An image that María Sanchez posted on Twitter of the “wall” that a friend built in her dorm room. Credit María Sanchez
Vandalism, offensive jokes, even criminal assault — reports of bias-based harassment have spiked since Donald J. Trump’s victory in the presidential race. Few of the perpetrators have been caught, but here is a look at five cases in which people have been directly accused. Some apologized. One denied being responsible. Another said his actions had been misconstrued.
It Started With a Joke
When Isabel Manu started sending her classmate María Sanchez internet memes that mocked Mr. Trump’s plans to crack down on immigration, Ms. Sanchez, whose parents had come to the United States illegally from Mexico, tried to shake it off: “It was just a little funny, like ha, O.K., awkward funny.”
Ms. Manu tried to turn up the humor after Mr. Trump was elected president. She failed.
Using clothing and shoes, she built a wall in Ms. Sanchez’s dorm room at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Mo., and left a note saying, “Trump won so here is a little preview of what’s to come.”
Tearful and disturbed, Ms. Sanchez posted a photograph on Twitter that was shared more than 50,000 times. “I was angry,” she said. “I threw the stuff, and I tore the paper.”
Ms. Sanchez, along with campus security officers, confronted Ms. Manu, who appeared shocked that the gag had backfired. Ms. Manu declined to be interviewed. Ms. Sanchez speculated that online humor around presidential politics had led her friend to think of the election, and what was at stake, as a joke.
Ms. Sanchez said that Ms. Manu had apologized, and the two are working on reconciling. “A friendship is not all love,” Ms. Sanchez said. “There are going to be horrible things that are going to happen. We have to move on and grow from this.”
What kind of Nazi name is “Isabel Manu” anyway? Must be some skinny blue eyed blonde who hates all Women of Color.
… The benefits of immigration are obvious to anyone who has ever eaten sushi, left a rumpled hotel room and found it spotless on returning a few minutes later, or golfed on three or four different well-groomed courses in the same small city. The costs of immigration, by contrast, are discussed only within a Losers’ Corner of poisonous internet comment threads and drive-time radio shows. What is more, the payoffs—that sushi, those golf courses—came immediately. The liabilities were mostly “off-balance-sheet,” and have yet to be settled. The welfare state’s responsibility for the swelling ranks of the aging poor is barely nodded at in the budget. The adaptation of the U.S. Constitution to fit immigration, rather than vice versa, is a huge cost, too. The adaptations required by mass immigration are so large that it can be judged a success only if the compensating economic benefits are vast. The best recent economic research indicates that they are not. …
[Harvard economist George] Borjas’s skepticism about the standard immigration narrative is the more damning because, on almost all social science matters, he seems not to have a contrarian bone in his body. Economists, like all knowledge specialists, are often prisoners of the research agenda taken up by their most gifted contemporaries. Borjas has no bone to pick with that agenda, which is often obsessively focused on uncovering bigotry and prejudice. Thus he quotes a study by economist Stephen Trejo to the effect that relative youth, bad English, and miseducation explain three quarters of the wage gap between Mexicans and U.S. whites but only a third of the black-white gap—“leading,” Borjas writes, “to the conclusion that much of that gap reflects the pernicious effects of racial discrimination.” Leading how? Not via any evidence Borjas cites. “In the long run,” he writes elsewhere, “immigration may be fiscally beneficial because the unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare are unsustainable and will require either a substantial increase in taxes or a substantial cut in benefits.” But those requirements do not make it wise or even advisable to add more unfunded liabilities in the form of immigrant retirement costs.
* * *
Borjas’s criticism of the standard immigration narrative thus carries no political agenda at all. It is confined to the ways that that narrative fails to hold up on its own terms. If he has arrived at conclusions more pessimistic than those of his colleagues, he has done so not by challenging their ideology but by correcting their errors. Several are laid out in We Wanted Workers. Let us examine three:
1. Immigrants are more welfare-dependent than the most frequently quoted statistics indicate, and far more welfare-dependent than the population at large.
If one looks at data from the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, one finds that 46% of households headed by an immigrant resort to welfare in some form, versus 27% of households headed by an American. Supporters of mass immigration, however, from community organizers to the Wall Street Journal, prefer to use a different and more easily manipulable data set from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, and to arrange it by individuals rather than households. This sounds more…individualistic. It also gives the impression that rates of welfare dependency among newcomers and natives are more roughly comparable. But it is a trick, Borjas shows. If an undocumented single mother from Mexico, say, bears two children after arriving in the U.S. and winds up on welfare, the system shows an increase of one immigrant and two natives. The welfare system is propped up by native households, each of which pays, by Borjas’s estimate, about $470 per year to cover losses from immigration.
2. Competition from immigrants dramatically reduces the wages of the workers whose qualifications most resemble theirs.
This is the sort of common-sense conclusion that you need not ever spend a day in economics class to understand. Yet for three decades economists have clung doggedly to the doctrine that immigrants can offer efficiencies to an economy without lowering the wage in the industries where they work. This is nonsense on the conceptual level: the lowered wages are the efficiencies. …
Whether immigrants help or hurt a sector of the economy has to do with whether they enter it as “complements” or competitors. Today’s immigrants are complements for rich people, who tend not to act as their own valets, chefs, gardeners, or maids. Others do those jobs. If the cost of them gets cheaper, rich people’s lives get better, and the number of people who can live like rich people may increase. The lives of the natives who used to perform those tasks get worse. The rule of thumb is that a 10% increase in the workforce of a given sector will result in a 3% fall in wages.
