Works for me.

Read it.

First, we must remind ourselves that wealth does not happen automatically, bestowed from above as if it were manna from heaven. It has to be created through the conscious and deliberate efforts of workers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs. Notice one group of people missing from this list: policymakers. Despite their claims to the contrary, policymakers cannot create wealth. Indeed, they cannot do so. However, their role in wealth-creation cannot be understated, for they wield the simultaneous power to foster growth and to inhibit it.

Adam Smith gave us the blueprint for growth all the way back in 1776. He writes, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”

Comparing the United States and the EU on these dimensions reveals differences.

Babylon Bee.

News of what USAID had been spending money on has caused quite a stir online. But there’s still a lot of misinformation out there. That’s why we’ve put together this handy quiz so you can test yourself on what’s real and what isn’t.

I couldn’t.

ZMan reads the tea leaves.

that has dominated the world since the Cold War. During the Cold War, this same system came to dominate the West, both as a whole, but also within the discrete parts of each member country. In fact, what happened at the end of the Cold War is this system sought to fill the void left by communism. The system was not liberalism, but rather a form of minoritarianism, minority rule.

Minoritarianism is a term coined by political scientists to describe a condition in which a minority has control of key decision-making processes. For example, the U.S. Senate requires a supermajority for certain things, which gives the minority party the power to veto these issues. This is the filibuster that the Democrats complain about whenever they need to placate their voters. In the case of the Senate, this system is to prevent the majority from abusing the minority.

Since the end of the Cold War, it has been official American policy to control the politics of the rest of the world. The endless yapping about “our democracy” is always about imposing Western systems on the rest of the world. After all, we have reached the end of history and there are no more debates about the morally correct way to organize a society, so everyone needs to fall in line. Even though the overwhelming majority of the world’s people disagree, the minority demands it.

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A second “Greater Idaho” bill was introduced in the Oregon State Legislature on Tuesday. The bill, HB 3844, would create a state taskforce to “document the state and federal legal and legislative processes that must take place to relocate the Oregon and Idaho state boundaries…” The legislature is already considering a bill in the Senate, SJM7, which is a memorial inviting the state of Idaho to begin border talks. The Idaho Legislature passed a similar memorial in 2023.

House Bill 3844, introduced by Representative Mark Owens of Crane and co-sponsored by Reps. Bobby Levy, Vikki Breese-Iverson and Emily McIntire, takes a different approach from the Senate bill. While SJM7 would begin border negotiations, the house bill would create a study group comprised of multiple stakeholders from across Oregon, who would then be tasked with attempting to answer some of the detail questions of a border change, like the impact on certain industries.

Greater Idaho Executive Director Matt McCaw praised the new legislation. “We are encouraged to see the representatives of Eastern Oregon coming together to advocate for their voters by bringing these bills to the Legislature. The people of Eastern Oregon have made clear they want to explore moving the border and joining Idaho. If the Oregon Legislature truly believes in democracy, they will honor those voters’ wishes and move forward on making a border change happen.”

Quilette.

As women’s social, occupational, and political engagement expanded in Western nations, social scientists anticipated a great psychological and behavioural convergence of men and women. As Alice Eagly and colleagues wrote, “The demise of many sex differences with increasing gender equality is a prediction of social role theory.” Their perspective is that most sex differences result from adherence to socially imposed norms and expectations. These norms and expectations have changed over the past several generations, as women entered educational, occupational, and political spheres that had been historically dominated by men. Today, in most highly developed nations, women are now the majority in higher education and are on track to become the majority in some formerly male-dominated and high-status professions, such as medicine. Even if one might argue that the gains in gender equality are not complete, social-role theory tells us that we should therefore see the sexes acting and thinking more similarly.

