Recent News

I recently validated Rep. Steve King’s quip that there are 100 times more drug-smuggling illegal alien minors than valedictorians. So did Tom Tancredo. But needless to say, the Main Stream Media is still determined to discredit King:

• [Fact Check: Steve King Says Valedictorians and Drug Smugglers Could Be Legalized, by Jordan Fabian, ABC News/Univision, July 25, 2013;
• 4 Pinocchios for Rep. Steve King’s claim on valedictorians and smugglers, by Glenn Kessler, Washington Post, July 29, 2013]

King was speaking figuratively and not suggesting that his was a perfect statistic. He has clarified, according to Glenn Kessler:

I wasn’t talking about the ratio. Border Patrol agents don’t know how many valedictorians we have that are also ‘DREAMers.’ In fact, I don’t know that the public knows either. But I can tell you it’s not nearly as many as the advocates for the DREAM Act would like to have you believe.

As I showed in my subsequent article documenting several fake “undocumented valedictorians,” this statement is indisputably correct.

But ABC’s Fabian [Email him] did not bother to even address how many illegal alien valedictorians there are.

And WaPo’s Kessler simply argued that King “offered no evidence for why the percentage of valedictorians among ‘DREAMers’ would be any less than in the general population.”

Of course, it’s absurd to demand that King “offer evidence” for everything he said—this was a journalistic interview, not a Ph.D. thesis. But, as I noted in my initial defense of King, Hispanics do have lower test scores than whites, and much higher drop-out rates than whites and even African-Americans. According to the College Board, which administrates the SATs, only 23% of Hispanics have test scores that show they are ready for college in contrast to 43% of the general population. [SAT Report: 77% of Latinos Not Ready for College, by Bryan Llenas. Fox News Latino, September 25, 2012]

Indeed, the lower average SAT scores by Hispanics understate how unlikely they are to be valedictorians: the disparities are even larger among the top achievers.

According to the College Board, the 99^th percentile for Mexican Americans in Critical Reading, Math, and Writing is a 700. In other words, less than one percent of Mexican Americans score a 700 or above on these categories. In contrast, a 700 in Reading, Math, and Writing, respectively, is only the 91^st, 75^th, and 89^th percentile for Asians and 94^th, 93^rd, and 95^th percentile for whites.

And even these numbers overstate Hispanic performance—because they are already less likely to take the SATs than other ethnic groups.

Although SATs are correlated strongly with academic performance, they are not grades. However, the College Board also recorded the average grades of students. Hispanics had a 3.21 GPA, compared to 3.43 for whites and 3.5 for Asians. (SAT Percentile Ranks for 2012 College-Bound Seniors [PDF], The College Board.)

So contra Kessler, there is plenty of “evidence for why the percentage of valedictorians among ‘DREAMers’ would be any less than in the general population.” [VDARE.com Note: Jason Richwine made this point in his doctoral thesis, IQ And Immigration Policy. ]

More points:

• Kessler acknowledges

Immigration patriots—meaning real Americans—can only view the top GOP politicians in the Old Dominion with pity and contempt.

• In March, gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli scrubbed his website of its immigration page. [Ken Cuccinelli’s airbrushed policies, Washington Post, March 19, 2013]
• In July, Mark Obenshain, the GOP candidate for attorney general—who launched his career on the memory of his father Richard, tragically killed in a 1978 plane crash shortly after winning the U.S. Senate nomination—sent fawning Ramadan greetings to the commonwealth’s Mohammedans.
• Most recently, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a fairly reliable conservative who represents the state’s 6th congressional district, began working with…
• House Majority Leader Eric Cantor , who represents Virginia’s 7th, on a KIDS Act that would grant amnesty for illegal-alien children.

Goodlatte is a Christian Scientist; Cantor is Jewish. So we have one man who believes in the 19th-century version of Scientology, and another whose coreligionists have arguably wrecked U.S. immigration policy and are now pushing hard for the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill, trying to give the Left a major gift: more Democrat voters.

