In my decades as galley slave in Washington’s journalistic sludge fleets, I occasionally encountered conspiracy theories, such as the Second Shooter who got JFK, and that FDR intentionally let the Japs blow up Pearl Harbor, and of many sightings of alien space ships. Various psychic oddities dwelling in the crevices of the Potomac Rome worried about fluoride in the water. Like most news weasels who had a living to make, I ignored them as being fringe notions and wackos, which they later proved to be, the stories if not always the people. In any event they seemed few.

Then came Nine Eleven and Covid and there were millions of conspiracy theorists (CTs). Their numbers elevated them from peculiarities to a sort of contained nation within the polity and, in the case of the vaccine worriers, a public danger in that they blocked efforts against the virus. Yet one cannot reasonably relegate a large fraction of the country to the realms of mental disturbance without explanation. What was going on? Perhaps it was another manifestation of the malaise and anxiety and creeping hopelessness that gnaw at so much of America.

Most of their theories were nuttier than Aunt Polly’s prize fruitcake, that Dad poured rum on every year at Christmas and lit on fire. For example, a photo of the Grassy Knoll from above showed it to be the last place in Dallas that anyone would put a sniper, being small, almost without concealment, surrounded on all sides by busy urban streets, and overlooked by tall buildings with lots of windows. The inability of CTs to notice radical incoherence and protuberant flaws like this in their conspiratorial ointment (or is it flies in ointment?) is characteristic of the species.

To my astonishment, I discovered that many among conservative friends believed in the FEMA camps and such, and that they became angry if these were questioned. So I stopped.

The contradictions in these tales were obvious as boils on a pole dancer, as were stark implausibilities and lack of knowledge of the underlying fields. While the theories themselves soon ceased to be interesting, the psychology of the believers fascinated me. There are a lot of theories and, I noticed men (almost all CTs are) who believe in one almost always believe in many. A few of the more popular

FDR helped the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. Black helicopters of some presumably nefarious sort fly over America. A hundred FEMA concentration camps, manned but as yet empty, exist to be stuffed with patriots or conservatives or somebody. The Navy shot down TWA 800. The Jews (or, in other popular versions, the CIA, Mafia, LBJ’s people, or Cuban intelligence killed JFK. The second shooter did it. The government is buying up, or has bought up, thousands of coffins for I’m not sure exactly what purpose. The Jews killed RFK. Obama wasn’t a US citizen. Covid doesn’t exist. While not existing, it contains microchips to track us. Also nanoparticles that do something probably not good. Also mRNA to reprogram our DNA. The Jews blew up the Twin Towers. The military blew up the Pentagon with a missile. The Jews killed Forrestal. Miracle cures for covid exist but are hidden by the government, or most world governments, to (a) make money for Big Pharma, (b) to train us to obedience as communist robots. The purpose of the virus is to depopulate the planet. Lots and lots of POWs and MIAs were knowingly left behind in Vietnam by the Pentagon. Space aliens are stored at Roswell and flying saucers are virtually everywhere. There is a huge conspiracy to pretend that large numbers of people are dying of Covid. Earlier there was a huge conspiracy to prove they weren’t. The Jews, nothing if not busy, are destroying white Christian civilization. Dominion voting machines were hacked. Fluoride in the water is softening our brains (but, presumably, hardening our teeth.) The Towers were blown up by mini-nukes, the airplanes didn’t exist but were holograms, and pools of molten steel were found under the rubble months later.

There is apparently among CTs a gentleman’s agreement that enthusiasts of one theory will not criticize a mutually exclusive theory For example, when the Twin Towers fell, huge steel beams were allegedly hurled long distances, proving the use of explosives, but the buildings also supposedly fell neatly in their “footprints,” proving “controlled demolition.” At least one of these has to be wrong.

Why CTs, often no dummies, do not notice these impossibilities puzzles me. Any tale is welcomed, though not necessarily accepted in preference to one’s own, as long as it criticizes the “official story” (which usually means “what happened.”)

Maybe to be well twisted you have to start with enough string. The fair few among my friends are otherwise normal and, while mostly conservative, fall within the political mainstream, at leas as loosely defined.

Billions of words have been written by now about almost as many theories of Nine-Eleven but none answers the prior question of whether the conspiracy was possible. This baffles me.