But like many almost-utopian academic predictions, social role and related theories have hit the wall of reality. Instead of convergence of the sexes, we have something closer to a great divergence. To the surprise and dismay of social scientists, many psychological and behavioural sex differences are larger in more gender-equal countries—precisely the opposite of their predictions—which has dealt a major blow to the plausibility of sociological theories of the origin of sex differences. As reviewed by David Schmidt and colleagues, then Marco Balducci, and most recently, Agneta Herlitz and colleagues, the divergence is broad and deep, including aspects of personality, emotional expressiveness, mental health, cognition, and occupational choices and preferences, among others. To be sure, there has been convergence in some areas (for example, intimate partner violence) and no change in others, but the trend is clear—women and men are becoming more different in important ways. Many of the expanding differences are small to moderate for individual traits, but the tableau created is of a substantive divergence.

Watch it.

Many ‘degrees’ are stuff you can actually learn on your own, and nobody is going to pay extra for your ‘degree’.

And a lot of bachelor level degrees are useful only to qualify you for some graduate program.

“I don’t want to Make a Difference. I want to Make Money.”

Read it.

Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, a scathing letter accusing him of, among other things, “dangerous views on vaccine safety” and “false hysteria that vaccines cause autism.”

The letter included 175 questions that she said he should be prepared to answer at his Senate confirmation hearings.

But in her letter, she exposes her own ignorance of federal vaccine policy and the laws passed by her own legislative branch.

From a commenter on a podcast that I follow:

I was in the gym and asked my trainer, ‘What is the best machine to use to maximize my attractiveness to women?’ and without saying a word he just pointed to the ATM.

Read it.

Billionaires and Big-Tech companies are fleeing Delaware in such droves, Newsweek said the state faces an “exodus” of major corporations.

After reports over the weekend that Facebook’s Meta was considering moving its incorporation from Delaware to Texas, billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted he will move his financial management company out of the Diamond State.

“We are reincorporating our management company in Nevada for the same reason. Top law firms are recommending Nevada and Texas over Delaware,” Ackman wrote.

Read it.

Nearly 8 in 10 U.S. voters agree with President Donald Trump that requiring photo identification to vote is a reasonable measure to protect the integrity of elections, Rasmussen Reports found.

Rasmussen poll results show that 77% of likely voters say requiring photo ID is a reasonable measure to protect election integrity. That’s up from 74% in 2021.

Only 17% say photo ID is not a reasonable measure, while 7% say they’re not sure.

ZMan is having fun.

a character in the Asimov novels called The Mule. This was a character called the “destroyer of worlds” because he literally destroyed whole worlds, but he also destroyed the conception of the world. In fact, his very existence was a threat to accepted understanding of the universe, because the universally accepted conception of the universe precluded the existence of The Mule.

This has been the issue since Trump arrived on the scene. The people atop the post-Cold War world and the post-Cold War world itself, were all based on the assumption that a political character like Trump was impossible. The days of populist, nationalist and picaresque political actors was done. The present and future belonged to the Davos persons, the boys and girls who were produced by and benefitted the most from the managerial ideology that dominated the West.

What Trump’s success in 2016 represented was the nullification of the managerial order because according to the logic of managerialism, men like Trump had no place in the system, so they could never be a threat to the system. Instead, they were marginalized to the fringes of managerial life, the place where things are made, fixed, and created to keep the mechanics of the world going. They had no place in the world where decisions were made by the great and the good.

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Lets in all sorts of riff-raff.

Last week, Donald Trump signed a new executive order which attempts to end so-called “birthright citizenship” in the United States. During the signing ceremony, Trump declared that the United States is “the only country in the world that does this with birthright…”

This is untrue and the Washington Post, among other publications, was quick to declare that Trump “falsely claimed” that the US is the only country with birthright citizenship, also known as the legal principle of unrestricted—or “pure”—jus soli.

Trump would have been accurate, however, had he said that birthright citizenship is becoming rare, and that it is especially rare among those wealthier countries that experience positive net in-migration. [Letting in a lot of riff-raff]

In many countries, as generous welfare states attract growing numbers of migrants, the idea of unrestricted jus soli has become less popular.

Indeed, Europe no longer contains any states that offer birthright citizenship, and others have added new restrictions to what jus soli provisions they have.

