As everyone knows, over the last couple of decades California has become a one-party Democratic state. Democrats hold a better than three-fourths hyper-majority in the State Assembly and their control is nearly as overwhelming in the State Senate. California has our nation’s largest Congressional delegation, but of its 53 members only seven are Republican.

Not only is every statewide officeholder a Democrat, but no Republican has won such a race in almost 15 years, with many of the recent contests not even featuring a Republican on the November ballot. The once-proud Republican Party of Reagan and Nixon has been reduced to almost total irrelevance.

This same pattern has held in national elections, with Donald Trump losing the 2016 California vote by a remarkable 30 points and the most recent polling data suggesting a similar outcome this November.

Except for tiny Hawaii, California is now America’s most heavily non-white state, with our white European population reduced to little more than 30% of the total. But such demographic factors explain only part of those lop-sided 2016 election results since white Californians supported Trump at a rate 20-25 points lower than whites in the rest of the country. If America’s entire white national electorate had voted like its Golden State counterpart, Trump would have lost all fifty states, mostly by huge landslides, and suffered by far the greatest electoral disaster in American history. All the Trump-hating pundits would have spent Election Night laughing and saying “I told you so!”

Although liberal domination of California state politics is not quite as absolute as Democratic control, the state is certainly very liberal, with our elected officials supporting all sorts of causes and policies that would be anathema in much of the rest of the country.

Given these political realities and expecting a heavy November turnout, state Democratic leaders believed they had the perfect opportunity this year to undo one of the last hated legacies of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, the Prop. 209 ban on governmental Affirmative Action, passed into law by a relatively narrow 55% to 45% margin in 1996. Democrats felt quite confident that a full generation of demographic and ideological shifts had totally transformed the electorate, allowing them to win a resounding victory for “racial diversity” at the ballot box.

The plan to restore Affirmative Action became an unstoppable political juggernaut, with the Assembly voting 60-14 and the Senate 30-10 to place Prop. 16 on the November ballot, repealing Prop. 209. The project enjoyed the strong support of popular Gov. Gavin Newsom and nearly all other prominent political leaders, as well as the unanimous backing of the UC Board of Regents and the heads of all three public higher education systems. Leading sports teams such as the San Francisco Giants and the Golden State Warriors added their endorsements.

California’s Attorney-General is a liberal Democrat, and his office provided what seemed like a slam-dunk official title description for the ballot measure: “Allows Diversity as a Factor in Public Employment, Education, and Contracting Decisions.” In this day and age, what California voter could possibly oppose “Diversity”?

So much for theory. PPIC, California’s leading public policy thinktank, just released the first major poll on the November vote, and our morning newspapers revealed that the attempt to restore Affirmative Action will probably lose, perhaps even by a huge landslide.

The traditional rule in California politics is that support for a ballot measure steadily declines as Election Day approaches, with undecideds overwhelmingly breaking No. Therefore, at this stage a successful measure should probably have a lead of at least 10 points. For example, experts believe that Prop. 15—a split-roll tax initiative—appears to be in trouble given its weak 51% support.

Meanwhile, only 31% of voters are currently backing Prop. 16, aimed at restoring Affirmative Action. Anything might still happen, but those are dismal numbers just a couple of weeks before ballots are mailed out.

The demographic distribution of support also tells an interesting story. Whites are probably one-third or less of California residents, but for reasons of age and naturalization, they still constitute a slight majority of likely voters, and only 26% of whites support Prop. 16. It appears that most white California Democrats refuse to support Affirmative Action.

Latinos are California’s largest group, currently representing 40% of the total population and perhaps eventually rising to an outright majority according to some projections. Only 41% of Latinos seem to support Affirmative Action.

Asians have been the group most strongly opposed to the restoration of Affirmative Action, fearing that racial discrimination would exclude their children from Berkeley, UCLA, and other top UC campuses, and a few years ago their vocal opposition had blocked a previous attempt to repeal Prop. 209. PPIC polls normally break out their Asian numbers, but in this instance Asians and blacks were lumped together, registering a combined 40% support for Prop. 16. Perhaps PPIC feared that revealing Asians (and blacks) as extreme outliers on this divisive issue would produce bitter feelings. Since Asian respondents outnumbered blacks by more than 2-to-1 and probably showed very little support for Prop. 16, it seems likely that black support for Affirmative Action was overwhelming, probably in the 60-70% range.

The low level of Hispanic support for Affirmative Action may surprise many rightwingers, but it makes perfect sense. The overwhelming majority of Hispanics work in the private sector, often in small businesses where most or all of the other employees are also Hispanic. If you and most of your coworkers are Hispanic, Affirmative Action is simply meaningless.

Prop. 209 had required color-blind university admissions since 1996, but Hispanic students have nonetheless still done rather well over the last couple of decades, actually overtaking whites in University of California admissions a few years ago, though still heavily outnumbered by Asians at Berkeley and UCLA. Hispanic families seem quite satisfied with this situation, and have provided no grassroots support for restoring Affirmative Action in university admissions.

With the exception of a tiny sliver of “professional Hispanics” who have made an entire career out of their ethnicity, Affirmative Action has never historically been much of a Hispanic issue. Indeed, I once noted the strong support Pete Wilson had received in his first 1990 campaign for governor.

For many years I had predicted to my friends that the increasingly bizarre and incompetent behavior of America’s ruling elites might soon result in a major “negative discontinuity” for our unfortunate country, the sort of massive event that future authors would use to divide one section of a thick history textbook from the next.

I couldn’t quite say what form that “discontinuity” might take, but I suggested possibilities along the lines of another Great Depression or some huge social upheaval or perhaps even a world war. The notion of an uncontrolled disease epidemic never crossed my mind, but our Covid-19 outbreak—together with the totally incompetent governmental response and the resulting social and economic disaster—seems to fit the bill quite nicely, even producing a triple-header of national calamities.

Or perhaps a quadruple-header. Although a world war still seems distant, the recent demonization of China, a bipartisan project of Democrats and Republicans alike, has already been labeled a new Cold War by leading journalistic observers, and cold wars can easily turn hot. Just a couple of weeks ago, American provocations in the vicinity of Chinese military exercises led the Chinese to respond by test-firing several of their vaunted “carrier-killer” missiles, weapons widely believed capable of immediately sending any of our primary power-projection platforms to the bottom of the ocean.

For three generations, the US has carefully avoided any military conflict with a near-peer, but that traditional forbearance may now have been replaced by extreme recklessness. Many of our cities have been set aflame in urban rioting, we have seen a huge spike in violent crime, and massive unemployment continues. So if the incumbent’s poll numbers look bleak as Election Day nears, a political October Surprise of major sabre-rattling and brinksmanship seems quite possible, and a sudden misstep might then put us at war in the South China Sea.

Chinese anti-carrier ballistic missiles have been developed to prevent an American blockade of their vital offshore waters, and many analysts doubt we have any effective defense. The loss of a carrier would mean thousands of American deaths and the possible collapse of our perceived control of the world’s sea lanes, perhaps ending the dollar’s long reign as the world’s reserve currency and thereby massively impoverishing our citizenry. A frantic American government might react by escalating to nuclear weapons, with horrific and unforeseeable consequences.

Greatly increasing this risk of war has been the very dangerous public game played for months by the Trump Administration and its political allies. The response of America’s national government to the Covid-19 outbreak was among the worst and most incompetent in the world, with only India and Brazil challenging our place at the bottom of the charts, and it is difficult to imagine a worse political nightmare for an incumbent during a presidential election year. The widespread national lockdowns produced an unprecedented spike in business failures and unemployment, which have only temporarily been mitigated by raising our national debt to levels last seen at the close of the Second World War.

Under such difficult circumstances, even the most sober and cautious of political leaders would naturally seek some desperate means of diverting blame elsewhere, and no one has ever accused our current president of such sobriety. So it was hardly surprising that for weeks during the peak of the New York outbreak and the early national lockdowns, Trump and his top officials explicitly suggested that the deadly virus had come from a Wuhan lab, thus accusing the Chinese government of being responsible for our deaths and economic disaster, with such charges being widely echoed in the media.

Although that public war of words has now subsided, the impact still remains. According to a poll taken at the end of April, a remarkable 45% of Americans believed that the deadly virus had “probably” or “definitely” originated in such a laboratory, with 74% of Republicans having that belief. Consider that nearly 200,000 Americans have already died and our business economy has suffered trillions of dollars in losses. Most great wars have been launched on merely a sliver of such justification.

This is an exceptionally dangerous situation, and we would naturally expect that our leading national publications would devote enormous resources to carefully investigating such dramatic charges and perhaps refuting them, especially given that their editorial staffs so greatly loathe the current occupant of the White House.

It sometimes seems like every edition of my morning New York Times includes one or more headlines screaming the phrase “Trump lied”, generally with reference to some casually insulting Tweet about a leading Democrat. But the Great Satan’s public accusation that the Chinese government has been directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 200,000 American deaths seems to have received far less scrutiny. Both the Wall Street Journal and the Times have published investigative reports on some of these issues, but these have been extremely deferential in their coverage, and anyway lacked the depth and detail that is so clearly warranted.

A natural venue for serious investigative journalism would be the prestigious national magazines that have traditionally provided long-form reporting, with The Atlantic and The New York Times Sunday Magazine being the most obvious possibilities. But these publications have increasingly shifted their focus to “wokeness” and seem to believe that the investigative research necessary to help deflect a world war with China has far less importance than a soulful piece on the emotional plight of transgendered black rappers.

Fortunately, the ease of Internet publishing has allowed the creation of a multitude of new webzine outlets, able to fill the gaps created by the increased frivolity and irrelevance of their established predecessors. The emerging landscape of alternative media is a broad one, with individual publications possessing different strengths and weaknesses. For example, our own webzine has very high traffic but is among the most controversial and therefore one of the least likely to be mentioned in mainstream outlets.

Situated at the opposite end of this spectrum is Quillette. Launched in 2015 by former mainstream journalist Claire Lehmann, this webzine is sufficiently respectable that few journalists or academics would fear any association. Establishing such respectability is merely a means toward an end, and Quillette has now justified that effort many times over by publishing a remarkable four-part series analyzing the wider Covid-19 accusations against China. The author, Philippe Lemoine is a Cornell graduate student originally from France and his exhaustive 31,000 word opus might once have appeared as the cover-story of one of our leading national publications prior to their lapse into decadence. I have seen nothing else so comprehensive on that subject, and I would strongly recommend that the articles be read by everyone interested in this important topic.

• The China Syndrome Part I: Outbreak
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For forty years I carefully read the New York Times in hard copy each and every morning, eager to discover what had transpired since the previous day. But just in the last few months, my commitment has begun to flag, and my eyes often only lightly glance at half or more of the articles and their columnar headlines.

I’d never thought much of Donald Trump, but can’t seem to work up the enthusiasm to read yet another article headlining the “lies” of our Great Satan or his coterie of lesser Satans. The endless villainies of his Luciferian ally Vladimir Putin have grown dull to my mental tongue. The diabolical wickedness of China, whom Trump had supposedly so recently courted, elicits little interest. Closer to home, my eyes skip over another “social distancing” advice column about Covid-19, or further explanations of how “peaceful protesters” had recently set a government building on fire in Portland, Oregon, or destroyed Chicago’s wealthiest downtown shopping district.

The Business Section reports that the worst disease outbreak in a century, the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, and the worst national rioting in two generations has produced unprecedented gains in share prices on Wall Street, but the staff writers have apparently forgotten the word “bubble.” Many days the Arts Section seems to have become almost monochromatically black. So my daily regular morning ritual now takes much less time than it did in the past.

I can’t exactly plot the trajectory of this sharp drop in my recent interest. But I certainly noticed the change not longer after a Twitter-mob forced the Times to summarily purge for insufficient “wokeness” its highly-regarded Editorial Page Editor, widely considered a leading contender to run the paper, perhaps suggesting that the journalists changed their coverage and writing style to avoid a similar fate. I had always read my morning newspapers at a local coffee-shop, but the Coronavirus outbreak ended that possibility, thereby disrupting my routine. And my years of denouncing the dishonesty of “Our American Pravda” in my own articles may have finally begun to register in my own mind.

There are occasional exceptions to this pattern. Earlier this month the Times carefully tabulated our national mortality figures and determined that our “excess deaths” from early March to the end of July had already exceeded 200,000, indicating that the American body-count from our Covid-19 epidemic was considerably larger than generally assumed, and might even reach the half million mark by the end of the year. But examples of such solid reporting seem few and far between these days.

The obvious decline of the Times is especially apparent to me each morning when I compare it with the rival Wall Street Journal, which I read immediately afterward. After Rupert Murdoch acquired the Journal in 2007, most observers predicted a sad fate at the hands of the proprietor whose early Fleet Street media empire had been built upon on the frontal nudity of the Page Three Girls of his tabloid Sun. But Murdoch totally confounded those skeptics, providing his new flagship broadsheet with huge financial backing and a hands-off editorial policy, thereby elevating it from a business-focused publication to a near-peer rival to the Gray Lady at a time when so many other papers were about to begin shriveling from massive loss of advertising. Within a couple of years, even such inveterate Murdoch-haters as The Nation acknowledged this surprising reality.

Superb journalist resources unshackled by extreme “political correctness” allow an outstanding product, and this has certainly been demonstrated by the Journal‘s regular front-page investigative reports. A few days ago, our continuing Covid-19 disaster prompted yet another of these, which I think lacked only a few crucial elements to be worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.

Numerous publications have documented America’s severe mistakes in combating the disease, but this 4,500 word WSJ report focused upon the serious mishandling of the original outbreak by Chinese authorities.

The article revealed that top public health officials at China’s Center for Disease Control only became aware of the situation on December 30th, when they learned that at least 25 suspected cases of a mysterious illness had already occurred in Wuhan during that month. But as the writers noted, the outbreak had certainly begun somewhat earlier:

Even a fully empowered China CDC would likely have missed the very first cases of the coronavirus, which probably began spreading around Wuhan in October or November, most likely in people who never showed symptoms, or did but never saw a doctor, researchers say.

All of this new information seems quite consistent with what had previously been discovered by America’s leading media outlets. But the Journal writers seem to have missed one additional fact that could have elevated this important story from a mundane investigation to a sensational expose. Although they documented that the Chinese government only learned of the Wuhan outbreak at the end of December, they seemed unaware that more than a month earlier American intelligence officials had distributed a secret report to our military allies describing the “cataclysmic” disease outbreak then underway in Wuhan.

A few months ago, I had noted the clear implications of this bizarre discrepancy in timing:

For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.

As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.

Back in early May Google took the remarkable step of deranking our entire website, placing our many thousands of content pages near the absolute bottom of its search results, where almost no one would ever see them. If a user included the keyword “unz” in a search string, our pages would still come up, but otherwise they would be almost totally invisible. So people specifically looking for our website could still find it, but almost no one else.

Google holds a worldwide monopoly in search, having a total market share greater than 90% and therefore functioning as a global gatekeeper to the Internet, so this harsh action had serious consequences. Our regular daily traffic dropped by 15% or more, especially reducing the inflow of casual new visitors who might discover our alternative media webzine in an unrelated search. The national wave of urban turmoil that broke out at the end of that same month soon overwhelmed this decline and lifted our traffic to new heights, but the severe loss of new readers remained. So although our daily pageviews have set new records, the number of unique visitors to our website has remained substantially diminished.

Then a couple of weeks ago, various journalists reported an even more severe manipulation of Google’s search system, with dozens of top Republican-leaning websites, including Breitbart and Drudge, suddenly discovering that all their content had entirely disappeared from Google while liberal-leaning publications remained unaffected. This search engine “glitch” ended within a day and the conservative websites reappeared, but there was widespread speculation that Google had added a “kill switch” that could cleanse the Internet of all right-wing content at a moment’s notice, and someone had inadvertently tested this powerful new media weapon in public, thereby revealing its existence.

A presidential election is less than three months away, and conservatives have long complained that the Silicon Valley tech giants are biased against them. So the very real possibility that Google was road-testing the ability to “disappear” all conservative publications at some crucial moment must surely have raised concerns even among the most level-headed.

I therefore naturally assumed that this crucial issue of biased search results would become a central point of questioning during last week’s Congressional testimony of Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Surely the Republican members of the committee would ask him why all the websites in their ideological camp had suddenly disappeared from Google, and whether this suggested deliberate plans by the Monopolist of Mountain View to slant its search results against their side of the aisle. Google displays the results of six billion searches each day, so such bias would probably have a political impact millions of times greater than the alleged “Russiagate manipulation” that had so dominated our national headlines for many months.

However, I was sorely mistaken. Neither the national newspapers nor other publications reported any such line of questioning. This suggested that the Republican members of the committee were either reluctant to antagonize their powerful witness, or more likely, were just too ignorant of the Internet to realize that if Google suddenly “disappeared” all their media outlets, many of their voters and their own seats in Congress would soon follow. So I was forced to listen to the entire three and a half hour hearing on YouTube, then afterward hunted around in vain for a complete transcript.

Although the Republicans made little attempt to pin down Google’s chief, some of Pichai’s responses certainly seemed to suggest that Google was committed to providing unbiased search results, especially during his questioning by Rep. Steve King (R-IA). He assured his listeners that Google never “put its thumb on the scale” of search results, nor allowed “manual intervention” to corrupt its objective algorithms. Any casual listener would surely assume that Google search results were ranked solely by the number and quality of their links and sources rather than modified for reasons of ideological bias or political expediency. Yet it is quite easy to demonstrate the contrary. I recounted last year:

As the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and two George Polk awards, the late Sydney Schanberg was widely regarded as one of the greatest American war correspondents of the twentieth century. His exploits during our ill-fated Indo-Chinese War had become the basis of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, which probably established him as the most famous journalist in America after Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, and he had also served as a top editor at The New York Times. A decade ago, he published his greatest expose, providing a mountain of evidence that America had deliberately left behind hundreds of POWs in Vietnam and he fingered then-presidential candidate John McCain as the central figure in the later official cover-up of that monstrous betrayal. The Arizona senator had traded on his national reputation as our best-known former POW to bury the story of those abandoned prisoners, permitting America’s political establishment to escape serious embarrassment. As a result, Sen. McCain earned the lush rewards of our generous ruling elites, much like his own father Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., who had led the cover-up of the deliberate 1967 Israeli attack on the U.S.S. Liberty, which killed or wounded over 200 American servicemen.

As publisher of The American Conservative, I ran Schanberg’s remarkable piece as a cover story, and across several websites over the years it has surely been read many hundreds of thousands of times, including a huge spike around the time of McCain’s death. I therefore find it rather difficult to believe that the many journalists investigating McCain’s background might have remained unaware of this material. Yet no hints of these facts were provided in any of the articles appearing in any remotely prominent media outlets as can be seen by searching for web pages containing “McCain and Schanberg” dated around the time of the Senator’s passing.

The last few weeks have seen the greatest wave of American urban unrest in two generations. Massive protests, riots, and looting have swept across dozens of our major cities, accompanied by an enormous amount of political vandalism, often targeting monuments to our country’s former presidents and other historical figures.

Most importantly, powerful elements of our political, corporate, and media elite have now declared their support for various policy goals of the newly-elevated Black Lives Matter movement, even sometimes agreeing that local police departments should be “defunded” and that our most celebrated national heroes such as Washington and Jefferson should be removed from their places of honor in our nation’s capital, proposals that would have been dismissed as utter lunacy just a couple of months ago. Many observers, not least in China, have noted the striking similarities this turmoil bears to aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. We seem rapidly heading towards some unknown but probably unfortunate destination.

This enormous national upheaval has centered on race, probably leading many individuals to reassess their racial understanding of the world. But some of these shifts may have been in less expected directions.

