Charles Murray’s FACING REALITY

If you belong to the fast-dwindling demographic that believes in objective truth, you will like Charles Murray’s new book, pub date June 15: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America.

Murray writes two distinctly different kinds of book, long and short. In the long books (most recently Human Diversity) Murray gives full rein to his passion for data, and for the deep truths hidden in big datasets. The shorter books, like his 2008 Real Education, are more journalistic and less challenging for a reader not well-acquainted with statistics.

(And I just noticed, looking up Real Education for the link, that its full title includes the word “reality,” just as this new book’s title does. Charles Murray, like your genial diarist, clings to a fusty, absurdly old-fashioned belief in objective reality quite independent of our feelings, wo wo wo feelings.)

This latest Murray book is one of the shorts: 125 pages of main text, with three pages of introduction, twenty pages of endnotes, four pages of maps, and a five-page index. There are several tables and a small handful of graphs (this one my favorite);

but not much heavy-duty quantitative analysis—little enough that a math-challenged reader can skip over it without serious loss.

Neither of the two truths in Murray’s title will surprise VDARE.com readers. In the author’s own words, from the book’s introduction:

The first is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The second is that American Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians, as groups, have different rates of violent crime.

Our public culture seems incapable of dealing with these facts other than by denial and dishonesty: “The assailant was described as a heavy-set male of about thirty, wearing a red jacket …” Hence the social stresses and strains we are all wearily familiar with.

What is to be done? Murray’s prescription is civic nationalism. We can all get along, he says, if we will just stay true to the principles on which our nation was founded and face reality.

You can applaud that—and I do—as coming from a generous, good-hearted patriot and seeker after truth. You can also mock it—and many on our side of the fence surely will—as a naive civ-nat “bravery signaller” murmuring emollient words into a howling gale of unreason.

What, after all, will be the united response to Murray’s two truths, assuming they deign to notice them, from all the commanding heights of our culture—from the media, the academy, the churches, all three branches of government? SYSTEMIC RACISM! LEGACY OF SLAVERY! SOCIAL CONSTRUCT! WHITE SUPREMACY! PRIVILEGE! BIGOT! BURN THE WITCH!

The great mass of people don’t share Murray’s enthusiasm for data, for facts, for careful empirical inquiry. They have no patience with z-scores and correlation coefficients. They are not interested in objective reality unless it grows their food or powers their gadgets. They want magic and religion. They want drama: saints and martyrs, heroes and villains, Good versus Evil.

In the Western world today those universal inclinations are directed by the widespread desire among white people, especially white women, to kneel and abase themselves before other races, to denounce their own ancestors and belittle all their achievements.

In the human realm, that is reality.

A dramatic rise in risk aversion

As mentioned in my May 14th podcast, I get emails grumbling that I don’t say half as much as I should about the covid pandemic.

I put it down to my native fatalism, which (I said) I think is common in people of my generation, perhaps especially English people.

Flu pandemics are, to those of our inclination, just part of the unavoidable background of life, like the weather. You don’t take foolhardy chances with them, any more than you go out without an umbrella when it’s raining, but you get on with your life and don’t make a fuss about them.

Whatever the reason, I can’t be much bothered with the pandemic. When I do my morning scan of the news sources after breakfast, I skip over the covid news. It’s not interesting to me.

Earlier by John Derbyshire (June 6, 2020) I Will Not Genuflect To This Church Of Antiracism

If you know any Shakespeare at all, you know the speech that Henry the Fifth gave to rally his troops at the battle of Agincourt. It ends with the words: “Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” There’s another Harry in the British Royal Family today, but he’s not Agincourt material. If we don’t have much of a Harry, though, we at least have a Saint George—the Holy Blessed Martyr George Floyd, who ascended to glory one year ago this last week, to the lamentations of his nation and the enrichment of his baby mommas. But if Harry Windsor moves me to sadness, George Floyd excites only disgust.

What a disgrace to our nation that this brutish, antisocial misfit has been elevated to our pantheon of heroes, canonized in the sick cult of anti-White victimology that dominates our culture.

Say what you like about Harry Windsor, he never stuck a pistol in a woman’s belly prior to robbing her house. (Although, to be perfectly fair to Saint George, there’s nothing in the court documents about the woman being pregnant, as is sometimes said. So that’s OK then. [Background Check: Investigating George Floyd’s Criminal Record, by Jessica Lee, Snopes, June 12, 2020, Updated February 24, 2021])

Last Tuesday’s feast day of Saint George did, however, at least offer us one of the most hilarious episodes of irony in the annals of video recording. I’m referring of course to those precious clips of TV reporters diving for cover from gunfire in George Floyd Square.

