December 18, 2004

Final Results: 2004 Presidential Election

Ruy Teixeira links to Michael McDonald of George Mason University and shows that Bush's win was a little narrower than the 3 points, 4 million votes we had assumed:

Bush 62,008,619 (50.74%)

Kerry 59,012,107 (48.29%)

Total (all candidates) 122,212,577

(Turnout Rate among eligible: 59.9%)

Margin of Victory: 2,996,512 (2.45%)

Judging from both 2000 and 2004, the Democratic candidate will pick up several tenths of a point after everybody stops paying attention and the conventional wisdom ossifies about how big the margin was.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The 3rd Secret Behind Why Red States Are Red

http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#Housingi

My new VDARE column reveals the third factor behind Bush winning a high share of a state's votes: low inflation in housing prices. Bush carried the 26 states with the least inflation in home prices between 1980 and 2004, while Kerry won the top 14 states with fastest growing housing prices.

Note that, tellingly, in second place as an indicator of GOP predilection, in between Years Married and Total Fertility, is the growth in housing prices between 1980 and 2004. The correlation coefficient is -0.82. The negative sign means that the more housing prices have risen, the more Democratic the state was.

For example, housing prices in Massachusetts, the most Democratic state in the 2004 election, rose 516%, the highest home inflation in the country. In Utah, the most Republican state, house prices were up only 162%.

Expensive housing retards family formation, which helps the Democrats. Rising housing prices transfer wealth from young people to old people.

Importing more foreigners, as the Bush Administration suicidally wants to do, drives up the price of homes by increasing demand. That makes it harder for young voters to start down the road to homeownership, marriage, babies—and committed Republicanism.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 17, 2004

An order of magnitude worse than 9/11?

What are the odds that Vioxx, Celebrex, and any other arthritis medicines might have killed ten times more Americans than Osama bin Laden?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Question: How do I make money off my red-blue findings?

Clearly, I've uncovered more than any other investigator about the great public question of the season: Why are red states red and blue states blue?

But how do I make any money off this? Lectures? Consulting? Today, is my 46th birthday and I'm getting pretty depressed looking at my earning prospects. Any suggestions?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

All Politics Is Local: Red and Blue Housing Prices Version

A reader writes:

It's interesting to see your column played out in real life. Here in Anchorage Alaska we have two bedroom communities on opposite sides of the fence. To the south-east we have Girdwood. It's a boutique community centered around a ski resort. Housing is expensive and people there are very liberal (Kerry won the town 70%).

To the North-west we have Wasilla. It's a kind of frontier community, nothing was there 40 years ago, but now it is the fastest growing town in Alaska. Housing is cheap. And the voters...very conservative. Bush won 74% or so.

Anyway, it's a very good comparison since the other factors (race, age, location, etc) are nearly identical.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Tom Wolfe's Portrait of the President as a Young Frat Guy

The main villain in Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is a fraternity brother named Hoyt Thorpe, whose depiction offers a lot of insights into the molding of George W. Bush. Which is interesting because Wolfe voted for Bush. He may be a jerk, but when foreigners are out to kill you, you just might want to be led by a jerk, assumes Wolfe.

More roman a clef aspects of "Charlotte Simmons:" The family background of the President of Dupont, Frederick Cutler III, from an ultra-assimilated Jewish family in the diplomatic corps, appears modeled on John Kerry.

Dupont basketball coach / demigod Buster Roth, whom the Jewish faculty members, such as Jerry Quat, quickly determine is German, not Jewish, would be modeled on Polish Catholic Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K).

JoJo Johansen, the only white starter on the Dupont team, is probably inspired by Duke's JJ Redick, although Redick's skills as a shooting guard are closer to JoJo's white roommate Mike.