3. The primary effect of immigrants on the country receiving them is a massive regressive redistribution of income and wealth among natives.
This redistributive effect is, for Borjas, “the key insight I have gleaned from decades of research on the economics of immigration.” The main thing about immigration is not wealth creation. It is not entrepreneurship. It is not diversity. It is redistribution from the poor to the rich. That this should be so jarring and implausible-sounding to contemporary sensibilities shows how censored the discussion of immigration economics has been—for this has always been one of the basic consensus conclusions of most economic models of migration. …
A decade ago, New Mexico ushered in a demographic trend that is likely to shape American politics for decades to come.
In 2006, it became the first state in the nation whose voting-eligible population switched from being majority white to “majority minority.”
California has since joined that group, according to estimates, and so, too, will Texas by 2019, according to three demographic experts. Nine more states are expected to reach the tipping point before 2052, when, those experts say, the national electorate will become majority minority, too.
“The map is going to continue to change,” said Ruy Teixeira, a co-director of the States of Change project, a collaboration among the liberal Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which published the predictions in a pair of reports this year and last year. The projections are based on migration, fertility and mortality trends and could be affected by changes to policy.
You can see from this map why the GOP had so much Electoral College success this year running an Alt Centrist candidate who was more appealing to moderate whites living near the Canadian Border than the usual Sunbelt candidates Republicans have nominated since Nixon.
As white people have moved more and more from suburban to urban locations, the cry has gone up that poor, crime-prone blacks must be rescued from the horrors of having to live close by booming downtowns and relocated to distant suburbs without much public transit or, ideally, to dying small cities. For their own good, you understand. And to fight racism.
You see, places like Dubuque, Iowa have Magic Dirt, while the Near North Side of Chicago had Tragic Dirt, until receiving a dirtectomy about the same time the Democratic machine in Chicago tore down the Cabrini-Green housing project.
Cabrini-Green (empty greensward) had to be demolished so its residents could “Move to Opportunity” in Dubuque.
But if Ben Carson were appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the New York Times worries, he might not be as enthusiastic as the Obama Administration has been about ethnically clearing blacks from high-gentrification potential zones and dumping them on loser whites to deal with.
President Obama’s civil-rights legacy looked on track, not long ago, to include a major push against America’s deeply entrenched housing segregation. In 2015, his administration rolled out a rule requiring local communities to assess their own patterns of racial and income segregation and make genuine plans to address them.
The move followed years of debate and came as segregated cities like Baltimore and Chicago faced renewed bouts of racial unrest. The federal government, advocates hoped, was finally trying to repair a long-unkept promise of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
Now that rule is likely to be undermined — and possibly erased — by a Department of Housing and Urban Development headed by Ben Carson. President-elect Donald J. Trump offered the cabinet post on Wednesday to Mr. Carson, a neurosurgeon and a former presidential candidate, who grew up poor in Detroit but has no experience in housing policy.
While we know little about what Mr. Carson would do at the agency, he has downplayed the role of government in his own up-from-urban-poverty story. (“If you don’t succeed,” his mother taught him, according to his autobiography “Gifted Hands,” “you have only yourself to blame.”) And he has specifically criticized the Obama housing rule.
Known as “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the rule has been politically contentious. Its backers argue that it is essential to remedying the long history of government and private-sector discrimination that has resulted in poor, segregated neighborhoods persisting to this day. Critics say that the rule amounts to government overreach into the decisions — and demographic makeup — of individual communities and a free housing market.
“A circa-1960s view of the Cabrini-Green public housing complex in Chicago, which became synonymous with unrelenting poverty and murderous street gangs.” Credit Chicago History Museum, via Getty Images
Republicans in Congress have tried to defund its implementation. Mr. Carson wrote last year that the new policy followed the government’s history of failed “mandated social-engineering schemes,” and would redirect low-income housing primarily into wealthy, white communities that oppose it.
If he is confirmed by Congress, Mr. Carson would have wide latitude to shape or slow the rollout of the rule, along with broader enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.
Michael Lewis has been the gold standard author of frequent flier books since the end of the 1980s. He has a new book coming out in December about the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, The Undoing Project, who studied why people make bad decisions.
Vanity Fair has one chapter from the book. I didn’t find too much of interest in that chapter, although I did like this question devised by Kahneman:
The mean I.Q. of the population of eighth-graders in a city is known to be 100. You have selected a random sample of 50 children for a study of educational achievement. The first child tested has an I.Q. of 150. What do you expect the mean I.Q. to be for the whole sample?
I think I know what answer Kahneman wants.
But, by the way, if the first kid tested scores a 150, how sure should you be that the average IQ of the city “is known” to be 100?
Maybe you are using a 20 year old Ravens test and the average is now 106 due to the Flynn Effect. (From the 1940s onward, the Flynn Effect kept being discovered by psychologists, but then getting undiscovered because it Is Known that it should not be happening. It took James T. Flynn to make sure the Flynn Effect, like Columbus with America, stayed discovered.)
Or maybe there has been a massive misnorming screw-up, like with the military’s enlistment test from 1976-1980 that let in a whole bunch of dopes during the Stripes era. In 1978, Senator Sam Nunn started asking Pentagon officials why sergeants and chief petty officers kept complaining to him about the intelligence of new recruits. The Pentagon replied that it is known that new recruits were scoring higher than ever. Then in 1980, they admitted to Nunn that the test scores had been incorrectly inflated since 1976.
