Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzhock Adlerstein write:
There is no gene for hatred. Youngsters learn it from others—from parents and peers; from sermons and social media. So Americans would do well to heed calls to oppose hateful barbs aimed at our Muslim neighbors.
It also follows that officials should be vigilant about attitudes of refugees seeking to emigrate to the United States. The Syrian people are trapped in a black hole of civil war, a criminal regime, wholesale slaughter and ISIS barbarity. The world has witnessed a desperate exodus with migrants and refugees literally washing up on mostly European shores. Here in the U.S, the President finds himself caught in a fierce debate with critics demanding that we know more about each applicant, lest there be ISIS operatives amongst them. Others object to questions visa applicants are asked, including: “Have you ever been a member of a terrorist organization?” Clearly, the entire vetting system needs a reboot.
A good place to start is in understanding the values the American-wannabees carry in their luggage.
Syria, before its descent into chaos, formalized a twelve-year educational system in 1967. Despite the secular tendencies of the Baath Party that controlled Syria for the last half-century, it included mandatory religious education. An overriding goal was convincing the majority Sunni population that the small governing Alawite sect were also good Muslims. The religious education incorporated by the Ministry of Education hewed to a strict – albeit not fundamentalist – Sunni interpretation, to the exclusion of all others.
Only a small number of studies of Syrian textbooks have been published, although they stop around 2003. Nonetheless, they give us a good picture of what Syrians who may soon be our neighbors were taught for decades.
According to one of the most cited studies, Prof. Joshua Landis at University of Oklahoma found that the Syrian textbooks do not malign Christians, unlike those of other Arab countries. However, Jews – not Israel – are singled out for contempt and extermination. A tenth grade text book teaches: “The logic of justice requires the application of a single inescapable verdict on the Jews; namely, that their criminal intentions be turned against them and that they be eliminated.”
All other religions are treated even more poorly. Landis’ summary: “Islam accepts only two choices for pagans [i.e. disbelievers, or members of any religion other than those that revere the Bible]: that they convert to Islam or be killed.”
Do attitudes of intolerance affect behavior? In a recent interview with La Stampa, Syed Farook, the father of San Bernardino mass murderer Syed Rizwan Farook, spoke of his efforts to convince his son that taking up arms was not necessary. His message to his son was hardly a model of tolerance and understanding. “Certain problems disappear on their own,” he said. “In two years Israel will not exist anymore. Geopolitics is changing: Russia, China and America don’t want Jews there anymore. They are going to bring the Jews back to Ukraine.”
Do attitudes determine behavior? Not always. But we owe it to ourselves to learn as much about pervasive attitudes in other societies, and figure out their impact on any candidate seeking admission to the US.
How much faith do you place in the U.S. government figuring this out? I have none.
As I have written previously:
When it comes to Israel, Dennis Prager wants to keep it a Jewish state. Mar. 24, 2014, Dennis's questions to his guest Caroline Glick revealed his concerns:
* "Everybody thinks one-state is the end of the Jewish state."
* "On what do you base that? Why have we been fed the wrong [demographic] figures all these years?"
* "If the [demographic] numbers had not been false, you would not be advocating the one-state solution?"
* "[Her book] is primarily based on what she contends are the real numbers of Jews and Palestinians in the area west of the Jordan river, west of the state of Jordan, and if everybody was in one state, there would still be a two-thirds Jewish majority."
* "The notion of a Palestinian state would end… What's in this for a Palestinian?"
Caroline: "Full civil rights. Freedom. Everything."
Dennis: "Everything but their own national expression."
"What do you say to having millions of people in your population who want to annihilate your state?"
Caroline: "We're talking about three million people and a lot of them do but what can you do? You have to prevent them doing that… I don't understand why we should have sympathy for aspirations of people whose aspirations are based upon negating us and destroying us."
Dennis: "Having within your population millions of people who loathe you and feel they were cheated out of their own national expression, you don't worry about that?"
Yet, when it comes to America, Dennis has long supported mass immigration and he has expressed no interest in maintaining a majority population of whites and a dominantly white culture (even though it was whites who created the United States of America). Echoing Bill Bennett, Dennis Prager has often said he is "more afraid of what America will do to immigrants than what immigrants will do to America."
Jan. 9, 2014, Dennis said: "It's a nation of immigrants. The difference is us, not them. We tried to Americanize them then."
Au contraire, wrote Steve Sailer in 2004:
But look at Europe. Its experience proves that the different immigrant approaches of the host countries matters less than what the immigrants bring with them…
Finally, the French have traditionally tried to do with their immigrants almost exactly what the neocons recommend here: cultural assimilation, education in civics theories, monolingualism, meritocracy, separation of church and state, and all the rest…
Officially, France is what the neocons say America is: a "Proposition Nation" defined by adherence to ideological concepts rather than by descent. Indeed, the American and French "propositions" are basically identical…
But they've failed miserably with their huge North African Muslim population, which now makes up somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of the population. (The French are so neocon that they refuse to count by ethnicity.)
Indeed, this French neocon philosophy probably can't survive the impact of the Muslims. France's Muslims are now so poor and hostile that the most dynamic political figure, the center-right Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy (himself the son of aristocratic Hungarian immigrants), has called for France to junk its tradition of equality under the law and institute affirmative action for Muslims.
Similarly, Brazil, despite its endless boasting about having no race problem, recently imposed racial preferences.