Also, I'm surprised by how many people don't figure out that the college in "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is obviously primarily Duke, where Wolfe's daugther Alexandra graduated in 2002. Are there any other schools with 1490 average SATs and national championship basketball teams and a social scene dominated by fraternities and sororities? Here's a Duke geology professor listing 14 similarities. I was also struck by his response to the denunciations of the realism of Wolfe's portrayal of elite college students:

How real is Wolfe's Duke? For that slice of the Duke undergraduate body that is represented by Wolfe, I'd say it's very real. I've been at Duke for 14 years now. This is my last year. Every year for the last several years, I've gone on a week-long field trip with Duke students. I've gotten to know Duke students pretty damn well. And about 30 percent of them bear an uncanny resemblance to Wolfe's Duke. The language that they use fits Wolfe's dialogue to a T. The ugly attitudes expressed by them in conversation fit the attitudes described by Wolfe. Wolfe's Duke is a dead on accurate description of about one-third of Duke's student population.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 16, 2004

"A Series of Unfortunate Events"

I don't have much to say about the new Jim Carrey movie based on the bestsellers for kids by "Lemony Snickett" about three orphans who mock-grimly triumph over a hostile world that's a cross between Dickens and The Addams Family. I took three 12 year old boys who had all read the books and they all liked the film version but weren't blown away.

I too thought it was decent; but it needed one more surprise climax. It ends rather like "Jurassic Park III," where the main characters are flying off to safety in military aircraft, and you figure, "Okay, it looks like the movie is coming to an end, but of course the helicopters are going to be suddenly attacked by enormous bloodthirsty flying pterodactyls right about ... NOW ... no, wait, ... NOW ... no? ... huh, they're really making us wait for the surprise ending ... hey, why are the credits starting? ... why are the lights coming on in the theatre? ... why'd everybody go home? ... I demand my Pterodactyl Attack!"


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Why the Sailer Stomping Now?"

asks a reader and I try to provide an answer over at the VDARE blog.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"The Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic"

(Apologies to Julia Ward Howe from John Derbyshire)


Mine eyes have never noticed any difference at all —
Black, brown, or white; gay, bi, or straight; or thin or fat or tall;
Male, female, or transsexual — they’re constructions soci-al:
We must celebrate each one.
Glory, glory, there’s no difference!
Yet still, we’d better give some preference.
To enrich our own learning experience,
Till critical mass is here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Contemporary Christmas Classics

http://www.iSteve.com/04DecB.htm#CCCderb

: There's strong feeling in favor of The Pogues' "Fairy Tale of New York" from 1987, a duet between poor Shane MacGowan and Kirsty Macoll, about a drunken Irish immigrant:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain tune
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

He tries to to patch things up with his spitfire girlfriend by bringing up all the good times they'd shared:

Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

(chorus)
The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

It's not coincidental that this, possibly the greatest of all recent Christmas songs, explicitly refers to the music of mid-century Manhattan when Tin Pan Alley, and its Christmas song-writing minions, was at its peak.

Other nominees include:

Father Christmas - Kinks
2000 Miles - Pretenders
Christmas Must Be Tonight - Robbie Robertson
Merrry Christmas, Darling - Carpenters
Light of the Stable - EmmyLou Harris
The Rebel Jesus - Jackson Browne Christmas Wrapping - Waitresses
Christmas With the Family - Robert Earl Keene
Christmas in Hollis - Run DMC
Christmas at the Zoo - Flaming Lips

And here's John Derbyshire's updatings of Christmas and other songs, such as "The Seven Days of Kwanzaa," "God Rest Ye Merry Democrats," and the the admittedly unChristmasy Gilbert & Sullivanesque "I Am the Very Model of the Modern Homosexual:"

I am the very pattern of a modern homosexual:
I wear a suit and tie, I am impeccably respectable;
I live out in the suburbs with my partner, who’s a blogger; we
Are very nearly ready to commit to strict monogamy.
We party, but we always beg the neighbors to excuse the noise
Of after-midnight dancing to the music of the Pet Shop Boys.
We’re active in the local church, which is of course Episcopal
— ‘Piscopal — ‘Piscopal —
We help out with the youth group — I assure you there’s no risk at all!

(All) They help out with the youth group, he assures us there’s no risk at all.

You needn’t fear we’ll turn your kids, the whole thing is inborn, you see.
It’s nothing we can help, so disapproval is just bigotry.
My hair is cropped, my goatee’s trimmed, my lisp is undetectable;
I am the very model of a modern homosexual!

(All) His hair is cropped, his goatee’s trimmed, his lisp is undetectable;
He is the very model of a modern homosexual!

