Why does everyone who gets cancer become an insufferable jerk? They all feel entitled to impose obligations on the rest of society from that day forward.

Ibram X. Kendi needs a slave to do his writing for him.

why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?

As far as I can tell, all leadership is getting dumber. Indeed, everyone is getting dumber. The cause for blacks is fairly obvious, but it is not exactly obscure for everyone else.

Kendi’s books were banned by some school libraries…

You might say this is a necessary evil, but I don’t like it and it might very well be an own goal for the counter-woke movement.

Where are the adults in the room saying that libraries should have a wide-variety perspectives on the shelf so that students can have the opportunity to consider them, wrestle with competing ideas, learn how to think, and make an informed judgment for themselves?

Instead of banning Kendi, how about leaving him on the shelf next to books by Ben Shapiro and former LA Congressman Dr. Dave D. (the horror!)?

When the response to censorship by the Left is censorship by the Right, the end result is that everything gets censored and there is no intellectual engagement at all. Personally I think that is what “The Borg” wants. Banning Kendi isn’t a victory, it’s just part of the Devil’s Dialectical Dance to Doom.

It is interesting that far more developed structures of ideas- far superior to this Kendi joke- did achieve huge prominence while anyone critically disposed could destroy them in a minute.

Probably there are times & epochs when masses & classes simply go- completely nuts. Even when they are supposedly educated, “modern” or living in non-totalitarian regimes.

Lemmings & fellow travelers.

A society in crisis or a self-delusional society may operate for some time. But, in a short time, these delusions, hypocrisies, hallucinations …. break & vanish.

The question is then: what next?

It’s just just a matter of dysgenics: as you yourself have pointed out, Kendi is obviously dumber than Ta-Nehisi Coates & Jamelle Bouie. His stupidity and the resulting simplemindedness of his message is precisely what made him preferable to them in 2020.

CNN: “Ibram X. Kendi Says a Backlash Has ‘crushed’ the Nation’s Racial Reckoning.”

In other words, Kendi has lost the argument. We have a euphemism emergency in the headline (I’ve bolded 2):

1. “Backlash”: [translation] Negro fatigue
2. “Nation’s Racial Reckoning”: [translation] Negro social parasitism

“An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades? Perhaps differential fertility by class (W.E.B. Du Bois used to complain about how his Talented Tenth was being swamped by the babies of Booker T. Washington’s black masses), which was large among black women up into the 1990s (but may have eased off since)?”

Perhaps because there is less and less colorism, or those blacks that have considerable white admixture in their DNA are having fewer and fewer offspring, while those that are closer to 70, 80, and 90% black DNA are having considerably more offspring. Thus the Talented Tenth has fewer to draw individuals to draw upon from white admixture.

Either that or progression to the mean is finally coming.

An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades? P
==
Hypothesis:
=
When Alex Haley’s father went into academe in the 1920s, you had to teach serious subjects (in his case, agronomy). For over 50 years, institutions have been working to bulk up their black faculty. You’ve had a vast increase in the number of black faculty, but it’s been pushing on a string to increase the number of black professors teaching and researching in serious subjects. So, the mean quality of black faculty has been decaying. What you have is places being created in victimology programs or in subjects which have seen considerable decay (sociology, teacher training).
==
Note, the large increase in the number of people employed as professors (given that the share of youth obtaining a baccalaureate degree went from 6% to 13% to 25% to 45%) would tend to exert downward pressure on the impressiveness of faculty (all else being equal), but it would not necessarily be noticeable outside of classrooms because the less impressive faculty go unremarked unless they’re nuts. Institutions are so mad to have blacks as decoration that they tolerate poor performance and bad behavior they would not have in 1990 much less 1960.
==
The solution is simple and will not be adopted: stop pouring Miracle Grow on the nettles and restore the seriousness of purpose of your degenerate programs. A conscientious board of trustees can do this by prescribing a formula for admission which consists of an equation that has high school GPA, board scores, and achievement test scores as arguments; by replacing the current admissions office staff with number crunchers; by firing the DIE cretins in the provost’s office and HR, and by closing decayed programs in order to start anew (selectively) some years down the road. Top targets should be each and every victimology program, the teacher-training program, the social work program, the library administration program, the sociology department, and the studio art program. The school of communications is another place to look for scalps.
==

I was sure I could find a link from you ranking Bouie above TNC above Kendi, but I’m coming up short at the moment. In the meantime, John McWhorter & Glenn Loury (both professors of subjects they didn’t make up themselves) have called out the emperor-has-no-clothes aspect of Kendi:

Crushed the “Nation’s Racial Reckoning.” Isn’t that like saying we didn’t have that national racial conversation that media was always pounding the table about??

Sometimes, even with a loud speaker, no one pays attention to a one-man band.

Right – Du Bois had a PhD from Harvard back in the day when that really meant something and when they weren’t giving no colored men no breaks. Kendi could barely score @ the 50th percentile on his SAT and probably has a good flat 90-100 IQ (SAT %iles used to correlate strongly with IQ but by the time Kendi got to college they had made it easier so that the Negroes wouldn’t find it too hard). Maybe blacks have gotten dumber but white people have gotten dumber too – how dumb is it to think of a guy who should be maybe a waiter or a truck driver as an “intellectual”.

Maybe blacks have gotten dumber but white people have gotten dumber too – how dumb is it to think of a guy who should be maybe a waiter or a truck driver as an “intellectual”.
==
Likely skilled worker of some sort. Food service is pretty much the bottom wage stratum.
==
In truth, the careers of Kendi and diAngelo are frankly bizarre and an indicator of how unwell academe is. I suspect if you unpacked it, you’d discover that most black faculty belong at a different sort of institution than the one that hired them and at the bottom of the pile you find people who have no business in academe. (KC Johnson found a nest of such people at Duke, the issue of Wm. Chafe’s efforts as provost). Every once in a while you get a celebrity like Houston Baker (nut-gasbag) or Kendi (clot) who has a considerable profile but is an embarrassment to any honest craftsman.

I admire Dr. Kendi’s industry.

I don’t. Do you admire the “industry” of Merrick Garland? Both of them hate our guts. Not admirable.

He thought he wasn’t smart enough for college, even though he had been admitted to historically black Florida A&M University.

Same here. I used to think I couldn’t possibly be college material, despite the the fact that I scored well enough on the ASVAB test to qualify for the US Army.

“black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?”

You would think high-caste black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean would have raised the standards, but I don’t think that has happened.

“Ibram X. Kendi Says a Backlash Has ‘crushed’ the Nation’s Racial Reckoning.”

We’ll have a racial reckoning.

No fear.

I admire Dr. Kendi’s industry.

He must have a high IQ. Industry being correlated with high IQ is an HDB axiom.

He’s probably Jewish like Whoopi Goldberg and her tribe, I bet he has a great sense of rhythm as well, another attribute of the Jew and high IQ.

As for “Even Trip Gabriel appears to be tiring of the Outraged Black Woman Discovers Another Manifestation of Systemic Racism beat.” in your other post, I doubt that very much. Like Whoopi, Kendi et al he’s Jewish:

Good lord, we’ve finally figured out what boarding school is for: Turning Jews into white people!

https://www.gawker.com/253667/trip-gabriel-about-getting-his-kids-out-of-the-house

Rhythm and melody, signs of the High IQ Jew, 5,000 years selected-for adjustment to alcohol after the vast dying out moment in sub-Sahara when all those not selected-for died during the great drought as the historic Jewish viticulture rose to prominence on the shores of the Sahara Desert. It was a shoa ending in barrels of shiraz which only the chosen could slake their thirst.

This is also why the Jews have a great hatred of the Chinese exhibited by constant videos of them on WorldStarHipHop bashing Chinese on the New York subways and in Chinatown Los Anglese.

As Yeats wrote of the Jew:

“Out of Sub-Sahara have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.”

The confident, professorial Kendi that most see in public is replaced in the book by a younger version who struggled with doubts over his intelligence.

If it makes him feel any better, I’m STILL struggling…

…with doubts over his intelligence.

OK, beyond that, perhaps the cause and effect on this intelligence of intellectual leaders is being understood backwards. People with intelligence – and I just met a black guy in the talented 0.1%, an economist from the Carter administration times, BTW, who told me a little about the FDIC – perhaps don’t want to be a part of the stupidity in the Big Government, Education, the Media, etc. of modern times.

If you really are very intelligent, how boring and stupid life will be at the top of the modern Establishment! You might be smart enough to stay away from all that. Not everyone is after money and fame, contrary to the iSteve attitude that those are the be-all-to-end-all.

That’s a fine libertarian argument. But it no longer applies with our current demographics. And it won’t for the rest of the century.

They don’t.

1. The business of elementary school students is learning how to read, write, and sum and to grasp the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics. If all goes well, they get some reading in, they can diagram a sentence, they can write grammatical English, they’re competent with arithmetic, and they’ve absorbed some elementary algebra. In addition, they can recite the timeline of American history and they understand the basics about its physical and human geography.

2. The business of secondary school students is (1) trying to master what they did not master in elementary school, 0r (2) trying their had at various trades, or (3) getting instruction in academic subjects. Reading Kendi is irrelevant to every subject other than history / geography / civics. Recall that these are high school students, and you’re teaching out of textbooks. Syntopical reading on these subjects isn’t much done among high school students and you want in anything resembling a research paper you assign to encourage your students to have a gander at information-rich material. Kendi’s a polemicist.

https://www.unz.com/isteve/slate-astrology-is-in/

In defense of the new mass market Slate, they've probably maintained more of their dignity than The Atlantic: E.g., Slate's Jamelle Bouie must have 20 IQ points over Atlantic's Ta-Nehisis Coates.

— Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer) September 12, 2018

Excuse me, our esteemed host had cancer.

Fascinating to see truly intelligent men discussing this topic

This supports what I have heard elsewhere that many of the most learned black intellectuals are rather upset with recent woke lightweights getting all the fame and fortune. Perhaps some envy mixed with disgust and outrage.

I remember when Adolph Reed, Jr., a brilliant black political scientist, said about the woke white adulation of Coates. He compared it to gushing over the maid’s son getting into college. Anyone who has read “A Man in Full” may recall “the Cap’m” paying the tuition for his maid’s son.

The point being — the top black intellectuals want to be judged as harshly as white intellectuals, because they believe themselves to be capable of withstanding such scrutiny, and believe their work will benefit. Just as Satchel Paige and Dizzy Dean made great efforts to pitch against each other

Do you admire the “industry” of Merrick Garland? Both of them hate our guts. Not admirable.

There was someone who, when challenged to say something nice about the devil, said, “He’s a hard worker.”

Kendi almost died young of cancer a number of years ago

So, did Supernigbo get cured through YT medicine, or did he opt for a witch doctor from De MuddahLand?