But let’s take these one at a time. Why did the Cooch, as he is known, get out the Stalinist cyber-erasers and wipe his website clean of immigration talk? As The Washington Post noted, he was, to some degree, what the Left disparages as a “hardliner” on immigration. He supported Arizona’s law that permitted police to check the immigration status of those stopped lawfully by police, and then issued an opinion that Prince William County’s cops could indeed inquire about the immigration status of those they stop. He even wanted, at one time, to end birthright citizenship.

But now as James Hohmann recently reported in Politico, his “immigration tone varies with venue.” [July 25, 2013]

Perhaps Cuccinelli fears a backlash from the state’s Leftist Catholics and their bishops, who peddle the lie that Catholic social teaching dogmatically requires assent to their nutty position on immigration.

But another possibility is this: The pro-homosexual, pro-abortion Left and Main Stream Media (where distinguishable) have successfully painted Cuccinelli (along with E.W. Jackson, the surprise black candidate for lieutenant governor) as religious extremists. This has panicked “moderate” Republicans into thinking Cuccinelli cannot win the election against Democrat Terry McAuliffe, a renegade Catholic leftist. With typical cowardice, they are bolting. Thus Bill Bolling, who quit the governor’s race after Cuccinelli’s forces took control of the state party’s nominating process, has formed the Virginia Mainstream Project to convince Republicans that the only important issues for Virginians are jobs and the economy.

By retreating on immigration, Cuccinelli and his consultants probably think they are lowering his profile on what is in some sense a “social” issue, at least as the Left portrays it. For the Left,

 In my recent defense of Rep. Steve King for daring to mention the Hate Fact that there are many more illegal alien drug mules than valedictorians, I made two points that could perhaps be challenged:

• First, I pointed to the dismal academics at North Miami High School, alma mater of Daniela Palaez, the most celebrated “undocumented valedictorian,” as an example of how being valedictorian at a low quality school may not require that much skill.

I could be accused of cherry-picking one example to be indicative of a larger class—kind of like how the Main Stream Media will cherry pick a few alleged valedictorians to be indicative of illegal aliens.  

• Second, I also expressed skepticism that some of these “undocumented valedictorians were actually valedictorians, without coming up with a specific example other than a story about honor students from a 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

So now, in the interest of fairness, I have researched as many other “undocumented valedictorians” I could find. I found articles discussing unnamed undocumented valedictorians (I'm an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard, Newsweek, November 27, 2010), and a New York Times article about a named undocumented valedictorian from almost 30 years ago, Harold Fernandez, who apparently has since had a  successful career as an MD:  An Undocumented Princetonian By Joseph Berger, December 29, 2009.

However, I’ve only found five (5) actual undocumented valedictorians who came out of the shadows to give us their real names.

Of those cases, two involved students who came from schools with dismal academic records. In the three other cases, I found another valedictorian who graduated from the same high school the same year.

In other words, these three “undocumented valedictorians” are, well, undocumented.

• Vidal Tapia, International High School, Paterson NJ.

According to the New Jersey Star-Ledger, illegal alien “Vidal Tapia is by all accounts International High School’s brightest prospect… he carries a 4.0 GPA, a National Honor Society membership and a slew of community service hours.” [Paterson high school valedictorian faces 10-year ban from U.S. due to immigration status, March 11, 2011]

But according to US News and World Report, in 2010-11 there were 66 12^th graders at International High School, compared to 110 10^th graders, suggesting a very high drop-out rate. The graduation rate was only 53%. The school was 66% Hispanic, 29% black, 4% white, and 1% Asian. 72% of the students were “economically disadvantaged”. Only 33% of the students were “Proficient” in Math. US News did not give the reading Proficiency rate

• Solanlly Canas: High School in the Community

The New Haven Independent ran a sob story about Solanlly Canas’ failure to get financial aid for college because of her illegal status. [New Haven Rallies For Solanlly & Chastity, by Melissa Bailey, May 3, 2013] The story had a happy ending—taxpayers and fellow students now subsidize her education. (I should also add that Miss Canas, like the Dr. Fernandez mentioned above,  is Colombian and appears to be of largely Spanish ancestry and thus not representative of the average illegal immigrant population.)