My HIV I manage with a handy pharma-copeia;
With modern medications now we gays are in Utopia!
I shoot up with testosterone and work out till my limbs are sore;
My voice is deep, my chest is broad, I’m butch-er than a stevedore.
You’ll just have to get used to us, adjust the laws to suit our needs;
To take another attitude from adherence to worn-out creeds
Would mark you as intolerant! a basher! and a criminal!
Criminal! — Criminal! —
We’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is minimal.

(All) They’ll slander and defame you and you’ll find support is minimal.

I wonder which fan of the Pet Shop Boys the Derb was thinking of when he penned this?


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 15, 2004

Kerri F. Dunn Sentenced to Prison

Justice is served:

A former Claremont McKenna College visiting professor, who spray-painted her car with racist and anti-Semitic slurs and then reported a hate crime on campus, was sentenced today to a year in state prison. Pomona Superior Court Judge Charles Horan said Kerri Dunn "terrorized" minority students at the college and turned the rest of the students into suspects, adding that her actions could have sparked major racial violence. He likened her actions to calling in a fake bomb threat, saying it had the effect of terrorizing people.

Along with the state prison term, he ordered Dunn to pay restitution of nearly $20,000 to Claremont College to cover the cost of beefing up security and canceled classes, and an undetermined amount of restitution to the police department for filing a false report.

From my never before online "Hate Hoax" article in the May 10, 2004 American Conservative:

In 1999, Pamela Gann became Claremont McKenna College's first president who was a registered Democrat. She didn't seem happy heading a college with a moderately conservative reputation, and tried to use "diversity" to make CMC less diverse and more like every other college. Gann and the conservative professors fought bitter battles over affirmative action hiring.

Gann's frustration with her rightist holdovers seemed to feed into the growing paranoia at some of the other Claremont colleges, where the staffs nurture an obsession among its "diverse" students (i.e., everybody except non-Hispanic heterosexual gentile white males) to navel-gaze over whether or not they feel "comfortable with the climate."

It was 72 degrees with a gentle breeze blowing, so the climate seemed okay to me, but a flier on Pitzer bulletin boards made the local idée fixe a little clearer: "Diversity and Campus Climate: You are invited to participate in a discussion about campus climate."

Another advertised: "Queer Dreams and Nightmares: What is it like to be a student at the Claremont Colleges? Student panel discussion addressing the current climate at the 5-Cs, both academically and socially." This was part of a conference entitled, with that profusion of punctuation that is the secret fraternity handshake of post-modern academics, "[Re]Defining a Queer Space at the Claremont Colleges."

The university's main concern appears to be to make students feel "comfortable," a word that reappears constantly in Claremont publications despite the obvious hopelessness of the project. The only way to make 19-year-olds feel comfortable is to wait 30 years while they sag into their well-padded maturities. Right now, they are teenagers and their surging hormones have far more important emotions for them to feel than comfort. Adults, however, who make careers out of encouraging kids to mold permanently self-pitying identities around their transient social discomforts have much to answer for.

A series of semi-nonexistent "racial incidents," such as liberal Scripps students advertising a racial sensitivity seminar with posters featuring the N-word, were parlayed by activists into a mood of dread. Kerri F. Dunn, a 39-year-old academic prole, a visiting professor of social psychology at CMC whose contract was up in June, repeatedly harangued her students about the racists and sexists lurking in the shadows. On March 9th, she gave a fiery speech at a campus event on "Hate Speech Versus Free Speech." She then walked to her 1992 Honda Civic and returned some time later, claiming she had found it spray-painted with anti-black, anti-female, and anti-Semitic slurs. The Irish-American Dunn pointed the finger at her own students, arguing that only they had heard she was considering converting to Judaism: "How else would they believe I was Jewish unless they were in my class?"

Dunn's allegation triggered a frenzy of fear and loathing.

Although faked hate crimes have become routine in the years since the Tawana Brawley hoax, the college presidents immediately canceled the next day's classes (costing parents paying the full $37,000 per year list price for 150 days of education about $250 each, or close to two million dollars in total at list price). At the mass rally the next night, Dunn announced, to rapturous applause: "This was a well planned out act of terrorism. And I don't believe for one second it was one person. I think that there's a group here, a small group, but I do believe that there is a group here that perpetuates this in all different kinds of ways."

