From the US Department of Agriculture:

Natural Amenities Scale

The natural amenities scale is a measure of the physical characteristics of a county area that enhance the location as a place to live. The scale was constructed by combining six measures of climate, topography, and water area that reflect environmental qualities most people prefer. These measures are warm winter, winter sun, temperate summer, low summer humidity, topographic variation, and water area. The data are available for counties in the lower 48 States.

So, the coast of California, the Sierra Nevada, and the highlands of Colorado are the best counties in the 48 states in terms of natural amenities. That would seem to accord with the views of rich guys.

I’ve been to C ochise County, AZ, another one of America’s superstar counties, along with Gila, AZ (which I don’t recall visiting). They are way far south so have mild winters, but they are at fairly high altitudes so aren’t very hot or humid in summer.

The worst counties on this scale are in the upper Midwest.

In the middle of the country, especially blessed counties are in the highlands near the border of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and in northwest Arkansas, where Sam Walton chose to found Walmart over 60 years ao.

I would think that a few more measures would round off this scale: tree cover, average height of trees, and number of mosquitos. This map is biased toward boring southwest desert, such as the empty plains of West Texas, because due to higher altitude they aren’t that hot in summer and have lots of sunshine in winter. But people like trees, which West Texas is short of.

Similarly, this map is biased toward lower latitudes, which, all else being equal, tend to have a lot of mosquitos for more months of the year.

Thus, while the southeast deserves credit for its many tall trees, it also has a lot of mosquitos.

From Jackson Jules’ Substack:

Book Review: Noticing: you know him through his influence

JACKSON JULES
MAY 08, 2024

How does Steve Sailer do it? How did a golf-obsessed market researcher go from tracking customer purchases at grocery stores to becoming one of the most influential rightwing intellectuals in the world?

Compare and contrast Sailer with Raj Chetty. Chetty has every advantage that a social scientist could ask for. He is the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. His genetic pedigree is impeccable; he is descended from a scholarly Tamil Nadu family. And due to his high-status position as a chaired Harvard professor, he managed to convince the IRS to give him access to their anonymized tax records, one of the most valuable data sets in the world. He employs an army of high IQ and high conscientiousness graduate students to mine his voluminous data sets for any interesting pattern they can find.

And yet: if you want to know what Chetty’s data actually says, you have to read Steve Sailer.

Chetty aimed to study the question: What is behind social mobility? Why do some places have high social mobility while others have low social mobility? The conclusions that Chetty drew from his research just-so-happened to agree with liberal pieties; he advocated for residential integration, quality education, and family support. It took Sailer’s careful eye to notice that districts of high social mobility are in majority-white places like Minnesota and Utah while districts of low social mobility are in places with larger black populations like Georgia.

Noticing is a collection of Sailer’s greatest hits from over twenty years of blogging. Sailer’s eclectic interests stretch from statistics-heavy science like computerized adaptive testing and population genetics to more average-Joe topics like the LA Dodgers and Hollywood trivia. He is best known for popularizing the phrase “human biodiversity” (HBD), which refers to the study of how groups differ in terms of physical, cognitive, and behavioral traits. HBD focuses particularly on differences between racial groups, but also examines differences related to sex, sexuality, and the variation between individuals.

Even accounting for the fact that Noticing is Sailer at his best, it’s eerie how prescient he was on so many topics that the mainstream got wrong.

“What Will Happen in Afghanistan?” (01/26/01): a review of John Huston’s 1975 film “The Man Who Would Be King”. Adapted from the Rudyard Kipling novella of the same name, “The Man Who Would Be King” is an adventure film about two ex-soldiers who find themselves embroiled in an ill-conceived nation-building project in Afghanistan. Predictably, tragedy ensues.

“Cousin Marriage Conundrum” (01/13/03): an essay on the institution of cousin marriage. In the Middle East, cousin marriage is a common practice, with an estimated 46% of marriages occurring between first or second cousins. This high prevalence of consanguineous marriages results in extended families sharing significant genetic similarities, leading to exceptionally strong family ties in these societies. The strength of these kinship bonds undermines the development of non-kinship-based institutions, such as those associated with representative democracy.

“GOP Future Depends on Winning Larger Share of the White Vote” (11/28/00): an essay outlining his recommendations for the GOP electoral strategy. He argues that instead of pursuing minority voters, the GOP should focus on attracting working-class whites to create a broad, cross-class white coalition. Sailer emphasizes the role of immigration as the key issue to unite this coalition. The essay garnered renewed attention following Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily featured anti-immigration rhetoric.

“Track and Battlefield” (12/31/1997): an essay co-written with sport scientist Stephen Seiler on the gender gap in sports performance. In the 90s, there was a common narrative that women were on the verge of surpassing men in sports. This narrative started due to the apparent convergence of male and female world records in track and field events. Sailer’s analysis of the data revealed that not only had this trend failed to continue into the 90s, but had actually reversed. He proposes that the reason for this reversal was that the rampant PED usage of the 80s disproportionately benefited female athletes compared to their male counterparts. So when sporting authorities cracked down on PEDs in the 90s, the crackdown had a greater impact on top-level female athletics than top-level male athletics.

“World War T” (1/22/14): an essay where he predicts that transgenderism would be the next leftwing rallying cause. Although the Supreme Court did not officially legalize gay marriage in all states until 2015, it was evident by 2014 that its legalization was inevitable. Based on then-recent coverage by the New York Times (which Sailer reads more religiously than most liberals I know), he conjectured that transgenderism would soon take the place of gay marriage as a central issue for left-wing activism.

“A Rape Hoax for Book Lovers” (12/03/14): his essay concerning the infamous UVA rape hoax. The original Rolling Stones article was over the top, featuring a three-hour long gang rape with broken glass strewn across the floor. Other than a lone blog post by Richard Bradley, there was very little doubt expressed anywhere. It wasn’t until Sailer shared Blow’s post on his own blog that the mainstream media started exhibiting skepticism as well.

This is a very impressive track record. It’s not just that he got the predictions right. He also explained exactly what ideological blindspots were stopping our establishment institutions from putting the pieces together.

How does Sailer do it?

The Steph Curry of Intellectuals

OK, “The Steph Curry of Intellectuals” is cool.