(Awkward sentence, BTW-“almost died young of cancer a number of years ago” WTF?)

And the reader comments about “brilliant blacks” and “talented tenth” Uh, no…. CuckWhites are desperate for a negro idol to slobber over, but….no.

Schitt never tasted like chocolate candy. Not now, not in the future, and not in the past.

Ibram was a bright but underachieving senior at his Northern Virginia high school. His GPA was below 3.0; his SAT scores were just above 1000.

I was an underachiever but a significantly better student than that. (I likely took tougher classes, too.)

Then again, I’m White.

Wikipedia says he was born in 1982 so that SAT score is even worse after factoring in the April 1995 re-centering.

Art? Mr. Deco? Forest and Trees?

Okay, so the referenced article explicitly says “some school libraries.” But if you do an internet search you come across a plethora of articles mentioning the “banning” of books in public libraries. Moreover, the article itself is not a discussion of what kinds of texts belong in a high school library, which admittedly are generally small and pretty worthless overall. The article is part of the general “Culture War” going on between the Left and the Right – that is why it is receiving a mention at iSteve, a blog about the Culture Wars and such.

Way to reply to me with literally the most narrow perspective one can have and miss the wider point – that a general strategy by conservatives to counter-censor what they don’t like only ends in the further intellectual impoverishment of the society as a whole. Your reply makes me think you like censorship of things that don’t suit your tastes, but are too afraid to say so, so you couched your reply in “what’s best for the children” terms. Don’t be a Karen.

Let’s have more Mr. Deco and less Ms. De Pointe.

“Recall that these are high school students, and you’re teaching out of textbooks.”

Speak for yourself, Bazooka Joe. Primary and secondary sources only, or it’s the dunce cap. Sydney or the bush! Well… Does Jacques Barzun count as a textbook? I guess they’re acceptable in math and science.

“He thought he wasn’t smart enough for college,”

Well, he’s had one accurate thought in his life.

“even though he had been admitted to historically black Florida A&M University.”

Seals it. HBCUs are toy colleges and Potemkin universities, not real ones. He thought he wasn’t smart enough for college, and he was right.

Ibram X. Kendi Says a Backlash Has ‘crushed’ the Nation’s Racial Reckoning.

We’ll have a racial reckoning.

Good point. Could it be that the Racial Reckoning already happened and crushed Ibram X. Kendi’s dumb ideas?

So now he’s just asking for a do-over where no one else is allowed to comment: no Waxes, Negys, or Pestas.

Merrick Garland is eye-candy meant to obfuscate Obama girl Lisa Monaco’s machinations and schemes to disappear whitey.

“Excuse me, our esteemed host had cancer.”

Hopefully our host isn’t on the booster train: myocarditis, blood clots, cratered immune systems, and cancer recurrence.

This seems too obvious to even state, but libraries have a finite budget. They must be selective about the books they buy. If the majority of the parents in a district don’t support using this finite budget to make “anti-racist” race hustlers rich, then I don’t see a problem with it

Ibram was a bright but underachieving senior at his Northern Virginia high school. His GPA was below 3.0; his SAT scores were just above 1000.

I think they have that argument by the wrong end of the stick. No one on a college prep track in high school should finish with a 3.0 gpa if they only end up scoring ~1000 on the SAT. He was (and is) overachieving relative to his level of intelligence.

At best I guess you can say that Kendi has a decent work ethic, in the same way that even some of the most brain-dead of criminals are often able to exert considerable mental and physical energy finding ways to con people. Something about inventing and executing a good scam motivates them in a way that honest work never seems to.

“The school of communications is another place to look for scalps.”

You drop the word and I’ll return just before dawn with a burlap sack filled with shrunken verbalist heads. Then I’ll return to my storage unit where I’ll receive a collective hail fellow well met from my action figure collection before I begin cooking my oatmeal on the hotplate. I hate those verbalists so much.

Most of those immigrants are too busy making money.

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants.
The question is: What are we busy about? ”

Henry David Thoreau

“how dumb is it to think of a guy who should be maybe a waiter or a truck driver as an “intellectual”.”

Not what that is at all. It’s called, if you tend to engage in the crime of noticing, that the emperor has no clothes, your career is over, terminated, for the crime of “racism”. Pure and simple.

You notice the wrong thing, your career is over. To actually go to great lengths to not notice and survive in today’s world takes an abundance of street smarts. So when in doubt of a POC “intellectual”, be sure to treat them as anointed subjects, even holy objects of worship.

To wit:

My link to the proof of Jews, High IQ and ability to consume vast amounts of alcohol without vomiting appears to be broken so here is the evidence instead.

At last we have HBD-clad proof that Prince Harry is Irish:

“Harry was sitting on a wall outside a pub. In between throwing cider bottles he was vomiting behind the wall. He is one of the most revolting people I’ve ever met.”

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/royals/prince-harrys-revolting-behaviour-conveniently-left-out-of-his-book/news-story/cba27fd4e3b7cfdf483dc29f9ad81610

Clearly Harry has more trouble with handling alcohol than Italians and Jews therefore, ipso facto, he’s Irish. The wanton vomiting is the icing on the cake, or the spew on the pub floor, as they say down in Dingle.

So, HBD-clad proof that the 2nd heir to the English throne is Irish: not a balding git, full-on bluey (ginger), loves the Nazis, married above his HBD racial category into the ranks of mulatto, loves to drink, shags slappers in the fields at the back of pubs, vomits wherever, whenever and as much as he can, furthermore, is a revolting person.

If only he could be like Whoopi Goldberg and her Jewish kin with 5 thousand of years of viticulture in the sub-Sahara having “selected them for” in the beer vomit stakes.

Magnificent abstemious Jews like Drake, Sammy Davis, Jr., Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet just to name a few. Note, all Jews are born with rhythm. This is because rhythm was selected for in the sub-Sahara. While crushing the grapes under their feet all the Jews would kick up a song with a massive bass driving beat which would set those feet a stomping the pinot, syrah and grenache.

They’d sing “The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, shall be trampled under foot” as a sonorous booming bass chorus pulsated in grape crushing waves.

And that, my friends, is how the Jew was selected-for in not vomiting and not binge drinking alcohol.

This story has been brought to you by Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories for Little Children combined with the genius of HBD.

“The momentum was just crushed by a pretty well-organized force and movement of people who are seeking to conserve racism,” he says.

Well organized? LOL. Meaning a lot random normal people calling “bullshit”.

“Well organized” more describes the side that has the media, the universities, all major US corporations and the US government.

~~

Seriously, can we just separate?

The easiest way to handle this “oppression”. Separate the “oppressed” from their “oppressors”.

Everyone should be for that, right?

By the way, OT, but a pleasant little story from the local crime log:

Shaheem Stantavis Wright, 21, Ledavian Marquise Davis, 25, and Airrion William Davis, 18, were each charged Friday in 3rd District Court with theft, a second-degree felony. On Dec. 7, Wright and Airrion Davis entered Target, 7025 S. Park Centre Drive [Midvale, Salt Lake County, Utah] “and stole approximately $23,000 in Target gift cards and Apple products,” according to charging documents. “The stolen Apple products included an Apple watch, two iPads and baby clothes.”

Shaheem Stantavis? Ledavian Marquise? Airrion?

I’ve heard that Mormons could be pretty inventive with baby names, but those seem a little out there. It sounds like Airrion done messed up.

Ibram X Kendi does not write for sophisticates, he writes for hicklibs. The great Peachy Keenan wrote an excellent summary of the hicklib phenomenon for Claremont’s American Mind:

https://americanmind.org/salvo/hicklibs-on-parade/

The piece is mostly concerned with trans ideology, but it’s the same thing. Needless to say, Kendi doesn’t write for blacks, either. Blacks don’t buy or read books, and they already know everything anyway.

An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?

Dysgenics has had an adverse effect. But also there are many more opportunities for intelligent blacks than there were 60 years ago. Who would want to be an “intellectual leader” when well-paid corporate employment is theirs for the asking?

“The momentum was just crushed by a pretty well-organized force and movement of people who are seeking to conserve racism,” he says.”

A vast white-wing conspiracy… seeking to conserve leprechaunism.

Guess at his HBCU they didn’t teach him the difference between “conserve” and “preserve,” either.

Kendi…became an intellectual celebrity in the summer of 2020…

“intellectual celebrity”

LOL

No.

Never feel sorry for X. Jack Dorsey laid ten million on his scam outfit at BU. X says he is vegan. What a goofball.

Jack Dorsey Donates $10 Million to BU Center for Antiracist …
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2020/jack-dorsey-bu-center-for-antiracist-research-gift
WebTwitter and Square cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey has donated $10 million to Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, just six weeks after it was launched by …

Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square Cofounder, Donates $10 Million …
https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/press/jack-dorsey…
WebJack Dorsey, Twitter and Square Cofounder, Donates $10 Million to BU Center for Antiracist Research “Cyber civil rights expert Danielle Citron , a School of Law professor …

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Donates $10M to BU Center for …
https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/twitter-ceo…
WebJack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, donated $10 million to the center founded in June by Ibram X. Kendi, according to BU Today. “What is amazing is just the generosity …

The momentum was just crushed by a pretty well-organized force…

There is an organized force active on our side? Whodathunkit?

Lots of teachers in blue urban areas are fed up with behavioral issues in schools. In my area, what disruptors are allowed to get away with is unbelievable. Some of this stuff was unheard of when I was growing up. In my state, it’s reached a point where the replacement rate of teachers leaving the profession (for whatever reason) has dropped below replenishment. Historically odd. Training new teachers takes years. The good ones are hard to replace. The schools will break soon if district admins and unqualified school board members don’t get real and cut it out with the woke policy BS. Teaching was always tough, but people like Kendi and his allies in district admins have made it unbearable. It’s painful seeing and hearing yuppie parents cheer woke on. Do the ones with children in blue city public schools understand what’s going on?

There’s more too this of course, but standards in schools need to come back.

Ibram X. Kendi says a backlash has ‘crushed’ the nation’s racial reckoning.

Crime rates soar and remain high after BLM riots: suddenly defunding the police doesn’t sound so good anymore.

Former college students with useless (or no) degrees default on hundreds of billions in student loans: suddenly lending tuition money to poor students doesn’t sound like such a great idea anymore.

College administrators and corporate veeps for “diversity, inclusion, and equity” spend most of their time spewing venom at – and finding ways to discriminate against – white Americans, straight Americans, and Christian Americans: suddenly DIE executives don’t sound like such a great idea anymore.

The government increases welfare spending by hundreds of billions, millions of people drop out of the workforce, and inflation soars: suddenly welfare for the able-bodied doesn’t sound like such a great idea anymore.

Yes, Mr. Kendi, there is a backlash. That backlash is called reality.

