Consider the recent example of Dr. Jason Richwine, late of the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological travails became one of Washington’s major scandals-of-the-month over the past week.  Googling his exact name now yields half a million web results, and I’d guess that 99% of these are of extremely recent vintage.

As some media commentators have suggested, Richwine himself may be wondering Why Me and Why Now?  After all, the racial writings and opinions that provoked so much media fury had never been secretive or disguised; they were always hiding in plain sight.

His Harvard doctoral dissertation asserting the strong connection between race and IQ and suggesting that American immigration policy should be changed to reflect this relationship has been freely available on the Internet for years, as have been video clips of his public pronouncements on the same subject. His articles and columns arguing that Hispanics have unusually high crime rates—mostly written in rebuttal to my own contrary findings—have always been a mouse-click away, and anyone checking would have noticed that these writings had appeared in Alternative Right, a racial nationalist webzine whose ideological orientation has now suddenly been classified as poisonous by the Washington commentariat.

Obviously, one important factor in Richwine’s sudden DC demise was his newly-found prominence as co-author of a major Heritage study attacking the fiscal basis of the proposed immigration reform legislation. Powerful organizations support such legislation and they certainly had every incentive to undercut that research by destroying the credibility of one of its authors. Perhaps a Washington Post journalist just happened to stumble upon Richwine’s 2009 dissertation or perhaps pro-immigration opposition researchers quietly pointed him in that direction.

But given the highly controversial nature of Richwine’s racial views and his visibility as author of dozens of major studies at DC’s premier conservative thinktank over the last three years, it is easy to imagine that a similar if less widely reported version of this same ideological scandal might have occurred years ago. An enterprising reporter somewhere might have noticed Richwine’s controversial opinions and decided to write about them, the talking heads on cable television hostile to Heritage might have taken up the topic, and perhaps a mini-firestorm would have developed on a slow news day. Our political world is filled with open barrels of gunpowder and showers of random sparks, and although they sometimes explosively connect, more often they do not and instead remain in place, waiting for a future moment.

This metaphor of open gunpowder and random sparks should be kept firmly in mind when considering my recent American Pravda article on the remarkable lapses of our mainstream media.

My piece has certainly not been ignored, having received more initial readership than anything I have ever previously published with the sole exception of my Meritocracy article; it spent almost two straight weeks ranked as TAC’s most read article, and still remains safely lodged at number two.  And it has received widespread coverage and linkages from numerous Internet websites and pundits, including a very generous and widely distributed column by Paul Craig Roberts, one of the most vocal public defectors from the reigning bipartisan establishment that some have aptly termed our “American Regime.”

Meanwhile, the piece also received major mention in so establishmentarian a publication as Forbes, with columnist Eamonn Fingleton describing it as one of the best critiques of the American media he had ever read, and sending many thousands of his readers in my direction.  Other mainstream journalists have privately expressed similar sentiments to me, and they may also eventually help bring the piece to wider public awareness.

And on our website itself, there appeared a lengthy and particularly perspicacious comment by one “Gabriel” worth excerpting here:

Of course, it is extraordinarily disconcerting to question the media, especially if you ever got around to trusting it in the first place. You made a comparison of the information we get from our own senses with news we get from the media. Excellent comparison — and it works both ways: not being able to trust the media is just as bewildering as not being able to trust your own nervous system! You’re being hit over the head but you can’t tell! Every time you question the source of that trail of blood behind you everyone laughs at you! Not only do media lies disturb your own vision, but the mainstream media, through various means, controls the “group mind” as well. Fall out of touch with that, and you can lose friends, influence, investors, your job… whatsoever.

* * *

Many readers point to things left out of this article, often with an accusatory tone. Look, people: this article punches a hole in the wall of illusion the mainstream press has built around each of us. The author proceeds to point in various specific directions. To those disturbed that x, y, and z weren’t covered I would say: there is an entire world on the other side of that wall. An entire universe. It’s called the truth, and there’s a whole lot of it.

I have certainly been gratified that so many individuals have commented favorably on my piece, and praised its portrayal of the dishonesty of the American media and the consequent extent to which our public is misinformed and misled.  But even so, very few have chosen to explicitly mention the several barrels of open gunpowder that I carefully stacked in the last one-half of my article text.  Perhaps at some point some bold and enterprising journalist somewhere will decide to ignite one or more of them.  If so, then the  resulting media conflagration may turn out to be vastly greater than that surrounding the recent auto-da-fe of the unfortunate Dr. Richwine.

Meanwhile, the ardent civil libertarians of the Obama Administration have announced that they expect the ongoing War Against Terror—and the extraordinary legal situation it requires—to continue for “at least another 10 to 20 years” and therefore say that the original 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing this Forever War should remain in place without alterations. Liberal Democratic congressional leaders strongly endorsed this perspective, while conservative Republicans demurred…or perhaps it was the other way round. The entire story was buried deep within the inside pages of this morning’s New York Times, and received little coverage anywhere else in the mainstream American media.

However, I was also very pleased to see Reason’s science correspondent Ron Bailey citing some of my own Race/IQ analysis in his effective attempt to refute Richwine’s views based on a dispassionate presentation of factual evidence rather than mere vituperation.

And I’m now off to attend an international conference, held in a part of the world whose educated citizens surely receive their own media Pravda, probably better than ours in some respects and worse in others, but certainly providing a strikingly different version of reality.

Only a week earlier, Richwine had reached a pinnacle of his career, listed as co-author of a widely trumpeted Heritage research study demonstrating that Congressional passage of proposed immigration reform legislation would cost American taxpayers some six trillion dollars…or perhaps the figure was six quadrillion dollars.

But then some enterprising journalist discovered the dreadful evidence of Richwine’s horrific heresy, namely that his 2009 doctoral dissertation at the Harvard Kennedy School had focused on the very low IQs of those racial groups providing most of our current immigrants, with his conclusion being that such inflows must be halted lest American society be dumbified into disaster. Taken together Race and IQ constitute an exceptionally volatile mix in modern American society, and ignited by a six trillion dollar spark, the resulting explosion blew Richwine out of his comfortable DC employment.

Now it seems to me that Heritage’s reaction was a bit difficult to justify. After all, the title of Richwine’s dissertation had been “IQ and Immigration Policy” perhaps providing some slight hint that his topic had something to do with IQ and immigration policy. So the inescapable conclusion is that Heritage was perfectly willing to employ someone with Richwine’s racial views but only so long as the media and the public remained unaware. Last week the media found out, hence exit young Richwine.

However, the behavior of Richwine’s mob of media-tormenters seems just as reprehensible. Glancing over a few of the multitude of denunciatory columns I see little sign of any serious attempt to rebut rather than merely vilify poor Richwine. His attackers seem horrified that anyone might dare believe such heretical notions, rather than whether those beliefs are correct or incorrect. This absurd situation has certainly been noted by Richwine’s own legion of determined defenders, with blogger Steve Sailer citing this case as a perfect example of the recent American tendency to “speak power to truth.”

But in the famous words of Talleyrand, the approach followed by Richwine’s critics “was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” When a Harvard Ph.D. makes extremely controversial claims about race and intelligence and the main response is to lynch the messenger rather than dispassionately refute the message, the natural conclusion of reasonable onlookers is that Richwine may have been “politically incorrect” but he was factually correct. For example, David Weigel’s lengthy discussion in Slate seems to imply this perspective, and how can anyone blame him? If race and IQ constitute the sort of intellectual pornography never to be candidly discussed in respectable company then the primary sources of information and opinion become small brown-paper-wrapper websites, whose opinions on such ideologically-charged topics may or may not be wholly reliable.

I suspect that Weigel is merely one of many prominent journalists and media pundits who draw important portions of their world view from furtively exploring the nether regions of the Internet. After all, our reigning academic orthodoxy has insisted for decades that “race does not exist,” a scientific claim roughly equivalent to declaring that “gravity does not exist.” Hence, many younger journalists have come to doubt this palpable absurdity, and may often seek transgressive truths by reading the perspectives of various racialist bloggers, who unfortunately are often just as ignorant and mistaken as their orthodox opponents. The Washington Post and Slate.com are sister publications and there was the amusing spectacle of bloggers David Weigel and Jennifer Rubin taking diametrically opposite positions on the Richwine controversy, although neither apparently has the scientific or quantitative background necessary to evaluate the actual issues under dispute.

