Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and "equity." How come?
When you examine the massive funding and total lack of vetting of 20 million+ migrants, calling it an oversight is laughable. It was intentional harm inflicted on American citizens.
I think Dr. Jill and Joe remain angry that the Clinton/Obama Ivy Leaguers viewed him with disdain. The Senator from MBNA, with his shabby Syracuse Law degree. Did they really believe in all the woke nonsense his administration promoted? He’s like a boat without a rudder.
As noted in another comment, he actually has an excellent rudder. He tacks to the center of Democrat policy almost unerringly. This is the guy who sponsored the Violence Against Women Act and then went on to approve of tranny boxers bashing female opponents.
This post makes my draft list of Best essays of 2025 (which admittedly is 3 times as long as the final list).
The Zeitgist Theory is probably right. A lot of Clinton Democrats went crazy, and a lot of them were intimidated into thinking they had to behave as if they were crazy because Crazy was stylish and the real crazies were scary and included some big donors. Note, too, that the Biden Administration did not go crazy into endorsing Hamas. That Democratic Zeitgeist did not unify the Press and the Donors and the Scary Heavy-Pressure People.
The later never bought the Crazy because they never believed it. It was just a means to Power. And Power got the fake GoGos like Yglesias to ignore the Dollar Store grifting that was all the Biden Crime Family could pull off.
The Power theory is no good for the Biden politburo, because it didn't work for them, or the Democratic power. The Crazy stuff wsa good for the Bernie Sanders people, who wanted to grab control and to wreck the country to prepare for the revolution. It was like having the Bolshevik policies in Russia in 1917 being a bad way to win the war against Germany and fix he Russian economy. It was bad ordinary politics, though, bad for graft and for winning elections. The Politboro knew that.
“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
To wit, the literary/tv/movie character I think I hate most is the smart ass writer/reporter type who always gets the last word and what he wants with some snarky comment. Talk about projection by the writer.
One of my hobbyhorses is how it appears that some time in the 1970s a bunch of nerdy wordcels decided to stop writing about Cary Grant and Humphry Bogart types and try to sell the women of the world the idea that the really desirable men, if you think about it, are 'sensitive guy' types who don't look like they could fight
I wasn't even thinking about looks. Grant was suave. Bogart was cool. Imagine doing a reboot of "Play it again, Sam" but instead it's a guy getting advice from an imaginary Alvy Singer.
I read a profile of Cary Grant in GQ maybe in the 1980s. The author told the story of his mom showing him a photo of Grant as an old guy. The author said "Wow, I hope I look like that when I'm 70" to which mom responded by laughing her ass off and telling her 30 yo son "you don't look like that now. Don't worry. Nobody looks like that."
I have found that helpful at several points during my average to below average looking life.
I remember seeing 'All the President's Men' when I was in my teens, and thinking naively that there really could not be a cooler path for a bookish youth like me to tread.
Now I look back and think that movie might be one of the most destructive cultural products of the 20th century.
I commend any opportunity taken to use this quote.
Interestingly, Marlowe, as surely he is the epitome of who Chandler is describing, is a 'noticer' in terms of his "startling awareness' and this is undoubtedly reflective of Chandler himself. If his descriptive writing wasn't proof in itself then him being described "as a rather nasty man at times" by the WaPo reviewer seems to me at least to suggest he saw into the reality of matters to such an extent as to offend the refined sensibilities of the WaPo man.
The shift of the Democrats from a party predominantly concerned with economic fairness for the middle to lower middle class to one dedicated to identity politics and cultural warfare meant they gave up on developing policies that were intended to be practical and broad and switched to top down imposition of social changes they wanted but had no organic support.
Along with this was that the political heart of the party changed from old school labor Dems who liked and were loyal to our culture to one where the so called civil rights activists became the core, and they actively hate our culture and most of the people in it, so most policy was designed to punish and disenfranchise them.
Economic issues are still the single biggest concern for ordinary people, and if the GOP stays focused on that it will gain strength. If the Dems ever had the brains to revert to that they would be very competitive but even in the face of overwhelming evidence that immigration, trans and DEI cost them dearly they cannot let it go.
This is not new; it started back in the 1960s when the Party of the Working Man started tiptoeing away from working class causes to civil rights, women's lib, and immigration reform. The American working class was just too white, too provincial, too religious and too armed for urban democratic tastes. There is iconic, emblematic photography from that era with the Hard Hat Riot and the Boston Busing Riots.