I have eaten nettles many times. They are delicious and mineral dense with very deep roots that mine the soil.

Steve’s been Cauterized!

Christina Cauterucci = Tut– rich inaccuracies. Cue anarchist circuit!

The smartest people of all groups tend to get lost inside the patterns and themes of complex subjects, and find common ground with other intelligent people outside their group. The most insecure, and usually of middling intelligence within their group, tend to want to navel-gaze about their own identity. Those are the ones that head DIE programs and become administrators at all levels.

There must be high intelligence blacks and Hispanics who have found careers that challenge them and remain out of the spotlight. The midwits who have no interests outside championing their own heritage are the ones we always see and hear, though.

If it’s true a backlash Has ‘crushed’ the nation’s Racial Reckoning that’s one more thing for which to be thankful. But I have my doubts; I live in Minnesota, a land filled with death wishes of self-loathing Whites.

Does this “anti-racist” believe that “racism” is to blame for the cancer that almost killed him?

I don’t have very high standards when it comes to public intellectuals, I just think that public intellectuals shouldn’t be retarded. I keep that opinion to myself mostly.

Kendi’s big market is Ed School grads who also got below 1000 on the SAT. They buy it, like it, and then force their students to buy it. Ed majors average around 940.

A friend is an elementary school principal. She described a meeting with woke young white teachers. She (Mexican) and another principal (black guy) were struggling to explain to them that they need to teach their kids to read, write and do math, not be activists. None of the activism matters if they can’t do the other things, which obviously they weren’t doing well with.

“Systemic wokeness”—brilliant coinage! It co-opts the progressive word systemic and prefixes it to the previously co-opted progressive word woke, applying it to the phenomenon of institutional capture and entryism.

Mendacity and / or stupidity of the press alert:

The term [antiracist] means to actively fight against racism rather than passively claim to be non-racist.

Nope. Kendi’s entire schtick is defining the words “racist” and “antiracist” in terms of results. If your policy leads to a world where blacks come out behind on some desirable metric, it’s a “racist” policy by definition. An “antiracist” policy is one that leads to racial parity on the desirable metric. It’s got flat nothing to do with “actively fighting racism” or “claiming to be non-racist.”

Given that definition (like the famous one defining a horse’s tail as a leg), yeah, I bet lots of decent sane people would prefer to “conserve racism.” Especially if the alternative is that we all live in a crime-ridden Third World s***hole with black criminals in charge.

“Systemic wokeness”—brilliant coinage!

More like systolic wokeness– i.e., the beat goes on.

There is a lot of truth to this.

I used to teach some science classes in NYC. There was one class I taught several times for which half the class was always Spanish speaking and the other half English speaking.

I had them divide into two tables. At the beginning of each term one table would be Spanish and the other English. By the end of the term one table was the more competent students regardless of language; the other table the lesser students. Every time.

This is probably why the idea of open borders is so seductive to intellectuals. Many smart and capable people see themselves having more in common with other intellectuals in Europe and Asia than with non-intellectual Americans. Of course being replaced by H1-B cheap labor changes a lot of minds.

He thought he wasn’t smart enough for college, even though he had been admitted to historically black Florida A&M University.

This is the wrong conjunction

As far as I can tell, all leadership is getting dumber. Indeed, everyone is getting dumber. The cause for blacks is fairly obvious, but it is not exactly obscure for everyone else.

Yeah, it’s a mystery.

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/03/17/blocked-govt-report-finds-fluoride-lowers-kids-iq-case-heads-to-court/

Kudos to Kendi for surviving cancer and making a ton of cash on a twisted grift. Any ‘backlash’ is due to people having fatigue over the never ending whining from blacks like Kendi. No matter how much they are given and how much adulation is bestowed upon them by ignorant White liberals, it will never be enough to shut them up. They will continue to whine well into the next century. If they are so put out then please leave the US and go to the Caribbean or Africa and create your dream society. The better part of the population wants to hear no more from you.

IMHO there is a true gem of black scholarship which will survive the test of time:

“Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics” published in 1959

https://archive.org/details/casteclassracest00coxo/page/n4/mode/1up

Long time ago I bought a copy from street book vendor for $1 then read it more than once. Once I explained to my Hindu Brahmin friend the Brahmin Pecking Order, for example – the Brahmins which administer funeral rites are lower than regular hardworking Sudras. He listened to me with gaping mouth. Also this book delivers more than it’s title promises. There is a section “Estates”.

My explanation of Dr Oliver Cox Intellectual Miracle:

1. Dr Oliver Cox was a Mulatto
2. He was born in Trinidad and Tobago
3. He was not an Affirmative Action A$$hole
4. Standards of scholarship 70 years ago were much stricter.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell’s books full of platitudes & ZERO original thoughts, Ibram Kendi despicable propaganda, Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming”, Barak Obama’s book “Stories I tell to my daughters” and similar such pathetic BS – they are not entirely useless:

1. Easy college credits in “Afro-American Studies” for credentialed YT Starbucks baristas
2. Easy college degree for fat & dumb-as-pig-dribble black female Gov workers.
2. Special Ed aids in high school
3. Bottomless source of entertainment for Russians and Chinese who learn English

john McWhorter is smarter than kendi or coates but he can hardly become a galvanizing leader when his shtick is that the dumb black crazies are wrong but blah blah racism is still a problem and I’m a liberal

Training new teachers takes years.

You just need an undergraduate degree in any subject (preferably not “education”). My niece just slid right into the job immediately via Teach for America, an organization that cons smart white college graduates into a teaching job as an addition to their resume for their next job or for graduate school. Smart kids can pass the Praxis exams for their fields easily.

Shaheem Stantavis? Ledavian Marquise? Airrion?

Are blacks naming their children after Martians?

Speaking of Thomas Sowell’s books full of platitudes & ZERO original thoughts…

Nobody explains the white progressive mindset better than Sowell. Are you saying he cribbed this?

What the hell happened in Kenosha and Portland, or at Sam Brinton’s job interview, if not naked unrestraint?

Yuppies don’t have kids in blue city public schools, unless their particular school doesn’t have ghetto blacks in it.

The schools will break soon…

The “schools” have been broken for quite some time.

☮

The CNN article lists Kendi’s “accomplishments.”

But they can’t come out and say what he really accomplished. By popularizing the narrative that all whites are racist no matter what, he’s responsible for a lot of whites now avoiding any contact whatsoever with blacks.

If you can’t win, why play the game?

Kendi’s concept wasn’t new. Spike Lee was saying things like this a long time ago. But by mainstreaming this, Kendi made blacks radioactive to a lot of whites. When you see people moving to places with no blacks (as I regularly do these days), know that Kendi is at least partially responsible for this mass migration.

Nobody explains the white progressive mindset better than Sowell. Are you saying he cribbed this?

I’m saying he’s a cribba:

He’s my go-to guy for two things– pointing out, for one, that all over the world, differences between ethnic groups are the rule.

Sounds like Sowell cribbed from Muhammad Ali, who adroitly cribbed from (what was) common sense:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-monkeypox-chronicles-andrew-sullivan-challenges-me-to-quote-him-on-gay-marriage/#comment-5533405 (#130)

You write:

Nobody explains the white progressive mindset better than Sowell.

What the hell happened in Kenosha and Portland, or at Sam Brinton’s job interview

Criminals being criminals, losers being losers, and freak sympathizers hiring freaks. One doesn’t need Thomas Sowell’s boring blather to explain an antifa mugshot collection.

if not naked unrestraint?

What’s with the tortured kinky jargon? Are you going postmodern on us?

Reg, you’ve praised Sowell dozens of times on iSteve, yet I don’t believe you’ve deigned to actually quote any of Sowell’s amazing original thoughts. Why don’t you take the opportunity to impress us with a quote or two? Shouldn’t be too taxing…

“Ibram was a bright but underachieving senior at his Northern Virginia high school. His GPA was below 3.0; his SAT scores were just above 1000.”

An SAT score just above 1000 mean he very clearly was NOT “a bright” anything.

Took the words out of my mouth. From personal experience, “bright but underachieving” does a lot better on the SATs.

True. Ivy League liberals and woke Hollywood types do not read Kendi. Liberal white elementary school teachers or the kind of woman who runs a vegan cafe would seem to be his target market

Many smart and capable people see themselves having more in common with other intellectuals in Europe and Asia than with non-intellectual Americans.

High IQ people generally do have more in common with each other than with their co-nationals. Globalization has made this worse. The „best schools“ like Harvard, MIT, Oxford or even INSEAD have become aggregators of global financial, engineering and managerial talent rather than, as they one were, schools for creating national elites.

She (Mexican) and another principal (black guy) were struggling to explain to them that they need to teach their kids to read, write and do math, not be activists. None of the activism matters if they can’t do the other things, which obviously they weren’t doing well with.

The former Red Guard Youth in China were also used and abandoned. They didn’t make out well in the Chinese labor market after spending their youth as political shock troops. ( Hua and Bar, China in 10 words, 2011 ).

So, did Supernigbo get cured through YT medicine, or did he opt for a witch doctor from De MuddahLand?

YT medicine:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/ibram-x-kendi-explains-it-all/#comment-4194202
https://www.unz.com/isteve/ka-ching-ibram-x-kendi-signs-deal-with-netflix/#comment-4419038

Mario Partisan wrote to Art Deco:

Okay, so the referenced article explicitly says “some school libraries.” But if you do an internet search you come across a plethora of articles mentioning the “banning” of books in public libraries.

Public librarians tend to be pretty good about opposing book banning.

The fact remains that budgets and shelf space are limited.

More fundamentally, there is no right to have your own personal nonsense published: unless, that is, you happen to own a printing press and a publishing house.

Of course, nowadays, in the age of the Internet, anyone can self-publish on the Web as much as he can write.

But he can’t guarantee an audience.

That is what publishers and libraries really do: bring things to the public’s attention.

And neither Kendi nor anyone else has a right to the public’s attention.

And public libraries are paid for by taxpayers. Just maybe those taxpayers ought to have some say over how their money is spent?

Agree.

Kendi is another barker claiming there is an obvious solution if we just do as he says.

When the end game doesn’t unfold as expected, he tells us the people are not sufficiently worthy.

Why does everyone who gets cancer become an insufferable jerk?

My wife has cancer, asshole! I hope you get it and see what it feels like.

Since MLK assassination there has been a void of independent political leadership for blacks. For everyone else that ended too with JFK and RFK getting the bullet.

But blacks would always tend to produce an independent political structure so since then they have had their own set of political leaders who just LARP the civil rights movement in an endless circle of rhetoric and not even nothing to show for it, but that there is nothing to show for it, nothing can never be shown for it because the civil rights movement succeeded.