Dunn's image of a secret goon squad of marauding junior Straussians was as memorable as it was preposterous, but the administration had already been apprised of the unsurprising truth. Earlier that day, two eyewitnesses had told the Dean of Students that Professor Dunn had slashed her own tires.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

iSteve.com's 4th Annual Kwanzaa Song Search

A December tradition here at iSteve.com is our attempt to find out if anyone in Kwanzaa's 35 years of bureaucratically recognized existence has ever written a Kwanzaa song that is not intended either to parody Kwanzaa or to indoctrinate children, but simply to celebrate the holiday.

The best known Kwanzaa song is "Hey, Kwanzaa Timmy, Whatcha Gonna Gimme?" sung by Kwanzaa Timmy (Tim Meadows) and the Kwanzettes on Saturday Night Live in 1998:

Kwanzaa Timmy: "Santa Claus is come and gone,
But don't be sad and blue
'Cause Kwanzaa Timmy's coming,
And soon you'll be coming, too.
Tell that fat old bearded dude
He's living in the past, he
Only knows who's been bad or good,
But I know who's been nasty!"

Kwanzettes: "Hey, Kwanzaa Timmy,
Whatcha gonna gimme?"

Kwanzaa Timmy: "I've brought you lots of gifts, gi-irl."

Kwanzettes: "Come on, Kwanzaa Timmy,
Whatcha gonna gimme?"

Kwanzaa Timmy: "I'll promise to rock your world!
My gifts to you symbolize our African unity.
A Mkeke mask, some corn, some wine, and a booty full of me.
Kwanzaa was founded by Dr. Maulana Karenga.
And like the spirit of the holiday, I plan to get up on in ya!"

Kwanzettes: "Hey, Kwanzaa Timmy,
Whatcha gonna gimme?" ...

Kwanzaa Timmy: "Look at my eyes, and listen to my mouth."

Kwanzaa Timmy: [ spoken ] "Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima are the first three Kwanzaa dates.
It's also the sound of the bedsprings, while sweet, sweet love we make.
The last four days of Kwanzaa: Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba, and Imani.
The next day, tell all your friends about my sexy Kwanzaa party!"

Kwanzettes: "There's no booty-knocking, less you fill my stocking."

Kwanzaa Timmy: "Kwanzaa's about giving, not getting."

Kwanzettes: "If you want to sex us, better bring your Lexus."

Kwanzaa Timmy: "I got corn, I got bushels of corn."

Kwanzettes: "Think I know you, Mister;
You knocked up my sister."

Not bad, but that hardly lives up to the funniest fact about Kwanzaa, which is that its invention was subsidized by J. Edgar Hoover. Ann Coulter has the details here.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

iSteve.com's 1st Annual Recent Christmas Song Search

Of course, not a lot of popular Christmas songs have been written since 1969, either. For example, each year, Madonna's 1987 version of "Santa Baby" moves closer to standard status, but the song itself was written in 1953, and originally performed by Earth Kitt.

Dru Sefton wrote:

There are just no up-and-coming, festive standards of tomorrow. Experts say that's because music styles have shifted from lyrics-based ballads to upbeat dance music. Composers have a hard time getting big names to record new pieces. And publishers just aren't interested in sentimental holiday songs anymore.

Virtually all the secular holiday tunes we hear and sing today were written between 1934 and 1958, said Ron Clancy, author of "American Christmas Classics," a set of three CDs, lyrics and an illustrated book.

A few of those favorites: "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," 1934. "White Christmas," 1941. "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," 1944. "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" 1945. "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," 1949. "Frosty the Snowman," 1950. "Silver Bells," 1951.

"One reason why these songs resonate even today is better songwriting," said Clancy, of North Cape May, N.J. "There was a sentimental swing, just a feel to them." ..

To be crass, the incredible royalties you can make from a popular Christmas song ought to motivate songwriters -- for example, one-hit-wonder Elmo Shropshire, a retired veterinarian, still makes $80k annually from having written half of "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" in 1979 -- but there are a lot of things our culture can't seem to accomplish anymore no matter how much money is available.