Having thus sketched the political atmospherics of the Richwine Affair, including the bad and self-damaging behavior of so many participants on all sides of the controversy, I should also discuss the substantive issues, namely whether Richwine’s views are right or wrong, and also my impression of the general quality of his scholarship in advocating them. My own background is in the hard sciences, and I prefer determining reality based on evidence and quantitative data rather than from ideological first principles. Personally, I’m less interested in whether Richwine’s views are “incorrect” than whether or not they are correct.

My first substantial encounter with Richwine came in early 2010 when I published a major article arguing that Hispanic crime rates in America were roughly similar to those of whites of the same age, a claim that naturally ignited a firestorm of hostility from various rightwingers. Although most of the attacks were merely vituperative, Richwine had recently undertaken major research on exactly that same topic and had come to polar opposite conclusions, so he soon became my strongest analytical opponent, resulting in a long series of very productive exchanges. Although he confined his critique to just one of the three or four major pillars of my case, he initially made some effective points. But after several rounds of debate and the discovery of additional evidence from California, I think most impartial observers concluded that my analysis was almost entirely correct. I urge all interested parties to read my original article and the series of lengthy exchanges with Richwine and others, and then formulate their own conclusions.

Richwine’s behavior during this lengthy debate was exemplary and the exchanges proved very useful in extending my own analysis.  And later that year we were both invited to reprise our arguments in a public debate at a major anti-immigrationist conference, where I met him for the first time.

As I mentioned earlier, an unfortunate consequence of Richwine’s intellectual martyrdom may be the widespread assumption among uninformed journalists that his various theories were probably correct, and indeed Weigel states that Richwine “demolished” my own analysis of Hispanic crime. But that is Weigel’s own error and I tend to doubt that he either read my article or the subsequent exchanges with Richwine before making such an erroneous claim. Perhaps the current controversy surrounding these racial issues may prompt the major media to more carefully compare my own arguments with those of my opponents, carefully weigh the evidence, and then bring the important conclusions to much wider public attention.

With regard to Richwine’s IQ arguments, last year I published a major 7,500 word article on exactly the same topic of Race/IQ, arguing that there was overwhelming evidence that the IQs of various ethnic groups were far more malleable and environmentally influenced than is widely believed by many of those interested in the topic. Once again, this article provoked a vast outpouring of angry commentary from various rightwing bloggers and pundits, probably the most uniformly hostile reaction I’ve ever received to anything I’d written. I responded to my multitude of critics in a long series of columns, totaling perhaps another 15,000 words. By the time the debate wound down, I think the accumulated evidence in favor of my position was absolutely decisive, and several of my strongest early opponents privately told me so, though I’m sure many of my angriest critics will never admit that.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media timorously avoided this explosive subject and almost entirely ignored the many tens of thousands of words produced during the long debate. Once again, perhaps the current Richwine controversy will provide the media a second opportunity to objectively review the topic and bring the important facts to a wider audience.

Richwine himself had not participated in last year’s heated Race/IQ debate and at the time I was only vaguely aware of some of his previous work on that topic. But the question of Mexican-American IQ was an important focus of my own analysis and taken together with some additional evidence that came out during the course of the debate, I would argue that the conclusions Richwine formed in his doctoral dissertation are almost certainly incorrect.

Obviously, it would be absurd for me to attempt to summarize nearly 25,000 words of my arguments in just a few sentences, and I urge all interested parties to read my material and decide for themselves whether my arguments are persuasive. But after quickly reviewing major sections of Richwine’s controversial doctoral dissertation, I would like to make a few important points.

First, he argues that the large IQ deficit of impoverished Hispanic immigrants is likely to inflict a long-term social disaster upon American society. However, it is well known that nearly all previous immigrant groups—southern and eastern Europeans—who came here in poverty similarly scored very low on IQ tests in the decades after their arrival, with results that were sometimes far below those of today’s Mexican immigrants. Yet after a generation or two their tested intelligence had almost invariably converged close to the American mean. Evidence of the past does not necessarily predict the future, but such a strong historical pattern should leave us cautious about assuming it will not continue.

In fact, Richwine specifically discusses the famous study by Carl Brigham, who concluded on the basis of the tests taken by WWI recruits that southern and eastern Europeans were drastically inferior in innate mental ability to America’s mostly northwestern European population and argued that their continuing immigration would produce a national disaster. Richwine rather cavalierly dismisses this historical analysis as having been based on poor testing methods and probably motivated by a belief in “bizarre…racial categories.” But Brigham was a highly regarded psychometrician and his careful research was widely accepted by nearly all the leading experts of that time. Having carefully read his book, I cannot find any serious fault with his methods nor any indications of unscientific bias on his part. Brigham may have been mistaken in his conclusions, but they seem to have been based on the best evidence and theory of his day.

Furthermore, Richwine chooses to ignore a vast amount of additional evidence from that same period, much of which was collected in Clifford Kirkpatrick’s important 1926 academic monograph “Intelligence and Migration.” Kirkpatrick provides page after page of separate studies demonstrating that during the 1920s the tested IQs of American schoolchildren of Greek, Slavic, Italian, and Portuguese ancestry were usually in the 75-85 range, and that Jewish schoolchildren sometimes performed just as poorly. These results are hardly obscure since they have been cited for decades by Thomas Sowell, and I think it is a serious scholarly lapse for Richwine to have essentially ignored them. Perhaps he simply believes that all IQ experts of a century ago were frauds and their empirical work should be dismissed, but if so, he should explicitly make that argument. Otherwise, we must accept that southern and eastern European immigrant groups had very low IQs a century ago and have average ones today, which is an extremely important finding. In fact, I have demonstrated that there is overwhelming evidence that various other group IQs have risen rapidly over time, and I also provided some strong indications that this exact process is already occurring among today’s Hispanic immigrants.

On another matter, Richwine must be aware that Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck rank as two of the greatest figures in twentieth century psychometrics. Yet decades ago both these scholars reviewed the structural evidence of Mexican-American IQs, and reached conclusions almost identical to my own, namely that the acknowledged gaps to white intelligence scores were largely perhaps almost entirely due to environmental factors and would steadily disappear as the population became more affluent and acculturated. Scientists should not argue from authority and Jensen and Eysenck might certainly have been mistaken, but it seems unreasonable for Richwine to never mention their contrary analysis.

Richwine’s doctoral work was performed at Harvard’s Kennedy School for Public Policy, which is separate from the main graduate school containing academic disciplines such as evolutionary biology, psychology, and sociology. The typical Kennedy School graduate receives a Masters Degree in Public Administration, and is often a mid-career government official, seeking to burnish his academic credentials. The three faculty members who evaluated Richwine’s dissertation—George Borjas, Richard Zeckhauser, and Christopher Jenks—are noted social scientists, but with the possible exception of Jenks, who was apparently a late addition, none seems to have a strong background in IQ issues; otherwise, they surely would have brought the facts I have cited above to Richwine’s attention and required him to properly address them. And once the media mob began baying for blood, Richwine’s advisors immediately backpedaled on any familiarity with IQ issues and quickly disassociated themselves from the dissertation they themselves had approved.

Again, the fault is less Richwine’s or that of his advisors than the totally taboo nature of the topic in question. Even given the best of intentions and effort it is difficult to undertake solid research in a subject that few are willing to discuss in public and one in which there exists such widespread misinformation.

Several months ago a prominent liberal academic with whom I’ve become a bit friendly was horrified by my article speculating on the Social Darwinist roots of Chinese success, pointing out that my analysis so sharply deviated from the established description of reality promoted by Stephen Jay Gould. He also mentioned that several of his friends wondered why I seemed so “obsessed” with race.  I would argue that racial issues are an interesting and important subject, especially in a country as racially diverse as our own, but another factor behind my focus has been what I see as a dangerous vacuum of calm and reasonably informed discussion.  After all, if I don’t write about Hispanic crime, I shudder to think who else will.

Perhaps our major media might use the opportunity of this current controversy to begin covering racial subjects in a manner more substantive and thoughtful than just quoting endless exchange of smears and slurs. If so, then the intellectual martyrdom of Dr. Jason Richwine may have served a useful purpose.