UnHerd.

Donald Trump returned to office issuing a range of executive orders that toughened up immigration enforcement. These include using the armed forces to facilitate deportations, boosting the number of troops at the border, and reinstating the Remain in Mexico policy, which requires asylum-seekers to apply in Mexico, while blocking those who trek to the US border. To the surprise of pundits, polls suggest robust public backing for many of these measures, not least mass deportations.

One clear reason is economic: Mass low-wage migration depresses wages, especially on the lower rungs of the labour market. Progressives would do well to come to grips with this reality, even as the Trumpians would be wise neither to overstep their mandate nor to limit their policy to showy and polarising deportation actions.

To see why, it’s worth examining the history. Between 1965 and 1995, the share of Americans who favoured lower immigration rates rose to 65%, up from a third. The shift in attitudes corresponded with a dramatic rise in low-skilled legal — and especially illegal — immigration. Migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border reached 1.64 million in 2000, more than double the rate in 1980 (the 2000 peak would be surpassed under Team Biden).

ZMan:

The thing I am watching is the Musk takeover of the IT systems. The crazies are freaking out over this and maybe with good reason. The amount of collusion between the government, social media employees and the domestic terrorist doxing and stalking people is something that has never got much attention, but that could change. At least that is something the crazies fear. Then you have the billions that flow into underwriting the crazies from the government.
We now live in interesting times.

If the Soviet Union hadn’t been an existential threat, there wouldn’t be any NATO installations there.

Joel Kotkin.

intervention. Warning about how an oligarchy of “extreme wealth, power and influence” risked the basic rights of every citizen, he even suggested it could threaten American democracy itself. Given how late Biden’s intervention came, to say nothing of his typically stumbling delivery, it’s tempting to dismiss his comments as the rantings of a tired old man.

In truth, though, I think the speech matters. For in its populist appeal to Main Street over Wall Street, it reflects the revival of something we haven’t seen in years: class politics. Rather than appealing to racial subgroups, or sex or gender identity, Biden instead spoke, however fleetingly, to those many millions of Americans who care more about their paychecks than the colour of their skin.

Nor, of course, is the 46th president alone. Increasingly, both main parties realise that to win at the ballot box, they must appeal to the middle- and working classes, as proven by Trump’s roughly 10-point lead among those two-thirds of Americans without a college degree. Yet, if that speaks vividly to radical shifts across US socioeconomic makeup, it remains unclear if politicians on either side of the aisle are truly willing to back blue-collar workers — especially when the oligarchs continue to have such a grip over them all.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

One of the things that you see with people who arrive on this side of the great divide is they often go through a crash course learning all the stuff that was excluded from their education and political understanding. Condensing that down into easily digestible bits is probably a good project for someone, given that we are seeing millions turn up on the edge of the great divide, looking for a lift over to this side.

That really is something to savor. Trump gave a presser after the chopper collided with the passenger jet in Washington and he put the blame on diversity. It is not the first time he has said something like this since he was inaugurated, but it is still shocking to hear a public official say what had been prohibited a year ago. This administration is saying things that got you booted from Twitter before Musk.

This is why the corporate takeover model works. Every company has a culture, and that culture is reinforced by management. Inevitably when new owners come in it means changes to the culture. To outsiders it does not seem that important, but to the people inside it is shocking. Our political system is being overhauled in the equivalent of a hostile takeover, like greenmailing. Instead, it is orangemailing.

Quillette.

In my reading of Othello, I will demonstrate how an understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying male intrasexual competition can inform our analysis of character and motivation. We will see that studies in evolutionary psychology provide evidence against the argument that race is of central importance to the character of Othello. Instead, an argument will be made that Othello and Iago represent dramatic extremes of two enduring behaviours whose conflicts over millions of years have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.

Go to Amazon and search for Dr. David Buss.

Read it.

