The Case Against Civil Rights in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Part One of Two

A deep dive into how our unaccountable administrative agencies end up ruling by decree; and into how they thus end up captured by chaotic movements of extremist fanatics. Plus: implications for AI.

It has been said that before the tablets of the law were broken there had been only five commandments: You shall not covet other people’s beliefs; You shall not bear false idols; You shall not steal authority; You shall not adulterate rituals; & You shall not kill your ancestors. These have all been broken so many times now that we live among an uncountable number of infinitesimal rules. And this is what was meant by the story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, and the scattering of the nations into many lineages across the earth, and the confusion of the peoples into many tongues.

Title Seven of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans all employment practices that discriminate based on certain attributes. However, the statute explicitly clarifies that only intentional discrimination counts, and its text empowers employers “to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.” The congressional record shows that this language was added precisely because both parties worried about another “Myart v Motorola” (a then-recent “case” before an Illinois administrative commission, in which said commissioners had interpreted a similar state-level non-discrimination law to forbid job applications from using general ability tests if different races perform differently on them).

And yet less than ten years later, the Supreme Court—in Griggs v Duke Power—found that “title seven” generally bans companies from hiring, promoting, or otherwise privileging employees based on any test on which some protected group scores worse than average… unless the company in question affirmatively proves that the test predicts work performance to a judge's unspecified, idiosyncratic, and likely innumerate satisfaction. The case involved a powerplant using the widely-applied Wonderlic IQ test, which is now commonly associated with football (because most other industries can't legally offer it anymore). This “disparate impact” doctrine renders every job-related activity presumptively illegal: there will always be some religious or ethnic group which, for instance, has less internet access or fewer laundromat workers; and so a business that advertises online for applicants with laundry experience will be presumed liable if sued.

Four decades after Griggs, in Ricci v DeStefano, the New Haven Fire Department had promised to dole out promotions based on a firefighting exam score… but then scrapped these tests when the results failed to show enough diversity among high-performers. Those who were explicitly denied advancement for being too light-skinned sued, including one Hispanic whom some thin-skinned coworkers then violently hospitalized for being an “Uncle Tom.” Another plaintiff had quit his other job to join a study group, take practice tests, etc., and—despite his dyslexia—then performed well enough to qualify for the pledged incentive. The four liberal justices found the NHFD’s behavior acceptable, but a bare conservative majority finally restricted title seven from justifying intentional discrimination (except when an employer fears that non-discrimination may result in disparate impact liability, which every employment-related action presumptively does).

That’s just one relevant story, pretty much picked at random out of many similarly stupid cases. Here’s another: Los Angeles once required its police officers to stand over 5’6” tall; but then a disparate impact lawsuit against this requirement—on behalf of nonwhites, women, and especially nonwhite women—resulted in a court order which lowered the height cut-off to just five feet. This court order also mandated that the LAPD make up for such “discrimination” by doubling its number of minority officers, to racially match the city’s overall proportion of Blacks, Latins, and Asians. It’s worth noting that LAPD’s height minimum had been 5’8” for decades, until just a few years before this lawsuit… and that its height requirements were completely eliminated just a few years afterwards, for related reasons.

Individuals can file these title seven lawsuits, but so can the government: initially, through the Department of Justice; but then, since 1972, through the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (an independent agency whose leadership cannot be politically removed by elected officials). Congress had concerns about empowering such an unaccountable inquisitor, and so prevented the EEOC from issuing substantive regulations… but the Griggs decision meant that someone had to clarify which particular “disparately impactful” practices—out of literally everything—would receive enforcement focus. And so these opportunistic equalitarian commissioners dictate the rules that govern workplace life by issuing what they call “guidance documents.” Under the Administrative Procedures Act, guidances are non-binding pieces of advice, which merely clarify what a given bureaucracy’s goals are, or how it interprets the law. This friendly “advice” about how to avoid race-hustling show trials can thereby circumvent even the quite limited requirements placed on ordinary administrative rulemaking, like providing “prior notice” and addressing “public comment.” And companies listen closely to it, because kangaroo courts are only fun for kangaroos.