The trend in France, and Brazil, follows Sailer's Law of Quotas:
"In the long run, ideology is irrelevant; instead, there will be affirmative action if at least one politically significant ethnic group is well below average in competitive ability."
What Mexicans in particular and Latin Americans (outside of Cubans) have done in general in America mirrors their low achievement in their native lands. Edward S. Rubinstein wrote in 2004:
A new study by the United Way of Los Angeles finds that 53 percent of the city's adult population—3.8 million people—are functionally illiterate. [United Way, Literacy@Work: The L.A. Workforce Literacy Project, September 2004.]
The percentage soars to 84 percent in heavily Hispanic south L.A., dropping to 44 percent in the greater San Fernando Valley.
When we last checked, only 41 percent of Los Angeles' population was foreign-born. Thus the illiteracy problem in that city is not limited to immigrants. Many of their U.S.-born children must also be functionally illiterate.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about half of hispanics in America are basically illiterate, and the problem is getting worse. "Among Hispanics, the percentage with Below Basic prose literacy increased 9 percentage points between 1992 and 2003…" By contrast, only 7% of whites and 24% of blacks are this illiterate.
Oct. 5, 2010, Dennis wrote an open letter to American hispanics. Though for high rates of legal immigration, Dennis said: "No country in the world can allow unlimited immigration. If America opened its borders to all those who wish to live here, hundreds of millions of people would come in. That would, of course, mean the end of the United States economically and culturally."
Hispanic-Americans, along with blacks, are located primarily at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. They consume more government services than they pay for in taxes and it seems to be in their group interest to vote for higher taxes and more welfare. By contrast, it is in America's group interest to restrict such immigration.
Prager's pro-immigration position is closer to the neoconservatives (William Kristol, John Podhoretz, Charles Krauthammer, etc) than to the conservatives such as Steve Sailer:
The neocons argue that immigrants should be admitted based on their current—or eventual —assent to the propositions underlying the United States government, such as “All men are created equal.” But the neocons have failed to answer numerous questions about how their philosophy would work…
President Bush has asserted that most Iraqis share our fundamental political values. If that’s true of the furious Iraqis, who are notorious even among other Arabs for self-destructive lunacy, then how many billions of other foreigners qualify to move to America?
And exactly whom would the propositionists keep out, other than the most fanatical Muslim fundamentalists? With the exception of a handful of refugee dissidents, the vast majority of immigrants to America are in it for the money and are willing to mouth whatever platitudes would be required to get in.
Finally, there’s an insidiously Jacobin implication to propositionism. If believing in neoconservative theories should make anyone in the world eligible for immigration, what should disbelieving in them make thought criminals like you and me?
Ultimately, propositionism seems less like a well thought-through philosophy and more like ethnocentric nostalgia, an intellectualized exercise in ancestor-worship. Emotionally, the neocons abhor asking tough questions about today’s immigrants because they see that as the equivalent of asking tough questions about their own Ellis Island immigrant forebears and, thus, about themselves.
Internet poster Stephen T. wrote about Prager to Lawrence Auster Nov. 24, 2006: "If his wife needed some chores done while he was out of town and told him she intended to go to a street corner and randomly hire a Mestizo Mexican day laborer in the country illegally to work around the house with her in his absence, he would feel completely relaxed and have no worry whatsoever about her safety. However, if she said she was going to hire an American man to do the same thing, Prager said he would greatly fear for her well-being."
Auster replied: "That is one sick liberal. He has not even read in the papers of the endless series of rapes and murders of white Americans, not to mention lesser crimes, performed by Mexican and other Hispanic illegal aliens, including murders of their white employers?"
Another poster replied:
Dennis Prager…has a deeply heartfelt, emotional investment in believing that, while Americans are turning their backs on “conservative values,” there is somewhere else on the face of this earth a superior “other” culture—a simple, pious, goodhearted folk, who will work as servants for his family for practically nothing and who embody the old-time values he reveres… When reminded of the rampant corruption, immorality, violence, and cruelty which these same Mexicans have created in abundance in their failed, backwards country of origin, Prager typically excuses it all as entirely the accidental quirks and flukes of a broken political system—having nothing to do with any sort of cultural or societal ills of Mexicans at large. I live in Los Angeles and I also know where Dennis Prager lives: it’s an outlying, heavily private security-guarded community nowhere NEAR any of these “other” people whose values he supposedly admires so much. His kids have all attended exclusive private schools (not the LAUSD, with its Mexican-style 60% dropout rate) and I doubt Mr Prager socializes with many of the working Americans he delights in seeing downgraded from middle-class status to the level of third world peasants.
Internet poster "Gary M." wrote to Lawrence Auster in 2008:
Prager interviewed Michelle Malkin a number of years ago on his radio show about her book,Invasion. At one point, Malkin became so distressed by what she was hearing from him, that she stopped and asked, “Mr. Prager, do you even believe we should have a southern border?”
…Prager seldom, if ever, has anything but gushing praise for immigrants of the Mexican variety. He says he favors a border fence, but… he is one of these people who also supports a huge increase in legal immigration to go along with any reductions a fence might provide in illegal immigration.
On Nov. 12, 2013, Dennis said: "Why is the [American] latino population so left of center? Because they left countries whose culture is big government. We have not taught them. We haven't taught anglos, or the people who have been here the longest — blacks. We haven't taught anybody what American values are, so why would we expect a latino to be in favor of a small government United States?