A tale: In Marine Corps basic—OK, AIT, Advanced Infantry Training at Lejeune—we had a (very, very) short course in demolitions. It consisted in crimping a blasting cap onto a length of fuse, inserting it in a block of c4, lighting the fuse, and running like hell to the other side of the berm (“Fire in the hole.”) We saw demonstrations of how to use det cord to connect multiple blocks of boom stuff, but didn’t actually do it. I’m pretty sure I could have dropped a small rural bridge in Vietnam, but not much else.

One thing the instructors stressed—we probably would have figured it out all by ourselves—was that to bring something down, you needed to cut the supports that held it up.

Applying this complex reasoning to the Twin Towers, a Marine would reason that here too the supporting elements needed to be cut. What were these? Answer: the fifty-nine huge steel uprights on each face of the building. Where were these? Answer: In plain sight of all of the workers in the offices on the outer face of the building. Great big things, covered with wood facing or plaster, but visible. Visible every day. All day. Would not a CT, if he wanted to be believed by anyone outside of the community of the faithful, at a minimum have to explain how the Mossad agents rigged these pillars for demolition without being noticed?

No.

CTs don’t think this way. All you have to do is believe, to know without finding out, to accept without checking. The CTs aren’t lying, aren’t trying to fool the public. If they were, they would try to inject a degree of plausibility into the story. Nor do they seem to want to convince a wider public or, again, they would answer the essential questions. If you want me to believe that the Israelis did do it, you have to show me that they could have done it. If they couldn’t have, they probably didn’t. Weirdly, CTs on the web become much angrier at me for doubting their theories than at the Israelis who, they assert, killed three thousand Americans. I do not recall hearing a demand for even a diplomatic protest, much less carpet bombing Tel Aviv, appropriate if Israel did it.

(As of fifteen minutes ago, I have encountered a new kink in this rope: The explosives were built into the Towers at the time of construction. I suppose by a large gang of Mossad agents pretending to be construction workers The towers were finished in 1973, making them a monument to terroristic forethought. The more you look at this stuff, the sillier it gets, but CTs don´t notice.)

In pondering Washington’s new toy, a cold war against China, one sees a pattern. China’s approach to influence and prosperity is commercial and longsighted. This does not mean that the Chinese are warm and fuzzy, only intelligent. They advance their interests while turning a profit, which wars don’t. China invests heavily in the infrastructure, both physical and educational, that makes for current and future competitiveness. They are fast, agile, innovative, and imperfectly scrupulous. They seek trade agreements: The Comprehensive Agreement on Investment with Europe, The RCEP, Regional comprehensive Economic Partnership, the CPEC, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the huge Iran deal, the development with Russia of the NSR, the Northern Sea Route. They seem good at it, China now being the largest trading partner of something like 165 countries.

Washington’s approach is military, coercive, shortsighted, and commercially dimwitted. It forms military alliances: the Quad in the Indian Ocean, with Japan against China, puts missiles in South Korea, pushes Europe to buy more American weaponry, sends naval forces to the Indian Ocean, Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf to intimidate, without much success, China, Russia, and Iran. It wants to get the Ukraine and Georgia into NATO to threaten Russia. It makes as much sense as lug nuts on a birthday cake.

China’s major capital expenditures, as gleaned as best I can from pubs covering these: highways, dams, bridges, very-high-voltage power lines, airports, rail, new high-tech 360 mph rail, five-g implementation, reactors, and semiconductor catchup.

America’s major capital expenditures: the B-21, F-35, Virginia-class subs, , Ford-class aircraft carriers, SSN (x) attack submarine. Biden says he will build infrastructure but, if history is a guide, he will pander to the woke, fight systemic racism, promote LBGQXYZ, become mired in congressional infighting, and the whole thing will devolve into pork. Want to bet?

What are these weapons for? The B-21 is an intercontinental nuclear bomber. What does one do with intercontinental nuclear bombers? Engage in intercontinental nuclear war. Are we sure this is a good idea? There will be no such war unless America starts it. China isn’t going to since (a) its approach to power and influence is commercial, which is working well, and (b) America has so many, many nuclear weapons of all sorts that China would be obliterated. If the US launched a first strike, the bombers would get there hours after the war was over. What would be the point?