Racial factors obviously underlie a wide range of major public policy issues yet are almost always ignored by nearly all participants. However, every now and then a careless statement or uncovered document will suddenly bring these subterranean flows to the surface, producing a volcanic eruption of white-hot controversy. Thus American politicians and policy analysts, knowingly or not, spend most of their careers walking through mine fields and occasionally blowing themselves up.

Consider the newly released Heritage Foundation report sharply criticizing the fiscal impact of the proposed immigration reform legislation currently being considered by Congress.  For a couple of days the focus had been on the green eyeshades issue of whether the multi-trillion-dollar claims had improperly failed to include dynamic scoring in their underlying econometric model.  But then the debate suddenly took an explosively controversial turn when the media discovered that co-author Jason Richwine possessed a long paper-trail of highly heretical racial views, especially with regards to IQ matters.

Racial differences constitute the intellectual pornography of our American elites, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and a host of web journalists are now eagerly covering this prurient debate, which seems likely to overshadow any analysis of the original 92-page report itself. Most mainstream conservative pundits have been sharply critical of Richwine, but a few associated with the VDare webzine, such as Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire, have risen to his strong defense.

Now from a personal perspective, I have very mixed feelings about the proposed immigration legislation and haven’t followed the ongoing debate in much detail.  But less than 24 hours ago I noticed a huge upsurge in traffic to an article I’d published last year on racial IQ issues, and that caught my attention.

At the time it appeared my 7,500 word cover story had sparked a huge debate on the web, involving many dozens of overwhelmingly hostile responses together with nine follow-up columns of my own, totaling a further 15,000 words.  But with the notable exception of a short column in the Boston Globe, the entire mainstream media maintained a studious silence on such a taboo subject, and that greatly irritated me. So perhaps the current outpouring of media commentary on Race/IQ may finally provide timorous journalists with the excuse they require to actually investigate this important subject and perhaps bring some of the major conclusions to a much wider audience.

And by purest coincidence, the same Dr. Richwine had also been one of my principal interlocutors in 2010, when publication of my major article analyzing Hispanic crime rates had similarly provoked a raucous debate on the web, a debate that was similarly almost totally ignored by the mainstream media.

If my findings on these important topics now attract broader attention, I’ll be the first to congratulate our journalistic community, since late is always better than never.  And I’ll certainly owe a large debt of gratitude to the unfortunate Dr. Richwine.

After all, we live in the Age of Television, when the images we see on the small screen—or its cinematic big brother—define our known world with far greater force than does the printed word or sometimes even the direct evidence of our own senses. Television may not be reality, but for all too many Americans, Reality is often Television.

Consider one of the most copiously sourced of the unreported scandals that I described, namely the long Vietnam POW cover-up so exhaustively documented by Pulitzer Prize-winner Sydney Schanberg. The evidence is overwhelming, the supporters include individuals of the highest credibility, and the governmental denials have largely been perfunctory. But since the story has not been widely featured on popular cable news chat shows, the events remain almost entirely “unreal” to the vast majority of today’s American journalists and the public they purport to inform.

Certainly at times the unreal has almost crossed the barrier to suddenly becoming real. For example, after the end of the Cold War when American scholars gained access to the Soviet archives, a Harvard researcher discovered a Politburo document confirming that Vietnam had kept back hundreds of American POWs until America delivered the billions in promised financial reparations, promises that were never fulfilled. The resulting expose made the front page of the New York Times in early 1993, and with the longstanding cover-up apparently about to unravel, former National Security Advisors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared together on the Jim Lehrer Newshour, confirmed the likely authenticity of the document, and admitted that “men were left behind.” But most of the media continued to repeat bland governmental denials, and the story quickly vanished from the headlines.

Similarly, one of the weightiest “debunking” articles, a 1992 cover story in The Atlantic, presented overwhelming evidence that President Ronald Reagan personally accepted the reality of the POWs and that his Administration had explored various efforts to either rescue or ransom the survivors. But the author, a leftist cultural historian specializing in film criticism, merely cited these facts as proof of Reagan’s ignorance and idiocy.

Thus, American presidents, former National Security Advisors, New York Times Pulitzer-Prize winners, members of Congress, and other highly reputable sources all indicate that the scandal is true, but the absence of ongoing television coverage persuades our journalists and pundits that it is must be false.

Individuals from less trusting societies are often surprised at the extent to which so many educated Americans tend to believe whatever the media tells them and ignore whatever it does not, placing few constraints on even the most ridiculous propaganda. For example, a commentator on my article described the East German media propaganda he had experienced prior to Reunification as being in many respects more factual and less totally ridiculous than what he now saw on American cable news shows. One obvious difference was that Western media was so globally dominant during that era that the inhabitants of the German Democratic Republic inevitably had reasonable access to a contrasting second source of information, forcing their media to be much more cautious in its dishonesty, while today almost any nonsense uniformly supported by the MSNBC-to-FoxNews spectrum of acceptable opinion remains almost totally unquestioned by most Americans.

Such blatant dishonesty inevitably makes it quite difficult for cautious individuals to distinguish surprising reality from sheer nonsense. For example, another commentator on my article alleged that the Federal Reserve was refusing to return the gold it held for the German Central Bank, and claimed this was because America’s own gold reserves had long since vanished.

Now I’ve personally never spent even ten minutes fretting about the gold at Fort Knox and always vaguely assumed that the official amount of American bullion—whatever that total might be—was absolutely safe and secure, at least after James Bond foiled the dastardly plot of Goldfinger to steal it in the 1964 film of that name. But on the other hand, given the demonstrated factual unreliability of our government and our media, I must also fully admit I might be mistaken. For all I really know, all of America’s gold was sold or stolen years before I was born, and the handful of officials aware of this unfortunate fact have spent decades pretending otherwise for the most obvious reasons. How many honest Americans can truly argue the contrary?

To the extent that our media scrupulously avoids investigating numerous massive scandals and our pundits steer clear from even acknowledging their possible existence, they steadily embezzling whatever credibility might remain in the American media infrastructure, until one day the whole system of established belief will simply collapse as surely as did Madoff’s enormous financial empire.

Meanwhile, on other matters I was pleased to see that the The Economist’slengthy cover story on Affirmative Action in American university admissions included a favorable mention of my own Meritocracy article, while The New America Foundation has now officially released its American Social Contract symposium, including my own article advocating a large increase in the federal minimum wage.

In mid-March, the Wall Street Journal carried a long discussion of the origins of the Bretton Woods system, the international financial framework that governed the Western world for decades after World War II. A photo showed the two individuals who negotiated that agreement. Britain was represented by John Maynard Keynes, a towering economic figure of that era. America’s representative was Harry Dexter White, assistant secretary of the Treasury and long a central architect of American economic policy, given that his nominal superior, Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., was a gentleman farmer with no background in finance. White was also a Communist agent.

Such a situation was hardly unique in American government during the 1930s and 1940s. For example, when a dying Franklin Roosevelt negotiated the outlines of postwar Europe with Joseph Stalin at the 1945 Yalta summit, one of his important advisors was Alger Hiss, a State Department official whose primary loyalty was to the Soviet side. Over the last 20 years, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and other scholars have conclusively established that many dozens or even hundreds of Soviet agents once honeycombed the key policy staffs and nuclear research facilities of our federal government, constituting a total presence perhaps approaching the scale suggested by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose often unsubstantiated charges tended to damage the credibility of his position.

The Cold War ended over two decades ago and Communism has been relegated to merely an unpleasant chapter in the history books, so today these facts are hardly much disputed. For example, liberal Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein matter-of-factly referred to White as a “Soviet spy” in the title of his column on our postwar financial system. But during the actual period when America’s government was heavily influenced by Communist agents, such accusations were widely denounced as “Red-baiting” or ridiculed as right-wing conspiracy paranoia by many of our most influential journalists and publications. In 1982 liberal icon Susan Sontag ruefully acknowledged that for decades the subscribers to the lowbrow Readers Digest had received a more realistic view of the world than those who drew their knowledge from the elite liberal publications favored by her fellow intellectuals. I myself came of age near the end of the Cold War and always vaguely assumed that such lurid tales of espionage were wildly exaggerated. I was wrong.

The notion of the American government being infiltrated and substantially controlled by agents of a foreign power has been the stuff of endless Hollywood movies and television shows, but for various reasons such popular channels have never been employed to bring the true-life historical example to wide attention. I doubt if even one American in a hundred today is familiar with the name “Harry Dexter White” or dozens of similar agents.