The skies over Washington D.C., where an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a passenger airliner Wednesday night, killing 67, is the most tightly controlled and surveilled airspace open to civilian air traffic in the United States. As such, it can be a hazardous place to be airborne, particularly at night, when bedrock principles of good airmanship can fall by the wayside and helicopter and air traffic control personnel can get overwhelmed, current and former military helicopter pilots told TWZ Thursday.

The collision killed the three soldiers aboard the UH-60 helicopter, as well as 64 aboard the PSA Airlines Bombardier CRJ700 regional jet, which was on its final approach to Ronald Reagan National Airport shortly before 9 p.m. when the accident occurred over the Potomac River.

It happened as the inbound airliner from Wichita, Kansas, made its visual approach to Reagan’s Runway 33. The PSA flight was operating as Flight 5342 for American Airlines. Go here to read our ongoing coverage of the tragedy.

Multiple investigations have been launched into the incident. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, echoing President Donald Trump, said Thursday that “there was some sort of elevation issue” with the Fort Belvoir, Virginia, based Black Hawk that the Army was investigating.

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The idea of historical inevitability has transfixed philosophers, theologians, and politicians for millennia. From the Apostles awaiting the second coming of Christ to the Marxists who looked forward to the collapse of capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the conviction that the future is already written has an intoxicating allure. In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper described this belief as “historicism” and argued that it is among the most destructive concepts humanity has ever devised.

Popper is well worth reading.

ZMan explains it all to you.

nothing like what his adversaries imagined. Despite the evidence that this version of Trump would be different, his antagonists inside and outside the regime were certain he was the guy they imagined. Therefore, his victory was a shock, but they were sure what worked the first time around would work again. The weird silence from regime outposts is due to having been wrong yet again.

This version of Trump is a very different thing from the original version. We are seeing this in the realm of foreign policy where Trump 2.0 has been executing a plan rather than doing battle with the hydra that is the foreign policy community. It turns out that his refusal to have any dealings with the foreign policy community as a candidate, and his decision not to use government resources for the transition, has provided him with the element of surprise upon taking office.

You see that with his initial appointments. Marco Rubio was an out of the blue pick for the State Department. It seems to have been a shock to Rubio as well. Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon is another bolt from the blue. In the case of Rubio, he is an easily controlled lieutenant running an agency in need of radical reform. Hegseth comes to the job with his own radical ideas about reforming the Pentagon. The semi-permanent staff at the top of both agencies are now in a crisis.

If it was grown in a lab, it isn’t meat, any more than a ‘gay marriage’ is a marriage.

Alex Tabarrok.

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing problem. Peptides, short sequences of amino acids, are nature’s first defense against bacteria. Research on antimicrobial peptides is promising but such research could be much more productive if combined with machine learning on big data. But collecting, collating and organizing big data is a public good and underprovided. Current peptide databases are small, inconsistent, incompatible with one another and they are biased against negative controls. Thus, there is scope for a million-peptide database modelled on something like Human Genome Project or ProteinDB.

Read it.

If it has a purpose, it’s not to defend against a non-existent foe, but to ensure US patronage.

ZMan rings the Passing Bell.

In certain circles the triumph of Donald Trump is being viewed as either a sign that liberalism is dying out or the sign that it is dying and the forces opposed to it are finally on the ascendant. Still others, stuck in the thinking of the last century, see the victory of Trump as a sign that the forces of darkness are ready to turn out the lights on the liberal order they are committed to defend. In both cases, there is that old problem of language in that no one seems to have the same definition of liberalism.

This confusion is not helped by the fact that for about a century the people at the retail end of politics have used the word “liberal” as a label. In the United States, people we call the left also use the term liberal. In fact, they often use the term left to mean super-liberal or radically liberal with liberal simply meaning pro-government. Liberals for example, want Medicare for all, while the left wants single payer. To confuse things even more, the right wants government regulated healthcare.

Putting aside the retail use of the word liberal, there is confusion as to what is meant by liberalism in modern discourse. The civic nationalists continue to insist it means the moral and political systems based on things like individual rights, equality before the law and the consent of the governed. Critics tend to view it as the collection of bourgeois cultural and social fads that have ripped through the West. One imagines liberalism as John Locke and the other as John Rawls.