The Independent says Canas was valedictorian at the “High School in the Community” in New Haven. Though designated as a “magnet school”, its senior class of 55 is just over half the size of its freshman class of 97, suggesting a high drop-out rate.  Overall, it’s 43% black, 34% Hispanic, 22% white, and 1% Asian. Some 77% of students are economically disadvantaged. Only 51% are proficient at reading and 32% are proficient at Math.

• Henry Mejia, Yorktown High School, Arlington, VA

In an NPR puff piece about a special scholarship fund for illegal aliens, it’s reported that Henry Mejia is “graduating as the valedictorian from Yorktown High School, and is headed off to Bucknell University.” [Scholarships For Undocumented Students, Including One Valedictorian,  By Jonathan Wilson, June 10, 2011]

I am familiar with Yorktown High School. It’s located in an affluent suburb of Arlington, VA.  Yorktown has a senior class of 547 students, which is actually higher than the younger years. Some 62% of the students are white, 10% are Asian, 18% are Hispanic, and 7% of white. 14% of the students are economically disadvantaged. 98% are proficient in reading 95% are proficient in math. Suffice to say, graduating

Not since Todd Akin’s comments about rape and pregnancy has the Conservatism Inc. Establishment targeted a Republican as they have immigration patriot Rep. Steve King R.-Iowa). In fact, Salon has actually dubbed King “The Todd Akin of immigration”  [By Alex Seitz-Wald, July 26, 2013]

This has disrupted (good!) the GOP House Leadership sly promotion of the so-called KIDS Act, which is basically the DREAM Act, under a different name from the bill that all but eight Republicans, only two of whom are currently in Congress, voted against in 2010.  It’s final proof that House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor are simply on the wrong/ Chamber of Commerce side of the immigration issue and are looking for ways to sneak this year’s Amnesty/ Immigration Surge legislation past their caucus.

King responded to the incessant blather about “undocumented” valedictorian DREAMers (still apparently the preferred nomenclature, I guess KIDSers doesn’t have the same ring to it) by pointing out that they are a small minority of the millions of illegal aliens.

He said:

“Some of them are valedictorians—and their parents brought them in. It wasn’t their fault. It’s true in some cases, but they aren’t all valedictorians. They weren’t all brought in by their parents. For everyone who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds—and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert. Those people would be legalized with the same act.”

(My emphasis). Needless to say, Leftist groups screamed racism, and professional pseudoconservative amnesty scamsters like Grover Norquist and Token Republican Hispanics like Rep. Raul Labrador ululated about how this would hurt GOP “outreach.” [Raul Labrador: Steve King comments ‘reprehensible’,  By Ed O'Keefe, Washington Post, July 24, 2013]

However, what was atypical though not terribly surprising, was that the GOP Establishment joined in.

John Boehner opined that “What he said is wrong. There can be honest

Welcome to another installment of No Obama Bundler Left Behind. This chapter stars an elite Hollywood fundraiser who scored a plum diplomatic appointment, slacked off on the job and left her public office in disgrace, and then rebounded from failure as a new Obamacare promoter. Nice crony "work" if you can get it.

This failed celebr-ambassador is Nicole Avant. Her father, Clarence Avant, is a prominent Democratic activist and music executive. Her husband, Ted Sarandos, is the chief content officer at Netflix. Her godfather is music legend Quincy Jones. On Monday, Avant turned up at an Obama administration confab with pop stars (Jennifer Hudson, Jason Derulo), comedy stars (Amy Poehler, Kal Penn, Aisha Tyler) and other assorted Beautiful People (public relations teams for Oprah Winfrey and Alicia Keys). The liberal glam squad members all have agreed to spread Obamacare propaganda to the masses.

Avant, billed as an "Obama administration veteran" by The Hollywood Reporter, represented "industry" at the Ministry of Health Care Misinformation meeting this week. The Wrap, another Hollywood gossip outlet, describes Avant as having been "tasked with helping boost Obama's relationship with Hollywood."

But what exactly has this "veteran" accomplished? What are her qualifications? How has she used taxpayer dollars, and what exactly is her "industry"?