The realization that the world is often quite different from what is presented in our leading newspapers and magazines is not an easy conclusion for most educated Americans to accept, or at least that was true in my own case. For decades, I have closely read the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and one or two other major newspapers every morning, supplemented by a wide variety of weekly or monthly opinion magazines. Their biases in certain areas had always been apparent to me. But I felt confident that by comparing and contrasting the claims of these different publications and applying some common sense, I could obtain a reasonably accurate version of reality. I was mistaken.

Aside from the evidence of our own senses, almost everything we know about the past or the news of today comes from bits of ink on paper or colored pixels on a screen, and fortunately over the last decade or two the growth of the Internet has vastly widened the range of information available to us in that latter category. Even if the overwhelming majority of the unorthodox claims provided by such non-traditional web-based sources is incorrect, at least there now exists the possibility of extracting vital nuggets of truth from vast mountains of falsehood. Certainly the events of the past dozen years have forced me to completely recalibrate my own reality-detection apparatus.

Thoughtful individuals of all backgrounds have undergone a similar crisis of confidence during this same period. Just a few months after 9/11 New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued that the sudden financial collapse of the Enron Corporation represented a greater shock to the American system than the terrorist attacks themselves, and although he was widely denounced for making such an “unpatriotic” claim, I believe his case was strong. Although the name “Enron” has largely vanished from our memory, for years it had ranked as one of America’s most successful and admired companies, glowingly profiled on the covers of our leading business magazines, and drawing luminaries such as Krugman himself to its advisory board; Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay had been a top contender for Treasury secretary in President George W. Bush’s administration. Then in the blink of an eye, the entire company was revealed to be an accounting fraud from top to bottom, collapsing into a $63 billion bankruptcy, the largest in American history. Other companies of comparable or even greater size such as WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, and Global Crossing soon vanished for similar reasons.

Part of Krugman’s argument was that while the terrorist attacks had been of an entirely unprecedented nature and scale, our entire system of financial regulation, accounting, and business journalism was designed to prevent exactly the sort of frauds that brought down those huge companies. When a system fails so dramatically at its core mission, we must wonder which of our other assumptions are incorrect.

Just a few years later, we saw an even more sweeping near-collapse of our entire financial system, with giant institutions such as Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Wachovia, and AIG falling into bankruptcy, and all our remaining major banks surviving only due to the trillions of dollars in government bailouts and loan guarantees they received. Once again, all our media and regulatory organs had failed to anticipate this disaster.

Or take the remarkable case of Bernie Madoff. His colossal investment swindle had been growing unchecked for over three decades under the very noses of our leading financial journalists and regulators in New York City, ultimately reaching the sum of $65 billion in mostly fictional assets. His claimed returns had been implausibly steady and consistent year after year, market crashes or not. None of his supposed trading actually occurred. His only auditing was by a tiny storefront firm. Angry competitors had spent years warning the SEC and journalists that his alleged investment strategy was mathematically impossible and that he was obviously running a Ponzi scheme. Yet despite all these indicators, officials did nothing and refused to close down such a transparent swindle, while the media almost entirely failed to report these suspicions.

In many respects, the non-detection of these business frauds is far more alarming than failure to uncover governmental malfeasance. Politics is a partisan team sport, and it is easy to imagine Democrats or Republicans closing ranks and protecting their own, despite damage to society. Furthermore, success or failure in public policies is often ambiguous and subject to propagandistic spin. But investors in a fraudulent company lose their money and therefore have an enormous incentive to detect those risks, with the same being true for business journalists. If the media cannot be trusted to catch and report simple financial misconduct, its reliability on more politically charged matters will surely be lower.

The circumstances surrounding our Iraq War demonstrate this, certainly ranking it among the strangest military conflicts of modern times. The 2001 attacks in America were quickly ascribed to the radical Islamists of al-Qaeda, whose bitterest enemy in the Middle East had always been Saddam Hussein’s secular Baathist regime in Iraq. Yet through misleading public statements, false press leaks, and even forged evidence such as the “yellowcake” documents, the Bush administration and its neoconservative allies utilized the compliant American media to persuade our citizens that Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs posed a deadly national threat and required elimination by war and invasion. Indeed, for several years national polls showed that a large majority of conservatives and Republicans actually believed that Saddam was the mastermind behind 9/11 and the Iraq War was being fought as retribution. Consider how bizarre the history of the 1940s would seem if America had attacked China in retaliation for Pearl Harbor.

True facts were easily available to anyone paying attention in the years after 2001, but most Americans do not bother and simply draw their understanding of the world from what they are told by the major media, which overwhelmingly—almost uniformly—backed the case for war with Iraq; the talking heads on TV created our reality. Prominent journalists across the liberal and conservative spectrum eagerly published the most ridiculous lies and distortions passed on to them by anonymous sources, and stampeded Congress down the path to war.

The result was what my late friend Lt. Gen. Bill Odom rightly called the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.” American forces suffered tens of thousands of needless deaths and injuries, while our country took a huge step toward national bankruptcy. Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and others have estimated that with interest the total long-term cost of our two recent wars may reach as high as $5 or $6 trillion, or as much as $50,000 per American household, mostly still unpaid. Meanwhile, economist Edward Wolff has calculated that the Great Recession and its aftermath cut the personal net worth of the median American household to $57,000 in 2010 from a figure nearly twice as high three years earlier. Comparing these assets and liabilities, we see that the American middle class now hovers on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of our foreign wars being a leading cause.

But no one involved in the debacle ultimately suffered any serious consequences, and most of the same prominent politicians and highly paid media figures who were responsible remain just as prominent and highly paid today. For most Americans, reality is whatever our media organs tell us, and since these have largely ignored the facts and adverse consequences of our wars in recent years, the American people have similarly forgotten. Recent polls show that only half the public today believes that the Iraq War was a mistake.

Author James Bovard has described our society as an “attention deficit democracy,” and the speed with which important events are forgotten once the media loses interest might surprise George Orwell.

Consider the story of Vioxx, a highly lucrative anti-pain medication marketed by Merck to the elderly as a substitute for simple aspirin. After years of very profitable Vioxx sales, an FDA researcher published a study demonstrating that the drug greatly increased the risk of fatal strokes and heart attacks and had probably already caused tens of thousands of premature American deaths. Vioxx was immediately pulled from the market, but Merck eventually settled the resulting lawsuits for relatively small penalties, despite direct evidence the company had long been aware of the drug’s deadly nature. Our national media, which had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising revenue from Vioxx marketing, provided no sustained coverage and the scandal was soon forgotten. Furthermore, the press never investigated the dramatic upward and downward shifts in the mortality rates of elderly Americans that so closely tracked the introduction and recall of Vioxx; as I pointed out in a 2012 article, these indicated that the likely death toll had actually been several times greater than the FDA estimate. Vast numbers Americans died, no one was punished, and almost everyone has now forgotten.

Or take the strange case of Bernard Kerik, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner during 9/11, later nominated by President Bush to be America’s first director of national intelligence, a newly established position intended to oversee all of our various national-security and intelligence agencies. His appointment seemed likely to sail through the Republican-controlled Senate until derailed by accusations he had employed an undocumented nanny. With his political rise having been blocked, the national media suddenly revealed his long history of association with organized-crime figures, an indictment quickly followed, and he is currently still serving his federal prison sentence for conspiracy and fraud. So America came within a hairbreadth of placing its entire national-security apparatus under the authority of a high-school dropout connected with organized crime, and today almost no Americans seem aware of that fact.

Through most of the 20th century, America led something of a charmed life, at least when compared with the disasters endured by almost every other major country. We became the richest and most powerful nation on earth, partly due to our own achievements and partly due to the mistakes of others. The public interpreted these decades of American power and prosperity as validation of our system of government and national leadership, and the technological effectiveness of our domestic propaganda machinery—our own American Pravda—has heightened this effect. Furthermore, most ordinary Americans are reasonably honest and law-abiding and project that same behavior onto others, including our media and political elites. This differs from the total cynicism found in most other countries around the world.

Credibility is a capital asset, which may take years to accumulate but can be squandered in an instant; and the events of the last dozen years should have bankrupted any faith we have in our government or media. Once we acknowledge this, we should begin to accept the possible reality of important, well-documented events even if they are not announced on the front pages of our major newspapers. When several huge scandals have erupted into the headlines after years or decades of total media silence, we must wonder what other massive stories may currently be ignored by our media elites. I think I can provide a few possibilities.

Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.

Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.

Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.

This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.

An even more egregious case followed a couple of years later, with regard to the stunning revelations of Pulitzer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg, one of America’s foremost Vietnam War reporters and a former top editor at the New York Times. After years of research, Schanberg published massive evidence demonstrating that the endlessly ridiculed claims of America’s Vietnam MIA movement of the 1970s and 1980s were correct: the Nixon administration had indeed deliberately abandoned many hundreds of American POWs in Vietnam at the close of the war, and our government afterward spent decades covering up this shameful crime. Schanberg’s charges were publicly confirmed by two former Republican House members, one of whom had independently co-authoreda 500 page book on the subject, exhaustively documenting the POW evidence.

Although a major focus of Schanberg’s account was the central role that Sen. John McCain had played in leading the later cover-up, the national media ignored these detailed charges during McCain’s bitter 2008 presidential campaign against Barack Obama. One of America’s most distinguished living journalists published what was surely “the story of the century” and none of America’s newspapers took notice.

In 2010 Schanberg republished this material in a collection of his other writings, and his work received glowing praise from Joseph Galloway, one of America’s top military correspondents, as well as other leading journalists; his charges are now backed by the weight of four New York Times Pulitzer Prizes. Around that same time, I produced a 15,000-word cover-symposium on the scandal, organized around Schanberg’s path-breaking findings and including contributions from other prominent writers. All of this appeared in the middle of Senator McCain’s difficult reelection campaign in Arizona, and once again the material was totally ignored by the state and national media.

An argument might be made that little harm has been done to the national interest by the media’s continued silence in the two examples described above. The anthrax killings have largely been forgotten and the evidence suggests that the motive was probably one of personal revenge. All the government officials involved in the abandonment of the Vietnam POWs are either dead or quite elderly, and even those involved in the later cover-up, such as John McCain, are in the twilight of their political careers. But an additional example remains completely relevant today, and some of the guilty parties hold high office.

During the mid-2000s I began noticing references on one or two small websites to a woman claiming to be a former FBI employee who was making the most outlandish and ridiculous charges, accusing high government officials of selling our nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign spies. I paid no attention to such unlikely claims and never bothered reading any of the articles.

A couple of years went by, and various website references to that same woman—Sibel Edmonds—kept appearing, although I continued to ignore them, secure that the silence of all my newspapers proved her to be delusional. Then in early 2008, the LondonSunday Times, one of the world’s leading newspapers, ran a long, three-part front-page series presenting her charges, which were soon republished in numerous other countries. Daniel Ellsberg described Edmonds’s revelations as “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers” and castigated the American media for completely ignoring a storythat had reached the front pages of newspapers throughout the rest of the world. Such silence struck me as rather odd.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official who regularly writes for this magazine, suggested he investigate her charges. He found her highly credible, and his 3,000-word article in TAC presented some astonishing but very detailed claims.

Edmonds had been hired by the FBI to translate wiretapped conversations of a suspected foreign spy ring under surveillance, and she had been disturbed to discover that many of these hundreds of phone calls explicitly discussed the sale of nuclear-weapons secrets to foreign intelligence organizations, including those linked to international terrorism, as well as the placement of agents at key American military research facilities. Most remarkably, some of the individuals involved in these operations were high-ranking government officials; the staffs of several influential members of Congress were also implicated. On one occasion, a senior State Department figure was reportedly recorded making arrangements to pick up a bag containing a large cash bribe from one of his contacts. Very specific details of names, dates, dollar amounts, purchasers, and military secrets were provided.

The investigation had been going on for years with no apparent action, and Edmonds was alarmed to discover that a fellow translator quietly maintained a close relationship with one of the key FBI targets. When she raised these issues, she was personally threatened, and after appealing to her supervisors, eventually fired.

Since that time, she has passed a polygraph test on her claims, testified under oath in a libel lawsuit, expanded her detailed charges in a 2009 TAC cover story also by Giraldi, and most recently published a book recounting her case. Judiciary Committee Senators Chuck Grassley and Patrick Leahy have publicly backed some of her charges, a Department of Justice inspector general’s report has found her allegations “credible” and “serious,” while various FBI officials have vouched for her reliability and privately confirmed many of her claims. But none of her detailed charges has ever appeared in any of America’s newspapers. According to Edmonds, one of the conspirators routinely made payments to various members of the media, and bragged to his fellow plotters that “We just fax to our people at the New York Times. They print it under their names.”

At times, Congressional Democratic staff members became interested in the scandal, and promised an investigation. But once they learned that senior members of their own party were also implicated, their interest faded.

These three stories—the anthrax evidence, the McCain/POW revelations, and the Sibel Edmonds charges—are the sort of major exposés that would surely be dominating the headlines of any country with a properly-functioning media. But almost no American has ever heard of them. Before the Internet broke the chokehold of our centralized flow of information, I would have remained just as ignorant myself, despite all the major newspapers and magazines I regularly read.

Am I absolutely sure that any or all of these stories are true? Certainly not, though I think they probably are, given their overwhelming weight of supporting evidence. But absent any willingness of our government or major media to properly investigate them, I cannot say more.

However, this material does conclusively establish something else, which has even greater significance. These dramatic, well-documented accounts have been ignored by our national media, rather than widely publicized. Whether this silence has been deliberate or is merely due to incompetence remains unclear, but the silence itself is proven fact.

A likely reason for this wall of uninterest on so many important issues is that the disasters involved are often bipartisan in nature, with both Democrats and Republicans being culpable and therefore equally eager to hide their mistakes. Perhaps in the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, they realize that they must all hang together or they will surely all hang separately.

We always ridicule the 98 percent voter support that dictatorships frequently achieve in their elections and plebiscites, yet perhaps those secret-ballot results may sometimes be approximately correct, produced by the sort of overwhelming media control that leads voters to assume there is no possible alternative to the existing regime. Is such an undemocratic situation really so different from that found in our own country, in which our two major parties agree on such a broad range of controversial issues and, being backed by total media dominance, routinely split 98 percent of the vote? A democracy may provide voters with a choice, but that choice is largely determined by the information citizens receive from their media.

Most of the Americans who elected Barack Obama in 2008 intended their vote as a total repudiation of the policies and personnel of the preceding George W. Bush administration. Yet once in office, Obama’s crucial selections—Robert Gates at Defense, Timothy Geither at Treasury, and Ben Bernake at the Federal Reserve—were all top Bush officials, and they seamlessly continued the unpopular financial bailouts and foreign wars begun by his predecessor, producing what amounted to a third Bush term.

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

Major References in The American Conservative:

• Christopher Ketchum: The Anthrax Files, August 25, 2008
• Ron Unz: Was Rambo Right?, July 2010
• Sydney Schanberg: Silent Treatment, July 2010
• Sydney Schanberg: McCain and the POW Cover-Up, July 2010
• Philip Giraldi: Found in Translation, January 28, 2008
• Philip Giraldi: Who’s Afraid of Sibel Edmonds?, November 2009

Most of the responses to my analysis were quite reasonable and respectful.  Anthropologist Peter Frost published a column questioning some of my arguments, which generated an extended comment thread.  George Mason University’s Genetic Literacy Project also provided a brief summary and link.

However, a target of my critique had been Dr. Gregory Cochran, a leading Gay Germ advocate, who had recently ridiculed the intelligence of my old professor E.O. Wilson for remarks supporting the contrary Gay Gene hypothesis.  I merely pointed out that to the extent powerful selective pressures would have weeded out any hypothetical Gay Gene, exactly those same selective pressures would have tended to remove susceptibility to a Gay Germ as well, so that to a considerable extent the two theories suffered from similar theoretical weaknesses and were not so obviously distinct.

Now Cochran is a notoriously arrogant and irascible researcher, and he reacted to my views by launching a blistering attack on his own blogsite, sharply questioning my intellect and knowledge.  Moreover, when I showed up to explicate my analysis as a commenter, he quickly banned me, possibly because I was defending my position a bit too well, and perhaps thereby “confusing” his coterie of worshipful fanboys.  My impression is that publishing a lengthy blog attack against someone and then banning the victim when he politely attempts to provide his own side of the argument is considered “bad form” on the Internet, but there are obviously individuals for whom these usual rules do not apply.