UnHerd.

The buzzy Apple show Severance depicts a group of office drones trapped in a cubicle hell called Lumon Industries. It’s a workplace drama in which suspiciously little is revealed about the actual work done by protagonist Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) and his colleagues. It appears to be a Sisyphean task of sorting random numbers — but we have no idea why, and neither do they. Do any of these people hunched over screens do anything of use?

Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.

But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.

Read it.

“Roy’s theory goes something like this: In the age of the internet, and the global-liberal marketplace of goods, ideas, and cultural touchstones it ushered in, local cultures are subsumed into a global culture with its own lingo, assumptions, and norms. That culture may be dominated by American exports—more precisely the contributions of American tastemakers—but we are not hegemons. Young people who grow up on the Web inherit an admixture of cultural inputs with no authority capable or qualified to tell them how to make sense of it all. Culture—implicit understandings of what is and what ought to be, shared by members of a community—has globalized, commingled, and diluted to the point of disappearance. All culture, in the traditional sense, is gone.

Read it.

We’ll still need an Underclass to do the shit jobs that can’t be automated, now that Americans are too narcissistic to do such work, and traditionally that was were ‘migrants’ started out before the Welfare State made malingering so comfortable.

Read it.

China’s first Type 054B frigate, the Luohe, was commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on Wednesday. The PLAN’s newest warship is purportedly bristling with advanced features. Its commissioning follows a Pentagon warning late last year about Beijing’s growing ability to quickly churn out high-end vessels as part of a rapidly expanding fleet with increasing reach across the globe. The ship class, referred to by the U.S. and NATO as the Jiangkai III class, could eventually become the backbone of China’s combat fleet in the future, although Luohe and a second Type 054B are believed to be the only two built thus far.

The Luohe was commissioned at the Qingdao Comprehensive Support Base, situated just across the Yellow Sea from South Korea. The ship was launched in 2023 and underwent sea trials last year. While Beijing released few technical details on the vessel, online posts citing the government state that the ship displaces about 5,000 tons. It is also believed to be longer and more capable of future system upgrades than its predecessor, the Type 054A.

Daniel Greenfield.

Leftism is a giant conspiracy theory. Its paranoid schizophrenic view of the world is not unique. The perception that the world is invisibly controlled by forces and agendas that most people are not aware of pervades many cults, conspiracy theorists and radical movements. But what is unique about the Left is its image as an intellectual movement and a cultural force that has enabled its paranoid worldview and its raving hostility to the world as it exists to dominate the discourse at the expense of the ideas, beliefs and cultures that predated it.

The central leftist conspiracy theory is wrapped in academic theories taught in every university, and its premises are as deeply embedded in our culture as they were in the USSR and much of the western world, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, has come to see at least some of reality through the lens of leftist conspiracy theories and to echo its messages.

Wokeness is the act of ‘awakening’ people to that alternate reality by imposing that lens.

Wokery is voluntarily taking the blue pill.

Read it.

A presidential pardon is not a get-out-jail-free card. Those who receive presidential pardons face two significant hurdles.

First, a presidential pardon only wipes the slate clean for federal crimes—it offers no shield against state or local charges. This gap in protection is precisely how Donald Trump found himself entangled in criminal cases across four jurisdictions: New York, Georgia, Florida, and the District of Columbia. Each of these jurisdictions operates independently beyond the reach of presidential clemency, underscoring the limits of federal immunity.

Secondly, presidential pardons leave the door open to civil penalties. Federal or state governments, as well as private parties, can pursue restitution or damages through civil courts, even in the absence of criminal penalties. Individuals who receive pardons may still face a range of lawsuits and financial claims, including those initiated by the federal government.