A pet hobby of mine is analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of public intellectuals in the same way that sports fans analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their favorite athletes. I’m not the only one who likes doing this. Arnold Kling occasionally runs something called the Fantasy Intellectual Teams project (a sendup to fantasy sports) where participants can draft intellectuals and compare their performance against one another.

For some public intellectuals, it’s readily apparent how they achieve success. Take Steven Pinker for example. When I first picked up a copy of The Language Instinct, it was obvious within a couple of pages that the author was one of the most verbally-gifted people on the planet. Of course, Pinker is also hardworking, intellectually curious, etc. But in the same way that it isn’t deeply mysterious to me how Shaquille O’Neal is good at basketball, it doesn’t feel too mysterious to me why Steven Pinker is a great intellectual.

How Sailer carved out a niche as a public intellectual is less clear to me. Don’t get me wrong: Steve is clearly a bright guy. While I can’t provide a source, I remember reading that he scored a 740 on the SAT Verbal section. And he got that score before the 1995-recentering, back when the SAT was a high-ceiling test and featured g-loaded questions like analogies. That ain’t bad.

To be precise, I scored 770 and 780 out of 800 on the SAT Verbal on the two times I took the SAT in the mid-1970s. Similarly, I scored 77 out of 80 on the PSAT in 1975 and 774 out of 800 on the GMAT in 1979.

As you might imagine from my subsequent career, I am a verbally bright guy.

Math not so much: 720 and 640 on the SAT. (Those were decent scores in the 1970s.) I’m good at doing arithmetic in my head, but I’m not good at the more abstract realms of math.

But loads of people have verbal IQs that high. Using an SAT-to-IQ conversion table, we can estimate that Sailer has a verbal IQ around three standard deviations above the mean. That’s really good! But in the US alone, there are over 400,000 people with IQs over 145. And based on my impressions reading him, three standard deviations above the mean sounds about right. A typical Steve Sailer blog post doesn’t involve complicated, multi-part, roman-numeral-indexed arguments like a Scott Alexander essay or the type of heavy-duty statistics you see thrown around casually by someone like Cremieux. And yet: time and time again, Sailer gets things right that other people get wrong. How?

As an intellectual, two attributes of Sailer stick out to me: his long-term memory and his non-conformity.

Long-term memory seems to be an underrated attribute for a public intellectual to possess. Memory also appears to be distinct from IQ (though the two attributes are certainly correlated). For example, Charles Murray (pre-1995 SAT Verbal score: 800) is clearly an incredible, generational verbal reasoner. However, on his Twitter, he is occasionally reminded of things that he has written about but has long forgotten (e.g., some obscure bit of data from his book Human Accomplishment). Meanwhile, Sailer remembers everything. It’s a bit of a punchline at this point for Steve to start a blogpost talking about the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, only to end up reminiscing about a particularly memorable stolen base in the 7th inning of a Yankees-Red Sox game that he watched on ABC’s Monday Night Baseball back in 1974.

Long-term memory is interesting because it might be connected to the difference between crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. Sailer had a relatively late start to his career as a public intellectual. While he wrote sporadic op-eds for newspapers for much of his adult life, it was only when got diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma on his 38th birthday that he made the transition to being a full-time writer. Perhaps the reason why Sailer was such a late bloomer was that it took many years of noticing patterns and collecting anecdotes before he had accumulated enough crystallized intelligence to really blossom as a writer.

The other thing that stands about Sailer is his nonconformity. The importance of nonconformity for exceptional intellectual achievement is often included in models of genius (see: Jensen’s multiplicative model of genius). But even compared to other writers known for their nonconformity (e.g. Richard Hanania), Sailer’s readiness to entertain ideas that most people would consider offensive puts him in a class of his own.

But while he is certainly disagreeable, Sailer doesn’t seem to delight in trolling in the same way that someone like Hanania does. That’s not to say Sailer doesn’t have a sense of humor (as his petty retweets of Will Stancil show). But he is consistently even-keeled in his blog posts. And in interviews, he speaks in a slow, professorial tone that is barely a decibel above a whisper. He is also remarkably lacking in ego. Many successful bloggers are reluctant to comment on other people’s posts due to a fear of looking stupid or being seen engaging in behavior that’s “beneath them”. Not Sailer. You can see him reply-guying on Marginal Revolution, AstralCodexTen, Twitter—wherever his intellectual curiosity is currently being stoked.

Enough speculation. How does Sailer personally explain his success?

My basic insight is that noticing isn’t all that hard to do if you let yourself: the world actually is pretty much what it looks like, loath though we may be to admit it.

My main trick for coming up with enough insights to make a living as an unfashionable pundit for 23 years has been to assume that private life facts—what we see with our lying eyes—and public life facts—what the scientific data tells us—are essentially one and the same. There is only one reality out there. We don’t live in a gnostic universe in which there is a false reality of mundane cause-and-effect and a horrifying true reality in which unnoticeable racism determines all fates.

Maybe it really is that simple. Sailer tells us that there is no trick. You just have to learn how to believe what your lying eyes are trying to tell you. And yet we keep insisting: for real, Steve, what’s your secret?

The irony at the heart of Steve Sailer is that despite being associated with IQ-determinism, the story of his public intellectual career tells precisely the opposite story: how real-world accomplishment is inevitably the product of many traits that can interact in surprising ways.

The Dreaded Question
At this point you might be wondering: why isn’t Sailer famous? Sure, without a PhD, a cushy academic job is out of the question. But why isn’t he working at a well-regarded think tank like the Manhattan Institute, publishing articles at Quillette and the National Review?

This is as good a time as any to address the dreaded question: Is Steve Sailer a racist?

There was a recent viral Twitter thread by TracingWoodgrains that touched on this question. TracingWoodgrains’s longtweet is characteristically nuanced, but ultimately he concluded: yes, if the term “racist” is to have any meaning at all, then Sailer is a racist.

I don’t disagree with Trace’s overall take, though I notice that I don’t feel the same instinctive revulsion towards Sailer’s racism. To me, Sailer seems to be more fascinated by black people than harboring strong animosity towards them. For example, consider the following quote:

In general, blacks have long done fairly well on average in fields that reward improvisational skills: jazz, running with the football, comedy, rap, etc.

Statements like this one lead his critics to accuse him of peddling old stereotypes. But what if he’s correct? What if black people really are better at freestyling than algebraic topology?