"They have not asked the question — why is America prosperous and Mexico not? And El Salvador not? Guatemala not? Nicaragua not? Colombia not? Why?"
To Dennis, the answer is simple — values. Jan. 3, 2014, Dennis said: "Latin America is the greatest enigma in the world. The most exhilirating people as a rule. You can't go to Latin America and not fall in love with the people. The sum is worse than its parts. They produce terrible governments and terrible ideas and an inordinate number of terrific people."
Latin America does not produce ideas. It borrows them from westerners. Steve Sailer wrote:
For his encyclopedic Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century, Peter Watson interviewed 150 scholars from around the world about who was responsible for the great innovations. Watson recounted that "…all of them—there were no exceptions—said the same thing. In the 20th century, in the modern world, there were no non-western ideas of note."
Latin Americans tend to under-achieve — both inside and outside of Latin America — their IQs (Venezuela's average IQ is 84, Mexico's 87, Brazil's 87, Colombia 89, Chile 90, Argentina 96 while the United States is 98).
Sailer wrote in 2005: "Latin American politics was long dominated by imported ideologies, such as Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s and laissez-faire in the 1990s. They were largely irrelevant because none of them dealt directly with Latin America's essential political problem: the enduring racial conflict originating in the Conquest of a half millennium ago."
Sailer wrote in 2006: "Latin Americans do the worst on school achievement tests relative to their IQs than any other large group of people. Some of that is cultural — Mexicans, especially, don't like to read and don't like to go to school…"
Sailer wrote in 2005 about American Hispanics, noting "a gap of 10.8 IQ points, or an IQ of 89 on the Lynn-Vanhanen scale where white Americans equal 100. That would imply the average Hispanic would fall at the 24th percentile of the white IQ distribution. This inequality gets worse at higher IQs Assuming a normal distribution, 4.8% of whites would fall above 125 IQ versus only 0.9% of Hispanics…"
Mar. 26, 2014, Dennis said: "Why did North America prosper and South America did not? In North America, they had private property. In South America, it went back to the king. The state was gigantic in South America and the individual was gigantic in North America and that's the difference to this day."
"Why is America prosperous and El Salvador not? The answer to that will explain everything. That is the Republican/Democrat divide. It's not the people. Your people are as bright and industrious as ours. It can only be the values. People from Latin America bring the values of Latin America to the United States and there is a receptive community that shares those values — the left."
"It used to be that when people came to this country, they didn't have those [leftist] values. They came to America and they knew, wow, this country is prosperous. I want to be prosperous. So therefore I am going to go into business and I will make a first generation business and I will work 18 hours a day and then my children will be prosperous. And that's exactly what happened, whether you were an Italian immigrant, a Russian immigrant, a Jewish immigrant. But now it's different. Values are brought that have a receptive audience. The more that latino immigrants decide to exalt the individual, the worse it is for the Democrat party."
On May 16, 2006, the AP reported: "With guns drawn, plainclothes police in a suburb of South America's largest city stopped and frisked motorists in a hunt for gang members who set off a five-day wave of violence that left at least 133 dead by Tuesday."
Sailer headlined: "Ahh, the Sweet Life in Latin America!"
He continued: "Real life is making the Brazilian gangster cult film City of God look like Sesame Street."
"I can't wait for the Senate immigration bill to pass so we can start importing more Latin Americans."
Why do civilizations decline? Rushton described one 19th Century theory:
The character of a civilization was determined by the traits of the dominant race, often created by the union of several related tribes. If wealth grows, cities develop, and an international society forms. Among the new arrivals are persons belonging to ethnic taxa that have never initiated a civilization. Degeneration sets in and the intrinsic worth the people originally possessed becomes lost, for the population no longer has in its veins the same quality blood with which it began. (Race, Evolution and Behavior, pg. 274)
Jan. 28, 2014, Dennis said: "How could blood have culture? That's pure racism. That's what the Nazis believed."
"I have never found blood important. I have always believed love and values infinitely more important than blood or sperm or egg. I'm always amazed by people who live in the modern era and have such primitive beliefs."
"I don't say genes have no impact on the way people behave. I think genes are significant. I'm talking about blood. Blood and genes are not the same thing. I want my children to have my values. I don't care if they have anything biological about me."
"Everything in life is ultimately values. That's all that matters… Do you fight for the good versus the bad? Race is one of the least significant things in the human species, up there with shoe size."
Prager's distinction between "blood" and "genes" makes no sense. Genes determine a man's blood. Blood is just one of many reflections of genes. A single gene, for instance, determines the ABO blood type. According to Wikipedia: "Genes hold the information to build and maintain an organism's cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. All organisms have genes corresponding to various biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type…"
Gene Expression wrote:
The median IQ of European peoples is now listed as 99, and this mostly holds for rich countries in the North and poor ex-Communist ones in the East, as well as white Americans, Australians, etc., and whites in six different Latin American nations.
In World on Fire Amy Chua describes the relationship between economic status and "Indian-blood" throughout Latin America: "Latin American society is fundamentally pigmentocratic: characterized by a social spectrum with taller, lighter-skinned, European-blooded elites at one end; shorter, darker, Indian-blooded masses at the other end…" (p 57).