Afterwards as MLK logically went towards, black problems are just general class problems. But because that solidarity and recognition is based on race, the later system leaders could pretend they were representing black political interests by just inveighing against ‘racism’ when most of the problems were pretty race-neutral class ones. Or at least the possible solutions were.

It’s fascinating to me how this gets so little press, at the moment the independent black political leadership in America began to focus on class, MLK got dead and the successors to him got ‘woke’.

So instead we get race riots in America every generation that are more about social marginalisation than ‘racism’. There never was a ‘crushing’ of the 2020 protests, they never had any tangible objective because they missed any possible solutions. They just toppled a lot of statues because there is no white racial ethnocentric force in America weighing down on blacks. Was there even a backlash though? Against those protests themselves? It seems more like excessive petty wokeness does better at generation backlash than black uprisings.

There will soon be a backlash as the public realizes that another giant bailout is going to the banking industry. The balance sheet of the Fed increased by 300 billion dollars last week. It has started printing up money to buy government securities from banks that the banks previously unwisely bought as investments. It has not announced it is doing this. It is doing it silently. Quantitative easing has once again resumed. Probably over half the banks in the country are insolvent so we are talking about trillions of dollars of future money printing to stop a bank industry collapse.

We are heading for raging inflation, and nothing can stop it because stopping it would lead to a huge economic crisis. This inflation is actually a type of tax, with the tax falling on the productive segments of society to bail out politically connected parasites. It will eventually leave this country impoverished. There will be a contraction in the size of government, and anything supported with government funds such as the federally guaranteed student loan program. Since higher education is a major promulgator of woke leftism, this will be a good thing.

…seeking to conserve racism

Yeah, I like the suggestion that it’s a quantity that will run out unless we carefully ration it’s use. LOL.

Note also the interplay here of narcissism, insecurity, and defeatism: Blacks should have Wakanda as a baseline existence, but YT has installed Racism, and YT is so powerful that we can’t defeat Racism.

“Systemic wokeness”—brilliant coinage!

More like systolic wokeness– i.e., the beat goes on.

Plausible metaphorology/ insightful.

An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?

I mean, has the white intellectual leadership in America been setting the world on fire? I think also there is something to the idea, similar to New Zealand or for Native Americans in the US and Canada, that when a small minority enters an environment (Higher education, higher classes) where they’re an even smaller minority, they tend to get married and have mixed children who are even mroe likely to marry a non-black spouse and thus the intellectual leadership tends to melt away over time.

It could also be worth noting that after the success of the civil rights movement, there wasn’t much in it for middle and upper middle class blacks in ‘black politics’ which focused on the problems of deprived black urban ghettos. The intellectual leaderships most likely not having grown up in or whose ancestors might never have lived in.

The conflation of race and class politics (And the handy sleight of hand it allows the American media and elite to swap them out when it suits their interests) means that there is little in explicitly ‘black’ politics for them personally, they rarely if ever face racism and have nothing in common with the urban black poor and even less with the Southern rural black poor.

The fallout of the social individualism revolution (1968 and all that) and the economic individualism revolution (Milton Friedman, Reagan, Thatcher and all that neoliberalism) has likely crushed any pipeline to intellectualism from black urban ghettos so few champions can even emerge but even if they did, what is on offer to them? Neoliberalism reigns, so no practical solutions to the problems of worsening economic fortunes is possible and even less so for social problems. That would quickly make any thinking person sit that role out.

Your ‘wider point’ is invalid for reasons I made clear.

And, no, books are not being banned from public libraries. People complain about how librarians spend limited budgets, especially when it means licentious material is placed in the children’s section.

https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/images/2006-2020-map.gif?_=66070

I don’t think pill popping fat white couch potatoes in the central Gulf states (and several adjacent states) are anything to write home about.

Hmmm. I suppose my question to the principal would be how it was that they hired so many problem people for teaching positions.

I am always bemused by the reports of conservative banning of books in libraries. In my experience, the libraries seem — as if guided by an unseen hand — to choose books like Kendi’s and reject anything that smacks of dissidence. For example, through my Maine public library account I have access to an ebook library called Cloud Library. There you can find Kendi and DiAngelo and other antiracist prophets but not a word by, say, Glenn Loury or Thomas Sowell or Candace Owens. I live in France, and the public libraries here with which I am familiar tend to avoid anything by, say, Eric Zemmour. I can’t say I approve of censorship in any way, but it’s quite ignorant to take the lefties’ complaints at face value.

Kendi’s books were banned by some school libraries

Choosing not to buy something is not the same as “banning” it.

Both Kendi and diAngelo do a brisk business in lecture fees. Someone in higher education is approving the expenditures. I’m wagering if you took a closer look, department chairs are contributing to the fees paid out of their slush funds. Even if the initiative is coming from some smarmy microbe in the student affairs office, the faculty own these situations.

Very true. The system selects for black bullshitters. It also selects for blacks of bad character; those with enough self respect to not wish to be used as tokens, might be seeking other employment — like maybe in engineering (but actually doing engineering, not sliding into a role as the department’s DEI czar).

He’s a product of NOVA, I wonder if he had family in the military at any point?

…..after his books became a go-to source for millions of Americans trying to make sense of the murder of George Floyd.

George Floyd was not murdered.

Why does everyone who gets cancer become an insufferable jerk? They all feel entitled to impose obligations on the rest of society from that day forward.

They are “saints among us, don’t you know.” The fact that they survived cancer makes them “super human.” And adds an air of “mystique” to their “great works.” It’s the health equivalent of woke Pokémon points.

“Excuse me, our esteemed host had cancer.”

That doesn’t add any merit to Kendi’s works. Dumb people of all ethnicities survive cancer all the time!

I have a bit of an on-topic tangent, if that makes any sense. Please bear with me.

I find it impossible to work up any kind of interest in Ibram X. Kendi, not even to criticize him. In fact, I would not be aware of this person at all if I hadn’t seen his name mentioned in alternative media like this place. I’ve never read a single line he’s written, and I’m never going to. I just don’t care.

On the other hand, I get the impression that Steve and at least some of his regular commenters really do care about him. Part of this is just a tradesman’s quarrel. They care about who gets branded as a public intellectual, and about the concomitant rewards of fame and money, because they would like to see Steve so branded himself. But another part seems to be that they actually have an inner need to engage with contemporary intellectual trends as such. Thus, they cannot simply ignore Kendi. They are going to read him, or whoever else occupies that space, regardless of whether they agree with him or not, because they cannot do otherwise.

It’s the second part that interests me. The urge to read contemporary writers is normal and marks one as a normal human being. To be up to date with the marketplace scuttlebutt is the natural habitat of the normie. However, it also marks one as very much “a man of his times,” an object of history destined to be caught up in the dominant trends and to drift with them wherever they may go. This is why you hear such people in the alt-media constantly talk about being “red-pilled.” They were at one point following along with mainstream narrative, and they never broke out of that except to follow an alternative narrative. The essential point about them is not which pill they took, but the fact that they took a pill at all. They are followers; they must have something to follow.

There is nothing wrong with being a follower, but we do have to recognize that it is not out of this mass that any new and significant vision arises. The only difference between the red and blue pills is the color. A lot of this stuff would be better off ignored, as I’m sure posterity will ignore it. The more it is ignored now, the more it will go away.

Hmmm ever notice that WEB duBois looked ohh I don’t know 99.99999% WHITE? Same with Julian Bond, Ben Jealice, almost all black “intellectuals”. Seems like with the term black intellectual one can make a strong case for one or both of the words getting air quotes.

As usual, Kendi is wrong. There was neither a backlash nor was woke racism crushed. Or, maybe, there is abounding good news and I am just reading the wrong sites.

Kendi is obviously commenting on his own diminished lack of relevance – it’s hard to say that the racial justice grift isn’t still going extremely well. There are god knows how many ‘director of diversity’ or equivalent jobs littering every industry these days.

No, just the opposite. It’s been going on for a while, but now critical race theory is being baked into the structure of everything.

Universities know that the supreme court may rule soon on the legality of use of race to make admissions decisions. Both prestigious undergrad institutions and med schools have been electively declaring that they will no longer submit GPA and test scores to US News and World Report and other groups that rank colleges. This means that there is no longer a penalty to an elite college for admitting applicants with less-than-elite GPAs and MCAT scores, or SATs.

But if GPA and MCAT becomes less important, what is becoming more important?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/top-med-schools-weed-out-applicants-who-dont-support-dei-new-report-says/

Your DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) score.

Now, these initiatives are only starting to be put into place in the Ivy-ish school I work for, but they have already been adopted in many ways going all the way up and down the chain– and making things explicit is only a formality. I kid you not, in my hard sciences department, one recent (white male) PhD graduate had an entire chapter in his dissertation devoted to black hair.

I suspect if you unpacked it, you’d discover that most black faculty belong at a different sort of institution than the one that hired them …..

Yes…..an institution with bars on the doors, a 16 ft perimeter wall, and elevated observation towers to prevent the “faculty” from leaving until society deemed it appropriate.

Definitely some truth to this.

I remember back when Tony Gwynn died of cancer, and the entire sports media in Chicago got out their soap boxes and started howling about the need to ban chewing tobacco from MLB. It was one of many reality checks I began experiencing about sportsball in general: The lecherous people who’s entire existence depended upon the goings on of a separate but similarly gratuitous entertainment industry felt entitled to basically demand that the hand that feeds them conform to their own worldview.

Never mind the fact that sports writers, at least until the latest generation of them (because they are basement dwelling sports spergs), are some of the most degenerate humans one can observe: Heavy smokers, drinkers, and gamblers; loud, obnoxious, pushy, and entitled, not to mention just as philandering as the sports stars they would party with at the clubs, only to later castigate the latter in tomorrow’s column.

Are blacks naming their children after Martians?

My working theory is that these names are selected in the delivery room when the new mother is handed a “Boggle” cube and told to shake away.

And he keeps tyranically imposing his love of baseball on us. How dare he!

Can it be said that not buying a book or preferring other titles, is not the same as banning a book?

-Nobody explains the white progressive mindset better than Sowell. Are you saying he cribbed this?-
-What the hell happened in Kenosha and Portland-

The best explanation of Mad Modern Leftism was provided by Polish guy. And I read it in NYT 😂
The print was VERY small but in my case it served as encouragement.

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/unabom-manifesto-1.html?action=click&contentCollection=meter-links-click&contentId=&mediaId=&module=meter-Links&pgtype=Blogs&priority=true&referrer=&version=meter+at+null

Well said, Hank.

An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?

Because “black intellectual leadership” has always been created by white people and jewish people. They are just the blacks that whites and jews hired to work for them or promoted their books. The intellectual leadership that blacks select for themselves are people Farrakhan and Tariq Nasheed. Troof.