That being said, there were two chapters of the book that felt weaker than the other portions, and they are related to the racism question: the chapter on citizenism and the chapter on Obama.

The first chapter of the book is on Sailer’s concept of citizenism: that society should be designed to meet the needs of its current citizenry.

Citizenism calls upon Americans to favor the welfare, even at some cost to ourselves, of our current fellow citizens over that of foreigners and internal factions.

And Sailer carefully explains the difference between citizenism and ethnonationalism.

Nor does citizenism suffer the fatal paradox dooming the white nationalism advocated by Jared Taylor and others who encourage whites to get down and mud-wrestle with the Al Sharptons of the world for control of the racial spoils system. Unfortunately for Taylor’s movement, white Americans don’t want, as he recommends, to act like the rest of the world; they want to act like white Americans. They believe on the whole in individualism rather than tribalism, national patriotism rather than ethnic loyalty, meritocracy rather than nepotism, nuclear families rather than extended clans, law and fair play rather than privilege, corporations of strangers rather than mafias of relatives, and true love rather than the arranged marriages necessary to keep ethnic categories clear-cut.

This is a stirring vision for America. I suddenly have the urge to fire up the old grill and crack open a cold one. But upon further reflection, it feels incomplete. If citizenism is meant to embody the political philosophy stemming from WEIRD psychology, then wouldn’t that inevitably mean favoring the ethnic groups that gave rise to that philosophy in the first place? I have a hard time seeing how citizenism in any practical real-world setting would not end up being ethnonationalism with extra steps.

Uncharitably, the impression I get from the citizenism essays is that (a) Sailer has an instinct that immigration is bad, and (b) he came up with a political philosophy that justifies immigration restriction without having to fully embrace ethnonationalism. He might very well be correct that immigration is bad! But the level of argumentation in this section isn’t up to his usual standard. …

Read the whole thing there.

Besides being a Nietzschean, I am also a Satanist lately:

Wow i did not know that

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) May 16, 2024

Did I ever mention I quit my marketing research job in 1988 to join a Satanist rock band? My corporate colleagues claimed that would be an imprudent career move because, among other reasons, I had no musical talent whatsoever.

To my surprise, they turned out to be right.

From the New Statesman:

America’s dime-store Nietzscheans

16 May 2024

What the unmasking of an anonymous publisher and Twitter personality reveals about the far right in the US.

By Sohrab Ahmari

@SohrabAhmari

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact . His latest book Tyranny, Inc is published by Penguin Random House.

It turns out that yet another leading member of the racial, “vitalist” right is an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward – not stopping with “normie” conservatism, but going all the way to the weird right. I’m referring to L0m3z, the founder of the edgy imprint Passage Publishing, home to, among others, the racial-hereditarian guru Steve Sailer. L0m3z’s identity as an ex-lefty California academic, who once sought to organise their [sic] fellow teachers, was recently unmasked by the Guardian.

Lomez was unimpressed by Ahmari’s attempt to shoehorn his sudden prominence this week into Ahmari’s pre-fab opinion about the rise of “pseudo-Nietzschean vitalism” on the right.

This is a complete lie. I have no idea where you got the idea that I am an "ex-lefty Bernie-bro." I have never said this. Delete. It's a total fabrication.

You do not understand your subject at all. Stop using me for you proxy war with BAP. pic.twitter.com/elIqgWNUJq

— Lomez (@L0m3z) May 16, 2024

And trying to squeeze me into the would-be Nietzchean superman box seems at least as silly. I’ve only read a couple of books by Nietzschean, and neither until I was over age 55, so they made vastly less impression on me than if I’d read them, at say, 15.

Ahmari’s essay appears to be about the Nietzsche fan Bronze Age Pervert, but his moniker goes unmentioned in it. Instead, Lomez and I are having micro-moments, so in the interests of timeliness, we got shoehorned into Ahmari’s thinkpiece, even though that doesn’t make much sense.

Though that alleged real identity is now a matter of public record, I’m choosing not to use L0m3z’s name, because in their online subculture, “doxing” is considered a sort of digital martyrdom, and I’d prefer not to heighten their mystique. And because what’s unique or singular about L0m3z is far less interesting than the sociological origins they share with many other members of this cohort: many – indeed, most – belong to the educated, urban professional classes who are profoundly alienated from the American mainstream.

Well, that’s a shocking discovery: bookish intellectuals tend to be from the educated, urban professional classes!

This little-understood sociological fact upends the typical understanding that many have of this sort of ideology. According to a conventional account, reinforced by misguided scholarship such as the recent bestseller White Rural Rage, in the US it is the Trumpian-Jacksonian back country that is seething with racial resentment. Rural Americans, to be sure, can sometimes come across as gruff when sounding off on matters racial and cultural. But it was members of the professional and even upper classes who promoted eugenic or dime-store Nietzschean ideologies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Likewise, it is a subset of disaffected or stressed urban professionals today who are developing a counter-culture centred around the worship of strength and the restoration of “natural hierarchies” among large human groups, as supposedly revealed by IQ bell curves.

According to the mythos promoted by people like L0m3z, the aristocratic or adventurous spirit, once free to roam and to designate value on his own, has tragically been imprisoned in the communal “longhouse”, lorded over by the primordial feminine, with its obsession with equality. When exactly this tragedy took place depends on who you ask: for some members of the online right, it was some 12,000 years ago with the advent of the agricultural civilisation and the shift from a “barbarian” mode of life into sedentary farming. For others, the tragedy occurred much more recently, with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Either way, no more could the natural aristocrat live free, for he was now chained to an egalitarian ethic that elevated the claims of the weak and the sickly. Soon, the grubby masses made even more audacious demands, reaching for what they could never truly possess: equality with the higher orders; they called this “democracy”. So things stand today. But the electronic rightists believe that there are ways out of the longhouse. Or better yet, perhaps the repressed aristocrats can smash it down altogether, restoring the natural order of things.

If you’re a conservative-minded, educated Zoomer today, chances are you thrill to some version of this mythos. Your world-view revolves not around the categories of conventional politics, but deep, hidden truths about natural hierarchies that map on to racial differences, conditioning some races to higher contemplation and others to servility.