As an example she describes her experience in Mexico: "Almost without exception the Mexican officials, lawyers, and business executives we dealt with were light-skinned and foreign educated, with elegant European names. Meanwhile, the people doing the photocopying and cleaning the floors were all shorter, darker, and plainly more "Indian- blooded." While considerable social fluidity exists in Mexico, it is also true that lightness of skin correlates directly and glaringly with increasing wealth and social status." (p 59)
The trends Chua observes within Latin American countries also appear to operate between these countries, with countries with mostly European populations, like Chile and Uruguay, being the most economically developed and countries with largely Amerindian populations, such as Bolivia and Ecuador being the least economically developed. Coblogger emeritus Godless Capitalist once compared 12 South American countries and found a correlation of .96 between GDP-per-capita and percentage of the population that is white.
Lynn's data confirms this general picture with intelligence as well. Both with between country differences (e.g. Uruguay (96) and Chile (99) score like European countries, while Ecuador's IQ scores range within the 80s), and within country differences; to use Chua's Mexico as an example, last year Lynn tested a representative sample of 920 in Mexico with the Standard Progressive Matrices and found that whites had an IQ of 98, Mestizo (mixed race) 94, and Native Indians 83 – all compatible with Chua's observations of a "spectrum" of "social status" by amount of "Indian-blood".
On Nov. 14, 2013, Dennis Prager said: "Importing people, large numbers of whom don't share your values, is not a good answer for these [European] countries."
If the values of big government are the problem, how come big government societies like the Scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Norway are prosperous? And when Scandinavians move to the United States, how come they prosper while fourth-generation Mexican-Americans do not? How come 65% of American Jewish adults over 25 graduate from college and 50% of Asians, 30% of non-Hispanic whites, 18% of blacks and only six percent of fourth-generation Mexican-Americans (with similar statistics for other good things in life like wealth, health, credit worthiness, which largely fall in accord with IQ scores)? Perhaps big government has less to do with it than human capital.
Dennis has historically spent more time on his radio show talking about adultery than about immigration (the index to his books Think A Second Time and Still the Best Hope contain no entry for "immigration" nor is the topic ever tackled in Prager's 16 years of publishing a personal journal) even though the human capital of a country will have more effect on its welfare than 99% of political legislation. You won't find many prosperous countries, for instance, where the average IQ is under 90.
In 2013 and 2014, Dennis opposed immigration reform aka amnesty because it would predominantly legalize immigrants from Latin America "with left-wing values" who were unlikely to vote Republican. (Feb. 4, 2014)
All things being equal, notes the book Race, Evolution and Behavior, blacks have more kids and younger populations than whites, who in turn have more kids and younger populations than orientals. On average, orientals invest more in their kids than whites, and whites invest more in their kids than blacks.
On Dec. 2, 2013, Dennis said: "I would like more black African immigration to the United States to bring those family values here."
Which African family values? Africa is a disaster with an 8% rate of AIDS infection. Africa has 18% of the world's land, 15% of the world's population and 1% of the world's GNP. Who wants to import that primitive way of life?
Gene Expression wrote:
References to the subject from the 60s and 70s typically gave Africans an IQ much like African Americans, thus Jensen (1973) wrote: "We do know that studies of the intelligence of Negroes in Africa have found them to average at least one sigma below Europeans on a variety of tests" (p. 66). Lynn (1978) is no exception. It wasn't until 1991, that Lynn had revised this estimate dramatically to minus 2 standard deviations, which has been the source of much anger and controversy ever since. Well, the current volume drops it a little bit lower even, to an IQ of 67 as the median score from 57 studies collected from 18 different African countries. Similarly, the average IQ of black populations from 6 locations in Latin America and the Caribbean is 71. This is virtually the same as the score for Ethiopians in Israel. In developed, predominately white countries, a second cluster of scores emerge for black Africans. African-Americans, of course, score about 85, while the median IQ from 20 studies of blacks in Britain is 86.
Ernest Van Den Haag, who Prager often cites in other matters, wrote in National Review in 1965:
One need not believe that one’s own ethnic group, or any ethnic group, is superior to others… in order to wish one’s country to continue to be made up of the same ethnic strains in the same proportions as before. And, conversely, the wish not to see one’s country overrun by groups one regards as alien need not be based on feelings of superiority or ‘racism’. …The wish to preserve one’s identity and the identity of one’s nation requires no justification…any more than the wish to have one’s own children, and to continue one’s family through them need be justified or rationalized by a belief that they are superior to the children of others.
Van Den Haag wrote in the Dec. 1, 1964 issue that intelligence could be accurately gauged by IQ tests, that it is largely heritable and that integrated education hurts whites and "demoralizes" blacks. "I am all in favor of improving the quality of education for all. But this can be done only if pupils are separated according to ability (whatever determines it). And this means very largely according to race."
Feb. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "The best explanation [for anti-Semitism] was given by a non-Jew, Ernest van den Haag. He was a major thinker that not everyone remembers today and it is too bad. He was quite something. Whatever he wrote on, he wrote with brilliant clarity. He wrote The Jewish Mystique. He said the Jews introduced a universal Judge Who demands certain behaviors and for this they have never been forgiven."
On pg. 165 of his book on James J. Kilpatrick, William P. Hustwit wrote:
The northern new conservative journalist Irving Kristol cautioned William F. Buckley to drop any criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act "in terms of racial differences." To do otherwise would be "political folly" and injure the conservative movement.
William Buckley wrote an April 8, 1969 column called “On Negro Inferiority." He praised Arthur Jensen’s research about race and IQ as “massive, apparently authoritative." He added: "Professor Ernest van den Haag, writing in National Review…brilliantly anticipated the findings of Dr. Jensen and brilliantly coped with their implications."
This kind of talk about race kept Prager from identifying as conservative until the conservative movement changed to a color-blind neo-con (aka Jewish) perspective in the 1980s.
Mar. 21, 2014, Dennis said: "One of my heroes [was] William Buckley Jr. He was a great man and a great thinker. I had the occasion to have dinner with him and it was a highlight of my young life."
Dennis Prager wrote a July 17, 2002 column entitled, "Why My Son's Best Friend Is Black."
…[B]lack Americans have been choosing segregation. You can see it at lunch tables in many schools, in the separate black graduation ceremonies and dorms at colleges, in the proliferating number of race-based professional organizations, and in choosing to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. …I still believe in the racial ideal I was raised with — integration.
…Second, it is most relevant that my son is a religious Jew and that his friend is a religious Christian.
…Steven is a wonderful boy who happens to be black. My son is a wonderful boy who happens to be white. Race is a non-issue to them, as it always should be among good people. For both boys, their religious identity is more important than their racial identity. Because Steven and my son are both religious, they have, often unwittingly to be sure, many values in common. When we explain to Aaron that Steven cannot play on Sunday mornings because he is at church, Aaron entirely understands; he was at synagogue the day before and couldn't play with Steven at that time. Both boys know the importance of watching their language, making blessings before eating, and much more. Steven and his little brother usually join my family at our Friday night Sabbath dinner, and almost always wear a yarmulke at the table. In fact, Steven expresses more interest in the religious rituals than the average secular Jewish guest — once again illustrating that values, especially transcendent ones, are far more humanly unifying than race or ethnicity. Any member of my family is more likely to bond with an African-American Christian than with an irreligious Jew.
It is difficult to overstate my pleasure at seeing these two boys becoming close friends. All credit must go to Steven's mother. She has chosen to live among non-blacks and to raise a son with Christian, human and American identities that are at least as strong as his African-American identity (which, for the record, she hardly ignores — Steven speaks fluent French in order to keep alive the language of his Haitian grandparents).
At our Sabbath table I see the real American dream unfold, and only wish more Americans of all colors and ethnicities would share this dream. Why is my son's best friend black? Because they share values that transcend race, and because they live near each other.
I wonder what would happen to this neighborhood if six Haitian families (with identical values to the family above) moved in? What would happen to property values? Prager's Haitian friends sound like lovely people, but statistically speaking, Haitians, inside America or inside Haiti, are a disaster, with sky-high rates of crime, including murder, and STDS, including AIDS.
And what happened to this friendship as the two kids grew up? As About.com pointed out: "The older children get, the more likely they are not to socialize closely with peers of a different race." Aaron is now in his 20s. I suspect his closest friends are not black just as Dennis's closest friends are not black.
Would Dennis ever write a column about his son's best friend being white? No, that's too boring. This wonderful black family that stimulated his column is the exception that proves the rule that everywhere in the world, including Africa, as compared to whites and orientals, blacks throughout history have tended to low levels of achievement and literacy and to high levels of crime and dysfunction, whatever the cause. No society, including America, and no neighborhood, has been able to import large numbers of blacks without importing those higher levels of crime, dependency and dysfunction. Despite trillions of dollars of social experiments, these problems have proved intractable.
No white or asian country has successfully assimilated blacks as a group to life results that match the majority population (just as whites and orientals as a group have not matched black strengths in preaching, rhetoric, sports, improvisation, charisma, dance, rap, jazz, etc). Blacks, whether as communities or countries, have never, statistically, met the levels of literacy, education, income, and lawfulness of their white and asian neighbors.
Despite these universal and obvious differences in behavior between the races through all times and in all places, according to Dennis, race should be a non-issue to all good people. "I'd be happy to have five kids from different races so long as they had my values," said Dennis Jan. 22, 2014.
Who are you going to believe about the unimportance of race? Dennis Prager or history? Surely you won't believe your lying eyes? Good people don't notice patterns. That's racist.
Different races have different strengths. As the black reverend and former NFL star Reggie White said:
Why did God create us differently? Why did God make me black and you white? Why did God make the next guy Korean and the next guy Asian and the other guy Hispanic? Why did God create the Indians?
Well, it's interesting to me to know why now. When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it.
White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world.
Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure.
When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality.
When you put all of that together, guess what it makes. It forms a complete image of God. God made us different because he was trying to create himself. He was trying to form himself, and then we got kind of knuckleheaded and kind of pushed everything aside.
Steve Sailer holds by Reggie White's thinking and hence he's more real about life than Dennis:
As a Reggieist (i.e., one who considers human biodiversity both a reality and a net blessing), I'm pleased to point out that IQ tests can't accurately measure at least one mental faculty in which blacks tend to outperform whites and Asians in real life. Despite lower mean IQ's, African-Americans are not a race of talentless dullards, but are instead the most charismatic contributors to 20th Century popular culture. What mental factor underlies the black revolutions in music, sport, oratory, dance, and slang? Subjective, improvisatory creativity.
