to reset with 10 holes remaining. Upon his return, he made four birdies, including back-to-back on the 17th
On the next to last hole of the U.S. Open, the short par 4, 312 yard 17th, Spaun came within a couple of feet of holing out for a double eagle ace, then two putted for a birdie.
and 18th holes to pull out a surprise victory with a closing 72 and a one-under 279 total score.
Thankfully, Violet looked like she had recovered during the day as she was behind the 18th green with her older sister Emerson and mother Melody watching dad make his 64-foot birdie putt on the last hole to win the championship.
In the crisis at Oakmont, the man made the two greatest shots of his life, the 318 yard drive on 17 and the 64 foot putt on 18.
I have no idea what Spaun’s individual political views are, but I doubt if he is sympathetic toward those of Nikole Hannah-Jones.
I'm not a high-achiever but I've participated in some brutally competitive career and non-career endeavors. In my experience if the organization stays mission-focused the Diversity takes care of itself. People from all races and walks of life will near kill themselves to get onboard a respected, mission-focused endeavor or institution.
Once Diversity becomes the mission the Talented Tenth get skimmed off, there's actually less Diversity, the mission is compromised, and nobody's happy.
Also, let me toot my own horn again for highlighting Trump's use of the Sailer 2.0 Strategy before Sailer did: it turns out black, latino, and Arby's-American men don't like being lectured by NKJ and her liberal white friends either. You're welcome Steve.
I’m imagining a meeting between J.J. and Nikole H.-J. where she is explaining the burden he’s been carrying all of his life while J.J.’s wife is asking if she’d like cream in her coffee and the girls are wondering why this woman talks funny. Americans truly live on different planets.
Do the feds know if NPR is preset on our car radios? We could use that to facilitate the great “sorting “ event that surely is in our future.