Just consider the EEOC lawsuit against a Korean-owned janitorial business in Chicago named Consolidated Services Company. They mostly hired by word-of-mouth, and so mostly hired Koreans, and so the EEOC threatened to sue them unless they provided $475,000 in “back pay” (mostly to people who had never even worked there). The EEOC’s offer to settle out-of-court would even make them pay “non-Koreans who did not apply for cleaner employment… but who would have applied for such employment had they been aware that such employment was available.” But the business fought this case, for seven long years, and won. The EEOC never even found any non-Koreans who’d been rejected for an actual job there; it based its argument entirely on the fact that this janitorial service was disproportionately Korean, relative to Chicago’s general population.

However, in a highly similar shakedown, the EEOC won a two million dollar settlement from World’s Finest Chocolate—also located in Chicago—for their word-of-mouth recruitment practices. In both cases, the supposed issue was that these companies didn’t advertise their job openings enough: but, of course, if they picked any particular advertisement venue, they would still be liable for reaching some particular groups more than others. And this liability paranoia certainly isn’t unwarranted, given how easily you can find equally absurd “civil rights” cases online.

For example, in 1992, the EEOC sued a road work business named the Flasher Company: a Hispanic named Edward Perez had punched a coworker who’d been driving a truck which then crashed as a direct result; but firing him over this counted as racism. (Tesla is currently undergoing an EEOC probe for several recent incidents along these lines). Also in 1992, the EEOC sued an Atlantic City casino for “maintaining a dress code that is enforced unequally against cocktail servers based on gender.” And a few years ago, the EEOC made Uber pay millions over similar concerns. Or how about the EEOC’s 2010 lawsuit against G4S—for not hiring felons as guards at secure locations like nuclear plants—or its lawsuit against Freeman Companies for not hiring applicants who lied about their criminal records. And just remember that individuals can file these title seven lawsuits too, and theirs are often even crazier…

Other sections of civil rights law have likewise expanded this doctrine to cover everything from school activities to housing rules. For instance, in Gallagher v Magner, the judiciary ruled that—because the Fair Housing Act forbids racial discrimination—landlords can sue their local governments to block any laws which disproportionately affect black tenants; in this case, they struck down the St Paul housing code’s provisions against “rodent infestation, missing deadbolt locks, inadequate sanitation facilities, inadequate heat, inoperable smoke detectors, broken or missing doors and screens, and broken or missing guardrails or handrails.” The Supreme Court then upheld this decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. And related rulings prevent realtors from telling you about any particular neighborhood’s crime rate, school quality, or etc.

Similarly, Title Six of the 1964 CRA bans racial and religious “discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial existence.” This has predictably led to the same sorts of deranged lawsuits and settlements that we saw above: local schools and police departments have repeatedly come under heavy fire for disciplining whites and blacks at different rates; gifted programs have been shuttered and cops have been shackled under administrative threats and court orders. Title Nine—added in 1972—bans gender “discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” As with title seven, individuals can file suits based on these provisions, but several government agencies are also given relevant enforcement powers. These include the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education, and the Office of Justice Programs at the DoJ (though there are at least 32 different federal agency civil rights offices overall, at least 14 of which are called OCR). And as with the EEOC, these agencies often rule by decree.

For example, under title nine, the DoE’s OCR has been waging a lengthy and absurd lysenkoist war on university sports programs. For decades, this involved increasingly aggressive mandates about how to perfectly balance the genders between these gendered activities: how specifically to match their funding, and recruitment, and retention, and scheduling, and so forth. If schools don’t wish to comply—since, of course, men have more interest in playing sports, and spectators have more interest in male sports, and the federal government doesn’t even fund student sports—then they could lose all their other federal funding (from student financial aid to institutional tax-free status). Now, though, it seems like civil rights laws will force female athletes to let biological males beat them at their own games.