I worked for a (Rocky Mountain-domicile) company (nameless to protect the innocent) that, as of the ’80s when I worked there, hired summer interns (paid in those days) from the Florida A&M engineering program, as an affirmative action recruiting effort. I had never heard of Florida A&M before this encounter.

Never in my 5-year tenure did a summer intern become a new hire. I can’t offer any insight as to why–I wasn’t privy. But it was a very white company in a very white state where the largest minority group were Mexican/Hispanic.

Thomas Sowell is Establishment Pet for a reason.

Real Heroes who see and speak the Truth are neither praised nor damned. They are memory-holed, incarcerated and never heard from again.

On the other hand – while Ted Kaczynski’s Harvard thesis on complex functions is beyond my grasp, his “Industrial Society and it’s Future” (a vivisection of Modern Leftism) can be read and understood by anyone.

The Flynn Effect is and always was nonsense, and Flynn stated that it was only as measured by the Raven Matrices, where learning to read them without getting a headache was difficult…

OT (not really)

Well, the incredibly overrated black supergenius Donald Glover’s major opus Swarm has arrived at Amazon Prime, and boy does it suck–terrible reviews in all the major publications (with a few interesting exceptions). Glover also used his clout to place Amerika’s next Hemingway on staff, the Harvard-educated, high-IQ Malia Obama.

Here’s The Guardian on Swarm:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/mar/17/swarm-review-donald-glovers-beyonce-inspired-serial-killer-satire-is-cold-and-dull

There was a time when Variety could be relied upon for giving fair, incisive reviews of various content. But now that it’s gone woke, what do they do when presented with a piece of turd created by a black genius? Give it to a black reviewer, of course:

https://variety.com/2023/tv/reviews/swarm-review-dominique-fishback-beyonce-inspired-thriller-1235555140/

Those Negroes sure know how to fly first class.

White intellectual leadership has also devolved.

Here is some of what retired MIT professor Ted Postal had to say about our current crop of leaders in an interview presented in the Scheerpost titled “Nuclear War with Russia? ‘A Wall of Fire that Encompasses Everything Around Us at the Temperature of the Center of the Sun’:”

I have taught at Stanford; I have taught at MIT; I have taught at Princeton, OK. And at Harvard. So I know what a lot of these people are, because they are very privileged—this is of course a generalization; there are certainly some extremely intelligent and thoughtful people among these. But a great bulk of these people are just completely in love with themselves; they are convinced that they know a lot more than they do; they will not listen, they’re not interested in learning—I mean, you try to present facts to them, they sort of walk away from you laughing.

And they are not experts. And it’s not a problem—it’s no problem at all that they are not experts. The problem is that they’re not interested in learning.

So we’re in a dangerous situation. We have a lot of—I’m sorry, because I’m so disturbed by this—we have a bunch of punks, you know, 30-year-old punks who come from privileged backgrounds, claiming they’re experts in policy when they actually do not have the basic knowledge. And they’re advising presidents. And this is not a good professional system. we need to do something about it.

No blacklash for Ibram is good for Ibram’s bottom line.

Steve asks:

“An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?”

A good question. The obvious short answer is that American public discourse is structured in such a way that nobody is able to honestly state the premise in public with any sort of thoroughness or seriousness, so it can never be studied or answered in public, either thoroughly or seriously, or even at all. It’s not even an “only Nixon can go to China” thing: in this case, there is no Nixon and there is no China.

If black intellectuals were to pose the questions relevant to black society with anything like genuine intellectual honesty and rigor, the answers they would get would not be in the immediate material interests of blacks, but rather soundly against them, so they just won’t do it.

The long answer is that actually it is a bad question. No fault on the part of Steve: but the truth is, there is no black intellectual leadership because there are no black intellectuals; or rather, there is no black intellectual tradition which is capable of producing black intellectuals some of whom might (theoretically, not realistically) constitute something like a “leadership”.

There are of course a smattering of real intellectuals who are “black”, though they are rare as hen’s teeth. But there are no “black intellectuals” because there is no such thing as black “intellectualism” — only shallow polemics, screeching lists of silly demands, and activism with a typewriter.

And it’s not the fault of blacks. The problem goes like this: a) American blacks are, historically speaking, very very new to the game of an intellectual tradition, due to their circumstances they had very little to draw upon which was genuinely their own, so it’s unsurprising that they don’t have one [1]; b) in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the few blacks capable of genuine intellectualism (guys like Douglass, duBois, etc) couldn’t afford to spend their energies being intellectuals, because they were too busy arguing in favor of the obvious: we shouldn’t be slaves, we’re human just like you, we are entitled to equal rights, and so forth. Imagine if Aristotle had had to spend his entire career trying to convince others that the moon was not rectangular. History wasted the talents and abilities of such rare black men. In philosophical terms, black philosophy, inasmuch as it even exists, is not really philosophy: like pretty much all philosophical schools worldwide outside the Greek tradition, it is actually just a wisdom literature, not a philosophy, and the wisdom contained in it consists almost entirely of, “Hey, stop hitting me with a stick!”

The third and c) part of all this is, the overwhelming influence of the black church on black thought and rhetorical strategy. For better or worse, the black church is polemical and charismatic and argues by assertion and by just plain hollering, not by rational disputation. This does not make it theologically unsound: as any good Christian knows, God delights in confounding the proud and the learned, and setting wisdom in the mouths of children and the humble. But all the same, the black church does not have deep and solid foundations in a magisterium, like Catholics and Jews and Muslims do; it has no lengthy intellectual tradition, its method of argumentation consists almost entirely of point-and-shriek tactics. There’s nothing for an intellectual to respect here, let alone cultivate them.

Historically the very first black demands were, We shouldn’t be slaves. Then they were freed, but they didn’t receive equal treatment. So then they fought for and finally got equal treatment, but the ugly truth came out: even with freedom and equal treatment, they were substantively incapable of achieving equal outcomes. Rather than shruggingly accepting this and getting on with life as best they could, they created an imaginary Ptolemaic phony analysis that rivals phlogiston and leech therapy in terms of its sheer silliness. And the political nature of the day is such that, they can keep blasting this patent horsesh!t all day long, confident in the knowledge that they can’t and won’t be just laughed out of town as they so roundly deserve.

And that’s why fire engines are red.

[1] – consider the counter-example of the Irish, who were savagely oppressed, enslaved, and genocided for over twice as long a time period as African-Americans. Twice they rose up and cast down their oppressors, first under King Brian Boru, and then a thousand years later under Michael Collins, struggling in arms against them in every generation in between. In the interim, though, they maintained, through underground “hedge schools” and by other means, a plurality of literacy in two languages (English and Latin) and maintained their own native tongue at the same time.

This and the continuity of the Catholic Church gave them an ongoing serious intellectual and artistic tradition which gathered force over time. MLK famously got his thought and his tactics from Gandhi, who not-so-famously swiped them more or less from Daniel O’Connell. To get a whiff of the Irish/Black differential here, read a short story by Langston Hughes, fruit of the Harlem Renaissance, in his collection “The Souls of White Folk.” Now read a short story by Frank O’Connor (please skip the over-used “Guests of the Nation.”) The contrast will make you fall out of your rocking chair.

like maybe in engineering (but actually doing engineering, not sliding into a role

We’ve gone from slide rules to slide roles!

From Calvin, through Kant, to Marx, the idea that “hard work” was some kind of recommendation rather than a flaw, has replaced the traditional (i,e., Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc.) notion of leisure, gentlemanly pursuit of knowledge, “liberal” (i.e. free, not servile) arts, etc. Communist societies boasted of their “brainworkers” as well as lauding servile workers making heroic efforts (Stankovitism). ALL MUST WORK! Down with the bourgeois parasites!

See Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, preferably in the recent translation intro’d by Roger Scruton.

“An SAT score just above 1000 mean he [Ibram] very clearly was NOT ‘a bright’ anything.”

Not unless you factor race into it. Then yeah, he was definitely a bright black kid.

Yeah. Look at the banks.

My sister died of breast cancer at age 51 on January 6, 2001. She fought for years, with the best help from UCLA. I flew there from Connecticut to California, on Christmas Day, to hold her hand when she died. She was the best of us, the kindest, most considerate member of my whole family.

Even at the end, she was more concerned about my happiness than hers. I remember her last visit to the doctor, me wheeling her out in the chair and holding her purse for her. She said, to the best of my memory, “Oh, Buzz, I’m sorry you have to hold my bag. You’re so manly, I know you must be embarrassed.” She really said that! A real sweetheart and the best big sister any boy could ever have..

Cheers to Steve for beating this thing. Truly, from the heart.

The fact remains that budgets and shelf space are limited.

Simple solution – ban all books! Lots of shelf space will be left. People don’t read books anyway.

Seriously, these replies about limited budgets and shelf space are just ham fisted attempts to justify censorship. My initial suggestion was that if libraries are going to have books on “Race” they have a few from a variety of perspectives. You reply suggests there isn’t a budget or space for a couple books on Race, only one book – and it shouldn’t be Kendi’s. Fine, but then there won’t be any books on the topic, because if you let the taxpayers decide, what are the odds that a group of libtards wouldn’t protest Shapiro or Duke?

Now extend this to every topic. There isn’t shelf space/budget for a small variety of books on Economics! We only have the budget for one book – and I can’t stand Keynes. It’s Freidman or nothing! Wait, the liberals refuse Friedman? Okay, let’s compromise – no Econ books! Agreed! After all, neither Keynes nor Friedman are entitled to public attention.

Look, I can understand parents protesting a bunch of kiddie porn books. That is clearly part of a weird and sick agenda. But in general, you do not want taxpayers or the public at large deciding what books belong in libraries. The average person on the street is a dimwitted peasant. If you decide literature by voting the result will be shelves filled with some combo of The View, Jerry Springer and the WWF.

It’s kind of funny – the traditional argument for censorship of books by Amazon is that they are a private company that can do what it wants. Now the argument for censorship by libraries is that they are funded by the taxpayer and things that taxpayers don’t like can be censored. You see how every argument ends up supporting censorship?

Everything is going according to plan…

Seriously, these replies about limited budgets and shelf space are just ham fisted attempts to justify censorship.
==
Actually, they’re the remarks of people who understand scarcity and cost, among them people who have actually worked in libraries and have seen how the book selection sausage is made.

Why does everyone who lives online become an insufferable jerk?

The consensus is that older sportswriters get sick of writing about sports, don’t really enjoy watching them anymore and try to transition into political topics. Not that they can openly talk about gambling now, that has kept some of them interested on sports. You are right about them being degenerates.

Actually, they’re the remarks of people who understand scarcity and cost

So your point of view is that there are only resources for one book in a genre, and because we can’t agree on what that one book should be, there should be no books. Good job.

Tono-Bungay wrote:

For example, through my Maine public library account I have access to an ebook library called Cloud Library. There you can find Kendi and DiAngelo and other antiracist prophets but not a word by, say, Glenn Loury or Thomas Sowell or Candace Owens.