Here's an interview with Justin Wilde that explains the dire economics of modern Christmas songwriting.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 14, 2004

Intelligent Design

I think the Intelligent Design theorists must have a pretty low opinion of the Designer's talents if they assume that His universe is such a badly designed, misfiring contraption that He must frequently get to work with his divine monkeywrench so that advanced life forms can evolve.

I don't object much to Intelligent Design theorists positing one or two interventions (e.g., to create life in the first place or to kick prehumans up to the human level), but to argue that the Designer is so inept that he must constantly meddle strikes me as nearly sacrilegious.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 13, 2004

The Mau-Mauing of Steve Sailer

From the Cyber-Catacombs: A friend writes:

The MAU-MAUING of Steve Sailer for having the temerity to propose a[n] ethno-demographic model of US psephology without going through academic gatekeepers, and then slipping it past the pee-cee censors, is both remarkable and horrifying to watch in real time.

The fact that frank discussion of human bio-diversity has to be undertaken in private cyber-catacombs, and public discussion must be undertaken in a baffling code, is one of the most bizarre facts about public life in the past half-century. The future will snicker over our anti-intellectual hush-hushing over ethnicity, just as we snicker over Victorian taboos about sex.

Of course, all it does is make public intellectuals, and formal science, appear suspect to those folk inclined to trust their 'lyin eyes and common sense. Which actually makes the public more susceptible to racist ideology by “actual and existing” racists.

Pee-cee thereby generates self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.

Which is no doubt intentional on the part of people like Morris Dees who profit by terrifying elderly and out-of-touch liberals in the suburbs of the big blue cities into donating to his money machine.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Southern Poverty Law Center - Guilt by Association

SPLC eviscerated by Kevin Michael Grace (The Ambler). Here's a bit from Kevin's brilliant article on the Southern Poverty Law Center in the July 2004 Chronicles.

In Morris Dees’ America, night is always falling. It is a nation of ceaseless cross-burnings and lynchings, where minorities cower endlessly in fear, waiting helplessly for the next assault from the Klan, skinheads, the League of the South, Thomas Fleming, Samuel Francis and Chronicles, Peter Brimelow and VDare.com, David Horowitz and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the American Enterprise Institute . . . The American Enterprise Institute? Surely there must be some mistake. Not at all...

Clearly, by 1994, even the SPLC realized there was no longer much to fear from the KKK, that tiny band of bedraggled and government-infiltrated losers. Even so, according to the SPLC’s most recent The Year in Hate, “Buoyed by rising numbers of Skinhead and Klan groups, the American radical right staged something of a comeback last year, following a tumultuous period that saw the destruction or hobbling of some of the nation’s leading hate groups.”

So what is the connection between AEI and some of the nation’s leading hate groups? Well, you see, AEI “in recent years has sponsored scholars whose views are seen by many as bigoted or even racist.” You have to love that passive verb, seen. For example? “For example, Dinesh D’Souza.” He holds a fellowship there and also holds heterodox opinions on the civil-rights movement. (You might think that D’Souza shopping Samuel Francis to save his own skin and getting him fired from the Washington Times would score him points with the SPLC, but apparently not.) More “controversial” still is AEI fellow Charles Murray, who wrote The Bell Curve, which cites research funded by the “racist” Pioneer Fund. Why is the Pioneer Fund “racist”? Because it endorses the idea of racial differences. It is a commonplace today for those that believe in the very idea of race to be condemned as “racist,” although it is hard to understand how such a thing as “racism” could exist in the absence of races...

The technique it uses to ferret out those “seen” as “racists” is one well known to aficionados of conspiracy theory: “consanguinity.” As the old song put it, “I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.” Or as Thomas Fleming put it, “If Congressman Tom Tancredo or [American Conservative executive editor] Scott McConnell has ever met anyone who met anyone who took money from the Pioneer Fund, they must be bigots.” By this measure, every person and organization to the right of the Southern Poverty Law Center is beyond the pale—which is precisely the point. Consanguinity is self-evidently a shoddy logical tool. Not so long ago, those on the right who employed it were accused of “McCarthyism.” Police departments and schools, however, make use of Dees’ smears and “Teaching Tolerance” materials. In 2001, Dees was the recipient of the National Education Association’s highest honor, the Friend of Education Award. And whenever any credulous member of the media wants the lowdown on “hate,” he gives the SPLC a call.