By all appearances, the industry of Nicole Avant is Nicole Avant. The Beverly Hills socialite and "power player" has appeared in highbrow magazines like "Uptown" with glossy photo spreads of her 1-percenter mansion -- designed, we must all be made aware, by Max Azria. Avant's personal website describes her as a "businesswoman," but her biography mentions no actual business. Instead, Avant exults

Victor Davis Hanson’s Tuesday column “Facing Facts About Race,” published at the National Review Online website, continues to draw commentary.  I passed some brief remarks myself here at VDARE.com the day it appeared.

Since most of the subsequent commentary points out the undeniable parallels between Prof. Hanson’s NRO column and one that I published on TakiMag last April titled “The Talk, Nonblack Version”—the piece that caused National Review to drop me from their contributor lists—I thought I’d say something more substantive.

The first thing I’ll say—I see no reason to strike a pose of false modesty—is that Prof. Hanson’s piece isn’t half as good as mine.  As web opinion journalism, in fact, it isn’t very good at all. 

For example:  My piece contained 37 hyperlinks, most of them to sites supporting some statement of fact I made.  Prof. Hanson’s piece contains no links at all.  Nor did his NRO editors bother to add any.  (The weekly columns I send in to VDARE.com always contain lots of links; but the VDARE editors invariably add more, and sometimes upgrade the ones I’ve included to better, more apt ones.  That’s editing.)

And then, right there in Hanson’s paragraph 2, we get some wobbliness with the facts.

Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws.

Here’s what the President said:

I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

Having said that, of course, the President indeed went ahead and talked about SYG anyway (apparently oblivious to the fact that these laws disproportionately favor blacks!). But he had at least conceded, albeit in passive-aggressive, self-referential Obamaese, that Florida’s SYG laws not having been used in George Zimmerman’s defense was a “fact.”  Which is not what you would gather from reading Prof. Hanson.

There followed some Hanson speculations on the President’s reasons for speaking, none of them one-tenth as penetrating—let alone as witty—as Steve Sailer’s riff on the speech. 

Then—The Talk! Prof. Hanson writes:

Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial…Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males.

That gives Prof. Hanson a segue into his version of “The Talk, Nonblack Version”—hence the comparisons with my April 2012 piece.

His “lifelong Democrat” father, says the Prof., after a mugging experience in San Francisco, advised him: “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” 

After suffering some similar experiences of his own, Prof. Hanson tells us, “I offered a similar lecture to my own son.”

He hastens to assure us that the lecture contained “constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race.” 

Yeah—that and $2.50 will get you a ride on the subway, pal.  My Talk had those reminders, too, as did my column:

Any individual black is entitled to the same courtesies you would extend to a nonblack citizen. That is basic good manners and good citizenship . . . While always attentive to the particular qualities of individuals…

It does no good. You may as well not bother. I won’t, in future.

Prof. Hanson further assures us

[Peter Brimelow writes: “Stuff-Up” is British/ Australian English for “a bad mistake, or something that has been done very badly.” Diversity Is Strength! Also, Paul Gottfried’s new website is The Gottfried Report]

Jack Hunter a.k.a. The Southern Avenger bent the knee. He denounced his own career and his own beliefs, as reported by his own former editor. [Former editor of Rand Paul’s Neo-Confederate staffer talks about the Southern Avenger | Jack Hunter asked me to delete columns, By Chris Haire, Charleston City Paper, July 18, 2013] He prostrated himself before the gods of Political Correctness, he said all that our masters could have required of him, and he gave them everything they could have wanted.

In the end, it didn't matter.

He was purged anyway, forced out of the staff of Senator Rand Paul supposedly to return to the life of a political columnist. Of course, he's also retiring the persona of the “Southern Avenger,” raising the question of why anyone should read him at this point. After all, what does he have to say?

This kind of conservative self-emasculation is shameful, but it is merely the logical conclusion of what I have called “Goldbergism,” the terminal stage of conservatism, the official ideology of the Beltway Right, named after former NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg, in whose earlier career I took an appalled interest. “Goldbergism” represents the ideological acceptance of Leftist narratives on Civil Rights, feminism, homosexuality, and most importantly, immigration. At the same time, it tries to maintain the pretense of political opposition through trivial partisan cheerleading. The result is an ideology both dumb and doomed to fail. But, within the Beltway, it has won this round.