For example, like a lot of NBA stars, Scottie Pippen's below-market contract, ill-timed trade demands, team-damaging pouts, and numerous child-support obligations imply that when given time to think, he often chooses unwisely. Yet, in the flow of the game, he's a Talleyrand at real-time decision-making. Leading a fast break, there are no permanent right answers. Even "Pass the ball to Michael Jordan" gets old fast as defenses habituate. Similarly, the NFL running back, the jazz soloist, the preacher, and the rapping DJ all must heed others' expectations and instantly respond with something a little unexpected. IQ tests — by necessity objective and standardized — can never measure this adequately.
Further, despite his data's inevitable shortcomings in this regard, Jensen does report that blacks possess particular mental weaknesses and strengths. Among individuals with equal g's, whites and Asians (like males) are typically stronger in those visual-spatial skills so useful in engineering and many skilled trades. In contrast, blacks (like females) often enjoy better short-term memories and thus can mentally juggle more balls in social situations. (This probably contributes to the black advantage in improvisation). Jensen's findings confirm my intuition (NR, 4/6/98) that while whites and Asians tend to be less masculine than blacks in physique and personality, they are typically more masculine than blacks in mental abilities. Put bluntly, whites and Asians tend to be nerdier than blacks. How many blacks would sincerely disagree?
Good thing that doctors don't follow Dennis Prager's color-blind approach as different medicines often work differently for different races who frequently have different health challenges. As Dr. Sally Satel wrote (with assistance from Steve Sailer) in the New York Times in 2002: "In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient's race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works."
Forbes reported in 2005: "A flood of studies has emerged showing racial differences in how patients suffer from disease–or benefit from drugs–in ailments ranging from osteoporosis to cancer. And several more have looked at the effects of drugs on particular racial groups. Many of the doctors conducting the studies are African-American."
Steve Sailer wrote: "Knowledge of racial differences in genes is a good thing: it tells blacks that they should be extra careful to limit salt intake, that they should get checkups for prostate cancer, that they should imitate Jews with their Tay-Sachs disease testing and find out if they are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia, etc."
So in matters of life and death, race can matter very much.
J. Philippe Rushton, Canada's most famous professor, wrote:
Just as women doctors have advocated that to conceptualize women as being the same as men leads to a neglect of women’s problems and their treatment (e.g., premenstrual symptoms and menopause and hormone replacement therapy), so black doctors have become concerned that treating blacks the same as whites is to neglect black problems. For example, 30 percent of the people who have kidney failure and undergo dialysis are black, but estimates are that fewer than 10 percent of organ donors are black. Blacks fare better with organs donated from blacks.
Another example is that genetics contributes to black hypertension. Black men experience a faster heart rate when performing moderate exercise, although the pulse rates of the black and white men while resting showed no significant differences. Black men have higher rates of cancer of the prostate than white men who in turn have higher rates than Oriental men, one determinant of which is testosterone (Polednak, 1989).
Racial differences exist in risk for AIDS with blacks being most at risk and Asians least so. In the United States, blacks, who make up 12 percent of the population, represent 30 percent of those with AIDS. Among women, 53 percent of those with AIDS are black. Fifty-five percent of children with AIDS are black.
Race is also a critical factor in the success of many medicines. For example, Asians are more sensitive to the drugs used to treat anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, requiring lower dosages; they are also more likely to have side effects with lower dosages (Levy, 1993). Another widely cited example is that Asians are more sensitive to the adverse effects of alcohol, especially to marked facial flushing, palpitation, and tachycardia. Levy (1993: 143) argues that ethnicity should be taken into account in formulary selection and prescribing decisions for individual patients.(Race, Evolution and Behavior, pg. 8)
Another way to see the importance of race is in sports. As the former black star Darryl Dawkins said: "Black basketball is much more individualistic. With so many other opportunities closed to young black kids, … if somebody makes you look bad with a shake-and-bake move, then you've got to come right back at him with something better, something more stylish… It's all about honor, pride, and establishing yourself as a man."
Regarding high school basketball, Dawkins said: "So if you're not scoring beaucoup points, if your picture isn't in the papers, if you don't have a trophy, then you ain't the man and you ain't nothing. Being second-best is just as bad as being last. And if a teammate hits nine shots in a row, the black attitude is, 'Screw him. Now it's my turn to get it on.'"
Why is white basketball more structured? "Because the white culture places more of a premium on winning and less on self-indulgent preening and chest-beating."
In the 1977 NBA championships, the Portland Trailblazer (with a largely white core) matched up with the largely black Philadelphia 76ers. "They beat us in six games," Dawkins said, "and the series marked the most blatant example of the racial difference in NBA game plans. We were much more flamboyant than Portland, and certainly more talented. We had more individual moves, more off-balance shots, more fancy passes, more dunks, and more entertaining stuff. But everybody wanted to shoot and be a star (including me), and nobody was willing to do the behind-the-scenes dirty work."
"The black game by itself is too chaotic and much too selfish. No one player is good enough to beat five opponents on a consistent basis. The black style also creates animosities among the players because everybody ends up arguing about who's shooting too much and who's not shooting enough."
When black Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman made an epic rant Jan. 19, 2014 after his team defeated San Francisco in the NFC championship game, Dennis Prager said: "I expect human decency [from athletes]. Perhaps I am spoiled because the sport I follow most avidly is hockey and you don't get this [way of talking after a game] in hockey."
Hockey is overwhelmingly a white game and professional football is overwhelmingly a black game. Blacks are better at rhetoric (visit a black church for example) and trash talking than are whites, who tend to be better at team work.