Other SPLC bête noires include “neo-Confederates”; Pat Buchanan; the Bradley, Olin, and Scaife Foundations; the Free Congress Foundation; the Council of Conservative Citizens; the Ludwig von Mises Institute; and the New Century Foundation, publisher of American Renaissance.

Those added to the SPLC’s enemies list are inclined to consider it a rather higher honor than any NEA gong. David Horowitz, however, was mortified. Horowitz was added for his opposition to reparations for slavery. Two howls of protest were published on Horowitz’s website, FrontPageMag.com. His own cri de coeur was an open letter to Morris Dees, which begged him not to lump him in with the real bad guys:

"You’ve made yourself a national reputation as a fighter against hate groups. Recently, however, you released a report called “Into the Mainstream” by a leftwing conspiracy theorist named Chip Berlet, which purports to show how “right wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.” This report is so tendentious, so filled with transparent misrepresentations and smears that if you continue to post the report you will create for your Southern Poverty Law Center a well-earned reputation as a hate group itself."

Where has Horowitz been? It is an old story: First, they came for the Pioneer Fund, and I did not speak out because I was not a eugenicist . . .

Movie buffs will recall that a TV movie was made about Dees. "Line of Fire: The Morris Dees Story" was released in 1991. In a delicious irony, this hagiography starred Corbin Bernsen, best remembered as the slimy lawyer Arnie Becker from L.A. Law. [More...]


Kevin Michael Grace lives in Victoria, British Columbia. He runs the website TheAmbler.com

We live in an age when guilt-by-association is considered the highest form of reasoning.

By the way, for a benign example of consanguinist thinking, the wonderful journalist Alistair Cooke, who died recently at 95, made it a habit in recent years, according to Peter Robinson, to tell people who had just shook his hand for the first time: "You have just shaken the hand of a man who shook the hand of a man who shook hands with Lincoln."

The intermediary between Cooke and Lincoln was the famous Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935). Damn, I wish my sons had had a chance to shake Cooke's hand. They could have carried this chain with just two intermediaries into the third century after Lincoln's death.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere:

I made the big time. Now I'm being smeared in a New York gossip column! The New York Daily News' professional tattletales Rush and Molloy (email them your thoughts on the subject at rushmolloy@edit.nydailynews.com) write:

Bad source code at NYT?

New York Times columnist David Brooks might want to do a background check on the next "expert" he quotes.

Brooks, the reigning conservative on the paper's op-ed page now that William Safire is leaving, is coming under fire for his recent column about Red State "natalism" and birth rates in which he quoted writer Steve Sailer's finding that President Bush "carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates."

Brooks doesn't mention that Sailer reportedly runs a Web discussion group whose members include white supremecists [sic] and anti-Semites.

Sailer also writes for vdare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a "hate group."

Brooks didn't immediately respond to our E-mail.

But on political magazine The American Prospect's blog TAPped, writer Garance Franke-Ruta asks, "Why is David Brooks promoting the work of a well-known eugenicist sympathizer who regularly indulges in racial stereotyping? ... [It's] journalism at its absolute shoddiest."

In reply, I wrote back:

Dear Rush and Molloy:

Speaking of the kettle calling the pot black, Part 1, you didn't mention that Ms. Franke-Ruta, amusingly enough, has herself been accused, at vast length, of racism by a civil rights activist organization who objected intensely to an article she wrote for The American Prospect.

To read the original indictment of Franke-Ruta's purported racism, go here and scan down to "Special Report: In Attack on Hispanics, American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta Is Accused of Journalistic Fraud." I must confess that my eyes glazed over while reading about Franke-Ruta's and The American Prospect's alleged high crimes and insensitivities against Latinos. What I saw of it before nodding off seemed no more persuasive than what she wrote about me.

On the other hand, why should the benefit of the doubt be extended to Franke-Ruta if she won't extend it to me? Good question. It's often those who live in the glassiest houses who are most inclined to throw stones to distract from the fragility of their own abodes.