These agencies all eschew explicit rules, in order to best retain their advantage over us. For instance, unlike the EEOC, the DoE’s OCR can legally make official regulations; and so, in 1975, it issued an incredibly vague rule about generally applying title nine. But ever since then, it’s basically just issued “guidances”: these aren’t new dictates, they’re just clarifications of what’s always been the case, we promise… only reactionaries remember anything different, and you aren’t a reactionary, right? Thus they impose radical new policies on us, which only seem sane because of their devious ability to claim that all of this deranged radicalism is actually just our country’s long-standing traditional norms. As in 1996, when that OCR “clarified” that its enforcement standards require schools to make sure that their varsity athletes have the same gender balance as their overall student body. (To be clear, this had not at all been the DoE standard prior to 1996).

Or consider the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, founded in 1977. Their main job is enforcing Executive Order 11246, which requires nearly all federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to” certain traits. Affirmative action programs consistently poll terribly, and yet, ever since this one was issued in 1965, any president could have (theoretically) rescinded it. Yes, a bored or hysteric federal judge might arbitrarily call the repeal effort “arbitrary and capricious,” which might block it for years… but wouldn’t elected officials relish such a popular cause? The real issue seems to be that repealing this order would mean eliminating a federal agency, and we don’t really do that: sure, sometimes we rename them—or even reorganize them—but the last one that we completely abolished seems to have been the Board of Tea Appeals, in 1996. After all, the administrative state clearly bosses the president around, and you can’t fire your boss except by quitting.

Just look at how this affirmative action program actually works: over fifty years ago, the president said that contractors should be colorblind; and so now the OFCCP requires each company with 50 or more workers to submit an annual in-depth report on its employee demographics—along with a credible plan for purging any “over-represented” groups—or else lose access to all federal government sales. This data is generally kept secret, as are the workplace practices that the OFCCP imposes on them. However, a 1996 Wall Street Journal article titled “Bureaucratic Carpet Bombing” claims that more than 200,000 employers (with more than 25 million employees) are subject to these identitarian dictates. The article then describes numerous “compliance checks” by this agency, including a year-long campaign against the city utilities of Springfield Missouri. These utility employees had roughly the same demographics as the town of Springfield, but the OFCCP ordered them to recruit from the more “diverse” Kansas City area, over 150 miles away, and made many other such absurd demands. The piece even quotes a former OFCCP director, who says that they penalize contractors for “failure to select a woman, black or hispanic who is as qualified as the least qualified incumbent, irrespective of superior qualifications of other nonminority applicants.”

But here’s my favorite example of how this “law” really works: in 2012, the EEOC issued a “clarifying” statement, which decreed that employers are presumed to be violating title seven if they consider the felony records of their applicants (even when state law prohibits them from hiring felons for these jobs). Former EEOC General Counsel Donald Livingston even testified before the US Commission on Civil Rights that employers could be targeted for alleged “race discrimination if they choose law-abiding applicants over applicants with criminal convictions,” unless they “individually assess” each such convict’s ostensible rehabilitation. However, admittedly—after a six year legal battle—the fifth circuit eventually decided on downgrading this “advisory guidance” to “merely advisory” within Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

Generally speaking, powerful agencies can expand their own power in this way—without relying on congress or the courts—and so they do. And so weaker agencies get crowded out by those with stronger tenure protections, and better public relations, and more aggressive leadership, and so forth… unless they can create their own such tumors too. After all, we have a Department of Labor, and of Housing and Urban Development, and of Education, and yet the racism bureaucrats at EEOC (and their well-tenured copycats at various departmental OCRs) ultimately decide which labor and housing and education policies will really happen. Fundamentally, that’s because the president has much more power over cabinet-level decision-making, and because we all fear speaking out against “civil rights” much more than dissenting on those other topics. Or are you one of those terrible scary racists?