In the Olympic 100 meter dash going back to 1984, all 64 finalists have been of West African descent. In the NFL, former Giant Jason Sehorn is the only white starting cornerback since 2000.
Another way to see the importance of race is to look for flourishing cities, states or countries with majority black populations. I can't think of any.
Another way to see the importance of race is to look at the two places leading the way in America in volunteering — the white cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul and Salt Lake City. Whites tend to be more altruistic than other races and the least interested in organizing in their own racial interest. The societies they create tend to be prosperous and therefore attractive to non-white immigrants, while blacks never create affluent countries.
As Steve Sailer wrote: "Contemporary American mainstream conservatism has been deformed by its allergy to leftist identity politics into arguing that traditional concepts of identity, such as ethnicity, race, kinship, sex, religious membership, and class, not only shouldn't mean anything, but that they don't mean anything, which is awfully silly."
Thinkers such as Sailer see the world more clearly in some ways than does Dennis because they give race its due. As Sailer wrote in 2007: "We realize that race is an inextricable part of human nature. Why? Because 'race' is the inevitable outgrowth of 'family.' A racial group is an extremely extended family that is inbred to some degree. When you start from this simple but profound definition, you can begin to answer all those questions that baffle and irritate…about why humans continue to act as if blood relations were important to them. (Quick answer: because they are.)"
Why bother to talk about the realities of race when it will only hurt your career? Sailer answered: "I believe truth is more beneficial to humanity than lies, obfuscation, ignorance, wishful thinking – and even hipness."
With a nod to the Tom Wolfe insight above, a Steve Sailer reader emailed him:
Maybe each particular group must feel that they have a theoretical chance to dominate or else there will be a psychological schism too large to bridge without overt domination of one group over another.
A diverse society therefore has two options: living a lie that every group is equal in ability (eventually backed by force as it fails) or a caste system backed by force.
This would seem to argue against neoconservative color blind society that ignores group differences.
A Sailer reader emailed: "If a critical mass of blacks decides to abide by the White egocosmos, it will damage the credibility of its black counterpart, and thus compel (eventually) blacks to accept being in second place in the dominant paradigm. Thus where going by the book might be the better individual strategy, the preservation of group vanity requires the instillment of an alternative paradigm reflecting the endowments of African-Americans, where they come in first and whites in second."
In a September 23, 2008 column, Dennis Prager predicted black race riots if Barack Obama is not elected:
And it could become a rage the likes of which America has not seen in a long time, if ever. It will first and foremost come from within black America. The deep emotional connection that nearly every black American has to an Obama victory is difficult for even empathetic non-blacks to measure. A major evangelical pastor told me that even evangelical black pastors who share every conservative value with white evangelical pastors, including pro-life views on abortion, will vote for Obama. They feel their very dignity is on the line.
Compared to East Asians at the furthest extreme and then whites, blacks, said the book Race, Evoluation & Behavior, have:
• _ shorter gestation periods
• _ earlier physical maturation (muscular control, bone and dental development)
• _ smaller brains
• _ earlier puberty (age at first menstruation, first intercourse, first pregnancy)
• _ more developed primary sexual characteristics (size of penis, vagina, testes, ovaries)
• _ more developed secondary sexual characteristics (voice, muscularity, buttocks, breasts)
• _ more biological than social control of behavior (length of menstrual cycle, periodicity of sexual response, predictability of life history from start of puberty)
• _ higher levels of sex hormones (testosterone, gonadotropins, follicle stimulating hormone)
• _ higher levels of individuality (lower law abidingness)
• _ more permissive sexual attitudes
• _ higher intercourse frequencies (premarital, marital, extramarital)
• _ weaker pair bonds
• _ more siblings
• _ higher rates of child neglect and abandonment
• _ greater frequency of disease
• _ shorter life expectancy
Isn't race just skin-deep? Rushton wrote: "Biological evidence shows that race is not a social construct. Coroners in crime labs can identify race from a skeleton or even just the skull. They can identify race from blood, hair, or semen as well. To deny the existence of race is unscientific and unrealistic."
What about crime? Rushton wrote:
Most people of any race are hard-working and law abiding. There is no “criminal race.” However, the difference in average crime rate means that a much higher percentage of Blacks can fall into a life of crime. The 85 average IQ of criminals is almost identical with the 85 average IQ of Blacks, so IQ is related to crime. Although Blacks make up only about 12% of the U.S. population, each year they commit about half of all crimes.
INTERPOL Yearbooks show the same three-way pattern of race differences in crime. African and Caribbean countries have twice as many violent crimes per person as do European countries and three times as many as do the Asian Pacific Rim countries like Japan and China.
U. S. Department of Justice statistics report that Blacks are 60 times more likely to attack Whites than Whites are to attack Blacks. For the 20% of violent crimes that are interracial, 15% involve Black offenders and White victims; 2% involve White offenders and Black victims.
Recalling his 1985 meeting with George Kennan, architect of America's containment policy against the Soviet Union, Vincent Chiarello wrote:
I remember…Kennan’s deep pessimism about the future of the United States. Time and time again, he came back to the same theme: that unfettered immigration from non-European nations would be a disaster, and that the thin line that separated the U.S. from the rest of the world would disappear. … [Harvard political scientist Samuel] Huntington was fiercely opposed to the notion of America as “a propositional nation.” Kennan emphasized that same objection by repeatedly pointing out our Anglo-Saxon roots and cultural heritage. I cannot help but believe that, toward the end of that session, Kennan, who was to live to more than 100 years, was saying that Anglo-Saxons, that is, the white race, were being endangered by a flood of unassimilable strangers that would shake the nation to its very foundational core.