I have been writing about this since the Alt-Right days. I wish I'd saved my better posts from my old blog. I could just repost them because we are still talking about the same things 20 years later.
I understand that this started over 50 years ago, but as recently as the Clinton Administration there were still a lot of traditional labor Dems who were left on economics and center right on culture - I worked for one. They had substantial influence until W came along but by the end of Obama's first term they were essentially extinct, and there was no internal firewall against the civil rights* obsessed activists who run things now.
*I use this term to refer to those who are centered on race/alphabet people stuff but calling it 'civil rights' is a misnomer since they are really about the supremacy of minority subsets of the population. It's really just a nod to the cultural turning point this movement represents.
It takes a few generations for politics to shift. In 1990, most Southern state legislatures had strong Democratic majorities although most had voted for Nixon once, Reagan twice and the older Bush once.
It would appear that the Biden Cabinet was not a Team of Rivals like Doris Kearns Goodwin fancifully named Lincoln's consigliere that brought havoc to the South but was more like Johnny Friendly's little mob in "On the Waterfront." Reading the expose of the Biden Administration's handing out of money to favorite Democratic groups from Catholic Charities to the $20 billion given to radical Green groups, Johnny Friendly and his little gang was a little more honest with their payouts and kickbacks than Scranton Joe's wheeler-dealers.
Of course the Politburo was aware of racial gaps in G loaded tests. But they either push that knowledge into the back of their minds or explain it as the fault of social structures or systemic racism. If blacks and Hispanics had access to better schools through FAFH and increased funding of majority-minority schools, and better early childhood education such as Head Start and government provided pre-school, those gaps would close. Forget 50 years of failed attempts and wasted trillions of dollars, THIS TIME leftest educational and social programs will work. Any other belief is RACIST.
Don’t even be aware of racists like that Steve Sailer, who racist far-rightists read but (other than Coulter or Murray) never acknowledge. Reject the bourgeois arguments of Rob Henderson and Amy Wax. They are racists for thinking that factors such as illegitimacy and discipline have any influence on group outcomes. Reject any prescriptions by Murray, because he wrote racist books like Losing Ground and The Bell Curve.
Do you think that members of the Inner Circle ever ride DC buses or Metro trains? Of course not. Not because they are aware of the dangers. Of course not. They are simply too important and too busy to use public transportation. Since the Metro is an almost completely black run operation, any deficiency in its operation and safety (which the Politburo don’t acknowledge) are due to systemic racism and racist Congress refusing to provide adequate funding.
Based on my experience, most of them are not aware at all of the gaps. They do not read any articles about the gaps because any talk about the gaps is hate talk. For those who are aware of the gaps, they hand wave it away by various claims including, "IQ isn't real or doesn't measure anything," "The gaps are because of inequality which is because of racism/slavery/Jim Crow."
If they’re not aware of the gap why are they always coming up with “new” (actually rehashed old) ways of closing it in the educational system? Why are they against G loaded tests as admission requirements for schools or employee selection for jobs or advancement?
They have numerous explanations for why the gap exists: the heritage of slavery, pre-1954 segregation, systemic racism, red-lining, poverty, not enough POCs in teaching and administration, etc. They aren’t sure what combination of factors account for the gap but one thing they are sure of: it isn’t heritable/genetic.
I referred to the Politburo/Inner Circle, not the left wing proles. They’re the ones pushing for racial preferences, knowing that otherwise blacks and Hispanics will be significantly underrepresented in G loaded academic settings and businesses. They give all of the excuses I listed above but are they true believers? I doubt it. That said, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see, so maybe they are true believers, in the same category as young earth creationists, except even more so, since they believe that human populations have been adapting and evolving in different environments since the out of Africa immigration 50,000 years ago, not 6,028 years ago. But if Steve is right that they don’t believe that Chinese women in the aggregate have smaller hands and fingers than Europeans, then maybe they do believe that there has been no divergence in population traits in response to adaptions to different environments in traits other than skin color.
Has anybody seen or heard from Nicholas Wade recently?