The first to discover these truths were the classical philosophers, though in some cases you have to know just how to decode the ancient texts to discern this. More recently, the latest findings in human genetics and IQ science have supposedly removed any doubts: human beings are born unequal, with the starkest lines of division drawn across large racial groups. To deny this “science” is to wage war against reality itself, yet that is exactly what modern democracy does.

And that’s precisely the problem in the minds of an increasingly radical and influential cohort of young right-wing intellectuals and their fandoms. If you’re part of this cohort, you feel personally aggrieved by democracy’s empowerment of the dysgenic. It’s why our institutions are so broken: many of the people directing state and society were never meant to direct anything. It’s why the market economy isn’t recognising your talents or serving your preferences…

Repelled by the mainstream, you seek meaning and purpose elsewhere. Your canonical books aren’t William F Buckley’s God and Man at Yale or Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (even if you might generally agree with libertarian economics). Instead, you seek out self-published tracts by pseudonymous academics and ideologues whose lodestar isn’t democratic capitalism or traditional Christianity, but the triumph of the eugenic over the degenerate, the IQ-endowed over the low IQ, Anglos over “negroids” and “beige people”.

For those accustomed to conservatism as it has taken shape in the US since 1945, all this can seem unsettlingly novel. Yet the mildly egalitarian conservatism that took hold in the postwar era was the product of a set of contingent circumstances. It was necessitated by the horrors of the Holocaust and then the need to best Soviet communism in a global ideological struggle. Mildly egalitarian conservatism was also bolstered by the “Judeo-Christian” consensus of the postwar era. Many of the architects of that consensus – figures such as Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus – had taken part in the civil-rights movement. And their commitment to racial equality remained ironclad, even as they became more theologically, economically and sexually conservative.

I’m sorry, but this is just ignorant. I read just about every single issue of National Review from 1969-1977. (In contrast, Ahmari was born in Iran in 1985 and didn’t arrive in the U.S. until 1998.) The views of NR’s social science experts (such as Ernest van den Haag) on hereditarianism and IQ had a big influence on me.

National Review continued to defend race realism on the IQ question. For example, its December 5, 1994 symposium on The Bell Curve was strongly supportive of Herrnstein and Murray.

Ahmari cites Michael Novak as the anti-Steve Sailer, but here’s the opening to Novak’s contribution to that symposium:

Sins of the Cognitive Elite

Michael Novak, National Review, December 5, 1994.

Excerpt:

Our intellectual landscape has been disrupted by the equivalent of an earthquake and, as the ground settles, intellectuals are looking around nervously and bracing themselves. At such times, the best policy is to heed the evidence that leads toward truth.

The problem with this policy today is that on at least three matters—IQ, heritability, and human nature—the rules we have lived under for some decades now are evasion, euphemism, and taboo. The earthquake has been caused by the simultaneous violation of all three. The problem is especially acute for liberals who have invested virtually their entire substance in three unusual beliefs: that almost everything important about human beings originates in the environment; that environmental factors may be manipulated at will by an intelligent and highly moral elite (composed of themselves); and that the ideal condition of human life would be a certain uniformity, which they call (equivocally) “equality.” By the latter term, they do not mean equality under the law, or even equality of opportunity, but an administered equality of result.

The Herrnstein-Murray findings have violently shifted the ground from under these intellectual foundations; hence the loud wailing and gnashing of teeth. Hence, as well, rapid efforts to shovel the earth back under the wobbly walls. Hence, finally, the hysterical efforts to assassinate the messengers. Their message cannot be true because much more is at stake than a particular set of arguments from psychological science. A this-worldly eschatological hope is at stake. The sin attributed to Herrnstein and Murray is theological: they destroy hope.

Back to Ahmari:

But there are other traditions. From the old federalist conviction that the richly propertied are best-suited for rule to the “master-race democracy” of the Jacksonian era; from the former US vice-president John C Calhoun’s attempts to frame slavery as a positive good, to the “mudsill theory” advanced by later Southern ideologues such as James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh; and from the social Darwinism of the late 19th century to Henry Ford’s obsession with “good blood lines” – some Americans have relied upon “natural hierarchy” to uphold entrenched interests. And even during the heyday of postwar conservatism, eugenic ideologues and think tanks could exert a great deal of influence, forming a sort of shadow conservatism not withstanding their public reputation as cranks and racists.

The empirical-minded race realists of a half-century ago hid out at Harvard (Richard Herrnstein, James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, etc.) and even in the United States Senate (where Moynihan won four terms as the Democratic senator from New York in 1977-2001).

Today, the postwar consensus has all but withered away. Intense polarisation has squeezed the sense of shared moral memory taken for granted by earlier generations. Religious authorities of all stripes are stumbling. And the intelligent young face a world of diminished expectations, in which identitarian warfare is frequently a path to the credentialled jobs that are the only alternative to financial misery.

Again, this sort of Nietzschean ideology is emphatically not a movement of poor whites or the rural working class. It is, and has always been, a middle-to-upper-class tendency, with many of its advocates holding poor whites in almost as much contempt as they do black Americans and other racial minorities. Old-school Wasp social Darwinism, for example, helped legitimate its adherents’ position atop the social hierarchy of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

What’s notable about our moment is that this noxious stream, rather than flowing on the high ground of established society, is deluging the culture’s subterranean channels. It is a counter-cultural posture – hence its attraction for former leftists. Also notable is the ironic prevalence of what could be described as “off-white ethnics” (Jews, North Africans, Arabs, Armenians and the like). Not exactly a background of Teutonic-Aryan supremacy, but perhaps this is a way to “prove” their claim to belonging in America. The stress of academic and professional competition with newer arrivals – from places like China and India – may also explain their redoubling of the Aryan fortress.

The combination of social pressures suggest that conditions are ripe for right-wing eugenics to re-emerge from the shadows, offering both consolation for a subset of the credentialled precariat — and the vision of a world transformed.