Speaking of the kettle calling the pot black, Part 2, you pass on the absurd accusation of the Southern Poverty Law Center that the online publication VDARE.com is a "hate group." Yet, you make no mention that the SPLC has widely been documented to be mercenary and racially discriminatory. Click here for all the grisly details.

[Also, check out all the other organizations the SPLC has denounced for racism, such as the American Enterprise Institute!]

And to find out the kind of mainstream organizations that the SPLC denounces, click here.

So, why aren't you out digging up scandalous dirt on the SPLC? It's all over the Web, including some much more juicy stuff than this. It's a disgrace that the American media tends to treat a discredited, but vastly rich and powerful organization like the SPLC, as if it is run by Mother Theresa.

Finally, let's look at the nonsense Franke-Ruta writes.

She doesn't deny that the facts Mr. Brooks cited from my article "Baby Gap" in The American Conservative (http://www.amconmag.com/2004_12_06/cover.html) are facts. Her behavior is a classic shoot-the-messenger attempt to help Democrats bury their heads in the sand. How is the Democratic Party ever going to put up an effective opposition to the Bush-Rove machine if they denounce those who tell them truth about the American voters?

The rest of her diatribe consists mainly of Joe McCarthyesque-guilt by associationism and out-of-context quotations from my hundreds of articles, none of which she attempts to refute.

The defining characteristic of anti-Sailerist diatribes like Franke-Ruta's is multitudinous quotations from my writings with no attempt at refutation of their truth. The reader is simply supposed to be shocked, SHOCKED that anyone would dare write such politically incorrect things.

A few times, Franke-Ruta gets so worked up she can't even be bothered to quote me out of context. I was particularly amused that she included my AmCon article's concluding paragraph in full:

"Nobody noticed that the famous blue-red gap was a white baby gap because the subject of white fertility is considered disreputable. But I believe the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking. At least, it's certainly more interesting."

Apparently, by letting slip that I believe that the truth is better for us than ignorance, lies, or wishful thinking, I've condemned myself in the eyes of all of polite society. No refutation of my shocking faux pas is needed. All bien-pensants can instantly see how much better it is to bask in reputable ignorance.

Franke-Ruta seems to be convinced that I drew a correlation between Bush's share of the vote by state and the total fertility of white women by state because I am a racist. No, I did it because I am interested in the facts.

[I of course also looked at the correlation of Bush's share and the total fertility of all the women in the state, but the r-squared of that nonracial correlation was only 37%, compared to 74% for the correlation between Bush's share and white fertility. For Franke-Ruta's benefit, let me point out that 74% is twice as big as 37%. As for explaining to her what an r-squared is, well, ...

The reality is that white fertility correlates with Bush's share of the vote better than total fertility or nonwhite fertility does.

Since I published my "Baby Gap" article, I've found a demographic factor that correlates even better with Bush's share of the vote by state: the average years married between the ages of 18 and 44 for white women. Here's the scatter plot, with it's spectacular correlation coefficient of r = 0.91:

Unlike with fertility, years married for all races correlates quite well with Bush's share of the vote, but still significantly less well than years married among white women. You can read all about this factor here. And you can read about a third factor that also correlates super strongly with Bush's share of the vote -- lack of housing price inflation -- here.

In 1943, George Orwell famously observed of this manner of thinking that puts all the weight on who says something and none on what he says:

"Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'Science.' There is only 'German Science,' 'Jewish Science,' etc… This prospect frightens me much more than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement."

Yet, there was an ironic and fortunate coda to Nazi disdain for objective truth that Orwell couldn't have known in 1943. Luckily, it was precisely the Nazis disdain for "Jewish science" that prevented them from investing enough to develop the most frightening of all bombs -- the atomic bomb. Historian Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times: "Germany despite the scientific exodus, retained enough nuclear scientists to conceive a bomb. But to Hitler, the nuclear field was identified with Einstein and 'Jewish physics.'"

Anyone, whether Hitler or Franke-Ruta, who evaluates assertions of fact based on the political correctness of the speaker is bound to be self-defeating, .