There are plenty of true believers. You hear it again and again if you actually take a look at what they themselves say. Aside from geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and intelligence researchers, it's pretty easy to either live in ignorance of the topic, or to believe one of the bullshit excuses ("we just need more money!"), given the sheer volume of propaganda against it:
The poll Steve Sailer provides has Asians being D+20 Asian, a significant change from 2020 which was D+31. Asia is a pretty big continent and it includes East Asia, South Asia and, for census purposes, Middle-Easterners are called Asians. I would guess most of the movement from 2020 to 2024 was East Asians trending more Republican and Middle-Easterners trending more Republican and South Asians not moving much towards the Republicans. East Asians live in urban areas and the transgressions of black criminals probably moved the East Asians rightward. As for the Middle-Easterners, the perception that the Democrats were pro-Israel and pro-Jewish moved them rightward. Just a hunch.
“Michael Bennet recounts seeing Biden flub the name of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas at an immigration debate, and he reflects that maybe Biden’s age explains why the administration’s actual immigration policy is so muddled and murky. Bennet decides that the problem is that the Democratic Party is in a state of disagreement about what to do here, and that without a full-time president, there just isn’t a clear choice or direction.”
Uh, Matty, maybe those Democratic advisers were reading your book about immigration with the title “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger”?!
Notwithstanding the governance issues of running a massive executive branch, I.e., a lot of policy was made outside of the White House (Mayorkas, Garland and Millie come to mind) which is what you would expect given a useless president and a small cadre of delusional advisors, don’t underestimate spite and self satisfied smugness as the reasons for crazy. I would wager a main catalyst for open borders and the transgender craze were attempts to piss off ‘racist MAGA’ voters. I won’t stray into the topic of the increasing feminization of our public discourse has anything to do with this. I guess I just did.
Being a ISteve reader since the 90’s is empowering because you can usually get to the crux of an argument or policy disagreement light years before others. And you’re always right. So it can be intoxicating walking around with this kind of power. Yglesias is political nerd who has devoted his entire adult life to this stuff and he’s right about 55% of the time while I’m walking around batting 1000. Does he know enough to have a deep sense of shame? These people have no INSTINCTS or they are they know the truth and just want to stay in good company and keep the paychecks coming. Frustrating to deal with them either way.
They do need to be constantly reminded how many Black (capitalized) people they got killed supporting the insanity of BLM. They all have a share in that obscene body count.
Biden was a tough nut for White and Cramer to crack, because they were interested in politicians with attractive personalities and fresh ideas. Biden's only idea is to find the exact center of the Democratic Party and to occupy that spot, so he has never intentionally said anything interesting.
As for his personality, I'll repeat a story I've told here before. When he was gearing up to run for president in the 1988 cycle, Biden gave a talk on the campus of the college I was attending. He went on about a magazine article he'd read, and in the Q & A one of the professors gently challenged him about his interpretation of the article. Rather than handle the challenge with a charming smile and a mild and forgettable joke, as most politicians would do, Biden got defensive and yelled at the guy from the podium.
At the reception afterward, Biden latched on to me. I wondered why he insisted on talking to me, since I was obviously a person of no consequence and didn't have much to say. I gradually realized that he had picked me because I was the tallest person there. Every time he saw the professor approaching him, Biden would turn, I would turn in response, and the professor would find himself looking at my back. I was miserable when I realized what he was using me to do, but I couldn't think of a way to escape.
Biden is a midwit Bubble dweller who grew up in the fake State known as Delaware. It's like the Luxembourg of States. He does not have a varied life experience or social dealings and he's graceless and lacks charisma. A lot of Americans find this appealing.
He might not be an intellectual but he has always struck me that he has street smarts. Cunning, aggressive and vengeful. Your story paints a good picture and I reckon that you shouldn't be too disheartened as in different circumstances I could quite easily see your professor friend beaten up outside the back of the dancehall.
Perfect, that’s the Joe Biden that I saw from his first appearance on the National stage. He is the ultimate grifter, a man of little intelligence and less integrity who has made a career of self serving mediocrity.
Within Washington, understanding the zeitgeist always lags. But when a large part of the time (imagine the effort) is spent on hiding the executive from the public, there is even more distraction. Overplaying the hand was always in the cards.
"As I responded repeatedly to the conspiracy theorists, the feeble old Biden’s shadowy “handlers” weren’t anybody interesting: they were just Democratic political lifers who had been handpicked by Joe and Jill for their loyalty to Biden."
Except that's not what you said; you simply dismissed it out of hand.
Looking back at this, I've been using the term "Politburo" to describe the cabal of Cabinet members and White House staff who actually wielded executive agency since February 2022. I should write a book too.