My guess is that reasons for interest in Nietzsche among some on the right today include:

• Our culture’s War on Men leads young men to search out masculine thinkers and ideologues.
• The spread of English as a second language and the spread of the Internet means that Continental Europeans and their thinkers play a larger role in right wing intellectual life in America today than when I was young when American conservative thought was dominated by Brits and Americans. For example, the Wikipedia article about Russell Kirk’s influential 1953 book The Conservative Mind lists 33 subjects of Kirk’s book, with only two of them being Continental Europeans (de Maistre and Santayana).
• Nietzsche, for all his weaknesses, was obviously a great writer, so it’s hardly surprising that he goes through fads all the time. For example, a third of a century ago, he was popular during the rise of political correctness in college English departments when everybody was supposed to read French theory. But it turned out that Nietzsche was grandfathered in as having been read by the French deconstructionists, and his prose was a lot more fun to read.

A boring secret is that many Dissident Right micro-celebrities don’t actually share much of a common ideology. In an era of censoriousness, we mostly aren’t very censorious, so we hang out together more than with people worried about getting canceled for being seen with us.

And we can be good company.

From the New York Times news section, an exercise in pounding home the Democrats’ talking point that the late May 2020 explosion in gun murders was due to the pandemic. The pandemic was the cause. The cause was the pandemic. Pandemic, pandemic, pandemic.

Number of times mentioned by NYT:

Pandemic: 26
George Floyd: 1
Protest: 1
Black Lives Matter: 0
Riot: 0
Defund: 0
Depolice: 0
Racial reckoning: 0

How the Pandemic Reshaped American Gun Violence

By Robert Gebeloff, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Eli Murray, Josh Williams and Rebecca Lieberman May 14, 2024

Taking a stroll around the neighborhood is a routine activity for many Americans. Yet for 47 million people — about one in seven — such a walk would pass near the location of a recent gun homicide.

The number of people living this close to fatal violence grew drastically during the pandemic years, a New York Times analysis has found, as a surge in killings not only worsened gun violence in neighborhoods that were already suffering but also spread into new places.

To assess the impact of the pandemic years, The New York Times created a map of every gun homicide in the United States since 2020, using data collected from the police and news media accounts by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. …

Though the level of violence has fallen since the worst days of the pandemic, Americans are still shooting and killing one another more frequently than they did in the years before the coronavirus arrived. The long-term impact of the surge in violence is being felt in many corners of the nation, and researchers will undoubtedly study it for years to come. …

The rate of fatal shootings per 100,000 residents remains above pre-pandemic levels in many places.

… The analysis revealed that gun deaths spread into new neighborhoods during the pandemic: An additional 8.7 million Americans now live on a block near a gun homicide — a 23 percent increase from the prepandemic years.

But even as the geography of fatal shootings expanded, killings also rose sharply in the nation’s existing centers of violence. These neighborhoods saw the worst of the surge, perpetuating a pattern of concentrated violence that long predated the pandemic. …

One thing the pandemic did not change is the sharp racial disparity in the communities most exposed to fatal shootings. Black people were five times as likely to live near a gun homicide as white people, while Latinos were three times as likely, Asian Americans were twice as likely, and Native Americans were 1.4 times as likely. The violence mostly followed patterns of housing segregation, which often leaves people of color living in poorer neighborhoods where crime rates are often higher.

It’s not that black neighborhoods are shootier because blacks are shootier, it’s that segregation leaves people of color living in poorer neighborhoods where crime rates are often higher.

Criminologists have offered several explanations for the drastic rise in the number of fatal shootings during the pandemic:

A rise in gun ownership made it more likely for violent disputes to become deadly. An increase in drug use, and drug dealing, made violent conflicts more probable. The disruption of public schools abetted an expansion of youth gang activity. And an upheaval in policing led to reduced enforcement in many cities.

… Everett is a city of 110,000 north of Seattle that is a hub for aerospace manufacturing. It is one of many smaller American cities where the number of fatal shootings both increased and spread during the pandemic years.

… When George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer early in the pandemic, it set off an anti-police protest movement around the nation. In Everett and elsewhere, the result was more difficulty in recruiting police officers to do the kind of work necessary to curb crime, said the chief of the city’s Police Department, John DeRousse.

… “If you were to compare us to Oakland or San Francisco, we don’t have the level of support or the same level of resources,” said Andrea Sorce, an economics professor who is running for mayor of Vallejo. “So, yeah, when something hits like the pandemic, we do get hit hard.”

… Overall, the footprint of violence spread in four out of five major U.S. cities. In Atlanta, the percentage of residents exposed to nearby gun violence rose to 58 percent during the pandemic years, up from 36 percent in the four prior years. In Columbus, Ohio, the exposure went to 41 percent from 28 percent.

Pockets of Violence

Even as violence spread in cities where it had been relatively low before the pandemic, it also intensified and spread in the places that already had high homicide rates.

… Dr. Williams runs the trauma unit at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and said the number of children and teenagers wounded by gunfire more than doubled during the pandemic, including 96 children 5 and under who suffered gunshot wounds.

“During Covid, we were so worried about the effect that it had on older people,” she said. “But we failed to recognize the effect of our children being out of school, and being out of normal socialization.”

In poorer communities, children rely on public institutions like schools and recreation departments to provide structure, and when that support was cut back during the pandemic, poorer children were more likely to suffer the consequences. Dr. Williams said many young people dropped out of the school system when society shut down, and never rejoined.

The historic explosion in homicides took place May 29-31, 2020, a half week after George Floyd’s demise. That’s about when most schools shut down for summer vacation anyway.

“There’s just a lot more children in the community that don’t have any way to stay busy and be occupied, and that’s getting them into trouble,” she said.

Memphis had more than a thousand homicide victims during the pandemic but the impact was even broader, since more than 335,000 people lived on blocks in close proximity to the violence — 83 percent of them Black or Hispanic. Some researchers believe more attention should be paid to these indirect victims.

… Black people were already far more likely to live near shootings before the pandemic, so when violence spiked, they were most likely to be affected.

Black people, much less Black Lives Matter, didn’t have anything to do with why violence spiked.

In Milwaukee, for example, where shootings are so frequent that more than a third of white residents lived near one, their Black neighbors had it far worse: 83 percent lived near a gun homicide.

… Debate Over Reforms

While homicide rates are falling in many parts of the country, they are still higher than prepandemic levels, and in some places they are still going up. The policy implications are still playing out in two primary areas: the battle over gun regulations and the debate over the role of policing.

… More than 140 justice reform bills passed in 30 states in 2020 and 2021, measures that are still controversial in some jurisdictions.