The tragedy in this case of course is that liberal smear artists like Franke-Ruta are, despite their similar attitudes toward truth, far from Nazis, and understanding what motivates voters is not destructive information like the secrets of the atomic bomb, but constructive knowledge. America needs the Democratic Party to be on top of its game, not to be wallowing in politically correct ignorance. The Democrats are the only organized American opposition to the Bush dynasty. But if they don't want to understand why they lost, and prefer to slumber in self-congratulatory bigotry, they simply won't be able to provide the effective political competition our country desperately needs.

As for Franke-Ruta's Six-Degrees-of-Joe-McCarthy-guilt-by-association charges:

"Brooks doesn't mention that Sailer reportedly runs a Web discussion group whose members include white supremecists [sic] and anti-Semites."

[You really shouldn't smear people as "white supremecists" if you can't even spell the word right!]

If there are any anti-Semites on the discussion group, they would be vastly outnumberd by the Jewish intellectuals and scientists who are members.

As for white "supremecists" (sic), the group includes East Asians, blacks, South Asians, and about 10% of the whites have non-white spouses.

And get a load of what Ruta-Franke calles me: a "eugenicist sympathizer?" Ooooooh! Sounds bad! But what the heck is that supposed to mean? Anybody who sympathizes with Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, or George Bernard Shaw would be a "eugenicist sympathizer" because they were all staunch advocates of eugenics back in the day.

What's particularly bizarre is that in the article of mine she cites http://www.vdare.com/sailer/pioneer.htm, I explicitly discuss my deep worries that new medical technology is increasingly making do-it-yourself eugenics, such as sex selection, available to parents. The potential social impact of this new free market eugenics concerns me greatly, and so I call for intensive study before we decide to let this cat out of the bag.

[Indeed, Franke-Ruta's list of out-of-context quotes from me draws from a lot of my most liberal arguments! For example, she quotes my criticism of conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan for his attacks on blacks for practicing ethnocentrism and identity politics. She is also shocked by my article presenting evidence from 30 social science studies that male homosexuals do not choose to be homosexual, but instead generally exhibit gay traits long before puberty. I could go on at great length in this vein, as could anyone who follows the links in her smear to my articles.]

As for indulging in "racial stereotyping," I am a science and sociology journalist whose work has been recognized by the highest scientific authorities. For example, Steven Pinker of Harvard, the superstar cognitive scientist who wrote the bestseller The Blank Slate, picked my "Cousin Marriage Conundrum" article, which originally appeared in American Conservative, for inclusion in his new anthology The Best Science and Nature Writing 20004. My article from early 2003 predicted, accurately, that nation-building in Iraq would be far more difficult than the Bush Administration was assuming because the Iraqi tendency to inbreed (half marry their first or second cousins) makes nepotistic corruption inevitable and makes it hard for Iraqis to cooperate beyond their intensely loyal inbred extended families.

In summary, you have aided Franke-Ruta in perpetrating "journalism at its absolute shoddiest."

Yours truly,

Steve Sailer

If you have anything to add, you can write to Rush and Molloy at rushmolloy@edit.nydailynews.com. Please be polite and avoid wide-ranging controversies.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The Marriage Gap Correlations with Red-Blue State Voting

My important sequel to "Baby Gap" is up at VDARE.com. Please make sure to read the message from Peter Brimelow. (Don't forget to mention to him how much you value my contributions to VDARE.com.)

Here are a couple of graphs that didn't make it in the initial version of the article, but really show what an outrageously strong correlation with the 2004 state-by-state election results I've found.

What a remarkably close fit for a single demographic variable!

When you do a multiple regression model using Years Married and Babies per Woman, you get a linear formula that gets the actual vote 88% right:

Interestingly, you get this 88% r-squared for accounting for Bush's share of the states' total votes when looking at the marriage and fertility among whites, rather than total population. When you look at marriage and fertility rates for the whole population, the r-squared of the multiple regression is only 80%.

A reader writes:

As always, your latest VDARE piece is brilliant. I did a quick search on my univiersity's periodical databases and didn't find a single study on white fertility/marriage and voting patterns. It simply does not appear to be on the radar screen of political scientists and sociologists in spite of its explanatory power. I made a contribution to VDARE and told them I was doing so because they publish your stuff.

By the way, I blasted what's-her-name from TAPPED in an e-mail the other day.
Keep driving the PC crowd crazy! Here's one from me that will get them:

Merry Christmas!


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer