Those Catholic kids and the American Indian

Those Catholic kids and the American Indian

A textbook case of racial tension encouraged by the System

Divide-and-conquer is the preferred tactic of the Sanhedrin

By Michael Hoffman | www.RevisionistHistory.org

The latest media tempest-in-a-teapot concerns Catholic teenagers from Kentucky set upon by the media and made to star in the perpetual Hate-Whitey videodrome, wherein, whether it’s a Gillette shaving commercial, or kids waiting for a bus after a pro-life, anti-abortion march in our nation’s capitol, they are cast as KKK/Nazi bigots. Of all the crimes and travesties in our land today, this minor incident between Indians and Catholic school kids is the event that propels the liberal outrage machine. Forget the mass extermination of disabled Down syndrome children with abortion, forget the forced conversion of children in our public schools to disease-inducing anal “gay” sex, forget female impersonators dictating an Orwellian regime on college campuses wherein “he" must be referred to as “she," otherwise the truth-telling offender who terms the ersatz gal a guy, is demoted or fired from the faculty or administration.

 It’s a truism that the inmates are in charge of the asylum. They are well on their way to transforming all of us into insane persons in their corporate world of relentless revolutionary change. Thankfully, the scapegoated, stigmatized Catholic youths are fighting back and showing some backbone, as noted below. That such a pitch of media hysteria could be invoked over a white kid merely staring at a Native American is more than ridiculous. This hyper-sensitivity to the least perceived slight to the new aristocracy of color is a revelation of the degree to which our media masters yearn for, indeed ache for a KKK or neo-Nazi group to attack minorities while the news cameras record it. Shaming white people is Job #1. Instilling self-hate is a psychological warfare device, a type of mental genocide that is underway 24/7 in America. 

In the final analysis, let us not imagine that the Zionist ruling class actually cares about the welfare of non-whites. They are merely cannon-fodder on the road to a neo-Bolshevik America. The Israelis have butchered tens of thousands of native people of color in Palestine without any sustained exposure or protest from the U.S. media. The Orthodox Judaic religion teaches that black people are a divinely designated slave race (cf. the Midrash on Genesis in the Soncino edition), and sub-human (cf. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, vol. 2, in the Shlomo Pines edition). These rabbinic dogmas have caused the black race untold suffering and misery throughout history. 

Meanwhile, the Cryptocracy has used the white race as its golem in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. 

The Cryptocracy manipulates people of color to serve as golem in the United States, disseminating a view of American history that portrays the majority of whites as whip-wielding tormentors of colored people in bondage, when the truth is that the vast majority of whites in early America were, as Congressman David Wilmot termed them, “the sons of toil.” Many arrived in this country in chattel bondage, not dainty “indentured servitude.” 

The clandestine objective of crowding whites into ever more narrow psychological categories of self-abnegation and erasure, is to inflame them into lashing out desperately with inchoate violence that can be exploited to further justify ever greater encroachment by the government on our immemoral rights, and the escalation of increasingly intense negative caricatures of conservative white people issuing from the salons of Hollywood and New York. 

The only ones who will emerge mostly unscathed from this contrived race war will be the same ones who emerged largely unscathed to rule in Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Russia, a century ago. 

Whites, Blacks and Native Americans cannot be allowed to join together in opposition to the empire of usury which is choking life on this planet. Divide-and-conquer has always been the watchword of the Sanhedrin. Whites with their affinity for Neocon war-Zionism, and Blacks with their partiality for the Democratic party of sodomite supremacy, non-educating public schools and unlimited cheap labor from south of the border, remain unconscious, easily manipulated golem of the six-pointed System.

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In addition to the report below, we recommend Rod Dreher’s incisive analysis here: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-covington-catholic-bonfire-at-the-stake/

The following is by Jonathon Van Maren of Lifesite News

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/anti-trump-media-touts-fake-news-to-whip-up-mob-against-pro-life-kids.-they

CNN, followed by the rest of the media lynch mob, has reported that a bunch of MAGA-hat wearing kids from Covington Catholic School in Kentucky had swarmed an elderly Native American man at the Lincoln Memorial following the March for Life in Washington D.C., chanting slogans like “build the wall.” 

Social media promptly exploded, with commentators of every stripe condemning the kids for being jackasses (which, if the short video clip released by the media was the entire story, would be the case). A number of pro-lifers followed suit, ostensibly in order to shield the movement from criticism and ensure that the entire March for Life was not tarred by the incident.

Things got ugly quickly. Journalists and pundits began to release photos of the high school boys next to images of white racists mobbing black civil rights activists at lunch counters in the 1960s. Some even compared the boys to the fresh-faced thugs of the Hitler Youth. One writer at Slate.com noted somberly that the facial expression of Nick Sandmann, the now unfortunately famous young man facing off with indigenous activist Nathan Phillips, was familiar because we’d seen his type before: Young, cocksure, powerful – and evil. 

Nobody, apparently, considered the fact that the image was simply one freeze-frame shot of an uneasy and awkward teenage boy thrust into a situation he didn’t know how to deal with. The media and the rest of the progressive mob badly wanted this story to be true: A pack of racist young white Catholic school boys sporting Trump hats following an anti-abortion march mobbing a Native American man? It was just perfect.

Too perfect, as it predictably turned out. Reason was the first publication to release a detailed rebuttal of the narrative, noting that when the nearly two hours of video footage of the incident was viewed – something the media presumably should have done before setting out to destroy the lives of some high school boys – a notably different story emerged.

 Soon thereafter, Nick Sandmann released a statement begging people to hear he and his classmates out. Here it is in part:

I am providing this factual account of what happened on Friday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial to correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.

I am the student in the video who was confronted by the Native American protestor. I arrived at the Lincoln Memorial at 4:30 p.m. I was told to be there by 5:30 p.m., when our busses were due to leave Washington for the trip back to Kentucky. We had been attending the March for Life rally, and then had split up into small groups to do sightseeing.

When we arrived, we noticed four African-American protestors who were also on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I am not sure what they were protesting, and I did not interact with them. I did hear them hurl direct derogatory insults at our school group.

The protestors said hateful things. They called us "racists," "bigots," "white crackers," "faggots," and "incest kids." They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would "harvest his organs." I have no idea what that insult means, but it was startling to hear.

Because we were being loudly attacked and taunted in public, a student in our group asked one of our teacher-chaperones for permission to begin our school spirit chants to counter the hateful things that were being shouted at our group. The chants are commonly used at sporting events. They are all positive in nature and sound like what you would hear at any high school. Our chaperone gave us permission to use our school chants. We would not have done that without obtaining permission from the adults in charge of our group.

At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants. I did not witness or hear any students chant "build that wall" or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.

After a few minutes of chanting, the Native American protestors, who I hadn't previously noticed, approached our group. The Native American protestors had drums and were accompanied by at least one person with a camera.

The protestor everyone has seen in the video began playing his drum as he waded into the crowd, which parted for him. I did not see anyone try to block his path. He locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face. He played his drum the entire time he was in my face.

I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves. To be honest, I was startled and confused as to why he had approached me. We had already been yelled at by another group of protestors, and when the second group approached I was worried that a situation was getting out of control where adults were attempting to provoke teenagers.

I believed that by remaining motionless and calm, I was helping to diffuse the situation. I realized everyone had cameras and that perhaps a group of adults was trying to provoke a group of teenagers into a larger conflict. I said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.

During the period of the drumming, a member of the protestor's entourage began yelling at a fellow student that we "stole his land" and that we should "go back to Europe." I heard one of my fellow students begin to respond. I motioned to my classmate and tried to get him to stop engaging with the protestor, as I was still in the mindset that we needed to calm down tensions.

I never felt like I was blocking the Native American protestor. He did not make any attempt to go around me. It was clear to me that he had singled me out for a confrontation, although I am not sure why.

The engagement ended when one of our teachers told me the busses had arrived and it was time to go. I obeyed my teacher and simply walked to the busses. At that moment, I thought I had diffused the situation by remaining calm, and I was thankful nothing physical had occurred.

I never understood why either of the two groups of protestors were engaging with us, or exactly what they were protesting at the Lincoln Memorial. We were simply there to meet a bus, not become central players in a media spectacle. This is the first time in my life I've ever encountered any sort of public protest, let alone this kind of confrontation or demonstration.

I was not intentionally making faces at the protestor. I did smile at one point because I wanted him to know that I was not going to become angry, intimidated or be provoked into a larger confrontation. I am a faithful Christian and practicing Catholic, and I always try to live up to the ideals my faith teaches me – to remain respectful of others, and to take no action that would lead to conflict or violence.

I harbor no ill will for this person. I respect this person's right to protest and engage in free speech activities, and I support his chanting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial any day of the week. I believe he should re-think his tactics of invading the personal space of others, but that is his choice to make.

I am being called every name in the book, including a racist, and I will not stand for this mob-like character assassination of my family's name. My parents were not on the trip, and I strive to represent my family in a respectful way in all public settings.

I have received physical and death threats via social media, as well as hateful insults. One person threatened to harm me at school, and one person claims to live in my neighborhood. My parents are receiving death and professional threats because of the social media mob that has formed over this issue. (End quote; emphasis supplied).

Many of the commentators who joined the initial pile-on have begun to retract their statements in view of the evidence. Jake Tapper of CNN tweeted out the rebuttal column by Reason, Scott Adams of Dilbertissued an unqualified apology to the boys and those who were misled by his initial condemnations, and conservatives and pro-lifers who had initially rushed to join those expressing outrage indicated their regret for doing so. A few media outlets such as NBC even released follow-up articles noting their initial mistake. Progressive indignation, however, continues to rage across social media. A few media figures, like Reza Aslan (who last made news for eating a piece of human brain in India), have been doubling down, insisting that it is crazy to believe that nuance might be necessary in a story where MAGA hats are present.

The boys and their families are already facing threats, vile name-calling, and doxing, which is apparently how some vile people show their disapproval of actions they consider unloving. Andrew Hodge, the brother of one of the boys, noted on Twitter that his family and relatives are facing nonstop threats of physical violence, and that nobody contacted his brother for the other side of the story before running with it—and some people are even attempting to contact the college Michael plans to attend in order to destroy his career plans of being a chef. There are many, many people out there right now who are trying to completely ruin the lives of a few high school students, and it is disgusting to watch.

It would be disgusting even if the original story had been true. Utterly wrecking the lives of high school kids because of a moment of indiscretion (and the MAGA hats on a school field trip were a questionable decision) is malicious, counter-productive, and shameful. Those joining social media mobs to supposedly combat evils such as racism are in fact acting in the service of hatred, which is revealed clearly by the fact that they seek only to destroy. The media, of course, gets their clicks and the viral videos and their virtue-signalling and then moves on. Even if the story turns out not to be true, it will have been very profitable for them nonetheless.

I hope we can all learn a lesson from this incident. The media, as usual, is willing to jump at the chance to smear those they have contempt for: Pro-lifers, conservatives, and Trump supporters. We should consider their biases and their track record before we instinctively believe their stories about people they despise, and before we join the social media pile-on. And the media, I hope, can take a long, hard look in the mirror and realize that real people paid real consequences for their irresponsible reporting this weekend. Kids got death threats. Families had their addresses posted online. High school students saw strangers try to destroy their future plans. And it isn’t over yet. That is what happens when the media gets a story wrong. There should be consequences….

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Trump: The goy who still doesn't measure up

Donald Trump: 

The goy who still doesn't measure up

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Trump and the Holocaust Remembrance: A Second Chance

By the Editorial Board of The New York Times

January 26, 2018, p. A22

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/trump-holocaust-anti-semitic.html

Michael Hoffman’s Analysis: Mr. Trump has been a better toady of counterfeit-Israel than Mr. Obama, yet in the following command issued by the High Priests in New York, we observe the never-satisfied element inherent in the supremacist Talmudic mentality: the goy is always a defective creature from whom perpetual “atonement” is required. Anything short of golem-like robotic compliance is met with supercilious scolding and further “moral tests” issued by the holier-than-thou neo-Pharisees. 

The goy can find “redemption” only in genuflecting under the spell of the magic wand of Holocaust benediction. The following editorial, “Trump and the Holocaust Remembrance: A Second Chance,” reeks of vanity and moral superiority, of which the New York Times is probably unconscious, in that it is so habitual. There is not a thought given to the necessity of special commemoration of all of the other holocausts of World War II—the civilians of every German city incinerated by the Allies, the Russian civilians of Stalingrad massacred by the Nazis, the Poles butchered by the Soviets at Katyn, and the Japanese civilians—of Tokyo (massacred by firebombing) and Hiroshima and Nagasaki (holocausted by atomic bombing). 

It is a sorcerer’s feat out of the Zohar's grimoire that all these holocausts are reduced to a tiny footnote in the sacred liturgy of the one and only Holocaust worth commemorating, that of planet earth’s one and only Holy People.

Michael Hoffman is the author of The Great Holocaust Trial, which, at one time or another has been banned by the Israeli, German and Canadian governments.

Saturday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. For President Trump, it is a shot at redemption. He failed a moral test on the same occasion a year ago when he issued a message that strangely left out any specific reference to the six million Jews murdered in the Nazis’ industrialized genocide. The White House cast the omission as somehow an “inclusive” approach because, it said, Roma, gays, the disabled and others were also victims. But Jews were unique targets. Failing to mention them was as bizarre as it would be to write a history of slavery and ignore the ordeal of Africans brought to America in chains.

It was an example of Mr. Trump’s complex, at times disturbing, instincts in regard to Jews.

On one hand, his elder daughter is a convert to Judaism, married to an observant Jew. His years in New York real estate involved frequent dealings with Jewish counterparts. He has thrilled many American Jews by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (though he’s displeased many more of them, who fear that this will impede the search for Middle East peace). At a ceremony on Capitol Hill in April, he spoke forcefully about the Holocaust as he pledged “never again.”

But there’s always another hand with Mr. Trump, and it can be unsightly.

After a march that included neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., last summer, the president said that there were “very fine people” among them. No, there weren’t. There are no very fine Nazis, neo or otherwise. 

He has passed along tweets from unabashedly anti-Semitic accounts, and has been slow to denounce assaults, vandalism and other Jew-hating acts, which the Anti-Defamation League says have risen sharply. In the first nine months of 2017, the latest period with available numbers, the league reported there were 1,299 such episodes, an increase of 67 percent over the 779 recorded in the same stretch of 2016.

As with other minorities, Mr. Trump is not above indulging in glib, often hurtful stereotypes, like the age-old trope of greedy Jews. There was his campaign image of the six-pointed star and cash cascading down on Hillary Clinton, and his assertion that Mrs. Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.” And there was this to Jewish Republican donors: “Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them —Perhaps more than any room I’ve ever spoken to.”

Unlike previous presidents, Mr. Trump couldn’t be bothered on a July visit to Warsaw to stop at the site of that city’s notorious Jewish ghetto. In May he visited the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, but offended some people by zipping through it far too quickly to absorb its poignancy and power. Then he signed the guest book with a discordantly, but typically, self-referential entry: “It is a great honor to be here with all of my friends — so amazing + will never forget!”

“I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” Mr. Trump has said with characteristic grandiosity. That is of course a claim beyond measurement. No one can know what is in his heart. But we do know what is in his public statements — and also what is not, like his expunging of Hitler’s greatest victims from last January’s Holocaust message. He can make Saturday his day of atonement. — New York Times

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Operation Sabotage the Memo

What are Adam Schiff, the Justice Department and the FBI trying to hide?

"The slippery shadow in all this is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein."

By Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/operation-sabotage-the-memo-1516925395

Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.

Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.

This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.

The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.

Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.

The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.

The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him.

The shrieks of reckless harm and national security are designed to pressure Mr. Trump to object. And wait for it: In coming days the Justice Department’s protectors will gin up a separate, desperate claim that Mr. Trump will somehow be “interfering” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe unless he objects to the release. According to this view, it is Mr. Trump’s obligation not just to sit by while the media and the Mueller team concoct their narrative, but to block any evidence that might undercut it.

The slippery shadow in all this is Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ recusal put Mr. Rosenstein in charge of digging into the actions—right or wrong—of the Justice Department and FBI in 2016. Instead of taking up that challenge, he named an old and dear friend of the FBI as special counsel, and directed him only to look at Mr. Trump. And Mr. Rosenstein appears to have signed up as an active participant in the effort to thwart any congressional investigation of the other side of the issue.

A department head interested in truth doesn’t flout subpoenas. He doesn’t do a runaround of the Intelligence Committee and try to sucker House Speaker Paul Ryan into aiding a stonewall by asking him to intervene just before a deadline and block a contempt citation. He doesn’t sit on the knowledge of outrageous texts between FBI agents and force Congress to drag it out of him. And he doesn’t sign off on the leaks and character assassination in which his department daily engages to undermine Congress.

Read more at WSJ.com

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Charles Murray sounds the alarm to white America

Michael Hoffman's introduction: This review of Charles Murray's new book (see below) on the declining fortunes of whites in America, Coming Apart, is not reproduced in The Hoffman Wire as an endorsement, but rather to showcase the Establishment's take on his despairing book. Which is not to say that Mr. Hacker doesn't make some valid points in the course of his review. My own perspective on Mr. Murray is that he possesses a self-defeating, post-modernist understanding of the utility of Christianity and its virtues and value. The Church cannot be embraced merely as a form of discipline. It is either a living, breathing faith in the commandments and way of Jesus Christ, or it is a TV Land footnote embroidered on an exhausted nostalgia. 

Murray deserves credit for his admonition concerning the low white American birth rate, but what else could any Cassandra advise at this late hour? Contraception is the signal failure of the heirs of the founders of this nation and represents its most fundamental betrayal. People who do not have sufficient spark to reproduce themselves by averaging at least three children per family, have no right to expect to rule the nation their forebears created. The dying white population is a matter of numerous factors: the attack on fathers by certain feminists and psychologists who saddle them with most of the responsibility for paying for children with almost none of the authority for raising them. There is also the psychological warfare of mainstream culture, with its "Hate Whitey" cinema, television and public school curricula. Lower class whites are encouraged to celebrate stupidity, while the upper class sucker in for the pseudo-ecological argument that an over-populated world requires couples to have no more than two children. Highly educated white couples are the main believers in this fallacy. There is also the modern Church, which regards the traditional teaching against artificial contraception to be an embarrassment, and a means by which modern women are alienated from Christian institutions. Chemical birth control has brought a plague of disease upon American women, including breast cancer, but most feminists will not make this an issue.

Numerous times God in the Bible warns His people that He will take the land away from them and give it to strangers if they will not obey Him. This is the case in America today, where whites have repeatedly refused to give birth to the children God wills to send into the world.  Charles Murray sees the curse being imposed but dances around the core of it and treats the crisis with palliatives. Most  whites know they will be a minority in their own nation in a few decades. This is not exactly news. If  white couples continue to refuse to act as the channel for the birth of God's children, while white America serves as the military golem of the bloody Talmudic state of counterfeit "Israel," they will richly deserve to surrender their nation to Asians, Hispanics or the black people who have been here for 300 years and whose labor helped to build this country. All three of these ethnicities are much less willing to serve the Zionists and may prove to be more fecund than sterility-oriented Caucasians. Both Charles Murray and his liberal critic, Andrew Hacker, are clueless when it comes to these issues. 

Murray has the additional handicap of discounting the role of NAFTA and the WTO's "free trade" globalism in transforming America into Shylock's cheap labor utopia. To strip American labor of its traditional protections against having to "compete" with stoop labor in those lands where Thomas de Quincey observed "man is a weed," is another failure of Murray's perspicacity. The strong American family of the past that Murray harkens after, was built on the Christian principle of employers paying a living wage to workers. Murray yammers on about Christian virtues yet he doesn't advocate even the most fundamental of its bedrock principles. The best that can be said for his book is that it sounds an alarm, but it will be left to American men and women with far more Christian vision than Charles Murray to revive the promise of this once Biblical nation. 

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 

by Charles Murray 

Crown Forum, 407 pp., $27.00

"The White Plight"

Reviewed by Andrew Hacker | New York Review of Books | May 10, 2012

(Two tables that accompany Mr. Hacker's published review are not included here)

Charles Murray has written another book about race. Much as The Bell Curve (1) argued that many human beings of African heritage were genetically less intelligent than most whites, so Coming Apart addresses the deficiencies of Americans of European origin. He charges large swaths of “white America”—his designation—with indolence, self-indulgence, and failing to understand the nation’s “founding virtues” of honesty, industriousness, marriage, and religion. An air of despair pervades the book. Those whose forebears did so much to build this country lack the kind of resolution the coming century will need.

Murray says he chose to focus on whites so he could conduct his analysis of changes in American society “independently of ethnic heritage.” He omits Asians and Hispanics because most are relatively recent arrivals, just as having African origins brings burdens of its own. This leaves some 200 million people—now 69 percent of the population, down from its 90 percent height in 1950—who told the most recent Census they consider themselves fully white in that they did not add another ethnic designation. As noted, he excludes everyone who identifies as Hispanic, even though half of them add that they are also white. (The 2010 Census form asked respondents both if they were of “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin” and their race—white, black, etc.) Several generations in Chile apparently would weaken a claim to European ancestry. Nor does he subdivide his white grouping by national origins or religious ties. Here he recognizes that each year sees further assimilation among white Americans, with surnames a last reminder of where they came from.

But Coming Apart is also a book about class. Or more precisely, two contrasting classes of white Americans. One, a “new upper class,” includes not just the rich and powerful, since it takes in a generous 20 percent of the population. By my calculations, it starts with families earning $135,724. The other, a “new lower class,” is everyone in the bottom 30 percent. Its top income, also by my count, would be $52,057. Nor are these classes wholly economic; Murray adds educational and occupational status to give a more rounded portrayal. Thus everyone in his upper class must have completed college and hold a professional or managerial position. He explains what makes both these classes “new,” and why conventional rubrics no longer apply. No discussion is given to the remaining 50 percent, which is odd, since they are literally mid-America and cast most of the votes in presidential elections. 

Murray believes that a new designation is needed to characterize a large part of the white population. In the past, it was called a working or blue-collar class, which emphasized their mode of employment. It was a given that such people applied themselves at their jobs, whatever their level of skill, and took family responsibilities seriously. Union wages meant they could own modest homes and send a large proportion of their children to college.

Today, in Murray’s view, this ethos barely exists. As he sees it, “prime-age” whites in this class, particularly men in their thirties and forties, frequently refuse to take available jobs, and put in fewer hours when they do, often by feigning disabilities. By his count, most of them are divorced, separated, or reluctant to take the plunge into marriage. Men who do aren’t much better, at least in a Philadelphia neighborhood he writes about. (The women “almost got an extra son at home, better known as the husband,” as Murray quotes the head of a parochial school.) More than a few engage in activities that end them in prison. At times, Murray refers to them as “rednecks” and “rabble,” not entirely tongue-in-cheek.

A generation ago, the term “underclass” was current, spurred by fears of urban violence, promiscuous procreation, and soaring welfare rolls. (2) An unstated premise was that almost all in that class were black, since whites couldn’t fall that far. Murray holds that the Great Society’s benefits sent a something-for-nothing message to the larger society. Starting in the Sixties, whites began to become entwined in the “tangle of pathology” Daniel Patrick Moynihan had ascribed to black Americans. Thus as Table A shows, each year sees white extramarital births coming closer to the black rates. But this presents a challenge for Murray, which he sedulously sidesteps. As was made clear in The Bell Curve, he believes that racial gene pools for traits like intelligence are real, and “black” and “white” are not just rubrics. So does he take the moral deterioration he sees in whites as a sign that a major human race is losing its power to adapt and compete? Murray does no more than imply it is the case.