The point is to funnel vast amounts of money into a bloated, running-on-autopilot military business so large that it can’t be reduced or controlled. All of this send-money PR assumes that China thinks it needs a nuclear holocaust. Who can doubt it?

It is impossible even to leave the military budget as it is, much less reduce it.

• Congress Moves to Increase Pentagon Budget, Defying Biden

Military industry is so pervasive, providing so many jobs in so many states with so many lobbyists, that the President and his party cannot control it

• China-Africa trade hits record high of \$139.1 billion from January to July: MOFCOM

America sends troops (Africom, Africa Command) and builds drone bases. China builds rail lines and buys up resources. Did we say something about a pattern?

What is a Ford-class carrier good for? The Fords are versatile ships, having a three-fold purpose: Funneling lots of money into military industry, killing defenseless peasants, and sticking the Pentagon’s tongue out at China. Killing peasants and soldiers in third-rate armies of bedraggled third-world countries is what the American military does. Think Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Somalia. Getting into big wars with real countries is no longer practical despite the opportunities for profits because big countries depend on each other too much commercially. Even killing peasants begins to lose cache, as witness the comic opera defeat in Afghanistan..

• Congress Pushes for Weapons the Pentagon Doesn’t want

A list of examples from Ohio. When military industry wants to produce a new weapon, it makes sure that components are produced in as many states as possible. But some things should be obvious. A big-ticket carrier creates a huge number of jobs for years at Newport News as well as jobs all over America for parts. When the carrier is completed and sails off to kill its peasants, the town goes into depression and stockholders lose dividends. The Pentagon then discovers an urgent need for another carrier. Congress shares this sense of urgency. Surprise, surprise.

What do I mean in saying that America is “short-sighted”? Try this:

• Oregon Governor Kate Brown quietly signed a bill last month that removed the requirement for graduating high school children in the state to be proficient in reading, writing, and math, in an effort to aid “students of color.”

Wowee, that must terrify them over in China’s engineering departments, where students are years ahead of American in mathematics. This sort of thing goes on across America.

Number of Chinese overseas military bases: 1 (Djibouti) American: Hundreds. Number of Chinese military conflicts: One, a minor border clash with India. American: You know the list as well as I do, with Iran perhaps being groomed for the next war. Which country spends more on the foregoing? What has America gained?

• ORAN an Also Ran to Huawei Five-G

This is long and kind of techy but makes the point that China is leaving the US far behind in five-g. While many think of Five-G as being for use in smart phones, this is actually of negligible importance. Where it counts is in industry, robotics, smart cities, mining with nobody underground, on and on. The United States, unable to compete with Huawei, consigned itself to primitivism by excluding the Chinese. Then it failed in its attempt to prevent China from rolling out five-g within its own borders. So much for bringing manufacturing back to America.

• China Overtakes US in AI Research

And whose fault is this?

• China Passes US in Output of Influential Science Papers

Here is a point worth noting. The Chinese have the engineers, the numbers and the focus to do pretty much anything. They do not always have the machinery. AI takes more brains than machinery.

• CATL goes all in on next-gen sodium-ion EV batteries

CATL Goes All in on Sodium Ion Batteries

Not a game-changer, and other countries look at the same thing but, as so often, China is right up there with the other big boys.

• “Last month, during high-level talks in Honolulu, the US Indo-Pacific Command and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) agreed to build a new base in the island nation.” To contain China.

A few weeks back I wrote a column suggesting that Jews have become successful because they are smart. I confess that I did it in the spirit of a small boy poking a wasps’ nest and running like hell. I am a bad person, but it is more interesting than accountancy. The Devil makes me do it.

I predicted–it didn’t take much predicting—that there would follow great fury and anguish and thundering that Jews aren’t really that smart, indeed really not more than anyone else, that they weren’t really inventive, had actually produced little or nothing, This led to the interesting conclusion that a tiny group, not very bright, not inventive and unproductive, “totally control everything.” This further led me, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to conclude that success must be proportional to the lack of any qualities likely to produce it and that if Jews were even less intelligent and imaginative, they would not only control everything but also everything else. This is getting confusing.