The dismal quality of Goldberg’s thought is fully evident in his recent column Rand Paul’s Big Fat Paleo Problem [New York Post, July 17, 2013], Here we are told the Kentucky senator, a much-Mentioned presidential candidate, has “hit some turbulence” because he allowed Hunter to work on his staff even though he once wore a “wrestling mask made from a Confederate flag,” uttered strong statements about states’ rights, and compared Lincoln to Hitler. Although Hunter had already proclaimed “I abhor racism” and said nice things about gay marriage and Obama last year, Goldberg views him as just the kind of rightwing kook

Although Speaker John Boehner just ludicrously refused to tell Face The Nation what he thinks about “immigration reform” a.k.a. the 2013 Amnesty/ Immigration Surge, it’s all too obvious what the House Republican leadership really wants: a sell-out. That’s why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is holding hearings today (July 22) on his personal version of the DREAM Act—to be called the KIDS Act. (DREAM spells “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors”,  KIDS spells I-don’t-know-what at this point. But the “D” stands for “Donor.”)

If the GOP really was a GAP, rallying patriotic opposition to this nation-breaking legislation, it would be holding hearings that expose its weakness (see my suggestions below). Instead, it’s steering debate into a sob swamp—which might well result in a bill going to conference into which  S.744 could be stuffed.

Ironically, the Washington Post story on the press conference announcing this showed John Boehner and Cantor posing behind a lectern with a banner that says GOP.GOV/JOBS. [House panel plans hearing on children of immigrants, By Ed O'Keefe, Washington Post, July 17, 2013. Actually that’s “illegal children of illegal aliens,” but, hey, this is the Washington Post].

But what Boehner and Canto are talking about a plan to give American jobs and subsidized college educations to millions of foreigners—at a time when 37 million Americans are struggling to pay off student loans and over half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed.

One man understands what the bankruptcy of Detroit represents—in an op-ed, he has cut to the heart of what the Motor City symbolizes.

• It’s not Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who lamented that “50 years of liberal policies” had doomed Detroit [Morning Bell: Jim DeMint’s First Day As Heritage President, Heritage Foundation, April 4, 2013].
• Sorry, Dr. Tim Stanley (who wrote an interesting biography on Patrick J. Buchanan), but 51 years of voting for Democrats doesn’t quite explain the fall of the Paris of the West either [Detroit bankruptcy – this is what happens if you vote Democrat for 51 years, Daily Telegraph, July 20, 2013]
• Nor is it Kevin D. Williamson of National Review— not for the first time, he fails to mention the elephant in the room when purportedly describing Detroit’s decline [Detroit Goes Down: A lesson for American cities, July 19, 2013].
• Nor Dave Hodges, host of something called The Commonsense Show, who wields what Steve Sailer has called “Occam’s Butterknife” to obfuscate Detroit’s demise [Who Killed Detroit City and Why?, CommonSense Show, July 18, 2013]. (Funny, because the motto of Hodges’ show is: Freeing America, One Enslaved Mind at a Time. And nothing, nothing, emancipates us from the dogma of racial denial than contemplating the bankruptcy of Detroit in 2013).

That one man: Black studies professor Dr. R. L’Heureux Lewis [Twitter], who published Abandon Detroit, Abandon Black America back on June 2, 2010 at the now defunct black paper, the Atlanta Post. It lives on at the black website Madame Noire (and here’s the Archive.org link). It gave me the idea to write my own book Escape from Detroit: the Collapse of America’s Black Metropolis.

[VDARE.com note: Since publication of this piece, Lewis has changed his name to "R. L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, also known as Dumi Eyidiyiye". Don’t ask us why. ]

Right in Lewis [whatever]’s first paragraph, any confusion about the origins of Detroit’s collapse is blowtorched away:

Detroit is a microcosm of Black America. I believe if you cannot love Detroit, you cannot fully love Black people. The Detroit Metropolitan area