Ironically, receiving a pardon can heighten the risk of civil lawsuits and state or local prosecution. Pardons attract heightened scrutiny from the public and potential plaintiffs, including well-funded advocacy groups eager to pursue justice or restitution. Preemptive pardons, such as those issued by President Joe Biden, are especially prone to being viewed as implicit admissions of guilt, potentially intensifying the drive for civil litigation or state and local criminal prosecution.

Read it.

In exchange for the Trump administration safeguarding access to key visa programs for Indians, India has offered to take back 18,000 of its citizens illegally living in the United States, Bloomberg reported.

India is hoping President Donald Trump maintains the H-1B visa program, which some of his supporters oppose. Of the 386,000 H-1B visas granted in 2023, 72% came from India, according to government data.

The country also wants Trump to maintain its student visa program and prevent Trump from ramping up tariffs against it, Bloomberg reported.

India is not using illegal migration to the U.S. to dump its underclass, as Mexico has done for the past sixty years. These are mostly high-tech workers and bright university students who just figure that they can make more money in the U.S.–India wants them back to reverse the ‘brain drain’.

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A California city declared it will not be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants amid President Donald Trump’s plans for mass deportations, dealing a blow to Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to “Trump-proof” the state from federal immigration enforcement.

The seven-member city council, all Republicans, in Huntington Beach, which is about 37 miles southeast of Los Angeles, voted Tuesday night to approve the initiative brought by Mayor Pat Burns to declare Huntington Beach a “non-sanctuary city for illegal immigration for the prevention of crime,” according to a news release.

“The intent of this resolution is to deliberately sidestep the governor’s efforts to subvert the good work of federal immigration authorities and to announce the city’s cooperation with the federal government, the Trump administration, and Border Czar Tom Homan’s work,” the council said. “This new city policy and declaration are common sense, supports our law enforcement, and advances public safety throughout the city.

UnHerd.

In an opening chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville captures the American scene in the whaling village of New Bedford, Mass. There are “savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh”; “Green Vermonters and New Hampshire men”; lunks and hicks and “bumpkin dandies” in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats “girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath knife”. Polite society may have responded with horror to these sights, but Melville understood that this wild diversity, ferment and lawlessness was the essence of his country.

New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.

The speculative fiction community term is ‘paranormal romance’.

Victor Davis Hanson.

There’s been a whole change of mentality, from the trivial to the existential. We also learn these disclosures. Why now? Why now? Why did we suddenly learn from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that Joe Biden had had cognitive decline all these years, in which to point that out was blasphemy?

And now, all of a sudden, we hear we were right all along. All of you were.

Astral Codex Ten.

Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.

Sounds good to me. Think of it as evolution in action.

A younger and more naive person might think the based post-Christian vitalist and I have some irreconcilable moral difference. Moral argument can only determine which conclusions follow from certain premises. If premises are too different (for example, a intuitive feeling of compassion for others, vs. an intuitive feeling of strength and pitilessness), there’s no way to proceed.

So it was revealing to watch some of these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.

Some of us think of Britain as one of those ‘far-off countries’ whose starving children one will never meet. Don’t know what that does to his argument.

ZMan does a deep dive.

The concept of racism is a novelty of the twentieth century that in recent times has been treated as a timeless truth. In the last century, the best people decided that their fellow white people had been living in sin because they had not welcomed the descendants of former slaves into their lives, so they set about correcting it. What started as a project to better the material condition of black people and include them into general society, slowly transformed into a cult of leukophobia.

It is a good example of how a negative identity can both spread and slowly destroy the people who embrace it. The first “antiracists” were sober minded compared to the modern version, in that they simply wanted to address the practical problem of incorporating the black population into the American legal system. As a practical matter, the United States had two legal frameworks into the twentieth century, one for the white population and one for the black population.

The fact that this dual legal system existed in America is a great example of how practical necessity must always come before the ideal. America was born, in part, in the notion of equality before the law. It nearly tore itself apart in a civil war over this very same issue, but into the twentieth century the majority of Americans, of both races, were comfortable with a two-tier legal system. It was this gap between the ideal and reality through which antiracism entered.