Murray begins by praising his new upper class. They are staying married and they say they attend religious services regularly. (No distinctions are made between, say, Episcopalians and evangelicals, even as the latter have their share of college graduates.) They are lauded for being “engaging, well mannered, good parents, and good neighbors.” He admires their social and professional skills, dubbing them a “cognitive elite,” educated for a fast-changing world. Yet their ascent has made them “increasingly isolated” from the rest of society, with “large areas of ignorance about how others live.” Murray supports his point by setting his upscale readers a quiz: When did they last watch Judge Judy or dine at a downmarket Applebee’s? This isolation and ignorance set his new upper class apart from its predecessors. Murray tells of the Iowa town of his youth, where the banker exchanged pleasantries with the local butcher on the street.

Then, without warning, Coming Apart turns harsh. We hear his top class described as “overeducated elitist snobs” who “believe that they and their peers are superior to the rest of the population.” At this point, the book relies heavily on David Brooks’s lampoon of “bourgeois bohemians.” So we hear anew about people who are drawn to spiced apple cider sorbet and spinach feta loaf, health clubs and marathons. The implication is that those at the top are frivolous and self-centered. But statistically this doesn’t fit. Murray chose to make his upper class large, encompassing one of every five Americans. While they may all be college graduates, they range from Yale art history majors to Iowa State engineers, and cider sorbet to burritos at Super Bowl parties. Still, Murray has mounted a grave indictment of his fellow white Americans, starting at the top. For all their cognitive cleverness, they are “an elite that is hollow at the core” and “as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way.”

Coming Apart has little to say about the economic conditions that create Murray’s classes. He requires a college degree for membership in his new upper class, since symbols, words, and numbers are its basic products. I occasionally found myself wondering if this isn’t a grand illusion, a fantasy about modern mandarins who feel they can master the universe with spreadsheets and economic models in a world where financial and military decisions rest on differential equations and PowerPoint presentations. Nor am I persuaded that verbal sophistication (“critical thinking,” “moral reasoning”), as defined in academic assignments, necessarily improves productivity. Still, the economy has found funds to underwrite this assumed elite, largely by paying less for blue-collar work, whether performed at home or abroad.

What makes Murray’s new lower class “new” is its tenuous tie to the labor force. The country once had a substantial industrial base, which was predominantly white. While Murray grants that there are fewer Detroit-type jobs, he doesn’t mourn the eclipse of organized labor. (“Unions usually do not play a large role in generating social capital.”) The problem, in his view, is that all too many of his newly lower-class men are what the English once called “work-shy.” Murray tells us that office cleaners average $13.37 an hour, which adds up to an annual $26,740. What one takes home from that, he says, should be “enough to be able to live a decent existence,” adding, “even if you are married and your wife doesn’t work.” So Coming Apart calls for a serious change in attitude, from which will emerge a new post-union class, grateful for $26,740 offers. (The current poverty threshold for a family of four is $23,050.) This altered outlook, Murray says, should enhance interclass comity. Janitors thankful for their jobs will not begrudge $267,400 to recently minted MBAs whose offices they are cleaning.

Murray has always been fascinated by genetic inheritance, whether within entire races or specific pairs of parents. Among his white “cognitive elite,” he says he sees a rise in “the interbreeding of individuals with like characteristics.” With women now receiving more than half of postsecondary degrees, credentialed couplings become common. “When individuals with similar cognitive ability have children,” Murray tells us, “the staying power of the elite across generations increases.” The traits passed on by the partners may be cultural, like diction and demeanor, or intrinsic, like a gift for mathematics or music. Unlike its predecessors, the new upper class will not be based altogether on privilege; it will be more like a hereditary meritocracy in place because of its greater share of society’s intelligence.

To reinforce this point, Murray says research shows that “graduates from elite colleges are likely to marry other graduates from elite colleges.” At first glance, this seems to make sense. Dartmouth and Duke are congenial milieus for young people to meet, even if nowadays a decade may go by before they marry. However, the source he cites doesn’t support this supposition. For one thing, it dealt not with recent graduates, but with men and women who were aged fifty-eight through seventy-two when the article appeared.3 Moreover, less than a quarter in this sample chose spouses “from colleges with the same institutional characteristics.”

For an updated test, I undertook an informal inquiry of my own, which suggests that Murray is only half right. In marriages listed in The New York Times during the first three months of this year, among the couples where at least one spouse had an Ivy-tier degree, in almost half the other did as well. Among the rest, Yale and Stanford graduates chose mates from schools like Baylor and Michigan State.

We know that well-off and otherwise accomplished parents can give their children a good start, or at least try. So the next question is how these presumably favored offspring fare as adults. Such studies as we have suggest that early advantages don’t always last. Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, found that of children raised in families in the top income quintile, only 38 percent were still there as adults. Ron Haskins at the Brookings Institution, also following top-quintile youngsters, was surprised to find that only a little over half (53 percent) obtained college degrees.

Claudia Dreifus and I conducted a similar study for a book we published two years ago. (4) We chose a full Princeton class, giving its 883 graduates time to have offspring of college age. We estimated, on the conservative side, that together they had 1,500 children. As it turns out, only 120 of them applied to and were accepted by Princeton—with or without legacy preferences—while about 180 applied but were rejected, which is itself a commentary on elite inheritance.

Of course, not all young people wish to attend their parents’ school, even if they could get in. In our Princeton case, the book produced for the class’s reunion reported where many of them went. In fact, only two ended at Princeton-tier schools: one each at Harvard and Cornell. Some of the rest landed at Lehigh, Wake Forest, Denison, Penn State, Carleton, UCLA, Tulsa, Northwestern, NYU, Virginia Tech, and the University of Scranton. We leave to others whether we’re seeing downward mobility or simply regression to the mean. In any case, excellent educations can be had at these and similar colleges. The larger point is that most seats at elite institutions now go to applicants—many born abroad—whose parents attended less highly ranked schools or none at all. Murray will have to do more research if he is to prove that America’s elite is becoming more hereditary.

Honesty is one of Murray’s four “founding virtues”—along with industriousness, marriage, and religion—which he sees imperiled. As a measure of that quality among Americans—or its lack—he cites incarceration rates for white adults, which have been steadily rising. While most prison inmates are black and Hispanic, a not negligible 850,000 white men and women are also behind bars. He provides detailed data on arrests and sentencing, as well as probation and parole. “Whites in state and federal prisons,” Murray adds, “are overwhelmingly drawn from working-class and lower-class neighborhoods.” It’s probably true that most people who are convicted did something illegal. But looking only at who ends up in prison serves to make dishonesty largely a lower-class failing.

On honesty among his upper class, Murray concedes the “damning evidence of systematic wrongdoing” in the financial world. Even so, he says he is “not clear” on how far “a decline in personal integrity” has spread among the better-off. For so broad an assessment, prison statistics aren’t much help. If Martha Stewart, Bernard Madoff, and Raj Rajaratnam come to mind, not many more can be readily named. In white lower-class circles, almost everyone can point to a friend or relative or neighbor who’s been convicted. This is seldom the case among the middle class. Indeed, its members prefer not even to suspect there could be felonious conduct by people they know.

As it happens, information is available. In 2006, the most recent year for figures, the IRS estimated that it failed to receive at least $450 billion, because of failures to file, underrreporting, underpayments, and bogus deductions, most of these conscious attempts to evade taxes. There is reason to suspect that tax evaders come largely from Murray’s top 20 percent. Certainly, this fifth contains corporate executives and their counselors, some of whom are periodically caught violating laws. Almost every week, the invaluable Corporate Crime Reporter tells of yet another bank or brokerage house conceding that its employees committed security fraud; the same source tells of pharmaceutical firms admitting that people on their payrolls fixed prices or marketed products illegally. Usually, however, only the corporate entities are charged, not the executives who planned or tolerated the felonies. The firms are almost always allowed to pay fines and settle silently, without admitting wrongdoing. Prosecutors argue that this is the best they can do, since it’s hard to prove malicious motives to a unanimous jury. (Insider trading cases are easier, since they’re often built on whistleblowing or tapped information.)

Is there a tacit agreement to spare executives from hard time? The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, based at Syracuse University, has the only count I’ve seen of financial prosecutions that ended with sentences. In the twelve months ending in November 2011, the ninety-four US Attorney Offices nationwide recorded a total of 719 cases where the defendants were sent to prison.5 Murray seems to see low numbers like these as evidence of upper-class honesty. Hence he cites a 2005 IRS figure that of 31 million tax filings by corporations, proprietors, and partnerships, only 217 penalties were assessed for civil tax fraud. He does not seem aware of the Corporate Crime Reporter findings. Moreover, he does not ask how many of those filed returns were carefully reviewed for fraud; nor does he ask how often prosecutors, presented with evidence that suggests fraud, choose to press charges. (The statistics on the proportions of returns actually reviewed and the numbers of these that showed inadequate payment could be revealing but aren’t provided here.)

For his own part, Murray himself shows every sign of being what white connotes. He was raised in Newton, Iowa (1960 Census: 99.6 percent white, 98.4 percent native-born). He laments that citizens of his stock have lost their moral compass. Apart from blaming Lyndon Johnson, he seeks no deeper explanation behind his race’s fall from grace. Is it wholly implausible to suggest that white America’s time of power and preferment is coming to a close, both at home and abroad, and that such vigor as remains is being devoted to personal acquisitions and enjoyments? Hence a desperate air among Republican aspirants—after all, we know the race of the party’s base—hoping for a last hurrah as their era ends. Even if demography isn’t always destiny, it should never be discounted. To start, white Americans aren’t having enough children to maintain themselves. The nonwhite population is certain to keep growing, from immigration and reproduction. Jonathan Chait forecasts that in only thirty years they will be the majority of the electorate. (6)

Evidence of white eclipse is actually close at hand. Murray says little about Asian-Americans, other than that he sees their basic traits as “similar to those of whites.” Here he’s very wrong. In vital respects, they differ markedly, as the entries in Table B show. That Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian descent work harder and more effectively is widely recognized, not least their excelling in competitions whites created. Nor from the many accounts I have seen does this drive center on the self. Bringing honor to one’s family is the major goal; a traditional impetus fosters mastering the modern world.