“Everything seemed to be getting at making crime less costly to commit or making law enforcement more costly to do,” said Rafael A. Mangual, a fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute who studies criminal justice. “I think people are unwilling to sacrifice the level of safety that was clearly sacrificed during the pandemic years.”

Whatever happens with the law and policing, researchers worry that the pandemic has left the nation more prone to gun violence than before.

“We are, as a society, experiencing long Covid,” said Dr. Wintemute, the University of California epidemiologist. “I don’t mean the physical effects of having the illness. We are only beginning to come to terms with the social damage that this pandemic has done.”

He added: “Many people’s futures, many people’s trajectories were altered by the pandemic, very few of them for the better. We’re going to be dealing with this for a long time.”

Methodology

… Exposure is measured by the share of the population living in blocks where there was at least one fatal shooting within a quarter mile during the pandemic years. Population figures are based on the 2020 census. …

Change-over-time figures compare the pandemic years, 2020 through 2023, with the four preceding years, 2016 through 2019.

As you may recall (although the New York Times wishes you wouldn’t), there were not one but two major social events in 2020: the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter-George Floyd “racial reckoning.” The NYT was against the former but, at the time, adamantly in favor of the latter.

This article assumes upon little evidence that the pandemic was the driving force in the huge surge in homicides that exploded in the last days of May 2020 following George Floyd’s demise on May 25, 2020.

Thus, it uses the word “pandemic” 26 times in its article versus once for “George Floyd,” once for “protest,” and with with no mentions whatsoever of Black Lives Matter, racial reckoning, defunding the police, depolicing, or other terms redolent of the summer of 2020 when murder rates soared.

Interestingly, motor vehicle accidents also rose sharply among blacks during the Floyd Effect, probably largely due to less fear of being pulled over for bad driving (and thus also less fear of being arrested for outstanding warrants or carrying an illegal handgun). The same thing had happened during the Ferguson Effect when BLM rode high in 2015-16 as cops retreated to the donut shot. Thus, in 2021, black homicide deaths were 44% higher than in 2019 before the racial reckoning and black traffic fatalities were up 39% as well.

Although the pandemic was worldwide, surges in murder and road mayhem were not seen in other countries. And in the US they rose less among whites and Asians.

So, blame for the rise in black carnage rests mostly on over-reaction to George Floyd and BLM.

I graphed black male age 15-44 deaths by week using CDC cause-of-death data:

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

UCLA’s Mostly Peaceful Counterprotest

Steve Sailer
May 15, 2024

In the most violent episode so far in the vastly publicized campus protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, at the end of April a goon squad of nationalist whites attacked the encampment of diverse UCLA students, while police stood back and let the militia whale on the pro-Palestinian demonstrators for a few hours. Finally, the cops got between the protesters and the attacking counterprotesters, then let the instigators go. The next night the police dismantled the encampment and arrested over 200 anti-Israel activists.

In an era when the Establishment obsesses over right-wing violence—last year, for example, President Biden declared, “White supremacy…is the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland”—one might think that the brawl at UCLA would by now be almost as exhaustively reported as January 6th or Charlottesville. But instead, you have to read news accounts closely to even guess who the hard men at UCLA were.

If the right-wing mob had been wearing Make America Great Again baseball caps, shouting “Christ is King,” and singing Russian songs about crushing Ukrainians, the struggle on the UCLA quad would be the biggest news story of the year.

Indeed, The New York Times and Washington Post have published lengthy investigative pieces demonstrating conclusively that outside agitators instigated the night of violence in front of UCLA’s Royce Hall.

Yet, both newspapers have been extremely reticent about the key question: Who were these far-right thugs?

Read the whole thing there.

After months of threats, The Guardian newspaper of London has revealed the shocking news that my editor at Passage Press is a cultured, witty, athletic, and handsome family man who goes by the Twitter handle @Lomez.

Although The Guardian’s exhaustive doxxing ran pictures of uninvolved randos like Kyle Rittenhouse, they didn’t run any of the subject of their doxing. So here’s one from the UC Irvine website from when he taught there.

I’m guessing this picture was snapped when Lomez was taking the family to nearby Disneyland. (Is that Captain Hook’s pirate ship in the background?)

From The Guardian news section:

Revealed: US university lecturer behind far-right Twitter account and publishing house

Guardian investigation identifies Jonathan Keeperman, a former lecturer at the University of California, Irvine, as ‘Lomez’

Jason Wilson
Tue 14 May 2024 06.00 EDT

A Guardian investigation has identified former University of California, Irvine (UCI) lecturer Jonathan Keeperman as the man behind the prominent “new right” publishing house Passage Press and the influential Twitter persona Lomez.

The identification is based on company and property records, source interviews and open-source online materials.

The reporting has revealed that Keeperman’s current status as a key player and influential tastemaker in a burgeoning proto-fascist movement came after years of involvement in far-right internet forums.

Much of that journey coincided with his time at one of the country’s most well-regarded writing programs: Keeperman first came to UCI as a master of fine arts (MFA) student, and was also a lecturer in the English department from 2013 to 2022, according to public records.

The emergence of Passage Press and other such publishers has been a key part of the development of a swathe of the current American far right, which is seeking to capture US institutions – or develop far-right equivalents – as part of a political and cultural war against what it sees as the dominance of a liberal “regime” in America.

In a June 2023 podcast interview, Keeperman characterized Passage Press and its literary prize as part of this effort to “build out alternative infrastructure, alternative institutions”.

It is a fight wholeheartedly embraced by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican party, especially in their railing against “the deep state” and promises of retribution should Trump win the 2024 presidential election.

As everybody knows, the reason Volume I of Passage’s Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug has sold out is because Trump has gifted a copy to every member at Mar a Lago and all his other golf clubs.

The Guardian repeatedly contacted Keeperman requesting comment on this reporting, at a personal Gmail address and a Passage Press address, and left a voicemail message at a telephone number that data brokers listed as belonging to Keeperman, but which carried a message identifying it as belonging to a member of his household.

Keeperman did not directly respond to these requests. However, hours after a request on 1 May, “Lomez” on X castigated “lying, libelous journalist-activists” and appeared to make veiled legal threats. Another detailed request was sent on 5 May, and just an hour later, Passage Press’s star writer posted about a “major legacy media outlet threatening to dox a pseudonymous Twitter account”.