There is in the horror of Jews an opposing strand, a pop-evo assertion that, well, yes, Jews are smart and they got that way because in the Shetls bright boys became rabbis and were respected so married the best prospects and had lots of children, concentrating genes for brains. Kevin McDonald is the guru of this line of thought. Like most, or all, ex post facto metaphysical Sunday-supplement evolutionism, this relies on genes assumed but undetected, acted upon by selective pressures imagined but neither quantifiable nor instrumentally detectable, producing results assumed to be consequent to but not correlatable with the assumed pressures. Apart from these quibbles the theory seems firm.

But if those doing the resentful hissing and snarling really believe that every aspect of our lives is run by Jews, perhaps from a control room deep beneath Manhattan, does this not imply we, the controlled, must be weak, feckless, dim, easily led and, well, contemptible? Are the rest of us really as helpless and docile as the hissers hold us to be? I mean, honest, I can actually dress myself.

For the record, I have found Jews other than some Israelis to be pretty good people, though there have been exceptions, certainly less tedious than their detractors, certainly more intelligent, and on occasions living up to their high moral impression of themselves. That is policy in this column. Deal with it.

Most of the squalling and fulmination aforementioned supports my not very astonishing assertion that Jews get ahead for the obvious reasons that explain the advance of any brighter group operating among the less bright: Indians and Chinese in Africa, Chinese in Indonesia, Australians and abos in Australia, and so on. The success and subsequent influence certainly exist, as easily shown by counting those in high governmental office, entrepreneurs, the sciences, arts, high-tech, academia, and the like.

What explains the seething resentment, other than a sense of inferiority? There is a close affinity between Jew worriers and anti-vaccers, and with conspiracy theorists in general. I have not actually heard anyone saying that Jews contain microchips or nanoparticles to alter our DNA, but I expect this any day now. There is the same sense of some unseen evil, a foul miasma, like swamp gas, palpable, almost visible but just out of the range of vision. behind everything. The (Jews, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, the Davos crowd, the UN, World Government, the Democrats).

For example, CTs believe not only in black helicopters, FEMA camps into which conservatives will be stuffed come the Reset, and a half-dozen (at least) conspiracies involving the virus, but also that Jews destroyed the Twin towers and killed JFK. I sleep with a loaded pistol.

The conspiracy game would fascinate psychiatrists if they weren’t already crazier than their patients. On the same page of the Vacca whacsites you can find articles arguing on powerful authority that the virus doesn’t exist, and that it is a conspiracy to depopulate the earth, that the needles contain microchips to track us and nanoparticles to reprogram our DNA for some reason probably not desirable. This is not parody. I know people who believe all of these things. But wouldn’t the nanoparticles jam up the needles? And if the earth were depopulated, who would the microchips track? These are deep waters.

Then, always, there is white Christian civilization, which Jews are said to be destroying. If so, they are not very good at it, since the said civilization has proved the most successful to date, but we will not worry about this. Does not one have in logic if any to believe either A, that Jesus is the Son of God and Jews His chosen people, in which case one might expect them to have a leg up in life, or B, that Christianity is a fraud, arguably perpetrated by Jews, and that the faith has no more truth in it than an elaborated Cargo Cult? And if Jews are good enough for God, shouldn’t they be good enough for us’

Of course one could posit that Christianity isn’t true but that it contains all sorts of desirable values and thus is a fitting timon for humanity, but then it still comes—shriek !—from those pesky Jews.

The perennial insistence that Jews are out to destroy white Christian civilization runs into the awkward facts that Jews are usually white and that Christianity is their invention. Uberpatriots make invidious comparisons between Christian virtues and the dark morals and failings of other races and tribes, but…wait…didn’t Jews write the Bible?

Jews of course tend to be politically liberal and so regarded as enemies by the anti-Jewish folk, mostly conservative. Note that liberals are highly inclusive in outlook, regardless of whether it makes sense in a given case, while conservatives are by nature hostile to outgroups, whether it makes sense in a given case or not. Another common thread is that liberals, sort of half of America, are dupes led by the nose by Jewish intellectuals whereas conservatives, the other half, see things with lone crystalline clarity

The connection of conservatism with nuttiness is in fact fairly rare, but it’s a doozy when it happens. Mainline conservatives believe in small government, lower taxes, states’ rights, individual liberty, traditional morality, and such. While some may disagree with aspects of these, none is loony. But then you come to the CT enthusiasts who fall off the Right Wing out where the feathers run out and giddy space begins. It seems not to occur to them that highly intelligent, educated, and decent liberals often come to their positions all by themselves. You don’t have to be a robot of the Jews to favor universal health care. When a society faces multiple grave problems with no solution, people of good intention will plunk for programs likely to produce miserable results over those plunked for by the other side, which also will produce miserable results.

I will now go into hiding.

Forty-six years ago in a previous comedy I was in Saigon, recently having been evacuated from Phnom Penh in an Air America—CIA—Caribou carrying, in addition to me, several ARVN junior officers and perhaps a dozen BUFEs (Big Ugly Fucking Elephants, the ceramic pachyderms much beloved of GIs). America had already embarked on its currently standard policy of forcing small countries into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. In Cambodia this led to the reign of Pol Pot, the ghastly torture operation at Toul Sleng, and a million or so dead. In the unending fight for democracy, casualties are inevitable.

At the time Saigon was tense because Ban Me Thuot had fallen and the NVA roared down Route One toward Saigon. To anyone with the brains of a doorknob, the American adventure in Vietnam was coming to an end, but the embassy was studiedly unconcerned. Embassies do not have the brains of a doorknob, but are keenly aware of public relations. Acknowledging the inescapable is not their way. As usual, Washington would rather lie than breathe, and did. As in Cambodia, so in Nam, and so later in Afghanistan.

Apparently a genius at State realized that a lot of gringo expats lived in Nam—the number six thousand comes to mind, but may be wrong—and that six thousand hostages taken when Saigon fell would be bad PR. So the embassy in Kabul—Saigon, I meant to say, Saigon—quietly announced that expats could fly out on military aircraft from Ton Son Nhut. They didn’t, or at least many didn’t. The NVA continued its rush toward Saigon.

The expats didn’t fly out because they had Vietnamese wives and families and were not going to leave them, period. These wives may not have had the trappings of pieces of paper and stamps and maybe snippets of ribbon. These things do not seem important in Asian war zones. But the expats regarded them as wives. Period. The family went, or nobody did. Period.

The embassy didn’t understand this because embassies are staffed by people from Princeton with names like Derek who wear pink shirts and don’t know where they are. The ambassador is usually a political appointee being rewarded for campaign contributions and probably doesn’t speak the language as few gringos spikka da Pushto or Vietnamese or Farsi or Khmer. For example, nobody at all in the embassy in Cambodia spoke Khmer. The rank and file of State are better suited to a high-end Rotarian barbecue than a Third World city teeming with strange people in funny clothes eating God knows what horrible things in winding frightening alleys. And so the State people could not understand why an American would marry one “of them,” as in the embassy I once heard a gringa put it. It was a good question. Why would a man marry a pretty, sleek, smart, self-reliant woman who wanted family and children? It was a great mystery.

The Taliban—NVA, I mean–NVA kept coming closer. A PR disaster loomed.

Meanwhile the PR apparatus insisted that the sky wasn’t really falling even as it did and no, no, no the US had not gotten its sit-down royally kicked by a ratpack of rice-propelled paddy maggots, as GIs described the opposition. Many in government seemed to believe this. This was an early instance, to be repeated in another part of Asia, of inventing a fairyland world and then trying to move into it.

Finally State faced reality, a novel concept. It allowed quietly that expats and their families could fly out, military. It was getting late, but better than nothing.

The comedic value of this goat rope grew, becoming more amusing by the hour. I was trying to get a young Vietnamese woman out as she had worked for the embassy and we suspected things might not go well with her under the NVA. Call her Linda. Linda and I took the bus to Tan Son Nhut. The Viet gate guards gave her a hard time, envying her for getting out while they could not, but we got in. I was going to tell the State people that we were married but that while I was in Can Tho, by then in VC hands, see, the marriage papers had slipped from my carrying case. This was obvious bullshit, but I guessed that if I made a huge issue of it they would bend rather than get in a megillah with a reporter, no matter how unimportant.