From Princeton to Berkeley, each year sees more places going to Asians on merit, with fewer white faces evident on competitive campuses. I wonder whether Murray would want to argue that if his whites were to truly apply themselves, they could match Asians on the SAT. (Currently, Asian women outscore white men.) Since he makes so much of genetics, does he think we are seeing signs of deterioration in the white strain?

Murray’s coda returns to his title: “our nation is coming apart at the seams.” The cause, as he sees it, is a preoccupation with self at every social level. Suburbanization segregrates the highly verbal from those who do most of the nation’s work. In Murray’s vision, we were to be not only a union of states, but a unified society. Thus the conservative mantra that any discussion of inequalities of income or privilege will set citizens against one another, indeed foment class warfare. While Murray doesn’t begrudge his cognitive elite its often lavish pay, he expresses concern over the “unseemliness” of much corporate conduct. A responsible ruling class doesn’t flaunt megamansions.

Murray wants a modern noblesse oblige: not just checks sent to charity but actual mingling, perhaps at Applebee’s. And, like Edmund Burke, he would have his lower class accept “their appointed place,” embracing honest labor and respect for authority. Nor is this entirely a pipe dream. When the Republicans muster majorities, they do it by rousing white voters below the median, lauding them as the nation’s bulwark. But such a strategy calls for casting other citizens as disloyal, undeserving, or immoral, not exactly a recipe for binding the nation together.

Murray’s reconfigured classes have emerged as if out of the air; they are not the product of organized interests or deliberate policies. Here Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence is a welcome antidote. He does not simply show the glaring increase in inequality since the 1960s. Almost every year has seen more of the nation’s income ascending to its higher layers, whether the top quintile, one percent, or the four hundred wealthiest families. He also shows how top tiers in management and finance devised ways to arrogate more money for themselves, at the same time using their political power to decimate unions. Noah observes that jobs aren’t sent offshore just for lower wages. Using foreign labor also offers relief from assertive American workers. I particularly recommend Noah’s list of solutions. He’s all for enlarging public payrolls, with WPA-style projects, rather than enriching private contractors. He would hire more IRS auditors to bring back revenue from Swiss banks. I especially second his call to “impose price controls on colleges and universities.” The increasing dependence of students on loans is creating a new indentured class.

Since his book is both much needed and a delight to read, the one caveat I have is offered in good spirit. On immigrants, I fear Noah relies too heavily on models purporting to show how wages have dropped because “undocumented” workers were more and more employed. Across the workforce, it may well be 2.3 percent or 3.7 percent, depending on your source. But those who feel the harshest impact are forty-year-olds who can’t see themselves in those $13.37 per hour jobs, which Murray turns into a commentary on their character. Such wages are accepted by—indeed, geared to—immigrants, who in their early years here are willing to sleep five to a room. Their prominence in meatpacking plants, kitchens, and twelve-hour taxi shifts not only attests to the function they perform in the workforce, but undercuts any consensus on a coherent immigration policy. Their presence is deplored by politicians while their services are sought by business managers. At all events, fewer businesses, including subcontractors for the largest ones, are willing to pay what were once viewed as “white wages.”

Noah knows, however, that as things stand, he cannot expect much when he calls for reregulating Wall Street, giving unions greater support, and making the rich contribute more in taxes. But he believes that his demonstration of growing inequality and his proposal to remedy it are worth a book. In contrast, it isn’t clear what’s the point of Coming Apart. Without much conviction, Murray calls for a quasi-religious “awakening.” Apart from this, he doesn’t feel that much can be done about the self-indulgence and indolence of his archetypal lower and upper classes. In fact, his world-weariness isn’t just about two classes and one race, but an entire nation facing a daunting century.

NOTES

1. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (Free Press, 1994); see the review by Alan Ryan, The New York Review, November 17, 1994. 

2. See “The Lower Depths,” The New York Review, August 12, 1982. 

3. Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and Michelle J. Budig, “The Romance of College Attendance,” Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Vol. 26 (2008). 

4. Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids—and What We Can Do About It (Times Books, 2010), pp. 71–76. 

5.“Fraud-Financial Institution Prison Sentences,” TRAC Reports, March 5, 2012. 

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6. Jonathan Chait, “2012 or Never,” New York magazine, February 26, 2012.

End quote from The New York Review of Books 

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