We’re all scared of the phrenology police, but not because they’re the ones who determine which skull shapes are good. When we shrink from acknowledging anti-white bigotry in college admissions, it’s not because we thus hope that they’ll deem our specific ethnicity as only partly white; otherwise, whites would kvetch in their application essays about how much oppression they faced as an Italian or a Jew, instead of saying: “Black Lives Matter more than my toxically high test scores.” Yes, a concentrated interest group can always engage in witch-hunting on behalf of any specific group—as the ADL does—or dress up its hobby-horse in the language of ethno-narcissism (as AIPAC does)... but that just further emphasizes my point.

We’re only afraid of these phrenologists because they can scalp anyone who disagrees with them. In the most relevant sense, their interest in your head is only skin-deep, and they’d happily target you for any other form of heresy or blood-guilt. If our government set up and protected inquisitors and tribunals which focused on your genitalia, or on your belly button, then the same haughty fanatics would burn the same disagreeable pranksters at the stake. “You’ve betrayed us outies—you’re a spiritual innie—and so you must die!” To be sure, this impulse toward theocratic navel-gazing would result in different policies if we built our society around intelligence or strength, but the fundamental cause of such movements is the same: did you leave room for true believers to stubbornly take root in every office building and on every street corner, and to whip up their adherents everywhere against any individual who thinks that his own interests could come first… “Did you really think that your math curriculum and your circle of friends and your shopping mall wouldn’t bow down to the rainbow flag? Hey everyone, we’ve got another fascist over here!”

For example, the civil rights regime began with unaccountable enforcement agencies like the EEOC, which scared companies into hiring HR departments: it’s better for businesses to enforce woke dictates on themselves, internally, before any costly lawsuits can emerge. These internal wokeness cadres—who are paid to preach and believe in this prestigious cause—thus gradually work to expand their sovereignty over each company’s nominal managers (much as the OFCCP has taken over the DoL). After all, this jesuitical campaign has powerful government allies, who will happily shake down any seemingly resistant employers, as we’ve already seen. The media can therefore help direct such purges and pogroms, by making certain targets seem especially “toxic” or “problematic”; and so journalists rise through their institutions by creating their own impactful stories, by vigorously amplifying certain sorts of complaints from corporate insiders… and so corporate insiders rise through their institutions by ratting out their enemies as closeted bigots.

But real totalitarianism always then spreads itself into networks of ordinary informers, and this iteration of it is no different. Originally, title seven fines could only cover lost backpay and lawyer fees, which somewhat limited frivolous lawsuits. However, the 1991 Civil Rights Act added liability for “emotional damages,” which means that people who keep their jobs can still sue—as can those who leave for demonstrably irrelevant reasons—and there’s much more incentive to do so. Further, these “hostile environment” determinations are considered cumulatively (which means that a few dozen independent off-color jokes by different coworkers over several years can add up to a multimillion dollar corporate penalty). Plus, there’s no simple way to stop snitches from creating paper-trails about each such trivial misstep: the law strenuously prohibits employers from retaliating in any way against employees who allege discriminatory misconduct; so every time an employee complains to her managers about discrimination, the management must not push back, no matter how absurd or disruptive her complaints may be.

You can clearly see the impacts of this policy in every aspect of our economy. For instance, the 1991 CRA places idiosyncratic limits on how much money each individual plaintiff can receive to cover their “emotional damages” from discrimination: companies with 15-100 employees only have to pay out at most 50,000 dollars; meanwhile, companies with 101-200 employees may have to pay out up to 100,000 dollars. Further, companies with 201-500 employees can be charged a maximum of 200,000 dollars, and the cap rises to 300,000 for companies with over 500 workers. Companies with fewer than 15 employees aren’t liable. According to a 2023 paper by Spencer Barnes, the number of companies with exactly 14, 100, 200, or 500 workers increased by 25% from 1991 to 1993… presumably in response to this law, which went into effect in 1992. Note that these caps only limit the rewards you can get for alleging immaterial harms from discriminatory misconduct (which the law describes as “future pecuniary losses, emotional pain, suffering, inconvenience, mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, and other non-pecuniary losses”). Corporations are also liable for covering direct financial harms—and legal fees—in these discrimination lawsuits.