A series of loud noises that sounded like at least 10 gunshots broke the quiet Tuesday morning at George Floyd Square on the anniversary of his killing. The police later said one person was being treated for a gunshot wound at a nearby hospital. https://t.co/2OuNHSgoFd pic.twitter.com/ieWcsytljQ

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 25, 2021

I enjoyed them every bit as much as you did. So did innumerable others, to judge from the YouTube comment threads.

Here’s one of those clips from ABC News. The studio presenter here is Diane Macedo[Tweet her] a white lady. She is talking live to a black street reporter, Alex Presha [Tweet him] in George Floyd Square. And in case you don’t know, the Square is now part of an autonomous zone, into which police are not allowed.

[Clip, 2m11s

Macedo: And Alex, we know that the day is full of events to both commemorate what happened and also celebrate George Floyd’s life. So what are we expecting both there in Minneapolis and across the country?

Presha: Well, Diane, I think one real powerful moment is, you mentioned, certainly the Floyd family meeting privately with President Biden. Well, right around that time or immediately after, the governor here, Governor Walz, has signed a proclamation urging residents in Minnesota and Minneapolis to observe nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds of silence, representing the nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds that Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, but …

[Sounds of gunshot.]

Hold on …

[More gunshots, background voices saying “Go! Go! … Down! Down! … Behind the engine block!”]

Yep.

[“Behind the engine block!” …]

Macedo: All right, we’re going to check in with Alex in a bit. Sounds like there may be some trouble there in Minneapolis. We’re going to check back in with them. Obviously, we hope that they are safe.]

Only one person was wounded, as so often happened in black shootings. Needless to say, no arrests have been reported [1 Person Shot Near The Site Of George Floyd’s Murder On The Anniversary Of His Death, by Joe Hernandez, NPR, May 25, 2021].

Minneapolis Police say the individual's wound is believed to be non-life threatening. Witnesses told police a suspect vehicle left the area "at a high rate of speed." https://t.co/ndTmLJxQrR #USRC pic.twitter.com/Qc4eDffuGr

— Top U.S. & World News🗽 (@USRealityCheck) May 25, 2021

So yes, the folk there in George Floyd Square were indeed celebrating the Blessed Martyr’s life in an entirely appropriate fashion.

And yes, just as the street reporter told us there, Saint George’s family members, latest winners of the Ghetto Lottery, did indeed meet with Joe Biden at the White House just about at the time their co-ethnics opened fire in George Floyd Square.

We just have to hope the president knew what was going on, and didn’t think it was a cabinet meeting.

There was of course a political angle here. There’s a new federal bill before Congress, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which will make it the law of the land that if a juiced-up six-foot-six 240-pound black guy doesn’t want to submit to being arrested, he durn well doesn’t have to.

The bill is currently stalled in the Senate, but the Floyd family members there in the White House Tuesday took the opportunity to promote it to the reporters present.

George Floyd's family to meet with President Biden and Vice President Harris at the White House https://t.co/eAdF4hdt0A

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) May 25, 2021

One of Saint George’s brothers, a chap named Philonese Floyd, offered the following argument:

If you can make federal laws to protect the bird, which is the bald eagle, you can make federal laws to protect people of color.

[George Floyd’s family meets with Biden and Harris at White House, by Kate Sullivan, CNN, May 28, 2021 ].

Earlier by Ann Coulter: “I Will Not Be Scienced”—Experts Wrong, Covid Could Have Come From Wuhan Lab After All

I have been enthusiastically promoting Nicholas Wade’s long article on the origins of the COVID virus.

Wade compares the two common theories: (a) the “wet market” theory, that the virus jumped from bats, or from bats via some intermediate host, to humans at a live-animal market in Wuhan, China, and (b) the “lab escape” theory, that the virus originated in a lab, also in Wuhan, doing research into viruses.

Wade allows that we can’t say dispositively which theory is correct; but by a judicious and thoroughly-researched sifting of the facts we do know, he leaves his reader thinking that the lab escape theory is the more probable one.

I’ll confess some partiality here. I’m a major Wade fan. I read his articles in the New York Times for years, and I’ve reviewed at least three of his books, including his 2014 race-realist book A Troublesome Inheritance. I have some slight personal acquaintance with him, too; and yes, like me he’s an immigrant from Britain.