I disagree that these people were the slow, steady hands of the Democratic Party who just got caught up in the moment. The people in the upper ranks of government and the private sector have become too insular and too wealthy. They exist in lifelong Bubbles, protected by a wall of high property values and work sinecures. They genuinely hate the Badwhites and want them swamped with pliant Third Worlders. They get a real emotional frisson from observing Have a Book Read to Your Kid By a Sexual Freak Day. They are as devoted to their globohomo Egalitarian religion as GW Bush is to his suburban goober Christianity.
I'm not sure who hasn't realized it yet, but there is no slow, boring center waiting in the wings to take over on either side. The infection has festered too long, the democratic institutions are too decrepit, and reform is no longer possible. As the late, great blogger Porter and I used to discuss back in the day, the Age of Ideology is over. America is tribing up.
I've met a lot of older people who desperately want to remain hip, relevant, young. They know the young people don't tie onions to their belts anymore but have no idea how to figure out what the youngsters are into these days. They're susceptible to easy to implement sound bites from their legacy media and whatever an actual young person tells them.
In my opinion, a sixty-five year old man expounding on the glorious multiplicity of human gender always sounds like 'how do you do, fellow kids.' As the kids say these days (these days being ten years ago) cringe.
Another cause is likely that as of the late 1990s the government was basically done. It had achieved the peak of service desired by the average of the electorate and there wasn't anything innovative for people in government to do (you know, that people actually wanted). It's like the supply of Cheap Chinese Crap (CCC as economists call it), it was amazing for a while but eventually it's like enough already. My house is full.
So you try a bunch of new stuff until you wreck the country a little and have some new real problems to fix.
“The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
When you examine the massive funding and total lack of vetting of 20 million+ migrants, calling it an oversight is laughable. It was intentional harm inflicted on American citizens.
They lack the ability to think that far in advance.
I think Dr. Jill and Joe remain angry that the Clinton/Obama Ivy Leaguers viewed him with disdain. The Senator from MBNA, with his shabby Syracuse Law degree. Did they really believe in all the woke nonsense his administration promoted? He’s like a boat without a rudder.
As long as he's eating ice cream at Rehoboth Beach, Biden didn't care about who was divvying up the loot.
As noted in another comment, he actually has an excellent rudder. He tacks to the center of Democrat policy almost unerringly. This is the guy who sponsored the Violence Against Women Act and then went on to approve of tranny boxers bashing female opponents.
I'd call that being towed without rudder or engine!
This post makes my draft list of Best essays of 2025 (which admittedly is 3 times as long as the final list).
The Zeitgist Theory is probably right. A lot of Clinton Democrats went crazy, and a lot of them were intimidated into thinking they had to behave as if they were crazy because Crazy was stylish and the real crazies were scary and included some big donors. Note, too, that the Biden Administration did not go crazy into endorsing Hamas. That Democratic Zeitgeist did not unify the Press and the Donors and the Scary Heavy-Pressure People.
https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Top_Ten_Articles_of_2025
The later never bought the Crazy because they never believed it. It was just a means to Power. And Power got the fake GoGos like Yglesias to ignore the Dollar Store grifting that was all the Biden Crime Family could pull off.
The Power theory is no good for the Biden politburo, because it didn't work for them, or the Democratic power. The Crazy stuff wsa good for the Bernie Sanders people, who wanted to grab control and to wreck the country to prepare for the revolution. It was like having the Bolshevik policies in Russia in 1917 being a bad way to win the war against Germany and fix he Russian economy. It was bad ordinary politics, though, bad for graft and for winning elections. The Politboro knew that.
They only had to look across the border at Canada to see massive immigration and transgender issues fully accepted.
Does the title mean that Matt Iglesias thinks he is one of Weber’s leaders and heroes? Now *that’s* funny!
Most writers think they are heroes. For example:
“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
To wit, the literary/tv/movie character I think I hate most is the smart ass writer/reporter type who always gets the last word and what he wants with some snarky comment. Talk about projection by the writer.
One of my hobbyhorses is how it appears that some time in the 1970s a bunch of nerdy wordcels decided to stop writing about Cary Grant and Humphry Bogart types and try to sell the women of the world the idea that the really desirable men, if you think about it, are 'sensitive guy' types who don't look like they could fight
Bogart was pretty funny looking himself for a gigantic star. Of course, Christopher Reeve was funny looking compared to Cary Grant.