We found ourselves in a long line of expats with their families leading to the door of a Quonset hut, inside of which a State official was checking papers. Some of the expats had around them what appeared to be small villages of in-laws, brothers of wives, sisters, everything but the family dog. An official with a bull horn told us to write down all their names and the relationships on clipboards being passed around. Tran Thi Tuyet Lan, sister, for example.

Then a genius at the embassy or Foggy Bottom realized that something resembling a third of Viet Nam was about to come out, listed as in-laws. Policy changed, at least in Washington which was as usual blankly ignorant of reality on the ground. At Tan Son Nhut this meant telling men that they had to leave parts of their families behind, which they weren’t going to do. This would not look good above the fold in the Washington Post. Dozens of Americans taken captive because the State Department would not let their families out.” All was confusion because the US had spent years telling itself that the disaster couldn’t happen. What to do?

American ingenuity kicked in. At the Quonset hut the guy with the bullhorn announced, “From now on, all mothers-in-law are mothers, all brothers-in-law are brothers. Change your forms.” All along the line, magic markers went through “in-law.” This meant that some women had two mothers, but this under the circumstances seemed a minor biological quibble. The guy with the bull horn was at most three feet from the guy in the Quonset hut who was certifying papers as valid. He solemnly looked at the papers with their strike-through’s, , certified them as correct, and that was that. A field expedient.

Hours and hours went by. Night came. Tempers frayed. Nobody seemed to have planned how actually to get these people out. Nobody seemed to have planned anything. Finally a 130 howled in. This was the Lockheed C-130 Hercules, a four-engine turboprop cargo bird and a magnificent plane. It taxied over. The engines did not shut down. The prop wash was strong and hot. The tail ramp dropped. The waiting mob were rushed aboard without ceremony. There were no seats in the dark cavern of the fuselage. That would have required planning, which no one in Washington had thought of. The air reeked of burned aviation kerosene. We squatted on the cargo deck while an Air Force guy with a bullhorn warned, “Keep the kids’ hands out of the expansion slots, you’ll lose them.”

The real-world Air Force didn’t have people named Derek in pink shirts and if you told it all rules off, get the job done, it did. Ramp up, fast taxi, takeoff run, tight corkscrewing climb with the engines running at power I didn’t know they had. The NVA and VC were now very close due to incompetent planning (have I mentioned incompetent planning?) and might have SAM-7s so it wasn’t a good idea to fly over territory they now controlled. Cutting and running from a stupid war run by generals as clueless as they were careerist, with Saigon spinning below, seen through open doors amid tightly packed peasants going they had little idea where. Days later when we got to San Fran on a chartered airliner, hundreds of refugees were dumped into the main concourse, no immigrations, customs, or paperwork.

A staple of the columnist’s life is mail embodying a weird obsession with Jews. It is a versatile obsession, suitable for any occasion. If I were to write a column on the economics of watermelon farming in rural Kansas for a conservative site, a high proportion of the comments would consist of angry denunciations of Jews, the Ziomedia, the ZOG, Jew bankers, Marx, the pernicious effects of Jews on watermelons, and the commie plot to destroy Western civilization, as if it were not competent to do it unaided. Given that Jews tend to prosper mightily in Western civilization, it is not clear why they should want to destroy it, but these are deep waters I will not endeavor to plumb. Further, it was not clear how a tiny group, most of whom seemed to be dentists, could destroy civilizations. Unless they were way smarter than the civilizations.

The hostility to Jews is grinding, bitter, and implacable, coming chiefly from conservatives, who by nature are tribal and tend to see existence in terms of threats and conflict. And often have a tendency to see everything whatever as consequent to Jewish plots. Why the rancor and, in particular, why the belief in the unlimited power of Jews?

At first I assumed that the daughters of the complainers must have been sold into Arab slavery by Jewish flesh merchants. Nothing else could explain it. Yet this turned out not to be true, at least in those cases I could investigate. (Two) The daughters were in place. The commenters never mentioned anything that Jews had actually done to them—poisoned their dogs, swindled them out of their inheritance. Most (though here I speculate) seemed not to know any Jews. So why this tedious fury?