Well, this is a brilliant piece of science journalism; and I speak as a person who’s been reading science journalism since the Eisenhower administration. Wade might be wrong on the balance of probabilities—and the article where I found it, at the website of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has a good argumentative comment thread—but for the sifting of facts and the weighing of probabilities, this piece is a classic. [The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan? by Nicholas Wade, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 5, 2021]

That sifting, that weighing, that arguing, is science at its best. It doesn’t come easily to human beings. To quote myself

Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. There is probably a sizable segment in any population that believes scientists should be rounded up and killed.

We of that freakish brotherhood just turn away wearily when we hear some fool politician or pundit with a degree in Media Studies tell us to “follow the science!” Politics and political punditry are the last places to go to for scientific understanding. You need a guide who understands how long and grueling the path to scientific certainty is.

Nicholas Wade quotes Francis Bacon, grandfather of the Scientific Revolution, quote: “Truth is the daughter not of authority but time.” End quote. We don’t believe that the Earth goes round the Sun because Copernicus said so, although he did, or because Galileo agreed with him, although he did. We believe it because we have been persuaded by thousands of pieces of evidence accumulated over hundreds of years by legions of observers sifting, weighing, and arguing.

I should say, however, that prior to Wade’s article, the most striking piece I’d read on the origins of COVID was the one by Ron Unz at his own website in March this year, arguing a third possible origin for COVID. This is (c) the “American biowarfare” theory, that the virus was developed in our own labs then deliberately let loose in China by one of our intelligence agencies.

Ron’s article is almost as long as Nicholas Wade’s, and also comes with an argumentative comment thread—975 comments when I looked just now. There are of course all sorts of objections you can raise against it, although it’s highly probable your objection has already been posed in one of those 975.

What do I think of Ron’s theory? I wouldn’t rule it out, given the lawlessness and deep stupidity of our intelligence agencies. For sure, Ron makes as good a case for it as can be made.

And it is kind of … strange that other than China’s immediate neighbors, the second country to be seriously hit by COVID was Iran, bête noire of the neocons who run those agencies. Several senior Iranian officials died of COVID. Hmm.

However, I’m temperamentally inclined to believe that, while conspiracies and plots are glamorous, dramatic, and exciting to contemplate, carelessness and error are much bigger factors in human affairs. On those grounds, and having seen up close how things are done in China, I favor the lab escape theory as most probable.

Will Francis Bacon’s principle be vindicated? With the passing of enough time, shall we one day we may know the truth of the matter? I won’t be holding my breath. To either verify or decisively eliminate the lab-escape hypothesis, for example, we’d need to have a good look at the records of the Wuhan lab in late 2019 and early 2020, and have unsupervised interviews with relevant employees.

In communist China, that won’t happen. Those records have long since been reduced to their component molecules and the ashes dumped in the Mariana Trench; those employees, in the unlikely event they survived their interrogations by the secret police, are now employed at stone quarries on the Qinghai Plateau.

It’s coming up to fifty years ago since Lin Biao, who had been Mao Tse-tung’s right-hand man, disappeared from the scene and was declared to have been a counter-revolutionary traitor. Was he? Did he really die while trying to flee China? Why was he trying to flee? After fifty years, scholars are still arguing.

If the ChiCom regime collapses, we may get to learn something new about the origin of COVID. Unfortunately there are no signs of that happening. Right now, we just don’t know.

This topic has, though, generated some good deep public debate: not from the clown show of our national politics, of course, which is not capable of engaging with anything deeper than a kiddie pool, but from smart, sane, thoughtful inquirers like Nicholas Wade and Ron Unz. Thanks to them both for their work.

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

Crisis in the Middle East! scream the headlines. After all these years—what am I saying? all these decades—editors everywhere must have the phrase “Crisis In The Middle East” set up as a single-key macro. But what they don’t have set up as a macro: “No Escape From Diversity Hell”—the mounting internal problems Israel has because it is an ethnically divided society. Of course, that might mean acknowledging that the U.S. has these problems too. And, unlike Israel, it’s importing more.

But Crisis in the Middle East! Is this week’s news; so with a sigh of weary resignation I hit the pause button on my fantasy about a mud-wrestling contest between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Marjorie Taylor Greene confronts Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez outside House chamber, CNN, May 13, 2021) and turn my attention to it.