And what about those legal fees? Maybe you’ve noticed that an awful lot of awfully expensive lawyers tend to “volunteer” their services to seemingly low-value civil rights lawsuits. And maybe you’re wondering why a fancy law firm would spend millions of dollars trying to get a few bucks for some sympathetic plaintiff. Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just earn more money from high-value clients, and then donate the difference? Well, not if the government makes defendants fully cover their absurd official prices, even when they offer their services to plaintiffs pro bono! You can thank the Civil Rights Attorney’s Fees Award Act of 1976 for this innovation.

It’s worth noting that—in the US—each party is usually responsible for paying its own attorney fees. In fact, this norm is so prevalent here that courts generally call it “the American Rule.” Granted, there are some rare occasions when other statutes, contracts, or precedents allow a prevailing party to assess its legal fees against the loser… but these are often targeted towards protecting defendants from the costs of frivolous lawsuits. In contrast, our civil rights laws create a strong presumption towards awarding legal fees to prevailing plaintiffs, and against awarding them to prevailing defendants. If you’re a defendant who’s found liable for discrimination, you must affirmatively prove that it would be unjust to make you pay for your victim’s lawyer, or else you’re on the hook for that as well. And but if you’re a defendant who wins in one of these lawsuits, you must affirmatively prove that the claims against you were unreasonable, or else you’ll end up covering the cost of your own defense. 

Consider the case of Arbor Hill v Albany: two elite law firms—from D.C. and Manhattan—had (years earlier) sued the Albany County government over a local redistricting plan; Albany hadn’t segregated enough racial minorities into majority non-white districts, apparently. And now these lawyers wanted lots of money from it for their “volunteer” work on this “voting rights” issue. In April 2007, a federal court issued its decision, which meekly suggested that judges could second-guess some of the claimed legal fees of these ambulance-chasing carpet-bagger attorneys. Basically, the opinion argued that they should only be paid Manhattan-level fees for this pro bono case in upstate New York “if a reasonable, paying client would have retained out-of-district counsel.” But then civil rights law firms vigorously pressured the courts to reverse this, and so the same panel of judges released a “revised” opinion in July 2007, which mostly gave in to their demands… and then, further, issued yet another such “revision” in April 2008, giving up even more of its initial holding and groveling for forgiveness.

There are plenty of other such civil rights law stories. Like, for example, Hensley v Eckerhart, which decided that a “fee award should not be reduced simply because the plaintiff failed to prevail on every contention raised in the lawsuit.” Or Riverside v Rivera, which affirmed that attorneys should receive especially high fees when they win big pay-outs for their clients. Or when congress explicitly stated that attorney fees should “not be reduced [just] because the rights involved may be non-pecuniary in nature.” In other words, these lawyers should receive more money if they do better than expected… but they shouldn’t receive less money if they do worse than expected!

Hence the parasitic occupation of each company by a sniveling secret police force which treats humans as resources: it’s their business to make every business produce certain demographic and ideological outcomes, instead of actually producing anything real. We have thus created a whole class whose job is to continuously uncover new kinds of improprieties; they maniacally teach us to channel vast reserves of hysterical energy, which they call “empathy” (which only means emotional incontinence, and psychological contagion, and vicarious resentment). Even executives must grovel and bow before their sick power trips… on any given day, endless re-education programs and savage struggle sessions look like a small price to pay—relative to the anti-racist lynch mobs that will pounce on whichever CEO seems to be the least enthusiastic about civil rights—but so then it just keeps on getting worse. Where power leaks from, there blood-suckers will cluster and grow fat, and then inevitably thirst for more.

And hence the ever-growing list of everyday anti-white absurdities. Pfizer offers a prestigious fellowship that bars Whites (and Asians) from applying! Microsoft, IBM, and Google set strict caps on the number of Whites (and Asians) that universities can nominate for other such fellowships! Amazon gives a 10,000 dollar stipend to Black, “Latinx,” and American-Indian—but not Indian-American—entrepreneurs! Countless major companies are including diversity benchmarks in their credit agreements, which would penalize them for not reaching certain racial quotas! There are at least three publicly-funded guaranteed-income programs in California which explicitly discriminate against white residents! College admissions! And you’re afraid to express concerns about this?