I wasn't even thinking about looks. Grant was suave. Bogart was cool. Imagine doing a reboot of "Play it again, Sam" but instead it's a guy getting advice from an imaginary Alvy Singer.
I read a profile of Cary Grant in GQ maybe in the 1980s. The author told the story of his mom showing him a photo of Grant as an old guy. The author said "Wow, I hope I look like that when I'm 70" to which mom responded by laughing her ass off and telling her 30 yo son "you don't look like that now. Don't worry. Nobody looks like that."
I have found that helpful at several points during my average to below average looking life.
I remember seeing 'All the President's Men' when I was in my teens, and thinking naively that there really could not be a cooler path for a bookish youth like me to tread.
Now I look back and think that movie might be one of the most destructive cultural products of the 20th century.
I commend any opportunity taken to use this quote.
Interestingly, Marlowe, as surely he is the epitome of who Chandler is describing, is a 'noticer' in terms of his "startling awareness' and this is undoubtedly reflective of Chandler himself. If his descriptive writing wasn't proof in itself then him being described "as a rather nasty man at times" by the WaPo reviewer seems to me at least to suggest he saw into the reality of matters to such an extent as to offend the refined sensibilities of the WaPo man.
It is one of the more fitting blog titles.
The shift of the Democrats from a party predominantly concerned with economic fairness for the middle to lower middle class to one dedicated to identity politics and cultural warfare meant they gave up on developing policies that were intended to be practical and broad and switched to top down imposition of social changes they wanted but had no organic support.
Along with this was that the political heart of the party changed from old school labor Dems who liked and were loyal to our culture to one where the so called civil rights activists became the core, and they actively hate our culture and most of the people in it, so most policy was designed to punish and disenfranchise them.
Economic issues are still the single biggest concern for ordinary people, and if the GOP stays focused on that it will gain strength. If the Dems ever had the brains to revert to that they would be very competitive but even in the face of overwhelming evidence that immigration, trans and DEI cost them dearly they cannot let it go.
This is not new; it started back in the 1960s when the Party of the Working Man started tiptoeing away from working class causes to civil rights, women's lib, and immigration reform. The American working class was just too white, too provincial, too religious and too armed for urban democratic tastes. There is iconic, emblematic photography from that era with the Hard Hat Riot and the Boston Busing Riots.
I have been writing about this since the Alt-Right days. I wish I'd saved my better posts from my old blog. I could just repost them because we are still talking about the same things 20 years later.
I understand that this started over 50 years ago, but as recently as the Clinton Administration there were still a lot of traditional labor Dems who were left on economics and center right on culture - I worked for one. They had substantial influence until W came along but by the end of Obama's first term they were essentially extinct, and there was no internal firewall against the civil rights* obsessed activists who run things now.
*I use this term to refer to those who are centered on race/alphabet people stuff but calling it 'civil rights' is a misnomer since they are really about the supremacy of minority subsets of the population. It's really just a nod to the cultural turning point this movement represents.
Trump is basically Dick Gephardt in better suits.
It takes a few generations for politics to shift. In 1990, most Southern state legislatures had strong Democratic majorities although most had voted for Nixon once, Reagan twice and the older Bush once.
It would appear that the Biden Cabinet was not a Team of Rivals like Doris Kearns Goodwin fancifully named Lincoln's consigliere that brought havoc to the South but was more like Johnny Friendly's little mob in "On the Waterfront." Reading the expose of the Biden Administration's handing out of money to favorite Democratic groups from Catholic Charities to the $20 billion given to radical Green groups, Johnny Friendly and his little gang was a little more honest with their payouts and kickbacks than Scranton Joe's wheeler-dealers.
"It would appear that the Biden Cabinet was not a Team of Rivals like Doris Kearns Goodwin fancifully named Lincoln's consigliere"
As a linguistic fascist it is my duty to note that "consigliere" is the singular form. The plural form is "consiglieri". Carry on...
I am properly disciplined.
Of course the Politburo was aware of racial gaps in G loaded tests. But they either push that knowledge into the back of their minds or explain it as the fault of social structures or systemic racism. If blacks and Hispanics had access to better schools through FAFH and increased funding of majority-minority schools, and better early childhood education such as Head Start and government provided pre-school, those gaps would close. Forget 50 years of failed attempts and wasted trillions of dollars, THIS TIME leftest educational and social programs will work. Any other belief is RACIST.