Last week there was some argy-bargy in Jerusalem over Arab families being evicted by Jews. That got Israeli Arabs out demonstrating; that culminated in major riots on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. This is a holy place, especially to Muslims, as their ancient mosques and shrines have mostly survived there while Judaism’s ancient temples haven’t. Israeli police went into the holiest mosque to control the riot, which of course riled up the Arabs even more.

It hasn’t helped that last week saw the end of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, immediately followed by the three-day festival of Eid al-Fitr. So for Muslims, religious passion was at its highest pitch this week—a sort of Muslim Easter.

Then the Hamas party that rules the Gaza Strip decided to join in the ructions by firing missiles into Israel’s towns and cities. This was terror-bombing, not strategic strikes. Israel naturally responded with air strikes on Gaza, strikes which were strategic, not just terroristic.

So, once again, we were off to the races.

The results of those missile and air strikes were considerably mixed. Israel’s Iron Dome system of missile interception seems to have done a good job, with less than ten percent of the Arab missiles getting through. Israeli air strikes, on the other hand, have offed several big-name Hamas leaders.

We are told, although evidence is hard to come by, that a lot of the Hamas missiles either blew up on launch or went up and then came down while still in Gaza, causing a lot of casualties. That aside, the official butcher’s bill for the week seems to be Israeli deaths in single digits, Gaza deaths about ten times as many. Given the random nature of the missile strikes, some of the Israeli deaths might have been Israeli Arabs; I haven’t seen any details on this.

There’s been a lot of background stuff helping to heat things up. The Trump administration moving our embassy to Jerusalem, brokering a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and curtailing cash aid to the Arab rulers of Gaza and the West Bank have raised the level of frustration among Arab militants.

Contrariwise, the April 7th announcement by Biden’s Secretary of State that we shall resume shoveling money into the Swiss bank accounts of the gangsters who run Gaza and the West Bank, has been taken as a encouraging signal that Uncle Sam is back in sucker mode.[The United States Restores Assistance for the Palestinians, Antony J. Blinken, April 7, 2021]

There’s politics, too, on both sides. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been in an unstable position for some time now, and could use a patriotic boost. Hamas likewise, tired of playing second fiddle in the diplomatic game to the Fatah party running the West Bank, which is supposed to be in political union with Gaza, but which hasn’t allowed an election for fifteen years[Elections – Mapping Palestinian Politics – European Council on Foreign Relations].

And in still deeper background, there seems to have been slow-rising instability between Arabs and Jews in Israel itself. In the troubles of these last few days, synagogues have been burned by Arab mobs [Soldier viciously beaten in Jaffa, synagogue burned in Lod, as rioting deepens, Times of Israel, May 13, 2021] and Arabs dragged from their cars and beaten by Jewish mobs [ Mob ‘lynching of Arab’ aired live on Israeli TV , AFP, May 12, 2021]

Where is it all headed? The politicians and diplomats are quacking and bleating, of course, with talk about “de-escalating the violence” and “outreach with the Palestinian leadership.” [Biden official heading to Israel amid efforts to end Gaza fighting, by Jacob Magid, Times of Israel, May 12, 2021]

My guess: the mini-war will go on for a couple of weeks, then the diplomats will come to some agreement on suitable bribes to be paid, and then everything will quiet down for a few years until the next “Crisis in the Middle East!” Lather, rinse, repeat.

If I don’t sound terrifically engaged with this, that’s because I’m not. I’d rather be back on the Barcalounger with MTG and AOC.

There are, however, things to be said that are pertinent to us, to civic-minded Americans, so I’ll have a go at saying them.

It’s those strains between Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews—that is, within Israel itself, not across its borders—that got my attention. In this week’s context the ill feeling isn’t hard to understand, but it’s been going on for a while, and apparently getting worse.

Sample headline from the Jerusalem Post, May 14th: Is Israel reaching a tipping point with internal clashes? Quote:

In October 2015, after a terror attack in Beersheba, a crowd lynched a bystander named Haftom Zarhum from Eritrea, claiming they thought he was a terrorist. In 2015, a mob in Majdal Shams attacked an ambulance and lynched a Syrian man who was wounded in fighting across the border and who the IDF was taking to a hospital. Druze accused the man of being a Jihadist involved in attacks on Druze in Syria.

(The Druze are an Arab minority practicing a non-Muslim religion).

Several American observers have remarked on the similarity in news coverage between the disturbances in Israel’s streets and those in our own—Antifa and Black Lives Matter goons smashing windows, beating up motorists, and so on.