In his 1993 memoir, Kennan wrote:
There will be those who will say, 'Oh, it is our duty to receive as many as possible of these people and to share our prosperity with them, as we have so long been doing.' But suppose there are limits to our capacity to absorb. Suppose the effect of such a policy is to create, in the end, conditions within this country no better than those of the places the masses of immigrants have left: the same poverty, the same distress. What we shall then have accomplished is not to have appreciably improved conditions in the Third World (for even the maximum numbers we could conceivably take would be only a drop from the bucket of the planet's overpopulation) but to make this country itself a part of the Third World (as certain parts of it already are) thus depriving the planet of one of the few great regions that might have continued, as it now does, to be helpful to much of the remainder of the world by its relatively high standard of civilization, by its quality as example, by its ability to shed insight on the problems of the others and to help them find their answers to their own problems.
Intelligence
Like all of the Western world's public intellectuals who are more interested in status than in truth (see Jason Richwine's 2013 dismissal from the Heritage Foundation for an example of what obvious truths one should not say publicly if you want to get ahead), Dennis Prager says he cares little about IQ. By being deliberately obtuse, he gets to have a nice life, make millions of dollars, enjoy vast popularity and go on television regularly. On the other hand, he sacrifices truth for cant.
As Jared Taylor wrote: "All people who hedge their opinions in the hope of a larger audience convince themselves that discretion is the price of influence—as they bank their honoraria and swan through the corridors of power. And, like [James J.] Kilpatrick, they build oases far from the racial chaos they no longer combat with all their strength."
Jan. 27, 2014, Dennis said: "All of my life I have said that the most important macro value, societal value, is truth. Virtually all evil emanates from lies."
Feb. 18, 2014, Dennis said: "People think brains are more important than everything. I knew at such a young age that was not true. I saw these kids in high school, some of them had such magnificent brains, but they couldn't navigate life. There were kids with great brains who cheated on tests…"
"I think those studies [that show a correlation between IQ and delayed gratification], if they exist, are crap. The idea that IQ correlates with character sickens me. You think a person of normal intelligence doesn't understand delayed gratification but a person with an Einstein IQ understands it better?"
Caller: "I think they're able to live in the future a little bit more."
Dennis: "Do you know how many brilliant Nazis and Communists there were? There were more intellectuals who supported Stalin than hardhats. I'm giving you a powerful example of the lack of correlation between brilliance, great brains, and decency. There is no correlation."
Caller: "Maybe it works better in the other direction and say that most people who become petty criminals and live lives of characterless drift tend to not have high intelligence."
Dennis: "That's a good question. I don't think it's necessary. I think people of completely average intelligence can be superior human beings. I don't think the saints of the 20th Century, like those who rescued Jews in the Holocaust, had extraordinary IQs."
"The brains thing blows my mind. I know I have a good brain, but I have rarely been impressed with brains. So what? It's a blessing like a good voice is a blessing. It never excited me when I would meet brilliant people. If they weren't good, they were boring. I felt that as a child and I feel that today. Goodness interests me more than brilliance."
"This reveling in brains drives me crazy. It's like revelling in baseball ability. If you have it, great, but it doesn't make you who you are."
"The stupid stupid notion that brains determine your life. Common sense is more important than brains. Wisdom is more important than brains… The average person is perfectly intelligent enough to deal with life. I have met very very few people that I walked away thinking, that person has a very low IQ. Everybody I work with at my home radio station is bright. Every single person. Since it runs across the gamut of human background, I have to believe that the vast majority of people are bright… I know one rocket scientist who is an emotional and psychological basketcase. It's a very narrow greatness, brains. Without wisdom, common sense, and character, it's nothing."
"If you don't know what to do with your IQ, what's the good of having a Stradivarius IQ?"
"People put up bumper stickers, 'My child is on the honor roll.' I've never been impressed with that. How about, 'My child is honorable.'"
Philosopher Michael Levin said in 1998: "Belief in the reality and significance of intelligence is inversely correlated with education, which is correlated with IQ. You have to be very intelligent to believe there is no such thing as intelligence."
Psychologist James Thompson wrote: "Rindermann found that higher IQ countries (not just East Asian ones) tended to be more moral, less corrupt, more humane and more liberal in their approach to human freedoms. One can certainly argue that intelligence does not guarantee morality, but that is a different point."
Gedaliah Braun wrote in 2009:
I am an American who taught philosophy in several African universities from 1976 to 1988, and have lived since that time in South Africa. When I first came to Africa, I knew virtually nothing about the continent or its people, but I began learning quickly. I noticed, for example, that Africans rarely kept promises and saw no need to apologize when they broke them. It was as if they were unaware they had done anything that called for an apology.
It took many years for me to understand why Africans behaved this way but I think I can now explain this and other behavior that characterizes Africa. I believe that morality requires abstract thinking—as does planning for the future—and that a relative deficiency in abstract thinking may explain many things that are typically African…
It has long seemed to me that blacks tend to lack self-awareness. If such awareness is necessary for developing abstract concepts it is not surprising that African languages have so few abstract terms. A lack of self-awareness—or introspection—has advantages. In my experience neurotic behavior, characterized by excessive and unhealthy sel