Don’t even be aware of racists like that Steve Sailer, who racist far-rightists read but (other than Coulter or Murray) never acknowledge. Reject the bourgeois arguments of Rob Henderson and Amy Wax. They are racists for thinking that factors such as illegitimacy and discipline have any influence on group outcomes. Reject any prescriptions by Murray, because he wrote racist books like Losing Ground and The Bell Curve.
Do you think that members of the Inner Circle ever ride DC buses or Metro trains? Of course not. Not because they are aware of the dangers. Of course not. They are simply too important and too busy to use public transportation. Since the Metro is an almost completely black run operation, any deficiency in its operation and safety (which the Politburo don’t acknowledge) are due to systemic racism and racist Congress refusing to provide adequate funding.
Based on my experience, most of them are not aware at all of the gaps. They do not read any articles about the gaps because any talk about the gaps is hate talk. For those who are aware of the gaps, they hand wave it away by various claims including, "IQ isn't real or doesn't measure anything," "The gaps are because of inequality which is because of racism/slavery/Jim Crow."
If they’re not aware of the gap why are they always coming up with “new” (actually rehashed old) ways of closing it in the educational system? Why are they against G loaded tests as admission requirements for schools or employee selection for jobs or advancement?
They have numerous explanations for why the gap exists: the heritage of slavery, pre-1954 segregation, systemic racism, red-lining, poverty, not enough POCs in teaching and administration, etc. They aren’t sure what combination of factors account for the gap but one thing they are sure of: it isn’t heritable/genetic.
The people in charge of the schools are aware of the gap, but the average left wing voters are not.
I referred to the Politburo/Inner Circle, not the left wing proles. They’re the ones pushing for racial preferences, knowing that otherwise blacks and Hispanics will be significantly underrepresented in G loaded academic settings and businesses. They give all of the excuses I listed above but are they true believers? I doubt it. That said, there are none so blind as those who refuse to see, so maybe they are true believers, in the same category as young earth creationists, except even more so, since they believe that human populations have been adapting and evolving in different environments since the out of Africa immigration 50,000 years ago, not 6,028 years ago. But if Steve is right that they don’t believe that Chinese women in the aggregate have smaller hands and fingers than Europeans, then maybe they do believe that there has been no divergence in population traits in response to adaptions to different environments in traits other than skin color.
Has anybody seen or heard from Nicholas Wade recently?
There are plenty of true believers. You hear it again and again if you actually take a look at what they themselves say. Aside from geneticists, evolutionary biologists, and intelligence researchers, it's pretty easy to either live in ignorance of the topic, or to believe one of the bullshit excuses ("we just need more money!"), given the sheer volume of propaganda against it:
https://bsky.app/profile/irhottakes.bsky.social/post/3lpwcu4qrak2h
The poll Steve Sailer provides has Asians being D+20 Asian, a significant change from 2020 which was D+31. Asia is a pretty big continent and it includes East Asia, South Asia and, for census purposes, Middle-Easterners are called Asians. I would guess most of the movement from 2020 to 2024 was East Asians trending more Republican and Middle-Easterners trending more Republican and South Asians not moving much towards the Republicans. East Asians live in urban areas and the transgressions of black criminals probably moved the East Asians rightward. As for the Middle-Easterners, the perception that the Democrats were pro-Israel and pro-Jewish moved them rightward. Just a hunch.
“Michael Bennet recounts seeing Biden flub the name of Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas at an immigration debate, and he reflects that maybe Biden’s age explains why the administration’s actual immigration policy is so muddled and murky. Bennet decides that the problem is that the Democratic Party is in a state of disagreement about what to do here, and that without a full-time president, there just isn’t a clear choice or direction.”
Uh, Matty, maybe those Democratic advisers were reading your book about immigration with the title “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger”?!
Good point!
Notwithstanding the governance issues of running a massive executive branch, I.e., a lot of policy was made outside of the White House (Mayorkas, Garland and Millie come to mind) which is what you would expect given a useless president and a small cadre of delusional advisors, don’t underestimate spite and self satisfied smugness as the reasons for crazy. I would wager a main catalyst for open borders and the transgender craze were attempts to piss off ‘racist MAGA’ voters. I won’t stray into the topic of the increasing feminization of our public discourse has anything to do with this. I guess I just did.