I recently received a short email from someone in his thirties with whom I’d been a little friendly over the last dozen years. He had spent most of that period solidly located within the racialist/HBD right-wing, regularly writing for its publications and even working with some of its leading figures during part of that period. This background lent particular weight to his conclusions.

He entitled his note “You were a prophet” and then declared:

I was a fool to believe that immigration mattered, that there was anything in American politics and culture other than the sadomasochistic relationship between white liberals and blacks.

He also provided some harsh appraisals of prominent anti-immigration right-wingers:

It’s amazing just how wrong people like Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan, and Steve Sailer have been on all these issues…Their mistakes are partly racialism, but more a degenerate nationalism, that ends up sympathizing more with criminals than honest people who contribute to society and mind their own business.

Although my correspondent did not refer to any particular articles of mine, there was really no need. Over the last quarter century, I have published hundreds of thousands of words on the contentious subjects of immigration and race, and my most recent writings take positions not much different from those that I had presented in the early 1990s.

Over the last few years and especially since the election of President Donald Trump, immigration has returned to the center stage of American politics, becoming the primary focus of most right-wing activists and pundits.

I regarded this approach as extremely misguided and counter-productive. Three years ago in the aftermath of the Charlottesville debacle, I circulated a private letter to a couple of dozen prominent figures in the reigning Alt-Right movement, then publicly released it the following year, along with two lengthy columns devoted to similar topics. These three pieces together provoked an enormous outpouring of responses, amounting to nearly 4,000 comments and 600,000 words, with some supportive but the overwhelming majority quite hostile. Those so interested may wish to revisit those discussions and decide for themselves whether or not my analysis has proven correct.

• An Open Letter to the “Alt-Right” and Others • August 21, 2017 • 2,000 Words • 2,034 Comments
• Racial Politics in America and in California • November 12, 2018 • 7,400 Words • 1,040 Comments
• Immigration, Building a Wall, and Hispanic Crime • January 14, 2019 • 5,800 Words • 882 Comments

From the time I first became involved in immigration issues three decades ago, it soon became apparent that the overwhelming majority of the strong opposition was racially-driven. John Tanton was the original founder of the modern movement and he had his roots in environmentalism and population control, while Roy Beck, a more recent leading figure, seemed most concerned with the impact of a heavy inflow of foreign workers upon native employment. But such individuals were the clear exceptions. I would say that something like 90% of the energetic core membership of the anti-immigration groups were soft-core or perhaps crypto-White Nationalists, with the movement representing a safe and somewhat “politically correct” haven for once-common ideological views that had gradually become too controversial to directly advocate.

During all of this time, a dystopian nightmare scenario dominated the fears of these individuals, involving the collapse of our stable middle-class society under a massive influx of non-white foreigners, a population impossible to assimilate and deeply hostile to our culture. Crime and social disorder would skyrocket and the cherished symbols of our national heritage would come under fierce attack. Once California and the rest of the Southwest became heavily Hispanic, a secessionist movement would naturally become a powerful political force, possibly seeking to reunite with Mexico

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This sort of apocalyptic vision was indicated by the title of one of the earliest works in the genre, The Path to National Suicide, published in 1990 by the late Lawrence Auster. Over the years, several bestsellers have been produced along roughly similar lines, including Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation in 1995, Pat Buchanan’s Death of the West in 2001, and most recently Ann Coulter’s Adios America! in 2015. Even figures of the highest academic repute have sometimes voiced similar fears, with Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington, one of America’s most eminent political scientists, publishing The Clash of Civilizations in 1996 and Who Are We? in 2004.

And whether we take our information from the pages of the New York Times articles or from informal smartphone videos, exactly these long-dreaded scenes of violent disorder and cultural upheaval have now appeared throughout much of our country. But the circumstances have been quite different than any of these writers had predicted.

Over the last few decades, America’s urban centers have been become overwhelmingly non-white and heavily immigrant, with residents of European ancestry these days reduced to less than 35% of the total. But within this national average, some cities are still largely white, and these have demonstrated an intriguing pattern.