You “Agreed” to this comment. What I was suggesting was that a compromise between the Left and the Right would be something like dropping DiAngelo and replacing her with Owens, thus keeping the number of books (and budget, shelf space, and ebook hard drive space) constant, but increasing perspectives.

What is so disagreeable about such a compromise?

As far as I can tell, all leadership is getting dumber. Indeed, everyone is getting dumber. The cause for blacks is fairly obvious, but it is not exactly obscure for everyone else.

It’s important to note that AM’s chart here from the GSS is for completed fertility for all cohorts.

I.e. it includes a lot elderly women still alive who had children–3+ TFR–during the baby boom. Plus all the Boomer gals still alive and almost all GenX. I.e. it is a lagging indicator.

Actual recent white fertility–i.e. the Millennials–has been running in the 1.6-1.65ish ballpark. Some of that might be capturing the effect of a continuing shift to later marriage/fertility–we’ll see. But it certainly is not more than 1.7ish. And continues to be dysgenic, though a recovery of the much stronger dysgenic trend that existed back around the turn of the century.

The pandemic has made TFR estimates a bit jumpy the last few years–decline, then some catchup recovery–so would not swear any figure really captures what’s going on but:
white — 1.65
black — 1.75
Hispanic — 1.9
Asian — 1.55
something in that ballpark is current +/- a tenth a point.

All somewhat dysgenic, but blacks wildly dysgenic, for all the obvious reasons of smarter/more responsible black women having problems locking down a comparably worthwhile man and starting a family.

Mr. Kendi (nee Henry Rogers) didn’t even bother to write a new book on some other subject.

Just cut and pasted a few new chapters supposedly aimed at younger people. But most young blacks seldom read books. Why would “being an antiracist” appeal to them? Not hating on Asians and Jews?

“How to Make That 3-Point Shot Every Time” would actually appeal to some of them.

A few months back at a Half Price Books I noticed a shelf full of his original book.

Comrades forcing kids to read this dreck (purchased by Woke teachers/librarians) but being off loaded ASAP.

How about “How to Be an Anti-Idiot”?

Ignore anything said by Mr. Rogers (a/k/a Kendi the Con Man).

I work with a guy who thinks that because his wife is Mexican, 20 million illegals are justified coming into the US.

I’ve had cancer twice. It sucks, but it’s not anyone else’s problem and they aren’t obligated to accommodate you and it Doesn’t make you a health expert, like on kovid, for example.

The average person on the street is a dimwitted peasant. If you decide literature by voting the result will be shelves filled with some combo of The View, Jerry Springer and the WWF.

My sister was head of a school library for thirty years. She said she tried to buy literary classics but buying them doesn’t mean anyone is going to read them. They’ll often just end up sitting on the shelves collecting dust. According to her, most of the kids would be wanting to read whatever the current fad book was in their age group.

I enjoy the literary classics, but I’ve never felt the general public should subsidize my reading habits. I also don’t feel I should be forced to pay for reading material for others. The best solution is to end government funding of schools and school libraries and also funding of public libraries. All government run libraries end up having book collections that reflect the wishes of those in power. It’s naive to believe otherwise. If you value liberty and the right to pursue individual happiness, then individuals should be able to pay for what they want to read and not pay for what they don’t want to read.

OK, let’s get this “book banning” stuff straight here. We’re talking about school libraries, most especially concerning, those in elementary and middle schools. The little ones have not much idea about the world yet, and they don’t have any idea about what kind of agenda-driven rubbish they might be borrowing on Library Day. Their parents don’t want them to have access to just anything, when there are 100’s of thousands of traditional books that are more than enough for school libraries. (At some point, as PD et al. have written, someone has to choose.)

The parents have every right to direct, with prejudice, the school boards not to include the BLT-G stuff or anything else that’s not appropriate. Better yet, those parents should yank their kids out of the Government schools.

How is that censorship? The difference between this and your public library*, is that the parents don’t have direct control over what books the teachers and librarian will direct their kids to. (In fact, though the 5th graders here were WAY beyond needing to be read to, the teacher found it necessary to have them all read along and listen to a book in which the protagonist is an illegal alien. Yes, true, but NOT COOL, story, bro.)

Finally, this “book banning” stuff reminds me of the 75-year BS history still taught (as of last week in elementary school even) about Joe McCarthy and his attempted “book burning”**. Peak Stupidity, i.e, I et. al., wrote about this episode from my reading of the M. Stanton Evans book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies. The post is Same Stuff, Different Decade. Excerpt of the key part:

Funny subcommittee meeting aside, the point here is that the same ctrl-left behavior that we see today was happening 70 years ago. Also, the ctrl-left of the time used some of the same tactics as they do today. History shows that Joe McCarthy, as per the title of the chapter in Mr. Evans’ book was a book burner. Then again, history is full of shit. McCarthy never called for any books to be banned from being written, sold, or read anywhere, much less burned. He just did not approve of the US taxpayers being charged for books on Communism being supplied to USIS overseas libraries built to counter the Communist narrative.

In other words, these were overseas reading rooms built to display anti-Communist material. Yet, a black poet named Langston Hughes was asked at the hearing what he thought about 200 of various titles of his pro-Communism books being displayed in those locations. He didn’t agree with their being there either.

.

* At the public library, I have a hell of a time finding the neat politically conservative, often history books that the great commenters here will point out often. Yes, they have shelves at the front full of the woke and minority-of-the-month club crap. I might be able to get one that I WANT ordered, but I admit I haven’t tried. The main thing is, I decide not to pick out that shit in the front for myself.

** “Book burning” was the term used by Michael Stipe of REM in their song “Exhuming McCarthy” from the 1990s. He was a tool, but that never detracted from the great sound of that band because most lyrics were un-understandable anyway!

Ben Shapiro? Are you fucking kidding me? Argue for William Pierce and I might take you seriously.

Nowhere are these books being burned, they’re not being put in kids libraries, because they’re pure anti-white propaganda.

Kids can’t make “informed judgment” they’re infinitely influenceable which is why we have age of consent laws.

“There is an organized force active on our side? Whodathunkit?”

Reg, Reg, Reg.

I never stated what you attributed. Perhaps you were quoting someone else.

We all get something that eventually kills us. But you seem to rather make the point. It’s a weird sense of entitlement with cancer that somehow the person is allowed to impose their suffering on the rest of the world.

People with heart problems don’t do that.

“…But in general, you do not want taxpayers or the public at large deciding what books belong in libraries. ..”

Mostly libraries should buy the books their patrons want to read.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the previous Celebrated Black Public Intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, seems to have been hustled aside in favor of Ibram X. Kendi.

Whatever else one may think of him, Coates is a pretty bright guy. The problem with bright guys is that they’re always in danger of going off the reservation; a dullard like Kendi is much easier to herd back into line. I remember there was some dust-up awhile back where Kendi was going off-script about transgender stuff, but that all suddenly went away, I imagine after somebody pulled Kendi aside and set him straight.

It’s harder to imagine that happening with a somewhat spergy nerd like Coates. If he suddenly started developing unapproved ideas, he strikes me as the kind of guy who would not be easily talked out of it and would just take that as a sign to persist even more stubbornly.

He is not intelligent enough for any other college course of study other than racial grevience. 108 iq though is about 2 SD above the average black.

It’s just just a matter of dysgenics: as you yourself have pointed out, Kendi is obviously dumber than Ta-Nehisi Coates………………….

Are they different? I thought they were the same person. Is there a difference between them?

What can I say, I can’t tell these “public intellectuals” apart anymore.

My suggestion is that going forward you respond to what I say if you’re going to respond, and not attribute to me the flotsam and jetsam swirling around in your head.

My suggestion to the acquisitions librarian at that particular institution is that whether she’s operating through catalogues or approval vendors or Choice that she match her selections to the library’s clientele. (She’ll tell me she does that). I’ll also suggest that she make selections which can be useful for syntopical reading. I’ll suggest further that she set aside part of the budget for customer requests. I’ll suggest in addition what she should look for in assessing the quality of work produced by academicians for general audiences. You might purchase Kendi or diAngelo in response to a customer request. They would not properly be your preferred selection if you were building a collection on these matters. Thos. Sowell, would, Edward Banfield would, Jennifer Hochschild would, Mark Kleiman would. One thing you want in such literature is a proper architecture of footnotes and bibliography.

But you seem to rather make the point.

I think you rather missed the point, which was: someone who says “Why does everyone who gets cancer become an insufferable jerk?” (an extremely nasty generalization) is being one. It’s called projection.

fabulous post–informative and well argued

Though it is many years and much later, my sincere condolences to you on your loss. I am sure that, even without my realizing it before today, the world is a far poorer place without her, and a far richer one in the Place where she now abides.

“An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?”

We know someone is smart when they figure out something that is true. No truth, no smarts.
Black intellectuals, and everyone else at the university, are barred from figuring out the truth about race. Einstein spouting Woke race dogma to keep his job would sound just as stupid as Kendi what’s his name, test scores and IQ not-withstanding.

Mario Partisan wrote to me:

But in general, you do not want taxpayers or the public at large deciding what books belong in libraries.

I don’t? What makes you think I don’t?

They are paying for it. Why shouldn’t I want them to have the final say?

You seem to think that public libraries are, like, paid for by God, and no mere mortals should have a say over what is in them.

They are paid for by taxpayers.

Someone has to decide which books are so worthless that they do not belong in the library.

Who better than the people who are paying for it?

I. “No, just the opposite. It’s been going on for a while, but now critical race theory is being baked into the structure of everything.”

It’s been going on for generations.

Affirmative action began, as Steven Farron argued in The Affirmative Action Hoax, during the 1950s.

For but one infamous example, beginning in 1951, an intellectual mediocrity and cheat with a “C” average from segregated Morehouse College, who was unqualified and unfit for the life of the mind, was accepted by White grad schools that expected White applicants to have “A” averages. His obvious plagiaries were ignored.

With the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, affirmative action was radically expanded. American higher ed was flooded with unfit black “students,” “scholars,” and “staffers.”

In the early 1970s, black supremacist “students” (aa admits) demanded and got departments of black studies, which trafficked in fraudulent scholarship, and whose faculty gave racist “students” As for blackness.

feminazis imitated the black supremacists, made their own demands, and got their own departments. (Later came militant homosexualists, and then sexual psychopaths.)

Politicized grading and grade discrimination were institutionalized.

Conservatives believe in censorship

‘controversial’ books will just disappear from the shelves, or be vandalized. If the students themselves don’t value intellectual diversity then providing it will be pointless.

1. Dr Oliver Cox was a Mulatto
2. He was born in Trinidad and Tobago

3. He worked hard in school
4. And did not act the fool
5. Cause back then admissions weren’t by lotto.

But in general, you do not want taxpayers or the public at large deciding what books belong in libraries.