Being a ISteve reader since the 90’s is empowering because you can usually get to the crux of an argument or policy disagreement light years before others. And you’re always right. So it can be intoxicating walking around with this kind of power. Yglesias is political nerd who has devoted his entire adult life to this stuff and he’s right about 55% of the time while I’m walking around batting 1000. Does he know enough to have a deep sense of shame? These people have no INSTINCTS or they are they know the truth and just want to stay in good company and keep the paychecks coming. Frustrating to deal with them either way.
They do need to be constantly reminded how many Black (capitalized) people they got killed supporting the insanity of BLM. They all have a share in that obscene body count.
Biden was a tough nut for White and Cramer to crack, because they were interested in politicians with attractive personalities and fresh ideas. Biden's only idea is to find the exact center of the Democratic Party and to occupy that spot, so he has never intentionally said anything interesting.
As for his personality, I'll repeat a story I've told here before. When he was gearing up to run for president in the 1988 cycle, Biden gave a talk on the campus of the college I was attending. He went on about a magazine article he'd read, and in the Q & A one of the professors gently challenged him about his interpretation of the article. Rather than handle the challenge with a charming smile and a mild and forgettable joke, as most politicians would do, Biden got defensive and yelled at the guy from the podium.
At the reception afterward, Biden latched on to me. I wondered why he insisted on talking to me, since I was obviously a person of no consequence and didn't have much to say. I gradually realized that he had picked me because I was the tallest person there. Every time he saw the professor approaching him, Biden would turn, I would turn in response, and the professor would find himself looking at my back. I was miserable when I realized what he was using me to do, but I couldn't think of a way to escape.
Biden is a midwit Bubble dweller who grew up in the fake State known as Delaware. It's like the Luxembourg of States. He does not have a varied life experience or social dealings and he's graceless and lacks charisma. A lot of Americans find this appealing.
He might not be an intellectual but he has always struck me that he has street smarts. Cunning, aggressive and vengeful. Your story paints a good picture and I reckon that you shouldn't be too disheartened as in different circumstances I could quite easily see your professor friend beaten up outside the back of the dancehall.
Perfect, that’s the Joe Biden that I saw from his first appearance on the National stage. He is the ultimate grifter, a man of little intelligence and less integrity who has made a career of self serving mediocrity.
Within Washington, understanding the zeitgeist always lags. But when a large part of the time (imagine the effort) is spent on hiding the executive from the public, there is even more distraction. Overplaying the hand was always in the cards.
"As I responded repeatedly to the conspiracy theorists, the feeble old Biden’s shadowy “handlers” weren’t anybody interesting: they were just Democratic political lifers who had been handpicked by Joe and Jill for their loyalty to Biden."
Except that's not what you said; you simply dismissed it out of hand.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-mr-bidens-multiracial-base-shows-signs-of-fraying/#comment-6247547
Looking back at this, I've been using the term "Politburo" to describe the cabal of Cabinet members and White House staff who actually wielded executive agency since February 2022. I should write a book too.
I disagree that these people were the slow, steady hands of the Democratic Party who just got caught up in the moment. The people in the upper ranks of government and the private sector have become too insular and too wealthy. They exist in lifelong Bubbles, protected by a wall of high property values and work sinecures. They genuinely hate the Badwhites and want them swamped with pliant Third Worlders. They get a real emotional frisson from observing Have a Book Read to Your Kid By a Sexual Freak Day. They are as devoted to their globohomo Egalitarian religion as GW Bush is to his suburban goober Christianity.
I'm not sure who hasn't realized it yet, but there is no slow, boring center waiting in the wings to take over on either side. The infection has festered too long, the democratic institutions are too decrepit, and reform is no longer possible. As the late, great blogger Porter and I used to discuss back in the day, the Age of Ideology is over. America is tribing up.
I've met a lot of older people who desperately want to remain hip, relevant, young. They know the young people don't tie onions to their belts anymore but have no idea how to figure out what the youngsters are into these days. They're susceptible to easy to implement sound bites from their legacy media and whatever an actual young person tells them.
In my opinion, a sixty-five year old man expounding on the glorious multiplicity of human gender always sounds like 'how do you do, fellow kids.' As the kids say these days (these days being ten years ago) cringe.
Another cause is likely that as of the late 1990s the government was basically done. It had achieved the peak of service desired by the average of the electorate and there wasn't anything innovative for people in government to do (you know, that people actually wanted). It's like the supply of Cheap Chinese Crap (CCC as economists call it), it was amazing for a while but eventually it's like enough already. My house is full.
So you try a bunch of new stuff until you wreck the country a little and have some new real problems to fix.