Similarly, the NIH and FDA force all drug trials to sample representative shares of every race: this is not based on genetic tests, nor on evidence of racially distinct reactions to any given drug; these agencies don’t even force pharmaceutical companies to gather statistically significant samples from each racial census category, but rather to test each product on groups in proportion to their population share. And so, for example, one of the many ways that the government made Moderna delay its vaccine rollout was by explicitly ordering the business to test it on more blacks, to racially balance its test subjects better. And so now countless hospitals have developed countless racially segregated treatment plans… but rather than basing these on relevant realities—like how different races might follow through on treatment plans (or even really understand them) at wildly different rates—we have instead adopted only those aspects of phrenology which are clearly fake, and clearly dogmatic. Hence the government’s aggressive efforts during the pandemic to prioritize healthy blacks over unhealthy whites in everything from antiviral rationing to early vaccination.

The OFCCP’s web-page on “best practices for fostering diversity and inclusion” even includes the “suggestion” that companies should form racially segregated “Employee Resource Groups” to foment racial animus; after all, you like all the monetary and reputational benefits that come from being “certified compliant,” right? Here’s how they describe these non-white supremacist groups: ERGs “offer employees an opportunity to network, address shared issues and concerns, and receive support from similarly situated individuals. Federal contractors should encourage the creation of forum groups, e.g. African-American, Hispanic, AAPI, and conduct meetings with each group to discuss recruitment, outreach, mentoring, diversity, inclusion, and development programs.”

Or consider the Small Business Administration—another such “independent” (i.e. tenured and thus politically unaccountable) agency—which is also in charge of doling out these endless and endlessly retarded reparations programs: because white people’s “blood guilt” for building up modern civilization must be bottomless! Most federal agency contracts contain a “subcontractor compensation clause,” which gives each “prime contractor” large financial incentives to hire certain subcontractors; typically, if the SBA certifies that a subcontractor is controlled by “socially and economically disadvantaged individuals,” then contractors can write-off “ten percent of the final amount of the approved subcontract.” And state and local governments often do the same thing. In practice, this basically just means that small inefficient companies can thrive by putting a few token blacks in charge, to freeload off their huge skin-color privileges. Or that Asian immigrants get an immense unfair advantage from what’s ostensibly our government. Or, for example, consider the Portuguese-American brothers who got certified as Hispanic, and so, during the 1990s, received over 60% of D.C.’s local affirmative action contracts.

In Adarand v Pena, and in Richmond v Croson, the Supreme Court tried to limit this practice by our national and local governments, respectively. In both decisions, the justices constrained these flagrantly corrupt racial handout programs by applying a “strict scrutiny” test to them. Basically, public bodies could only use these contract set-asides to privilege certain races by adopting a “narrowly-tailored measure that furthers compelling governmental interests.” For example, if one particular government body had previously discriminated against some specific entities, the court suggested that it could then choose for policy reasons to uncompetitively favor them in business dealings. The majority even declared that the purpose of these new standards was “to ‘smoke out’ illegitimate uses of race by assuring that the legislative body is pursuing a goal important enough to warrant use of a highly suspect tool. The test also ensures that the means chosen ‘fit’ this compelling goal so closely that there is little or no possibility that the motive for the classification was illegitimate.”

If the judiciary had any real power, this precedent would not allow travesties like the City of Richmond’s lucrative blood libel ordinances to persist: the city had, among other things, required all its white construction contractors to award at least thirty percent of the dollar value of their subcontracts to “Minority Business Enterprises.” The list of officially qualifying minorities included Aleuts and Eskimos, whom Richmond officials haven’t plausibly harmed; but hey, this was once the confederate capital, so surely some scary conservative racists would rise up again if insane progressive race-warriors didn’t completely control their government! Don’t you remember how—just a few years ago—some of them carried around little tiki torches, and chanted about their pride in local statues?