Why not? Somebody is going to decide what books belong in libraries. Right now, it’s librarians, many or most of whom appear to be woke lefties with poor taste and who are vaporing about books being “banned” (they aren’t).

If you read my post a little more closely, you would have noticed that I argued for David Duke, the former Congressman from Louisiana. His “My Awakening” is an excellent book in my opinion. I included Ben Shapiro in order to tailor my post in a way that might appeal to the iSteve commentariat – which is a bit more normie than the rest of UR.

It obviously didn’t work. Like most so-called liberals, they are really into censorship. They couch their arguments in all sorts of BS about how there isn’t enough shelf space for more than one ebook on a topic or how taxpayers shouldn’t have to see any book that they think they might disagree with (library by mob rule).

As I expected, the little debate we have had here at iSteve has revealed that “conservatives” would rather get Kendi off the shelf than expose people to their own point of view. Frankly, it’s a bit bewildering. The idea behind my original point was that putting crap like Kendi next to higher quality material is the best way to argue against crap like Kendi, just as anyone certain of their point of view should be eager to publicly debate the other side, because the juxtaposition of a strong case next to a weak one is more convincing than the strong case by itself.

I would wager that if the shoe had been on the other foot, and the article had referenced the censoring of a conservative, and I had said the compromise should be to leave the conservative but add a liberal for balance, these same people arguing against me would have agreed with me.

I’ve noticed that in Tennessee the public libraries quickly obtain major liberal books.

II. All sorts of fake scholarship ensued. A conspiracy of powerful, White “males” was blamed for causing “more work for mother.” A desire for law and order was condemned as “blaming the victim.” Same-sex marriage, we were told, had been institutionalized by the Medieval, Catholic Church. Black crime wasn’t to blame for prisons full of blacks, “racial profiling” and “mass incarceration” were.

In Howard Pollock’s 1999 Aaron Copland biography, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, Pollock wasted an entire chapter respectfully discussing “queer theory,” by the likes of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

https://nicholasstixuncensored.blogspot.com/2018/04/american-anthems-music-of-aaron-copland.html

“How the West Was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. By Kathryn Kalinak. Berkley [sic] and Los Angles [sic]: University of California Press. 2007.”

Kalinak acted as if it were a given that John Ford, actually a racial liberal, had been a White supremacist.

We now hear about violence, or the threat thereof, at places like stanford law, but I was writing about violence at the community college level, during the 1990s.

I got many articles published, mostly under the pseudonym “Robert Berman,” but no one would publish my higher ed book.

In 2000, a literary agent told me my book proposal contained “a little too much reality.”

III. The republican principle for writing on anything is the importance of being ignorant.

Well-to-do, well-connected neocons, by contrast, had no problem getting reams published on a “thing” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl.” Worthless books, too.

For over 30 years, republicans and self-styled “conservatives” have chuckled behind closed doors about “political correctness,” and written of “Gramsci’s long march through the institutions,” but who held the door open for the communists? Who gave them ever more money? Both Bushes, each speaking of his desire to be known as “the education president,” increased education spending more than the dpusa did. Bush II and Jeb! both stopped judicial progress against aa dead in its tracks, and reversed it, with their stealth aa programs in texas and florida.

The gop is every bit as evil and anti-American as the dpusa.

Sorry, I read that as LA (Los Angeles) and have no clue who you were referencing

At my local library, there are multiple copies of books by feminist authors and I have seen more than one conservative book go missing.
The lefties are more willing to cheat than we are, that is part of the problem.

Achmed E. Newman wrote to Mario Partisan:

Finally, this “book banning” stuff reminds me of the 75-year BS history still taught (as of last week in elementary school even) about Joe McCarthy and his attempted “book burning”**. Peak Stupidity, i.e, I et. al., wrote about this episode from my reading of the M. Stanton Evans book Blacklisted by History…

For more than fifty years, I have been trying to get anyone to give me the name of one single person that McCarty falsely accused who was provably innocent.

Needless to say, no one has ever given a direct answer.

I’m not a big fan of Tail-gunner Joe: I don’t think Communists ever had a real chance of taking over the US. The guy was certainly a blowhard, and, in fact, he was relatively liberal before he latched on to the anti-Communist thing.

But, what with the Venona transcripts, Chambers’ evidence against Hiss, and such, there is no real doubt that there were indeed a number of Communists in FDR’s Administrations.

That liberals still have so much trouble admitting that basic fact…

Well, it is very telling, I am afraid.

That was awesome. I thought it sounded like the start of a limerick as well.

We know someone is smart when they figure out something that is true. No truth, no smarts.
Black intellectuals, and everyone else at the university, are barred from figuring out the truth about race. Einstein spouting Woke race dogma to keep his job would sound just as stupid as Kendi what’s his name, test scores and IQ not-withstanding.

All true. Nonetheless, do we really need IQ / DNA tests for blacks to know the truth about race? It’s pretty instinctual, and pretty obvious.
The colonists new the natives were savages without the benefit of tests or studies.

> why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades?

There is an argument that people enjoy listening to people who are a little smarter than themselves, but not much smarter, because then they just don’t really understand it.

You could then say that black leadership is getting dumber because more black people are listening in these days of heightened racial tension, and generally when you increase the size of a community, you move to the means.

You could make the same argument when including whites — the politically active group of whites is also much larger, as is the fraction of whites going to college, as is the number of whites who listen to black intellectual leadership. All have the same effect.

Certainly, our white political leadership is also far dumber — or at least that’s my perception. Perhaps, however, the dumbest stuff from the past simply isn’t available now, just as “the oldies” music appears higher quality because nobody plays the bad songs from that era anymore.

Kendi, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, “How to Be an Antiracist,” became an intellectual celebrity in the summer of 2020 after his books became a go-to source for millions of Americans trying to make sense of the murder of George Floyd.

The fatal thing about celebrity intellectuals, from Jordan Peterson to Ibram X Kendi, is that their mediocre minds are extolled as great by a credulous public devoid of judgment and a cynical elite devoid of conscience.

As far as trying to make sense of the murder of George Floyd goes. That’s impossible.
And for a simple reason. He wasn’t murdered.

“ though a recovery of the much stronger dysgenic trend that existed back around the turn of the century.”

US White dysgenic fertility has been decreasing for a long time, I don’t think I’d even call it “strong” as of 2000. It probably was highest from about 1930-1970.

Iceland has the best data on this topic. Basically they look for high IQ genes and find that they are more common in older cohorts. It’s pretty ugly, though obviously not as bad as importing hostile 80-IQ third world populations.

More recently I saw an estimate than white fertility in Sweden had turned eugenic, based on income at least.

I didn’t spell it out in detail Dave, but the damn Elementary School has been teaching about McCarthy the same lies as for the last 75 years to my 11 y/o. He is privileged , however, to have a Dad who has a blog site with the The Right Stuff.

Until you read M. Stanton Evans’ book, you will not have the whole story, though. Joe was no lefty. The State Department had Communists from the early 1930’s. It’s hard to prove it, but the book asks the question Did American Commies cause the attack on Pearl Harbor? It was no sure thing, but the Commies within the State Department (some just sympathizers and some actual spies who ended up staying in China once Mao took the place) sent reports to Roosevelt pushing him into shunning any diplomacy with the Japanese, with help from their Japanese sidekicks Ozaki and Saionj.

The Commies stuck around right on into the Ike Administration. Ike and the new GOP Senate were more helpful to McCarthy’s investigations than Truman and the worthless Senator Tydings earlier on. However, Ike cucked out on the whole thing for political expediency.

McCarthy was no blowhard (that earlier one, not the guy we got now), and this stuff going on in the 1940s and ’50s was the beginning of the Commie Long March through the American Institutions.

They won, Dave.

…the few blacks capable of genuine intellectualism (guys like Douglass, duBois, etc)…

IE, blacks who are half white.

The fatal thing about celebrity intellectuals, from Jordan Peterson to Ibram X Kendi, is that their mediocre minds are extolled as great by a credulous public devoid of judgment and a cynical elite devoid of conscience.

Richard, next time you get the urge to rant against Peterson, I suggest you Wiki him. Among his many other accomplishments, he holds a PhD from Canada’s leading university, McGill, and has conducted cutting-edge research on alcoholism. He is extremely intelligent (you obviously aren’t or you would have recognized his gifts). Meanwhile Kendi is not “mediocre,” he’s a bottom tier affirmative action welfare case. See the difference?

Ibram Kendi’s complaints “Muh books are censored ! Because I am telling the Truth !!!” is another hoax he probably learned from Jussie Smollett. Sales must be increased, corporate donors must be milked etc

Amazon regularly sends me reading lists “How to be Anti – Racist” with book covers eerily similar to Special Education teaching aids. Should I buy at least one to avoid being blacklisted ? Questions, questions…

Meanwhile the magisterial Magnum Opus written by Oxford Don John Randall Baker in 1978, lavishly illustrated and very readable:

just crossed the Atlantic and landed at my doorsteps.

This book is bearing green oval stamp WITHDRAWN FROM DEVON LIBRARY SYSTEM

My first thought was “Small Hats took over British Libraries too !”

Then I looked up who is in charge of Devon Library System – the next best thing ! Very nice and very friendly Oxbridge trained lapdog !!! Or, as one very popular American pop sci book describes those types:

“To anyone who has enjoyed the spectacle of various smarmy insects shuffling along the tenure track at Harvard or Stanford, the idea that we are all simply “survival machines” seems oddly in conflict with the correlative doctrine of the survival of the fittest.”

Well, my friends, nowadays Smarmy Insects shuffle along the Tenure Track at Oxford and Cambridge 😁

“An important subject that has almost never been studied is why black intellectual leadership seems to have been getting dumber over the decades.”

Well, duh! Because the “black intellectual leadership” is increasingly being hand-picked by the billionaire ruling class. Their job is to divide and conquer, to guard the left flank of the oligarchy. Object to using tens of trillions of dollars of public funds to bailing out and subsidizing billionaires? Object to opening the country to third-world invasion so that wages and living standards for the many can be crushed and rents and profits for the few boosted? No, let’s not talk about that – let’s talk about how evil working-class whites are!

The increasing incoherence of the “black intellectual leadership” is not a bug, it’s a feature!

Mission accomplished!

I used to think I couldn’t possibly be college material, despite the the fact that I scored well enough on the ASVAB test to qualify for the US Army.

I wouldn’t advise bragging about that. But it’s adorable that you see some sort of connection.

Recruiter: Do you have a pulse and not too many felonies?

“No blacklash for Ibram is good for Ibram’s bottom line.”

There’s a half-way decent dirty joke to be made off this, but I don’t have the heart to do it.