My dispute with Cochran had hinged on a very simple point, namely whether or not the hypothetical Gay Germ in question induced the orientation for some deliberate reason or whether the effect was merely a more or less random byproduct of the pathogen’s bodily activity.  Cochran has provided no suggestion of the former possibility, which seems equally implausible to me, so his theory hinges on the notion that gayness is simply an unintentional aspect of the infection.  However, such a hypothesis seems to suffer from severe theoretical weaknesses.

Host/parasite systems are always undergoing the fiercest sort of evolutionary struggle, with both sides facing powerful selective pressures to gain the upper hand.  Indeed, many evolutionists in recent years have concluded that one of the most fundamental and important of all plant and animal traits—namely sexual rather than asexual reproduction—probably evolved primarily as an anti-parasitic defense mechanism.

But now consider the hypothetical Gay Germ.  If the induced orientation serves no useful purpose for the bug, maintenance of that particular extended phenotype would not be supported by any selective pressure, while the genes of the host would be under enormous contrary pressure to eliminate the trait by producing modifier genes or other neutralizing responses.  As a result, the evolutionary arms-race would be entirely one-sided, and we would expect the gayness-inducing aspect of the Gay Germ to quickly disappear, whether through changes to host or to parasite.  The human body is already filled to the brim with germs, and since the hypothetical germ produces no other apparent symptoms, the host DNA certainly wouldn’t care about one more free rider hanging around once it stopped trying to fatally compromise host reproduction.  A mutually-acceptable evolutionary truce would have been declared.

While it is possible to hypothetically posit that the induced orientation provides no benefit to the germ but is nonetheless inextricably linked to the pathogen’s life-cycle, this seems quite unlikely.  As I pointed out in a couple of my comments on Cochran’s blog, the harmful effects of virtually all other diseases are directly due to the needful activity of the germs in question.  Sometimes these involve digesting the body-organs of the host, sometimes clogging up the circulatory system by multiplying and spreading, or sometimes even manipulating the host’s behavior in order to more effectively spread to other hosts.  Since the alleged Gay Germ seems utterly asymptomatic, I find it doubtful that a germ would induce gayness and attack the host’s reproductive system merely out of pure maliciousness toward the host’s DNA.

Cochran countered by citing as a counter-example the “sterility belt” of Central Africa, in which Chlamydia, a sexually transmitted disease, sterilizes up to 30% of all adult women. He argued the germ gained nothing from inducing this trait while the infected host population suffered massive harm.

In response, I pointed out that the likely benefit to this particular STD activity was quite obvious.  Such sterilized African women would probably be divorced by their husbands and cast into dire poverty, thereby often being forced into a life of formal or informal prostitution as a consequence.  Since prostitutes might have hundreds of times as many sexual partners each year as married women, the gains to the transmission-vector of such a sterility-inducing STD would be absolutely enormous, providing exactly the sort of powerful selective pressure able to balance that operating on the host population.  Thus, such a “Divorce Germ” makes perfect evolutionary sense in the way a Gay Germ seemingly does not.

Now Cochran has devoted the last decade almost exclusively to these sorts of evolutionary biology issues, and for him to have apparently spent all those years believing that a 30% germ-induced host sterility rate—with absolutely enormous selective impact—served no useful purpose for the responsible pathogen is tantamount to revealing that he has Creationist-leanings.  Hence he immediately banned me from his blogsite for making such “lawyerly” arguments, and later declared that the corpus of my published articles had anyway proven that I was simply a “loon.”

There is an ironic subtext to this minor blogosphere contretemps.  In his own political views, Cochran is an extreme right-winger, and he and his friends are always denouncing our mainstream media for its climate of total censorship and bias against views that contradict the reigning Blank Slate theory of human nature.  Such criticism is perfectly valid.  But I find it a bit amusing that the moment anyone politely points out the holes in Cochran’s own pet scientific theories, his guillotine comes down and the heretic is expelled to the Outer Darkness.

Early in the twentieth century, the Trotskyites endlessly bewailed how their Stalinist foes had gained the upper hand and brutally purged them.  Yet I’ve always suspected that if the Trotskyites had been the ones who ended up on top, they would have treated their defeated opponents in exactly the same manner.

On a related matter, a reader of my previous column happens to be an old friend of Robert Trivers, one of the world’s foremost evolutionary theorists, and forwarded him my remarks, soliciting his opinion on the Gay Gene/Gay Germ question.  Trivers explained that the evolutionary problem of homosexuality had been an important focus of his thinking and research for thirty years and that no one had yet proposed a satisfactory model; he sketched out the various hypotheses and their obvious weaknesses.  Given my cursory knowledge of the field and his great eminence, I found it reassuring that my views were quite compatible with his.  However, he didn’t seem to think that anyone had ever seriously proposed a Gay Germ theory, so perhaps my original discussion gave far too much attention to that particular bit of occasional blogosphere speculation.

His theoretical brilliance aside, Trivers has also occasionally attracted attention for his politics.  Although evolutionary biology is frequently perceived as a stronghold of reactionary sentiment, perhaps due to years of public vilification and dishonest smears by Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and other critics of their ilk, the actual facts seem otherwise, with leading figures such as Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilson being strong liberals.  And Trivers himself turns this stereotype completely on its head, being a figure of the Radical Left.  For example, he was one of the tiny handful of whites who joined the Black Panther Party during its heyday, and apparently still holds those same views, having personally dedicated his most recent book to the memory of Panther leader Huey Newton.

My personal inclination is to focus on the scientific validity of a theory rather than the ideological leanings of the particular figure providing the analysis.

On another matter, I’m pleased that my article How Social Darwinism Made Modern China continues to generate steady traffic six weeks after publication, with total readership time now heading toward 20,000 hours.

Finally, the front page of his morning’s New York Times announced that NYC’s Cooper Union had officially ended its 150-year-old tradition of providing a top-quality education without charging tuition.  I had previously provided my own opinion on that proposal earlier in the year.

I refer, of course, to the Harvard Spreadsheet Glitch, the discovery of a calculation error in the early 2010 research of celebrity-economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. The Rogoff-Reinhart findings had been cited by officials and international agencies throughout the world as proof of the devastating economic impact of accumulated national debt.  As a result, most governments focused their Great Recession response on the need to minimize deficit spending and cut budgets rather than try to reduce unemployment via Keynesian pump-priming, which according to the study led to disaster.  But Rogoff-Reinhardt had made an error in their calculation, so Oops!

Now I am as absolutely far from being a trained economist as it is humanly possible to be, never in my life having taken so much as a single economics course or even opened the pages of a textbook.  But simple common sense and reading the newspapers tells me that the glitch in question had major world consequences, given how widely the austerity prescriptions were believed and followed by our ruling elites.

It appears that countries containing nearly a billion people were substantially affected by that widely promoted spreadsheet error, with trillions of dollars misdirected and probably many millions of citizens driven into deep unemployment and poverty.  Given that prolonged economic stress significantly lowers life expectancy, the premature death toll from that defective Rogoff-Reinhart spreadsheet likely reaches far into the hundreds of thousands.  Whichever drunken grad student typed in the wrong numbers has much to answer for, or perhaps we should just prosecute Bill Gates for selling a genocidal weapon such as Excel.

Now anyone can make a numerical mistake, and I have certainly made many in my own day, a source of permanent humiliation and guilt.  But consider that none of our financial, media, or academic elites bothered checking or confirming those erroneous calculations based as they were upon publicly available data.  Instead, they just endlessly trumpeted the results in news stories and speeches, once again manifestly confirming the total arrogant incompetence of those who rule our world.

The obvious reason for this ridiculous situation was that the Rogoff-Reinhart findings fit so perfectly well into the orthodox economic theories and perceived reality of established elite opinion that they were naturally assumed to be correct; if they had predicted something else, they surely would have been checked and rechecked and re-rechecked until even the slightest small error was found.  Our academics and journalists believe certain things to be true, and simply tend to discard or ignore evidence that does not conform to that framework, while our politicians read whatever speech the teleprompter sets before them, just like the network newscasters they increasingly resemble.  My impression is that the Brezhnevian Era of Soviet stagnation followed a similar pattern, though their politician-rulers were much far less photogenic and talkative.