Or if the first child who takes the test scores 3.33 standard deviations above the expected mean, are you quite sure you have a random sample?
Kahneman would find all these real world quibbles of yours to be examples of bad decision making. Just as Emily is stipulated to be a bank teller who was active in feminism in college, this question stipulates certain conditions, and who are you to question their plausibility?
One of Kahneman’s standard shticks is to write all sorts of Red Flags into his questions — “Emily led a feminist commune in college that was infiltrated by the FBI on suspicion of anti-male terrorism” — and then ding you for noticing his Red Flags.
If you want to de-Red Flag this IQ question, you could make the first kid score 125, or if you want to keep the arithmetic super simple, 130 with a sample size of 30. But a 150 is a Red Flag.
One secret to scoring well on Kahneman’s questions is to take them extremely literally. He’s kind of like Hymie the Robot in Get Smart:
Ironically, I have a vague hunch that part of the Flynn Effect is that people over the last century have learned to take things more literally from having to deal ever more with machine logic, which makes them better at taking IQ tests. (But it makes them worse at understanding their new President. Hence, the rage of the more Aspergery intellects toward Trump’s vaguely stated stances.)
Interestingly, Lewis positions his new book as explaining the science behind his Moneyball rather than his The Big Short. That seems pretty reasonable, in that financial bubbles tend to be historically contingent: the big money boys at least tend to learn from the mistakes of the recent past (while forgetting older analogies). A science of bad decisions works better when people keep making the same bad decisions. Baseball is a pretty traditionalist enterprise.
On the other hand, that reminds me that one interesting project for sabermetricians might be a history of fads in baseball decision-making. While baseball doesn’t change all that much, there have been bandwagons, some of which become permanent (e.g., home run hitting), some of which don’t. For example, successful franchises like the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960s and 1970s can cause a chain reaction of imitations around baseball: The Dodgers of my childhood, for instance, seem to have set off fads for having your aces like Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax pitch over 300 innings per year; putting a low on-base average base stealer like Maury Wills in as your leadoff hitter; converting outfielders to middle infielders in the high minor leagues (like Bill Russell); and teaching minor leaguers to switch hit (i.e., bat left handed against right handed pitchers and right handed against left handed pitchers). Most of these ideas are now out of fashion, but they seemed pretty cool a half century ago when the Dodgers were drawing huge crowds.
Likewise, it would be interesting to see which ideas of the early Moneyball era are now discredited. My guess is that early sabermetricians undervalued defensive skill in ballplayers because they had poorer quality data on defense than on hitting. This led to a lot of Dr. Strangeglove-type players, big clumsy oafs who could hit homers and get walks but not much else, being in demand. Nowadays, however, defensive statistics have improved so much that baseball has edged back toward the all-around athletes who look good in a uniform that the sabermetricians were making fun of fifteen years ago. My guess is that poor fielding is more psychologically destructive to teams than poor hitting, but I wouldn’t know how to measure that.
By PAUL BEDARD (@SECRETSBEDARD) • 11/23/16 10:10 AM
The jailed architect of 9/11 [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] revealed that al Qaeda’s plan to kill the United States was not through military attacks but immigration and “outbreeding nonmuslims” who would use the legal system to install Sharia law, according to a blockbuster new book. …
In Enhanced Interrogation, CIA contractor James Mitchell tells for the first time about his role interrogating al Qaeda principles, many like KSM still jailed at Guantanamo Bay. …
Snippets obtained by Secrets from the book set for release next Tuesday from Crown Forum show that Muslim terror groups had a much bigger plan to crush America than just through attacks like 9/11.
Instead, the plan is to fill the country with like-minded Muslims through the country’s easy immigration laws and by having babies, and then using the U.S. legal and welfare system to turn the country into a system like Iran.
Consider this passage in the book, Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America, where KSM reveals the plan to Mitchell:
“It would be nice,” he said, if al Qaeda or like-minded Islamists could bring America to its knees with catastrophic attacks, but that was unlikely to happen; “not practical” is the wording he used. From his perspective, the long war for Islamic domination wasn’t going to be won in the streets with bombs and bullets and bloodshed. No, it would be won in the minds of the American people.
He said the terror attacks were good, but the “practical” way to defeat America was through immigration and by outbreeding non-Muslims. He said jihadi-minded brothers would immigrate into the United States, taking advantage of the welfare system to support themselves while they spread their jihadi message. They will wrap themselves in America’s rights and laws for protection, ratchet up acceptance of Sharia law, and then, only when they were strong enough, rise up and violently impose Sharia from within. He said the brothers would relentlessly continue their attacks and the American people eventually would become so tired, so frightened, and so weary of war that they would just want it to end.
“Eventually,” KSM said, “America will expose her neck to us for slaughter.”
Of course, it’s not real clear how much you can trust what people tell you after you’ve been waterboarding them.
And KSM may have an exaggerated sense of the generosity of American welfare systems relative to Western European welfare.
Zombies have of course been big in 21st Century pop culture. One surmise is that they serve as a metaphor for discomfort about mass immigration and the threat of it accelerating, as in Germany in 2015.