The Guardian didn’t link to my Tweet, but that was me:

A major legacy media institution has been threatening to dox a pseudonymous Twitter account for months. The funny thing is that the man behind the pseudonym isn't a 400 pound basement dweller, but is charismatic, articulate, athletic, a snappy dresser, and movie star handsome.

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) May 6, 2024

As for Jason Wilson, the freelance doxer “based in Portland,” not so much:

Then again, by the standards of Portland leftists, Wilson is as handsome as Paul Rudd:

Scary ideas – and wanting to be recognized

Passage Press books include a Tucker Carlson-blurbed anthology of writings by “human biodiversity” influencer Steve Sailer;

The Guardian links to the inactive Archive version of the page selling my book so that its subscribers can be properly scandalized by my anthology’s existence without being tempted to buy it. But you can buy it here.

a similar retrospective from “neo-reactionary” guru Curtis Yarvin; and a print version of the biannual Man’s World. …

Passage Press differs from many others in its niche in offering new work by the contemporary far-right’s intellectual celebrities, and in curating in-person events and a far-right literary award.

The publisher also produces high-end limited editions of selected titles. The “patrician edition” of Noticing, a book by Sailer, for example, is “bound in genuine leather, gold-foil stamping” and “Smyth-sewn book block”, according to the website.

Though lavishly produced, the “patrician” offerings appear to have generated significant income for Passage. At the time of reporting, Passage had sold out its limited run of 500 patrician editions of Noticing at $395 apiece, according to the website. This equates to some $195,000 in revenue.

Is this true that we’ve sold out the Patrician Edition? My impression we that we are close to selling out, so we’ve de-emphasized marketing it in order to have a few dozen copies still available for strategic purposes.

An earlier patrician edition of winning entries in the 2021 Passage prize sold 250 editions at $400 apiece, according to the website, representing another $100,000 in revenue.

The publication of Noticing – also available as a $29.95 paperback – was spun out into a series of in-person events in Austin, Los Angeles, Miami and New York City, held in March, April and May.

Passage offered a $75 bundle comprising a copy of the book and a ticket to an in-person event, though the website warned prospective attendees: “Location details will be delivered via email. No photos or recordings of any kind will be permitted at these events.”

To prevent, say, doxxing of attendees by, say, The Guardian.

Buyers of the patrician edition could attend “salon events” in these cities for a $300 upcharge. These were advertised as “small, intimate spaces that include dinner, an open bar, and a unique conversational setting with Steve and special guests”. The website did not indicate how many salon tickets were available, but at the time of writing they had sold out.

… As the Twitter account grew, Lomez increasingly engaged in chummy interactions with prominent far-right figures including self-described eugenicist Bo Winegard, but above all with culture warrior Christopher Rufo, with whom Lomez has had dozens of interactions.

… Keeperman’s most influential publication as Lomez, however, may have been an essay published in “theocon” outlet First Things, which popularized a new right anti-feminist concept: “the longhouse”.

Here is his Longhouse essay in First Things.

The essay defines the longhouse as a metaphor for the supposed “overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior”.

Personally, I don’t get the “longhouse” metaphor, since they were features of distinctly chad cultures like the Normans, Mohicans, and Iroquois.

This metaphor has been widely adopted by writers on the anti-feminist right, including Rufo, religious conservative Rod Dreher and writers for outlets such as the American Mind.

… “I’m on my third [Twitter] account,” “Lomez” replied. “They’ve all been some version of Lomez. My, I mean, I’ve been posting in this Twitter space since about 2015-ish.”

He added: “I knew a lot of people from Steve Sailer’s comment section on his old iSteve blog, and a lot of the people who I ended up following on Twitter initially were people I recognized or were familiar to me from, from that comment section, and it was the kind of people that Sailer would link to.” …

An individual with the screen name “Mr Lomez” was a frequent commenter on Steve Sailer’s iSteve blog between 2012 and 2014. The archives of Sailer’s early blogging have since been transferred – along with comments – to the Unz Review, an aggregator of far-right content run by antisemitic software millionaire Ron Unz.

Mr Lomez posted criticisms of affirmative action in college admissions, commentary on the trial of George Zimmerman over his fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, and complaints about anti-immigrant parties being characterized as “far-right” in media coverage.

Mr Lomez also frequently flexed literary expertise, a deep knowledge of sports and a particularly intimate familiarity with college athletics.

In a post on 23 February 2013, Sailer was critical of the William Pereira-designed architecture at the UCI campus, with his post including a photograph of the Social Science Tower.

“Mr Lomez” commented: “My office is in that building. It’s as bad on the inside as it is on the out – claustrophobic and soulless. I feel like I’m in a rat maze.” …

Local news and high-school basketball reporting from 2000 indicates that as a high-school senior, [Lomez] was an accomplished football wide receiver and star basketball player for Campolindo high school in Moraga, in northern California.

He went on to play college basketball.

Moraga is the same northern California town where [Lomez] celebrated his bar mitzvah in 1996, according to a contemporaneous issue of the Jewish News of Northern California.

… In the last posts on the blog, there are hints of the racial thinking that “Mr Lomez” would later express on Sailer’s blog.

On 2 May 2007, in response to a New York Times report on a study that found racial bias in NBA refereeing, [Lomez] made an argument characteristic of “human biodiversity” proponents: “I’m gonna go out on a limb and suggest that black players get called for more fouls because black players do in fact commit more fouls.”

[Lomez] added: “Before calling me a racist, at least hear me out.”

From the New York Times obituary section:

David William Sanborn was born on July 30, 1945, in Tampa, Fla., where his father was stationed in the Air Force. He grew up in Kirkwood, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.

His life took a fateful turn at 3 when he contracted polio, which ravaged his left arm, right leg and lungs.

He was in an iron lung for a year, and he took up saxophone at 11 on the advice of a doctor, who thought learning a woodwind instrument would help him build respiratory strength.

The disease had lasting effects, some of them particularly challenging for a horn player. As an adult, Mr. Sanborn still suffered limited lung capacity, and his left arm was smaller than his right, with compromised dexterity on that hand.

“I don’t think of myself as a victim,” he was quoted as saying in 2005 by the Salt Lake City television station KSL. “This is my reality.”