[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

See, also, by Steve Sailer: Tories Smash Labour In Blue Collar By-election

I haven’t lived in England for thirty years now, and have been a U.S. citizen for nearly twenty, so I don’t have much interest in politics over there. I do browse some posts by British commentators, though, as part of my morning trawl through the internet looking for items of interest, and now and then something catches my eye—something I think is pertinent to our own politics here in the U.S.A.

This one didn’t just catch my eye; it had me jumping to my feet, fist-pumping to a degree that endangered the ceiling light, and emitting Rebel Yells.

The writer was James Delingpole. I thought I remembered that name as belonging to the ballet critic at the London Spectator circa 1980. Looking James Delingpole up, though, I see he was born in 1965, so that seems improbable. He’s married with three children, too, so … ballet critic? Eh, whatever, probably a false memory.

Mr. Delingpole certainly got my attention with Delingpole: Why I’m Not Voting Conservative on Thursday—Or, Indeed, Ever Again…, Breitbart, May 5 2021.

You need just a little background here.

Britain has two big political parties: the Conservative Party, a.k.a. the Tories, and the Labour Party. The Tories currently control Parliament under Party Leader and Prime Minister Boris Johnson. There are also some minor parties represented in Parliament, the most troublesome one currently being the Scottish Nationalists.

The Conservative Party naturally advertises itself as the more conservative of the two big parties, standing against radical change. The Labour Party was historically the party of, duh, Labour: of horny-handed sons of toil—coal miners, steel workers, ship-builders, and working-class folk in general. A lot of big names in the old Labour Party—for example Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the post-WW2 Labour government—came up through the ranks of the union movement.

Like our own Democratic Party, though, Britain’s Labour Party has in recent decades been taken over by gentry liberals. To the degree that unions still play a role, they are the fake “unions” of the public sector, lobbying not for a bigger share of the profits of capitalism, but for a bigger share of the public fisc.

A typical Labour member of parliament seventy years ago had started his working life as a coal miner; the typical one today drew his first paycheck as a lecturer in sociology at some minor college.

Well, Thursday this week there were elections over there. These mostly weren’t parliamentary elections. There was a national general election two years ago, and the next one isn’t due for another three years. Thursday’s elections were for regional and municipal positions—mayors, town councillors and such. You could think of it very approximately as like our mid-terms, although more heated than usual because last year’s elections were postponed on account of covid.

There was one parliamentary seat up for grabs Thursday: Hartlepool, a grimy seaport in the far northeast of England. (It’s fictional hometown of one of Britain’s most famous cartoon characters, the flat-capped, working-class loafer Andy Capp).

Who is Andy Capp voting for in today’s Hartlepool by-election? pic.twitter.com/O4iRyizfOP

— Patrick Sean 🥞 (@buffalopaddy) May 6, 2021

Hartlepool is old-school Labour, hasn’t had a Tory M.P. for sixty years.

🗳️🗳️🗳️🗳️🗳️

My latest cartoon for tomorrow's @Telegraph

Subscribe to my weekly newsletter to receive my unseen cartoons: https://t.co/JNDhrYJMFH pic.twitter.com/gnL0KFHTE8

— Matt Cartoons (@MattCartoonist) May 5, 2021

The Labour M.P. resigned in March under a cloud of allegations of sexual harassment, so this was a special election to replace him.

What about this James Delingpole piece that I liked so much?

It thrust, and what will return an echo from the bosoms of American conservatives, is the pathetic uselessness of institutional Conservatism.

In Britain, institutional Conservatism means of course the Conservative Party, who have held power over there for the past eleven years.

You have to qualify that, and Delingpole does, by noting that for the first five of those years the Tories were in coalition with a junior partner, the Liberal Democrats, a sort of concentrated essence of gentry liberalism, so they were under some restraint. For the last six years, though the Tories have ruled supreme.

Delingpole’s beef is that those eleven years were, from a conservative point of view, an utter waste of time. The three big-“C” Conservative Prime Ministers accomplished nothing of a small-“c” conservative nature.

The only small-“c” conservative advance in those years was Brexit. That was by referendum, though, and against the inclinations of big-“C” Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who resigned when the referendum result came out.

The signature achievement of Cameron’s Prime Ministership was the legalization of homosexual marriage.

Brexit aside, Delingpole gives a wish-list of seven things that a small-“c” conservative person, eleven years ago, might have hoped for from a big-“C” Conservative government. Here’s his list. I’ve abbreviated the entries, with just a couple of short direct quotes.

1. Control immigration.
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