This was most explicitly brought out in the 2013 movie starring Brad Pitt, based on the novel by Mel Brooks’ son Max Brooks, World War Z. A global epidemic of zombieism destroys most nations. The most intelligent country, Israel, survives longer than most by building a big, beautiful wall to keep out the zombie hordes, but …
All during the election campaign, we were inundated by tweets from professional campaign consultants laughing at the lack of sophistication and spending of Trump’s campaign staff. For example, Josh Marshall wrote in August:
ByJOSH MARSHALL Published AUGUST 22, 2016, 3:47 PM EDT
Since the election, however, Trump’s most trusted adviser, son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Kushner’s analytic expert Brad Parscale of low-cost San Antonio, have been a little less secretive about how they got so much more bang for their buck than did, say, poor Mitt Romney. A Forbes article about Kushner mentions:
Television and online advertising? Small and smaller. Twitter and Facebook would fuel the campaign, as key tools for not only spreading Trump’s message but also targeting potential supporters, scraping massive amounts of constituent data and sensing shifts in sentiment in real time.
“We weren’t afraid to make changes. We weren’t afraid to fail. We tried to do things very cheaply, very quickly. And if it wasn’t working, we would kill it quickly,” Kushner says. “It meant making quick decisions, fixing things that were broken and scaling things that worked.”
This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration.
I don’t have cable TV so I’ve never seen The Walking Dead. Is it a metaphor for immigration?
If both were true, explains a lot. Would generate huge inferiority complex, a lot to prove. I’ve shared with [X] that Trump talks about his sex life a lot more than other alpha males. My hypothesis is sex with strangers grosses him out but is contrary to the image he wants to project. A guy who is a tee-totaler workaholic is pretty boring in general, so he compensates with perception.
Donald Trump is not the most scholarly American, but he could do education a bit of good.
It’s not even all that necessary for Trump to appoint effective administrators to key roles in the Department of Education and in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. Simply get rid of the Obama bureaucrats actively orchestrating with The New York Times their mutual jihads against common sense in schools.
For example, Trump could name Haven Monahan as undersecretary in charge of the campus rape culture crisis that spawned the Rolling Stone UVA hoax and that would be better for America than the Obamacrat currently in the job.
From my 2011 review of Jared Taylor’s book White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century in VDARE:
What are the prospects for white identity politics emerging as a self-conscious, public force in America?
I’d guess: not good.
This is not to say that white identity politics won’t continue to manifest itself de facto. We saw that, for example, with the Tea Parties and the emergence of an overwhelmingly white movement to protect Medicare in 2009.
But, white people aren’t supposed to say: we’re doing this “to promote the general welfare” of “ourselves and our posterity” (to quote the Constitution’s Preamble). Whites aren’t supposed to say that—and they don’t like to, either. They like to come up with some principled reason, such as: the philosophy of Ayn Rand says so.
Thus, the GOP’s bright young man, Paul Ryan, managing to totally miss the point, announced a plan privatizing Medicare. (Older heads in the House GOP are slowly walking that one back.)
Nevertheless, an explicit white identity movement is unlikely to be tolerated. It’s not so much that blacks, Asians, and Hispanics don`t want this to happen. None of these groups are really all that powerful. Blacks tend to be colorful but not too competent; East Asians competent but colorless; Latinos culturally lethargic and unenterprising.
No, the much more serious roadblock to the emergence of white identity politics: more Jews don’t want it to happen than do want it to happen.
Many Jews have strong reasons for their aversion to white identity politics, either irrational (the Cossacks are coming!) or rational (what’s in it for me?).
Perhaps Taylor can persuade enough Jews to get onboard to make white identity respectable in the MSM and thus with the media’s consumers, the public. He’s striven manfully and graciously over the years to make Jews feel welcome in his movement and many Jews have written for American Renaissance.
Recall that neoconservatism emerged in the late 1960s, largely due to Jewish shopkeepers’ fear of black crime and Jewish civil servants’ fear of being fired by black politicians. Brilliant Jewish intellectuals like Nathan Glazer and Norman Podhoretz took their relatives’ complaints seriously.
Still, over time, Jews mostly figured out it was simply easier to move away from blacks and get better jobs where they didn’t have to deal with many blacks. Let other whites deal with them.
Thus Commentary lost interest in complaining about quotas, and neoconservatism morphed into mostly being an Israel Fan Club.
The fundamental question for 21st Century white identity politics is the same as for Armenians, just two or three orders of magnitude greater in media influence: What’s in it for Jews?
Taylor has worked out strong justifications for why a white identity movement would be good for average, and particularly good for below-average, whites. But not many Jews are below the white average.
Jews are generally praised in the press for engaging in Jewish identity politics. So why would they instead want to engage in disreputable white identity politics? What’s in it for them?
My alternative philosophy of “citizenism” proposed attacking identity politics at its most vulnerable points: Affirmative Action quota preferences for Hispanics and Asians. (See the 2005 debate between me and Jared Taylor on VDARE.com.)
Nobody can come up with a good justification for these privileges for immigrant groups. They just free-ride off the anti-white glamour of the 1960s black civil rights movement.
Indeed, there’s no good reason for the “Hispanic” category even to exist in government data. It`s not a race, it’s not an ethnicity, it’s not a linguistic group, it’s just a rent-seeking special privilege. Abolish the category! Once the data isn’t collected anymore, nobody can use it in government lawsuits alleging “disparate impact”.
I did propose conceding permanent quotas for the descendants of American slaves. That’s a high cost, but one we’re likely to pay anyway.
Is my philosophy extolling solidarity among American citizens rather than among whites likely to prove more acceptable to the media gatekeepers that Taylor’s white advocacy?
Sure—in the sense that a two percent probability is twice a one percent probability. You’ll note that, after all these years, I’m still using quotes around “citizenism” because nobody knows what the word is. It hasn’t exactly swept the intellectual world.
This is a pretty depressing way to wrap up. But I do think it’s safe to say that the conventional wisdom will change when it has to change. It probably won`t change until it has to, but it will have to when it has to.
In other words, what historian Hugh Davis Graham called attention to in the title of his 2002 book, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America, can’t go on forever. The mounting “racial ratio“ of nonwhite beneficiaries to white benefactors means the system will inevitably break down under the weight of numbers. At that point, white consciousness could be forced into existence.
In the meantime, we can all be thankful that Jared Taylor has been thinking ahead.
I coined the term the White Death last year when attention finally turned to a remarkable fall in life expectancy among some white populations due to the lucky coincidence of economist Angus Deaton and his wife publishing a paper on the subject just days after he was awarded the new quasi-Nobel Laureate in economics.
Local health outcomes predict Trumpward swings
Nov 19th 2016 | NEW YORK | From the print edition
… on November 15th Patrick Ruffini, a well-known pollster, offered a “challenge for data nerds” on Twitter: “Find the variable that can beat % of non-college whites in the electorate as a predictor of county swing to Trump.”
With no shortage of nerds, The Economist has taken Mr Ruffini up on his challenge. Although we could not find a single factor whose explanatory power was greater than that of non-college whites, we did identify a group of them that did so collectively: an index of public-health statistics. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington has compiled county-level data on life expectancy and the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, heavy drinking and regular physical activity (or lack thereof). Together, these variables explain 43% of Mr Trump’s gains over Mr Romney, just edging out the 41% accounted for by the share of non-college whites (see chart).
The two categories significantly overlap: counties with a large proportion of whites without a degree also tend to fare poorly when it comes to public health. However, even after controlling for race, education, age, sex, income, marital status, immigration and employment, these figures remain highly statistically significant. Holding all other factors constant—including the share of non-college whites—the better physical shape a county’s residents are in, the worse Mr Trump did relative to Mr Romney.
For example, in Knox County, Ohio, just north-east of Columbus, Mr Trump’s margin of victory was 14 percentage points greater than Mr Romney’s. One hundred miles (161 km) to the east, in Jefferson County, the Republican vote share climbed by 30 percentage points. The share of non-college whites in Knox is actually slightly higher than in Jefferson, 82% to 79%. But Knox residents are much healthier: they are 8% less likely to have diabetes, 30% less likely to be heavy drinkers and 21% more likely to be physically active. Holding all else equal, our model finds that those differences account for around a six-percentage-point difference in the change in Republican vote share from 2012.
The data suggest that the ill may have been particularly susceptible to Mr Trump’s message. According to our model, if diabetes were just 7% less prevalent in Michigan, Mr Trump would have gained 0.3 fewer percentage points there, enough to swing the state back to the Democrats. Similarly, if an additional 8% of people in Pennsylvania engaged in regular physical activity, and heavy drinking in Wisconsin were 5% lower, Mrs Clinton would be set to enter the White House. But such counter-factual predictions are always impossible to test. There is no way to rerun the election with healthier voters and compare the results.
The public-health crisis unfolding across white working-class America is hardly a secret.
Well, it was pretty much of a secret until only a year ago.
Last year Angus Deaton, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, found that the death rate among the country’s middle-aged, less-educated white citizens had climbed since the 1990s, even as the rate for Hispanics and blacks of the same age had fallen. Drinking, suicide and a burgeoning epidemic of opioid abuse are widely seen as the most likely causes. Some argue that deteriorating health outcomes are linked to deindustrialisation: higher unemployment rates predict both lower life expectancy and support for Mr Trump, even after controlling for a bevy of demographic variables.
I’m reminded of the horrifying drop in life expectancy in Russia during the Yeltsin years.
Polling data suggests that on the whole, Mr Trump’s supporters are not particularly down on their luck: within any given level of educational attainment, higher-income respondents are more likely to vote Republican. But what the geographic numbers do show is that the specific subset of Mr Trump’s voters that won him the election—those in counties where he outperformed Mr Romney by large margins—live in communities that are literally dying. Even if Mr Trump’s policies are unlikely to alleviate their plight, it is not hard to understand why they voted for change.
In other words, as I’ve pointed out before, Trump voters tended to be civic-minded individuals doing okay themselves, but concerned about the trouble in their overlooked communities.
The next exceptionable feature in the Message [from President Jefferson], is the proposal to abolish all restriction on naturalization, arising from a previous residence.2 In this the President is not more at variance with the concurrent maxims of all commentators on popular governments, than he is with himself. The Notes on Virginia are in direct contradiction to the Message, and furnish us with strong reasons against the policy now recommended. The passage alluded to is here presented: Speaking of the population of America, Mr. Jefferson there says, “Here I will beg leave to propose a doubt. The present desire of America, is to produce rapid population, by as great importations of foreigners as possible. But is this founded in good policy?”3 “Are there no inconveniences to be thrown into the scale, against the advantage expected from a multiplication of numbers, by the importation of foreigners? It is for the happiness of those united in society, to harmonize as much as possible, in matters which they must of necessity transact together. Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent. Every species of government has its specific principles: Ours, perhaps, are more peculiar than those of any other in the universe. It is a composition of the freest principles of the English Constitution, with others, derived from natural right and reason.
To these, nothing can be more opposed than the maxims of absolute monarchies. Yet from such, we are to expect the greatest number of emigrants. They will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or if able to throw them off, it will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing as is usual, from one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely at the point of temperate liberty. Their principles with their language, they will transmit to their children. In proportion to their numbers, they will share with us in the legislation. They will infuse into it their spirit, warp and bias its direction, and render it a heterogeneous, incoherent, distracted mass. I may appeal to experience, during the present contest, for a verification of these conjectures: but if they be not certain in event, are they not possible, are they not probable? Is it not safer to wait with patience for the attainment of any degree of population desired or expected? May not our government be more homogeneous, more peaceable, more durable? Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans, thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners, to our present numbers, would produce a similar effect here.” Thus wrote Mr. Jefferson in 17814—Behold the reverse of the medal. The Message of the President contains the following sentiments, “A denial of citizenship under a residence of 14 years, is a denial to a great proportion of those who ask it, & controls a policy pursued from their first settlement, by many of these states, and still believed of consequence to their prosperity. And shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives, from distress, that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? Might not the general character and capabilities of a citizen, be safely communicated to every one manifesting a bona fide purpose of embarking his life and fortune permanently with us?”
But if gratitude can be allowed to form an excuse for inconsistency in a public character, in The Man of the People; a strong plea of this sort may be urged in behalf of our President. It is certain that had the late election been decided entirely by native citizens, had foreign auxiliaries been rejected on both sides, the man who ostentatiously vaunts that the doors of public honor and confidence have been burst open to him, would not now have been at the head of the American nation. Such a proof then of virtuous discernment in the oppressed fugitives, had an imperious claim on him to a grateful return, and without supposing any very uncommon share of self-love; would naturally be a strong reason for a revolution in his opinions.
The pathetic and plaintive exclamations by which the sentiment is enforced, might be liable to much criticism, if we are to consider it in any other light, than as a flourish of rhetoric. It might be asked in return, does the right to asylum or hospitality carry with it the right to suffrage and sovereignty? And what indeed was the courteous reception which was given to our forefathers, by the savages of the wilderness? When did these humane and philanthropic savages exercise the policy of incorporating strangers among themselves, on their first arrival in the country? When did they admit them into their huts, to make part of their families, and when did they distinguish them by making them their sachems? Our histories and traditions have been more than apocryphal, if any thing like this kind, and gentle treatment was really lavished by the much-belied savages upon our thankless forefathers. But the remark occurs, had it all been true, prudence inclines to trace the history farther, and ask what has become of the nations of savages who exercised this policy? And who now occupies the territory which they then inhabited? Perhaps a useful lesson might be drawn from this very reflection.
But we may venture to ask what does the President really mean, by insinuating that we treat aliens coming to this country, with inhospitality? Do we not permit them quietly to land on our shores? Do we not protect them equally with our own citizens, in their persons and reputation; in the acquisition and enjoyment of property? Are not our Courts of justice open for them to seek redress of injuries? And are they not permitted peaceably to return to their own country whenever they please, and to carry with them all their effects? What then means this worse than idle declamation?
The impolicy of admitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation in the right of suffrage, or in the sovereignty of a Republic, is as much a received axiom as any thing in the science of politics, and is verified by the experience of all ages. Among other instances, it is known, that hardly any thing contributed more to the downfall of Rome, than her precipitate communication of the privileges of citizenship to the inhabitants of Italy at large. And how terribly was Syracuse scourged by perpetual seditions, when, after the overthrow of the tyrants, a great number of foreigners were suddenly admitted to the rights of citizenship? Not only does ancient but modern, and even domestic history furnish evidence of what may be expected from the dispositions of foreigners, when they get too early footing in a country. Who wields the sceptre of France, and has erected a Despotism on the ruins of a Republic? A foreigner. Who rules the councils of our own ill-fated, unhappy country? And who stimulates persecution on the heads of its citizens, for daring to maintan an opinion, and for exercising the rights of suffrage? A foreigner!5 Where is the virtuous pride that once distinguished Americans? Where the indignant spirit which in defence of principle, hazarded a revolution to attain that independence now insidiously attacked?
In his old age, California governor Jerry Brown is turning his back on his 1970s “Era of Limits” rhetoric and trying to belatedly match his father Pat Brown as a titanic builder.
In particular, Jerry wants to complete his dad’s California water project by building water tunnels under the Sacramento River delta and he wants to build a high speed rail line from northern to southern California.
However, Jerry is having trouble both with getting the money and with overcoming the thicket of environmental and other regulations that have grown up since his dad’s day.
If I were Donald Trump, I wouldn’t volunteer federal taxpayer money to help California, which didn’t vote for him. But I would ask Gov. Brown to detail federal legislation and regulations that are getting in his way.
I don’t know that federal red tape is getting in Brown’s way: California is quite good at generating its own.
But I am reminded of a 2009 incident involving rail transit in Los Angeles that Bill Clinton highlighted in his 2011 book Back to Work as an abusive intrusion of federal authority in the Golden State. I wrote in VDARE in 2011 in my review of the former President’s book:
Similarly, Clinton twice brings up a bizarre but obscure recent incident in which the city of Los Angeles asked for bids for new high speed trains from European manufacturers. One offered to build a plant in Los Angeles and employ Los Angelenos, while the other intended to import the rail cars from abroad. ["Rail car bid in doubt, firm makes new offer," by Maeve Reston, LA Times, May 28, 2009] But, to Clinton’s incredulity:
“… the federal government told Los Angeles that since federal money would pay for the fast trains, the very different impacts on the local economy of the two proposals could not be considered in awarding the bid! … This is nuts.”
Last night VP-Elect Mike Pence and family took an evening off from the Trump Transition to attend the hottest Broadway musical of the era, Hamilton. The rich people in attendance relentlessly booed Pence for profaning their SWPL Holy-of-Holies with his presence, and the cast lectured Pence from the stage after the final curtain (except that Pence had already slipped out).
Commenter Hereward points out Alexander Hamilton’s views on immigration, diversity, and assimilation from January 1802:
“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.
“The opinion advanced in [Jefferson's] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule. The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.
“The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”
Has anybody noticed that Hamilton’s program was rather Trumpish: protectionism, immigration restriction, infrastructure, and the Electoral College?
By the way, as the strong man of the first cabinet, Hamilton was a big league supporter of the 1790 immigration act that restricted immigration to whites only.
The message of Hamilton: If it’s good for Goldman Sachs, it’s good for the Diverse.
Hillary has seen Hamilton three times.
Hamilton
The funny thing is that Hamilton was the whitest man imaginable, with a nose sharp enough to carve roast beef. Commenter syonredux points out:
Here’s Joseph Ellis on the physical contrast between Burr and Hamilton:
“Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes …
Burr
Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr’s somewhat stationary shadow.”
Burr kind of looked like David Cross from Mr. Show.
“We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends”
Barack Obama
The upcoming transvaluation of values will do much to ventilate stale thinking. We will see Paul Krugman in the New York Times denouncing Trump’s deficit spending as an inflationary stimulus based on the discredited ideas of the false prophet Keynes.
Meanwhile, speaking of the New Freshwater Economics, I’m mapping out the Trump-Bannon Upper Midwest High Speed Rail line from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee, with a possible extension to Minneapolis in case Minnesota sees the light in 2020. (Sure, I’ve made fun in the past of Jerry Brown’s hopes to emulate his dad by building high speed rail in California, but it’s a lot easier to build high speed rail lines in the flat Midwest than in mountainous California. And, anyway, it’s a New Era.)
How does a hovercraft ferry from Muskegon, MI to Milwaukee, WI, completely bypassing blue Illinois, sound?
I thought so.
Or how about a tunnel under Lake Michigan from Michigan to Wisconsin that the Trump-Bannon Swing State Express can roar through at 220 mph (assuming Illinois doesn’t yield to reason in 2020)?
Back in 2012, I was able to write several major analyses of the election results in part because Reuters had set up 40,000 person panel and provided a tool for doing crosstabs, such as married Jewish men (61-39 for Obama over Romney). Practically nobody else seemed to notice it in 2012, so not surprisingly, Reuters didn’t pay for such a large panel this time.
The media cartel pays Edison to do an exit poll with a sample size of about 25,000. (I’m not being snarky about calling it a media cartel. The problem with the market research business is that it can always support only about 1.5 firms per industry. So, 8 or 10 big media outlets get together each election and hire Edison to do exit polling for them.
The analytical problem with this exit poll, beside lack of accuracy, is that only certain crosstabs are provided and I haven’t found anyway to get to crosstabs (e.g., whites [58-37 for Trump] are reported, and white men are reported [63-31 for Trump], and married [53-43], but not married whites nor married white men).
So here’s my question: are there other sources of data for 2016 that I’ve overlooked?
Steve Sailer is a journalist, movie critic for Taki's Magazine, VDARE.com columnist, and founder of the Human Biodiversity discussion group for top scientists and public intellectuals.
You're 100% right. They are trying to cause a Constitutional Crisis. Of course Soros and the Clinton lawyers have been studying this for the past two weeks.
Want to hear something interesting? Just today, Trump down to 94 cents in betting market for President. HRC up 3 cents to 6. Paul Ryan up...
I don’t see how they achieve anything with a GOP house, senate, exec.
Soros is acting like an obstinate, senile old man. A recount will be as effective as his BLM machinations that helped pave the way to a Trump presidency. I bet Soros has major ass kissing yes men for advisors. Maybe they mak...
That Report was meant to be a fiction; but aren't the conclusions drawn so amazing? Soviet Union disintegrated so spectacularly at the end of the Cold War and now we see U.S. is also rapidly transitioning to a third world nation. Without the end of Cold War and consequent globalization, would bo...
Since the math alone isn't doing the trick, maybe some data would help. This runs in Octave and should work in Matlab too. Play with the parameters and run it as many times as you need to convince yourself that your estimate is biased and mine is not.
----------------------------------------...
WRT the recount, Jill Stein tweeted the following:
"Why would Hillary Clinton—who conceded the election to Donald Trump—want #Recount2016? You cannot be on-again, off-again about democracy."
Stein starts the recount, then criticizes Hillary for joining in/sending lawyers. Check out Stein...
Two weeks ago we were decrying the importation of foreigners as rigging the election. Now, were crowing that the Dems couldn't win Florida because they were soft on Castro.
Tribalism all the way down
I spent this summer with the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. My entire undergraduate career at Harvard College has revolved around grand philosophical questions of citizenship. I have grappled with questions like what makes a citizen a citizen? What is a citizen? How does one acquire citi...
At the bottom of the same NYT article it is revealed that the only physical attack was on a Trump supporter by an "anti-bullying activist":
"An Altercation With a Trump Supporter
Shacara McLaurin, a singer and anti-bullying activist in New York, said that she was walking home after a perfor...
Cuba's life expectancy benefits from the fact a substantial portion of its population is predominately Spanish, and Spain has the highest life expectancy in Europe and is tied for 4th in the world.
Missed clicking on your old Twitter/plunge article earlier.
I dig the amusing musings.
Life is pretty short, I suppose, like everybody says it is. But, sometimes, when I look back at all the weird twists in my life, it can seem enjoyably long.
Anyway, you can make sure to never miss having the...
Very interesting case; Just wondering what is the manufacturing that can be done profitably in U.S. with Cambodians & Haitians and can't be done in China.
If this woman gets a cushy expatriate job in Chile (as she well might be able to do, given Harvard's enviable placement and Latin American networks) she will have the added benefit of not having to pay US taxes while overseas, since she is not, in fact, a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.
...
OT: In the meantime, Jill Stein (I suspect prompted by Soros and the Clintons) is challenging the elections in MI, PA and WI. Why? No election recount has ever moved the results by anywhere close to Trump's margins. Well, there is the matter of time.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/e...
"The US surely imported masses of such people in the 19th century, didn’t it?"
It's no longer the 1800s, right? Times change, right? And many of the immigrants in the 1800s (probably an easy majority before the US Civil War) where from places on the North Sea or Baltic that show up in Beowul...
No, not illegal as far as I know. They had lawyers and met annually with the INS. Sometimes green cards are hard to get.
They can't be "undocumented."
They must have their original Chilean passports. Unlike the US, almost all other countries have exit controls, and airlines most certainly do. ...
No, but I have had a couple of discussions over coffee (nothing serious) on this. About 5 years ago, a smart computer geek I know was contemplating putting together a website for medical tourism. Great idea but he never had the resources to do it. That is an obvious play for the domestic angle...
For what it's worth, the Economist ranks Chile 23rd on its"Where-to-be-born index," ahead of Japan, France, the UK, and Spain. The US is ranked only slightly higher at 16th place.
http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life
Adults who knowingly break immigration law...
The vast majority have not been caught because they were all hate hoaxes. The few that have been caught were anti-Trump people physically assaulting pro-Trump people and the mainstream media never blame Crooked Hildabeast for these attacks.
Hoaxes indeed. Funny how all these swastikas are pop...
iSteve: Perhaps on the Wrong Side of History, but on the right side of reality.
Email me at SteveSlr *at* aol*dot*com (make the obvious substitutions between the asterisks; you don’t have to capitalize an email address, I just included the capitals to make clear the logic — it’s my name without a space and without the vowels in “Sailer” that give so many people, especially irate commenters, trouble.)
iSteve Panhandling
Steve Sailer
I always appreciate my readers’ help, especially monetary. Here’s how you can help:
First: You can use PayPal (non-tax deductible) by going to the page on my old blog here. PayPal accepts most credit cards. Contributions can be either one-time only, monthly, or annual.
Steve Sailer
P.O Box 4142
Valley Village, CA 91617-0142
Third: You can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. (Paypal and credit cards accepted, including recurring “subscription” donations.) Note: the VDARE site goes up and down on its own schedule, so if this link stops working, please let me know.
I’m using Coinbase as a sort of PayPal for Bitcoins.
The IRS has issued instructions regarding Bitcoins. I’m having Coinbase immediately turn all Bitcoins I receive into U.S. dollars and deposit them in my bank account. At the end of the year, Coinbase will presumably send me a 1099 form for filing my taxes.
Payments are not tax deductible.
Below are links to two Coinbase pages of mine. This first is if you want to enter a U.S. dollar-denominated amount to pay me.
Fifth: if you have a Wells Fargo bank account, you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Wells Fargo SurePay. Just tell WF SurePay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address steveslrAT aol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with PayPal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Sixth: if you have a Chase bank account (or even other bank accounts), you can transfer money to me (with no fees) via Chase QuickPay (FAQ). Just tell Chase QuickPay to send the money to my ancient AOL email address (steveslrATaol.com — replace the AT with the usual @). If Chase asks for the name on my account, it’s StevenSailer with an n at the end of Steven. (Non-tax deductible.) There is no 2.9% fee like with PayPal or Google Wallet, so this is good for large contributions.
Steve Sailer
Seventh: send money via the Paypal-like Google Wallet to my Gmail address(that’s isteveslrATgmail .com — replace the AT with a @). (Non-tax deductible.)
Here’s the Google Wallet FAQ. From it: “You will need to have (or sign up for) Google Wallet to send or receive money. If you have ever purchased anything on Google Play, then you most likely already have a Google Wallet. If you do not yet have a Google Wallet, don’t worry, the process is simple: go to wallet.google.com and follow the steps.” You probably already have a Google ID and password, which Google Wallet uses, so signing up Wallet is pretty painless.
You can put money into your Google Wallet Balance from your bank account and send it with no service fee.
Or you can send money via credit card (Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Discover) with the industry-standard 2.9% fee. (You don’t need to put money into your Google Wallet Balance to do this.)
Google Wallet works from both a website and a smartphone app (Android and iPhone — the Google Wallet app is currently available only in the U.S., but the Google Wallet website can be used in 160 countries).
Or, once you sign up with Google Wallet, you can simply send money via credit card, bank transfer, or Wallet Balance as an attachment from Google’s free Gmail email service. Here’s how to do it.
RSS