In “The Young Americans,” is Sanborn imitating Bowie’s vocal style or is Bowie imitating Sanborn’s sax?

From the Washington Post news section:

Meet Cooper Flagg, the next ‘White Duke villain’ and a potential No. 1 pick

Flagg is the top prospect in the 2025 NBA draft class and has overshadowed this year’s relatively weak crop, which will be in the spotlight during Sunday’s draft lottery

By Ben Golliver
May 11, 2024 at 6:02 a.m. EDT

Cooper Flagg will play at Duke next season, then is expected to be the top prospect in the 2025 NBA draft.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Cooper Flagg, America’s most coveted teenage basketball player, faced the biggest decision of his decade-long ascent from central Maine to the top of NBA draft boards.

The 17-year-old prodigy proved to be exceptionally ambitious in rising from rural Newport, which is closer to Canada going northwest or northeast, than it is to Boston, which is 200 miles south. After winning a state championship as a freshman, Flagg transferred to Montverde Academy, a basketball powerhouse near Orlando. Even before he led Montverde to a 33-0 record and a national championship this past season, the polished 6-foot-9 forward reclassified so he could graduate in three years and fast track his NBA journey. Now, he needed to pick a college.

But Duke was the school Flagg’s mother, Kelly, had followed so closely as a high school basketball player that she wore No. 32 as a tribute to Christian Laettner. Blue Devils Coach Jon Scheyer built a strong bond with Flagg on the recruiting trail, and the school’s recent track record of No. 1 picks, such as Zion Williamson and Paolo Banchero, was a big draw. What’s more, Jayson Tatum’s season in Durham was a formative viewing experience for Flagg, a third-generation Boston Celtics fan.

There was one catch: Duke is Duke, for better and worse.

“We definitely had that conversation with Cooper and explained the gravity of the situation,” Kelly Flagg said. “If you choose this school, you’re about to be the greatest, hated White Duke villain.”

Thanks to his highflying offense, hard-nosed defense and competitive drive, Flagg is the top prospect in the 2025 NBA draft class and has overshadowed this year’s relatively weak crop, which will be in the spotlight when the annual draft lottery is held Sunday afternoon to determine which team will get the top pick next month. If Flagg is selected first next year as expected, he will become the first White American No. 1 pick since Indiana’s Kent Benson in 1977.

“That’s a surreal feeling, knowing that’s history in a way,” Flagg said. “I definitely take pride in that, but I take even more pride in coming from Maine. [Going first] is something every kid dreams of. I’m definitely working toward that.”

Duke, he concluded, would best prepare him for the challenges of NBA life. Playing on that stage was worth the stereotypes and the heckling.

“Bring it,” Kelly Flagg remembered her son saying at the family meeting. “He’s always been fueled by negativity from the opposition. Every gym he went to his freshman year, he heard the ‘overrated’ chants. Then he would do something spectacular, and the chant would end abruptly. That’s just his personality. If you’re a basketball player, the color of your skin shouldn’t make a difference. If he can play, he can play.”

Make no mistake: Flagg can play. …

At a time when international players have won the past six NBA MVP awards, Flagg has emerged as an all-world talent who blends modern versatility with old-school fundamentals. In many ways, he defies NBA Commissioner Adam Silver’s concerns that the American developmental system overemphasizes playing games at the expense of practicing and produces NBA rookies who aren’t team-oriented players or effective defenders. …

Ralph and Kelly Flagg started dating when Kelly was in high school, and she likes to joke she picked her partner because his 6-9 height was essential to raising a basketball family. Kelly perfected Kevin McHale’s patented up-and-under move as a high school standout before playing on the wing at the University of Maine in the late-1990s. Ralph was a traditional post player for Eastern Maine Community College.

… As his time at Duke approaches, Flagg appears to have more in common with recent one-and-done stars such as Tatum, Williamson and Banchero than he does with Laettner, JJ Redick and other Blue Devils villains from a bygone era.

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine about Jeremy Carl’s book T he Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart:

Jeremy Carl is a pretty normal guy, a former official in the Interior Department in the Trump administration now with the Claremont Institute. He has five kids, which seems to drive, not unreasonably, his thinking. His dedication reads:

For my children: may they be treated equally as they pursue their dreams.

Presumably, this is a reference to Martin Luther King’s famous statement:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I’ve long argued that fostering anti-white hate is the inevitable result of the grand strategy of the Democratic Party to exploit the growth of diversity in the electorate by concocting a Coalition of the Fringes of American society. As immigration and social decay (e.g., transgenderism) make America more fragmented, the Democrats prosper (for example, they have won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections).

But what can keep the Democrats’ assemblage of Jews and Muslims, black church ladies and LGBTs from turning on each other in a circular firing squad? So far, all the Democrats and their allies in the media have been able to come up with to unite their Coalition of the Margins is encouraging their constituents to hate Core Americans: men, the married, homeowners, and, most of all, whites.

Carl offers fifteen chapters on how these days it’s not okay to be white. He writes:

Because we live in a political climate that is hostile to white people, the notion that it could be okay to be white—that whiteness is not something worthy of being condemned—is viewed by many elites as a hostile statement.

On the other hand, DEI seems to be fading in 2024. For example, I was not permitted to do a single public appearance for more than a decade, from early 2013 to mid-2023, because hotels where I was booked to be hosted kept canceling reservations due to Antifa threats of violence.

In contrast, I made one appearance in 2023 and, due to the current vibe shift, eight so far in 2024. Lately, I’ve been on the road promoting my anthology Noticing, showing up in Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, West Virginia, and New York. Last week’s two appearances were in an old-money Robber Baron formal city club in Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in a basement dive bar in the Lower East Side, where I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd so enthusiastic that it left me feeling like I was opening for Talking Heads and the Ramones in 1977. These shows were so successful that the publishers are now talking about trips to San Francisco and Washington, D.C., in the fall.

I could imagine them paying for my going to, say, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle as well if anybody there is interested in organizing shows. What about other places? If you want me to speak at your organization elsewhere, let me know. It wouldn’t be free, but it wouldn’t be relatively expensive, either.

Why are elites so hostile toward whites lately?

Carl’s final chapter, “The End Game: Reparations and Expropriations,” theorizes that the purpose of DEI is

to create an intellectual and cultural environment to justify the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites while instituting a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.