The bitterness, I noted, resemble the hostility of many blacks toward whites. Blacks, at the bottom of society, apparently need someone to blame. Similarly the commenters appeared to resent the Jews for being much more successful that house-and-garden-variety whites (Hagvacas). Might the causes be the same: a resentment of a superior people accompanied by an unwillingness to admit the superiority? The infuriated seemed willing, indeed eager, to point to the inferiority of blacks to themselves but, mysteriously, not their own inferiority to Jews. An oversight, no doubt.

I offer three helpful rules of racial resentment in gratitude for which an astounded world will doubtless send me their children’s college funds:

• First, prosperity tends to be proportional to intelligence over statistically meaningful populations.
• Second, resentment is proportional to IQ difference.
• Third, equal differences of IQ produce equal differences of outcome.

These rules do not apply exclusively to Jews. South African whites, and in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Chinese (who have a large IQ advantage over the natives) are detested for owning things and having money. In Indonesia they have been attacked by mobs and killed. In general, a rich, powerful, and distinguishable group will draw hostility.

Psychometrists, who study intelligence, almost universally rank the races in order of intelligence as Ashkenazi Jews, East Asians, Whites, Latinos, and blacks. (Note that income, educational level, and academic performance closely track this ordering.) The psychometrists are mostly white men so are unlikely to be cooking the numbers against themselves.

Among IQists, it is doctrine that blacks have a mean IQ of 85, fifteen points below the Hagvaca average of 100, and this is held to account for the lack of success of blacks. Searching the literature reveals authorities asserting that Ashkenazi Jews have a mean IQ of 115, as far above ordinary or Hagvaca whites as whites are above blacks. Eureka, and all. Equal differences of input produce equal differences of outcome. N’est-ce pas?.

Hagvacas don’t want, and Jews know better than, to emphasize this. Yet there it is.

One finds such as this, “Ashkenazi Jews, who make up 80 percent of the Jews in the world today, have, on average, the highest IQs of any ethnic group in the world. While Asians are often touted as the smartest people in the world, Ashkenazi Jews as a group average 115 on an IQ test—eight points higher than Asians and dramatically higher than the world average of 79.1. Ashkenazim skills in verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory, and mathematics are simply astounding—the group averages 125 on an IQ test of verbal reasoning. Since 1950, 29 percent of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to Ashkenazi Jews, who represent a mere 0.25 percent of the global population.”

Among IQ buffs, IQs tend to vary depending on polemic intent, and there will be much squawking to the effect that it isn’t, isn’t, iSN’T true, but observation suggests that it is. The foregoing plaudit tracks well with observable result. This sort of thing arouses shrieks of anguish amongst the Antis who grind their hair and pull their teeth, or maybe it’s the other way around. I can never remember. This engenders assertions that the IQ tests are biased, that Jewish success arises from collusion, that it’s culture, that it’s dishonesty and lack of principle—all of which closely parallel the assertions of blacks against whites.

After reading a great deal of this I began imagining Jews sitting among sacks of gold in darkened counting rooms, rubbing their hands together and saying, “Heh-heh-heh.”

Yet the disproportion in achievement is there. Neither Jews (wisely) nor Hagvacas want to recognize the fairly obvious reason.

The IQ difference if you do the numbers means that one Hagvaca in six is as smart as the average Jew, just as one black in six is as smart as the average white. It also means that if two percent of whites are at IQ 130, the cutoff for Mensa, then two percent of Jews have IQs of 145 or higher (which, according to some estimates is entry level for Wall Street, which is where money is. The nature of a bell-shaped distribution is such that at progressively higher IQs, the numerical advantage grows.

For centuries Jews have been charged with greed, deviousness, arrogance, clannishness, selfishness, generic horribleness, and sacrificing Christian children. In my experience Jews have been no more devious and horrible than everyone else, though admittedly this leaves much room for deviousness and horribleness. The only people who want to sacrifice Christian children are, occasionally, Christian parents. Yet character defects alone, if any, cannot produce overwhelming influence in intellectual endeavor. People who sleep in bus stations have character defects, but do not run publishing houses.

Are Jews obsessed by money? Or just better at making it?. Dentists, cardiac surgeons, IT managers, semiconductor designers and hedge-fund maestros s make more than taxi drivers, midlevel bureaucrats, and people who sell fan belts at the NAPA outlet.