[Video and transcript, Part I: here;
Part II: here;
Part IV;
Part V; and Part VI, the Conclusion of Steve Sailer’s Speech.]
There’s another aspect to the 21st Century’s obsession with Diversity. Not only is it always becoming more important, it also is not important when it comes to bad things. Consider the Iraq War.
Rather than tighten the borders after 9/11 to, you know, keep foreigners from killing thousands of Americans, the Bush Administration concluded that because we must invite the world, therefore we must invade the world.
Granted, Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, but, the Bush Administration argued, we were doing it for their own good: America would democratize Iraq, just like it democratized West Germany and Japan after WWII.
But what if Iraq and Germany are… diverse?
Well, responded the Bush Administration, they can’t be. Because that would be racist. You sound like a racist just for asking that question.
I then pointed out a fact that virtually nobody in America knew about Iraq—that roughly half of Iraqi married couples consisted of first or second cousins, with more of them first cousins than second cousins. And Iraqi cousin marriage made American nation-building in Iraq highly implausible.
muslims, especially arabs, are so much more loyal to their families than to their nations in part because, due to countless generations of cousin marriages, they are so much more genealogically related to their families than Westerners are related to theirs.
Why? If your son-in-law is also your nephew, then your grandson will also be your brother’s grandson. That solves a lot of potential sibling rivalry problems within the family over who gets to inherit the goat herd. But it doesn’t encourage Iraqis to cooperate with their fellow citizens who aren’t blood relatives.
Not surprisingly, the Bush plan to reform Iraq did not work. Iraqis went on being Iraqis, not Germans or Japanese.
A few years ago, a reporter for the new yorker called me up to get the inside story of why the intellectual Right had split up in the early 2000s. Was it over race? Immigration?
Nah, I said, it was over Iraq. The respectable republicans wanted to invade Iraq, and us deplorable bad guys didn’t want to start a pointless war. The new yorker reporter was deflated by this news. This was not the story he wanted to hear, so that quote never appeared in his article about how us bad guys are Bad.
The Bush Administration’s devotion to Diversity, while denying it could mean anything culturally unfortunate, also was involved in its most significant domestic disaster, the housing bubble that led to the 2008 economic crash.
The housing boom, which was centered in the Hispanic-heavy “sand states” of California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, was in sizable part due to a push by Bush in 2002 to 2004 to increase minority homeownership by gutting traditional mortgage credit standards, such as down payments and documentation of income, in order to sell more houses to immigrants, including the undocumented.
Republicans in Congress usually try to keep a wary eye on Democratic Presidents’ tomfoolery regarding mortgages for minorities. But when their own side is pushing it as part of Karl Rove’s plan for a political realignment by turning Hispanics into Republican-voting homeowners, nobody who is anybody objects. The Democrats like more lending to their voters, the Republicans like less government regulation of lenders, and high-rolling big lenders like the no-longer-existent Countrywide Financial strongly endorsed Bush’s project to get federal regulators off their backs so they could lend more to Latinos.
When researchers later looked at the popping of the mortgage bubble, Hispanics keep showing up in strikingly disproportionate numbers, with default rates three to four times the white rate, and for surprisingly large amounts. Because Hispanics tended to live in expensive places like Southern California, the average Hispanic’s home price was higher in 2006 than the average white’s.
This is not to say that the world economy wasn’t out of balance in general by 2008, but it is to say that the direct cause of the Great Recession was the Bush Bubble, much like the direct impetus for American entry into World War II was Pearl Harbor.
Pearl Harbor was hardly the only reason the U.S. got involved, but it definitely mattered. And, we thought hard about preventing another Pearl Harbor for a long time, and did a pretty good job of not being subject to sneak attack for another 60 years.
In contrast, virtually nobody has thought about the complex way that Diversity played into the 2008 disaster, so we’ll likely have some kind of replay in less than 60 years.
[End of Part III.]
1 comment:
" in order to sell more houses to immigrants, including the undocumented."
Homes when abandoned too often deliberately trashed or derelict and ruined.
Post a Comment