What will be the negative consequences of this devastating discovery for the careers and credibility of Rogoff, Reinhart, and all their supportive colleagues and promoters?  None whatsoever I expect.  Once a few weeks or months have gone by, and more Chechen terrorism or celebrity scandals have washed away any lingering memories, then new and improved Rogoff-Reinhart economic predictions from their same Harvard spreadsheets will be just as widely distributed and believed as had been their previous ones, with the same economic pundits touting them in newspaper columns or cable television debates.  The famous words of Talleyrand regarding the restored post-Napoleonic French Bourbon monarchs comes to mind: “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”

Given our current national trajectory it wouldn’t much surprise me if a sufficiently irritated and immiserated citizenry will eventually consider applying a very Bourbon outcome to our ruling elites, dealing with them in the same late eighteenth century fashion as was visited upon roi, duc, and comte, with the process perhaps garnering astonishingly high ratings on national reality-television.

Consider, for example, the analysis of human behavior.  Whatever most people may privately believe or say, the vocal academics and activists who control the commanding ideological heights of our media tend to claim that people act as they do largely because of social conditioning, and they often denounce or vilify those accused of the thoughtcrime of “genetic determinism.”  Note the example of (former) Harvard President Larry Summers.

But all rules have exceptions, and for some unknown reason those same activists and media organs have decided that homosexuality is genetically based, denouncing anyone who suggests otherwise.  Thus, genes officially determine gayness and nothing else, which hardly seems the most logical possibility in the world.  But pointing out such inconsistencies can get you into hot water, so few people do.

Given the remarkable dishonesty of our media elites across such a wide range of topics, there is a natural tendency to assume that the truth is probably the opposite of whatever they say about anything.  This undermines the credibility of the Gay Gene hypothesis, as does its proponents’ practice of treating scientific disagreement as religious heresy.

But frankly, the other side of the debate sometimes seems little better in its behavior.  I think one of the most highly vilified rivals to Gay Gene theory is “Gay Germ theory,” the suggestion that some sort of virus or microorganism is responsible for the behavior in question.  And just a few days ago, I noticed that evolutionary theorist Gregory Cochran, one of the leading Gay Germ proponents, had viciously insulted the intelligence of my old professor E.O. Wilson for his remarks supporting the Gay Gene side.

Although I’ll admit I’ve never much investigated this particular aspect of evolutionary biology theory, the whole academic dispute has always seemed a little strange to me.  As near as I can tell, the two battling hypotheses—Gay Gene vs. Gay Germ—are hardly all that much opposed, and may even blend into one another when we draw the proper distinction between proximal and ultimate causation.

First, consider the genetic hypothesis.  From what I’ve read here and there, there does seem to be a substantial degree of apparent heritability in the orientation, with the tendency running in families and the concordance being much higher in identical than in fraternal twins.  But the heritability is far too low to be explained by a simple genetic on/off switch, therefore implying at the very least some sort of stochastic environmental trigger, and quite possibly some set of modifier genes as well.

Now consider the rival “germ” hypothesis.  There seems no evidence that the agent is infectious in the usual sense of the word, so any such germ is likely to ambient in our society, with many or most people being constantly exposed and individual susceptibility to the virus being the determining factor.  But such susceptibility is likely to have a important genetic component, as seen in the evidence for partial heritability.  Thus, the hypothetical germ merely represents a particular example of the environmental trigger assumed by the genetic model, and the two theories are essentially the same.

Cochran and others ridicule the gene model as absurd, arguing that strong selective pressure would have rapidly eliminated any such genes from the population, and this is not unreasonable.  But similar criticism could applied to their own model, since genetic susceptibility to the germ would obviously be subject to equally powerful selective disadvantage.

Actually it seems to me quite easy to imagine circumstances in which the genes in question would be maintained in dynamic equilibrium, with the selective disadvantage of the orientation being balanced by other sorts of advantages, much as Sickle Cell genes survive because of the heterozygous resistance they provide to malaria.  Suppose, for example, that a GG homozygous condition together with a germ contact or some other environmental trigger (plus perhaps some modifier genes) produced the orientation, but that the heterozygous Gg combination provided some small selective advantage, quite possibly in something as mundane as digestion efficiency or iron transport.  The result would be the permanent maintenance of the genes and behavior in question.  I am certainly not suggesting that this particular model—which took me less than five minutes to produce—is correct, merely that I don’t see how it can be so easily dismissed out of hand based on the limited empirical evidence.

I suspect that one reason academic partisans of these rival theories are sometimes so arrogant in their certainty is that they tend to contrast their scientific-based ideas with the ridiculous Freudian nonsense that dominated the subject during the second half of the twentieth century, and assume that since those contrary ideas were probably 100% wrong, their own must therefore be 100% right.

On a different matter, Prof. Kevin MacDonald has responded to my criticism of his claims regarding the important role of Chinese polygamy, but I’m afraid I don’t find any of his new evidence very persuasive.

He correctly notes that some Chinese emperors were recorded as having many hundreds or even thousands of wives and concubines, and that polygyny was legal among all Chinese classes, but I’m still not aware of any evidence that the practice was widespread.  It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if a large majority of China’s tens of thousands of government officials had concubines, as well as many wealthy merchants; but such elite groups constituted just a negligible fraction of a total population numbering in the hundreds of millions.

In an effort to confirm my impressions, I went back and consulted the indexes of five or six of my books providing detailed sociological studies of particular Chinese villages, and just as I remembered, the numbers of second wives or concubines was close to nil.  Indeed, one of the authors pointed to the total absence of additional wives as being due to the huge costs involved, given how difficult it was for most Chinese villagers to afford acquiring even their first wife.  Interestingly enough, the major exceptions were exactly the ones I remembered, namely villagers who had moved away to a city and there become wealthy enough to maintain multiple families, one of which was often eventually sent back to their ancestral village to look after their local property.  The other typical case was that of villagers who had permanently relocated for work to a distant city or even moved overseas.  They sometimes formed new families in that location, while their original wife remained a “grass widow” at home; but I think this situation was also sometimes found in America’s Old West of the nineteenth century.  I stand by my impression that fewer than one percent of adult Chinese males living in rural villagers seem to have been polygamous.

And was the polygamous nature of China’s tiny ruling elite really so totally different than that of Europe’s kings or barons during the same centuries?  I’m hardly an expert on medieval sociology, but my impression is that most members of the royalty or nobility tended to have numerous mistresses and often multiple families, even though this practice was frowned upon by the Church.  As an extreme example, in the early eighteenth century King August the Strong of Poland was reported by contemporary sources to have sired nearly 400 children.  The point is that the although the practices of the tiny slice of ruling elites may attract great historical attention and produce major cultural influences, they are unlikely to shape the innate characteristics of a large population.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to see that my original Chinese Social Darwinism article continues to attract additional interest, with an Indian blogsite reprinting the entire piece and tweeting it out to over 20,000 recipients.  My paper was also highlighted by UCLA Professor Cameron Campbell, a leading world authority on East Asian demographics, two of whose books I had read as part of the background research for my own analysis.

On a somewhat less favorable note, some blogger named Alan Baumler has denounced my article as “Yellow Peril 3.1,” juxtaposing his criticism with a description of fictional accounts advocating the total extermination of the Han race.  He also described as particularly “loony” my suggestion that Chinese social-conformism may have roots in 2,000 years of strong central government authority, without apparently realizing that I was merely quoting the views of Bruce Lahn, a brilliant Chinese-born genetics researcher.  I’ll admit that I don’t really know anything about the blogger in question, but he does seem to have serious problems in reading comprehension.

Personally, it’s not the sort of issue that keeps me in a state of great ideological agitation, but since everyone else seems to be sharing his opinion, I might as well do the same, if only by pointing to the column I’d written on the subject back in the late 1990s.  I can’t say that any of my views have much changed, unlike those of a vast number of American politicians and pundits.

For me, the more important aspect of this current controversy is the insight it provides into the nature of America’s “conservative movement” and the so-called Christian Right. Some of the top leaders of the conservative anti-Gay Marriage organizations of the 2000s have now switched sides and fully endorsed the very practice they had long denounced as a social monstrosity, which is certainly a bit odd from a theological or philosophical perspective.  Have the world’s “eternal verities” suddenly been reversed in just six or seven years, or might the cause of their U-turns instead be found in the opinions of their DC cocktail-party friends or the views of the plutocrats who sign their paychecks?