Christian Grey, care to take a whack at it?

Unfortunately, the most effective counter-arguments to the arguments of Ibram X. Kendi are…
a mind-boggling multitude of intrinsically horrible blacks behaving horribly.

Example: Spring Break in Miami has been shut down again for the third year in a row, thanks to horrible blacks behaving horribly, including this recent incident involving a possible Pygmy with a gun, and murder on his wee mind:

https://nypost.com/2023/03/20/florida-spring-break-shooter-fired-stolen-gun-11-times-cops/

Just the world needs, reaction comments from triggered trolls.
You JP Fanboys are enough to make one blush for the speccies.

…their mediocre minds are extolled as great by a credulous public devoid of judgment.

Thanks for proving my point.

For more than fifty years, I have been trying to get anyone to give me the name of one single person that McCarty falsely accused who was provably innocent.

This is one reason of many why The Crucible is so retarded. Accusing someone of being a communist is as ridiculous as accusing them of witchcraft, is the idea.

Of course, now leftist fruitcakes think witches are real, and there are purple haired lesbians who claim to be ‘Wiccan.’ Not to mention the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans who carve up chickens to put a curse on that puta who stole their baby daddy.

They even cling to the idea that the Rosenbergs weren’t guilty and are martyrs somehow. Strange how they don’t claim the nazis that HUAC identified were framed or misunderstood.

I think the die is cast for American blacks for at least the next few generations. That is just a guess of how long it will take them to learn to support and raise the kids of the girls they impregnate. Seems like the key to a better destiny for them. They can try to commandeer white history, art, and white successes all they like. Won’t help ’em.

That said, here’s an outtake of the new remake, “Black to the Future,” featuring Darius McFly fleeing from mean bullies:

Skateboard pursuit: Man attempts to evade LAPD officers by riding away from scene #pursuit @KFIAM640 pic.twitter.com/JfdA9NFU84

— Tim Conway Jr Show (@ConwayShow) March 21, 2023

Steve Sailer wrote to me:

[Dave] “For more than fifty years, I have been trying to get anyone to give me the name of one single person that McCarty falsely accused who was provably innocent.”

[Sailer] General George C. Marshall:

https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/joseph-mccarthy-condemns-george-marshall-1951/

Except… as far as I can tell, every single thing McCarthy states there about Marshall is actually true, isn’t it?

In those quotes, McCarthy does not say that Marshall is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party or that he takes orders from Moscow but that Marshall engaged in actions that served Moscow’s goals.

And then McCarthy gives facts to support his case.

How is that condemning an innocent man?

The truth is that FDR and his chief advisors were indeed remarkably naive about Stalin: FDR thought he could charm Stalin as he charmed American politicos.

Turned out Stalin was better at the charm game than FDR.

Attacking FDR and his minions for that reality is hardly accusing an innocent man!

Achmed E. Newman wrote to me:

The State Department had Communists from the early 1930’s. It’s hard to prove it, but the book asks the question Did American Commies cause the attack on Pearl Harbor?

See John Koster’s 2012 book Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR’s White House Triggered Pearl Harbor: he makes a good case that Harry Dexter White intentionally provoked the attack on Pearl in order to serve Soviet aims.

White was a weird guy, probably never actually under Soviet control and probably never a self-conscious Communist. But he just liked aiding the Soviets.

This was very, very common among intellectuals in the 1930s (the “Red Decade”) and in FDR’s Administration.

White was in Treasury, not State, by the way.

AEN also wrote:

McCarthy was no blowhard (that earlier one, not the guy we got now), and this stuff going on in the 1940s and ’50s was the beginning of the Commie Long March through the American Institutions.

They won, Dave.

Very few of our current Leftists are literally Communists in the sense that they were ever members of the Communist Party or that they ever really understood Marxism-Leninism.

I am sure that I, and probably you, could give a better spontaneous lecture on the historical dialectic, the nature of class consciousness, the contradictions between the material forces of production and the relations of production, etc. than most of our current Leftists. (Yes, all of that stuff is nonsense, but I understand the nonsense: Bernie Sanders, AOC, Kendi, et al. don’t.)

Current Leftists are actually worse than Communists: Communists accepted that human sex is real, that material reality matters, etc. Yes, actual Communists were brutally evil and adhered to crack-pot economic theories.

But current Leftists are simply insane.

NotAnonymousHere wrote to me:

[Dave] no real doubt that there were indeed a number of Communists in FDR’s Administrations

[NAH] Two things: FDR had an actual Communist spy living in the White House, and the McCarthy hearings were after FDR’s administration.

Yes, of course, but McCarthy was largely complaining about Communists in the FDR Administration, some of whom had been carried over by Truman.

Indeed, since Truman took over due to FDR’s death, it was inevitable that initially Truman carried over all of FDR’s personnel.

Example: Spring Break in Miami has been shut down again for the third year in a row, thanks to horrible blacks behaving horribly, including this recent incident involving a possible Pygmy with a gun, and murder on his wee mind:

https://nypost.com/2023/03/20/florida-spring-break-shooter-fired-stolen-gun-11-times-cops/

Goddammit, I love Florida. It can’t just be “black guy shoots black guy.” One of ’em HAS to be a pygmy. A pygmy!

They even cling to the idea that the Rosenbergs weren’t guilty and are martyrs somehow. Strange how they don’t claim the nazis that HUAC identified were framed or misunderstood.
==
Who clings to this idea? Walter and Miriam Schneir eventually threw in the towel and Morton Sobell came clean before he died.

“Current Leftists are actually worse than Communists: Communists accepted that human sex is real, that material reality matters, etc. … But current Leftists are simply insane.”

It may be so; but please note, current Leftists have a done a spectacular job of destroying the West and all it has achieved and stood for, far better than the actual intellectual Communists ever did and a lot faster. They have actually achieved the great and final goal when the Communists could not.

It’s sort of the same way that a swarm of mindless termites can wreck a wooden house far better than rational you, armed with just a hatchet.

I wouldn’t advise bragging about [an obvious joke]. But it’s adorable that you see some sort of connection

Ha ha ha, autism speaks: “There are a number of sensible reasons a chicken might cross a road.”

This 2021 British article (why are they writing about this?!) seems clear. Note the title.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211206062235/https://www.newstatesman.com/world/americas/north-america/2021/03/executed-innocent-why-justice-ethel-rosenberg-still-matters

Love the retconning.

In her 2004 book The Jews of the United States, historian Hasia Diner wrote, “Since they [Jews] were a group of people who just decades before had been labelled inassimilable foreigners, the Rosenberg case specifically, and the anti-communist crusade generally, made the Jews exceedingly nervous.”

Today, however, Diner feels slightly differently. There was a “long ongoing internal Jewish war against the communists”, she told me.

This 2021 Time article might be more interesting. Doesn’t seem to actually assert her innocence, but this from the second paragraph definitely seems to be implying it. And the remainder does not admit her guilt that I see.
https://time.com/6072014/ethel-rosenberg-revisited/

Most importantly, her brother David, whose perjured testimony was the only evidence against her, died in 2015, which enabled the release of his Grand Jury testimony—the long-hidden statements he made before he was coached by prosecuting attorney Roy Cohn. It is not my concern here either to draw attention to the miscarriages of justice in the case nor to justify Julius’ activities as a spy-ring recruiter, now accepted as fact.

The smarter and less reality denying portion of the Left has realized the Rosenbergs were provably guilty (given the more recent information) so continuing to assert Ethel’s innocence is not in their best interests, but not all of the foot soldiers appear to have figured that out.

The Talented 1/10 has become the Talented 1/30.

-Discard

There has been doubt about Ethel Rosenberg’s legal guilt for decades. Radosh, Milton, & Stern concluded in 1983 that she was aware of and approved of her husband’s activities, but that’s something different from legal culpability. (Radosh & Stern writing in 1979 offered the opinion that Ethel had been framed by the FBI). The Graham-era Washington Post published an interview in 1996 with the man who purported to be Julius Rosenberg’s contact (in Soviet military intelligence, IIRC). By his account, Rosenberg took on more risk than he the contact thought advisable and calculated risks quite precisely. He also said the atomic espionage was not that important. Rosenberg’s real value was in purloining radio technology from the factory where he worked. In addition, he said Rosenberg was careful to keep Ethel out of it. Ethel dropped out of Communist Party activities in 1943 along with her husband, so it’s reasonable to conclude she was aware of his espionage activity in a general way. I think David Greenglass before his death did admit that he’d concluded his priority was to protect his wife, not his sister.

since Truman took over due to FDR’s death, it was inevitable that initially Truman carried over all of FDR’s personnel.

And then James Forrestal was murdered.

Thinking it was an obvious joke is exactly the level ASVAB tests for.

Recruiter: Can you tie your shoes?

You: Yes Sir!

Recruiter: No, I don’t have to see it. Urine! Make an X here.

That’s an obvious joke.

Attacking FDR and his minions for that reality is hardly accusing an innocent man!

FDR’s cabinet was loaded to the gills with commies. McCarthy didn’t bat a thousand, but he got a lot more right than he did wrong…

https://thenewamerican.com/franklin-roosevelt-s-subversion-from-within/

Goddammit, I love Florida. It can’t just be “black guy shoots black guy.” One of ’em HAS to be a pygmy. A pygmy!

Angry, homicidal Pygmies aside, the Negro Problem in Florida is most pronounced. As long as Ibram X. Kendi conscientiously maintains his “blind spot” for Negroes behaving horribly, the problem will continue to perpetuate itself, and black history will eventually relegate him where he belongs: another idle crackpot of his era, who perhaps subconsciously assisted in a lot of black bodies piling up.

BREAKING: Machete-Wielding Suspect Shot Dead After Taking Woman Hostage in Miami pic.twitter.com/oVp7XQ0mTM

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) March 21, 2023

That’s an obvious joke.

Totally. I can almost see Beetle and Sarge.

Speaking of racial delusions — the NYT reports that Haiti is in chaos and anarchy, with gangs controlling 90% of the capital, and police outgunned, and rampant shootings. But… how can this be? No white supremacy is there, no systemic racism, which we’re told are the root of all evils. No, only happy Sun People are there. It’s as if blacks are incapable of maintaining a civilized society, but that is a wacist thing to say, so, it is a mystery.

The Rosenbergs were blamed for the Korean war and all the attendant death and destruction.

It was widely believed at the time that (1) North Korea attacked the South at the instigation of Moscow, and (2) Moscow did this because it had acquired the bomb and so felt strong enough to directly challenge the U.S. in battle.

He committed suicide in May 1949. Truman had been in office for four years at that point. He’d dismissed Forrestal in March 1949.

FDR’s cabinet was loaded to the gills with commies.
=
It wasn’t. There were three subcabinet officers and a senior White House aide who worked for the Soviets.