Above all, the transformative power of the American media is once again revealed.  Some time back I joked with a conservative friend that after a few years of relentless media pressure the very same preachers then denouncing Gay Marriage as the “sin of Satan” would probably be  uniting same-sex couples in holy matrimony at their own churches, and so far the social trend lines seem to be supporting my prediction.  After all, in modern American society the Word of the Almighty and His Holy Book may have a powerful influence, but they are regularly trumped by whatever our electronic media tells us to believe.  Perhaps churches should just install television sets in front of their pews and cut out the middle man.

Meanwhile, the ideological libertarians who constitute such an important part of our conservative intellectual elite make the powerful argument that if two men—or perhaps five—want to marry each other, there is no reasonable ground to deny them that right.  After all, their personal happiness is obviously enhanced and it is difficult to see how any reasonable individual outside that blissful union could claim to be harmed as a consequence.  Some gain, no one loses, and American law should endorse practices that allow such a maximization of America’s total social utility value-function.

This argument seems irrefutable to me, at least given the framework of libertarian theory, today widely accepted by so many of our prominent thinkers on the right and even the left. But as an obvious corollary, I would suggest that once Gay Marriage has been fully allowed in all fifty states, whether by Supreme Court writ or otherwise, we would still remain very far from the full implementation of the individual freedoms originally promised by our Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights.

I refer, of course, to the burning issue of “Sidewalk Marriage.”  Consider a man who wants to marry his local sidewalk.  What argument could possibly be advanced against such a union?  The man certainly gains, both in happiness and self-respect, while not even the most benighted naysayer could advance any plausible argument that the sidewalk is injured by the process.  Certainly the nuptials would provide a financial boost to our struggling economy, especially given the number of construction workers who would necessarily be employed when man and sidewalk go off on their honeymoon.  Dutiful individuals would surely spend their own money to keep their beloved spouses neat and tidy, immediately repairing any cracks the moment they appear, and thereby saving our over-burdened taxpayers all sorts of local maintenance expense.  A win-win proposition all around, and even more importantly the moral position for society.

On an entirely different matter, someone I know sent me the following description of his son’s recent college admission outcome, and later authorized me to publish his note so long as I very slightly modified the text so as to maintain anonymity:

He is a National Merit Scholar, works at a major museum conducting science experiments for kids, works as a volunteer at a drop-in center for the homeless, is the editor of his school’s literary journal, acts in plays, is on the “Quiz Bowl” team, swims and dives, has a Black Belt, 1st Degree and is a good student.

Cumulative GPA: 4.38,
SAT Scores:
800 Reading
800 Math
770 Writing

AP Scores:
5 on US History
5 on European History
5 on AP English Language and Composition

He is on the wait lists at Harvard, Brown and Columbia and not likely to be admitted. So it goes…

The individual is white, lives on the East Coast, and has a very Anglo-Saxon name.

Some of my Meritocracy critics have suggested that the ridiculous skew of Ivy League enrollments exists because few of the capable students from most of our major ethnic groups bother applying.  Without detailed data I obviously can neither confirm nor deny this speculative excuse, but examples such as this one leave me quite skeptical of such an explanatory cause.

And the general topic does have deep resonance.  Although my article ran almost five months ago, right now it ranks #2 in current traffic on the TAC website, just below my recent “Mickey Mouse” column on copyrights.

With so many teenagers now discovering their future life-prospects as dealt out by our academic gatekeepers, discussions of the selection process are appearing in our media, and some of these include reference to my own Meritocracy article of almost five months ago, focusing on the same topic.

For example, the Sunday New York Times carried an interesting discussion by columnist Ross Douthat on the Ivies and their role in producing our national elites, which included linked references to my main Meritocracy article as well as my short piece for the NYT Forum on Asian discrimination.

Given that the reach of the electronic media so greatly exceeds the number of people who ever bother reading anything, I was even more pleased to see that Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday CNN television show ran a segment on college admissions, heavily drawing upon the findings of my article; his Time magazine column covered the same topic.  One minor point of confusion was his suggestion that I had ignored the substantial number of Asian students whose fear of racial discrimination causes them to conceal their personal background and are therefore lumped into the “Race Unknown” category.  In fact, I had discussed this and similar possibilities in detail, and provided all the related data.

Assuming that the racial and ethnic distribution of Ivy League admissions this year is roughly in line with the recent past, I would hope that activists and the media finally begin exerting serious pressure on our elite schools to provide their admissions rates broken down by race.  All the campuses of the University of California system freely post such data on the Internet, and I cannot think of any non-sinister reason for the Ivy League to make such strenuous efforts to keep such numbers secret.  My strong suspicion is that release of those ethnic percentages and their historical trajectory would produce such an uproar that the front pages of every major newspaper in America might devote many weeks to the reverberations and recriminations, with senior university administrators replacing certain Catholic archbishops as the leading villains in a decades-long cover-up of truly massive proportions.

Perhaps any aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins with friends working in Ivy League admissions offices should give some thought to just how nice a Pulitzer Prize or two might look upon their mantle.

On an entirely different matter, Prof. Kevin MacDonald has published an article analyzing differences in European and non-European marriage patterns, which included a lengthy discussion of my own recent China article.  He singled out China’s system of polygamy—in sharp contrast to European monogamy—as playing a central role in shaping the characteristics of the Chinese people over the last two thousand years.  However, I think his analysis is largely incorrect.

One problem in attempting to draw insight from the great literary works of a culture, as MacDonald does, is that these overwhelmingly focus on the lives of the topmost elites rather than the ordinary multitudes of the population.  For similar reasons, the tremendous importance of the traditional Chinese examination system in selecting China’s ruling meritocracy has led to widespread suggestions that this testing system played a major role in shaping the characteristics of the modern Chinese people and their high academic ability.  But both these possibilities seem very unlikely.

Although successful exam-takers received considerable social prestige in Old China, the major practical benefit they enjoyed was the possibility of an official appointment to the Mandarinate, which might provide them with huge opportunities to accrue wealth and power.  But the total number of such Chinese officials was utterly negligible, numbering just one in 20,000 Chinese during the nineteenth century, or a mere 0.005% of the total citizenry.  The overall characteristics of the population are unlikely to shift when even huge benefits are provided to such a negligible number of individuals.

Although the impact of polygamy would not be quite as insignificant, I think it would still be far too small to make a difference.  I’m not aware of any reliable quantitative estimates of the percentage of adult males who managed to obtain multiple wives or concubines in traditional China, but based on the detailed accounts I have read of particular villages and sociological overviews, the figure would seem very small, probably less than one percent of adult men.  Hence just a tiny fraction of women would have been absorbed by polygamy, with no significant impact upon the marriage prospects of the male population as a whole.

Instead, the overriding factor in preventing many men of each generation from obtaining wives was the widespread practice of female infanticide among the poorer classes, which experts estimate regularly produced a shortfall in the adult female population as high as 15% per generation.  Almost all the landlords of a village were just as monogamous as their poorer neighbors, with their wealth and land being far too insignificant to support an extra family on the side.  The missing wives of unhappy bachelors were not locked away in the harems of the rich, but had mostly been drowned at birth by the impoverished families of the previous generation.

Thus, I think the major demographic force upon Chinese society was the drain at the bottom rather than the overflow at the top.  The poorest portion of each male generation was unable to marry at all, and even those who did often suffered the ill effects of high infant mortality, both intentional and unintentional, as well as malnutrition and the ravages of periodic famines.  The bottom economic half of each generation probably produced just a small slice of the next one, and this economic winnowing was certainly a far more significant shaping force than the tiny handful of landlords who were so exceptionally wealthy that they could afford several wives and numerous children.

Admittedly, the major published works of traditional China would focus on the bitter intrigues of rival wives or the outstanding scholarly achievements of great scholars; but this had nothing to do with 99% of the Chinese people.  Similarly, the contemporaneous literature of Europe might focus on leading armies in battle, fighting knightly duels, or composing sonnets at Court, activities all totally alien to the lives of ordinary peasants, who constituted nearly the entire population.

Finally, I was quite astonished at the enormous response I received to my brief and casual discussion of the “Mickey Mouse” origins of America’s copyright law, with my column quickly reaching the top of the recent TAC readership charts and being Tweeted out to hundreds of thousands of individuals.  Sometimes I invest enormous time and research effort in a piece and relatively few people seem to find it interesting, and sometimes just the opposite.  Which just goes to show that our world remains highly unpredictable.