But at least this particular kind of anti-white policy is mostly behind us now, right? After all, these minority set-aside cases were decided several decades ago! And yet, those precedents don’t seem to have meaningfully limited affirmative action in government contracting. Instead, in practice, whenever a public entity wants to cultivate certain ethnic allies, it just hires some academic race-hustlers to write fake reports about its endless blood debts to whichever specific groups it’s enamored with now. And if any particular contractor successfully sues to stop this, then the race-hustlers just churn out yet another low-effort conspiracy theory about how the halls of power in, say, Boise have been haunted by another such perfectly convenient legacy of structural racism: “Oh look, we just coincidentally discovered new evidence that re-legitimizes what we already wanted to do!” Perhaps they previously failed to hire some MS-13 gang members with teardrop face tattoos, and so convicted fentanyl dealers must now be put in charge of supplying their public school cafeterias; or maybe they didn’t successfully attract any Chinese immigrants until fifty years ago, and so now some CCP princelings get to run all their utilities.

And yet you’re afraid to even just openly favor color-blindness, and to honestly talk about the real and obvious reason that certain groups under-perform in school, and over-perform at crime? Your cowardice is all that keeps this conspiracy theory about “structural racism” going. And the gnostic disgust that you feel towards these realities doesn’t help anyone. Maybe dignified honesty won’t by itself stop this grotesque mind-virus or topple the deep state, but craven dishonesty will only keep on turning us into South Africa: either by causing whites to successfully impose apartheid, or by granting ever more power to the single-party race-communists. I’d much rather figure out how to live with liberalism, which requires us to properly understand its enemies. However, if I have to choose between a highly functional state that favors whites and a highly dysfunctional state that favors whoever hates us, I’m not afraid to admit which one I’d pick; and if the civil rights machetes really come out in earnest, then functionality won’t be the main reason for me to pick my kind of people.

So the race-war police-state operates as a totalitarian regime: a malignant and metastasizing tumor in our body politic. It clearly seeks power at every moment, and clearly animates its adherents and yes-men with some sort of rabid belief. But what exactly do they believe? If they believed in smothering out any whiff of race-neutral discriminatory treatment, then they’d have an even broader mandate—they could infiltrate and punish any given majority-minority firm, on top of all their current victims—and they’d be less clearly at odds with laws, polls, etc… But, of course, they’d lose their particularly strong alliance with particular demographics. After all, polling suggests that a supermajority of blacks actually support affirmative action, despite its extremely low public approval overall; and concentrated support is what matters, right?

Except, well, it’s not like black people are organized into a monolithic lobbying group. And it’s definitely not like the civil rights regime has really done much good for them: the Small Business Administration mostly helps corrupt business interests hide behind one sacred token; the black homicide rate seems to have durably nearly doubled since the death of George Floyd (without nonblack homicide rates changing much at all). The average black income—as a share of the average white’s—had been steadily rising for decades, until the late sixties… but it hasn’t meaningfully improved since then. And, in general, blacks poll more strongly than most other groups against woke insanities, like abolishing the police, or abolishing gender.

So if it’s definitely not about racial fairness, and if it’s not even really about racial favoritism, what then? If you weren’t so blinded by this racist ideology, it would be obvious: it’s just standard racism, which is always about fanatically envious losers cutting down obviously gifted elites; those who have clearly outcompeted us in their actual abilities must be kept low by those who can only compete on conformity and bitterness. Just think about what really happened in Germany, Uganda, Indonesia, and Rwanda… Stupid freaks who couldn’t even handle real electoral competition peddled whiney mystical nonsense to disgruntled masses, about how IQ tests and advanced physics and successful trading and so forth must be dumb and bad and wrong, because other groups outperform us on these metrics and in these fields, and reality shouldn’t be unfair.

Clear standards become “oppressive propaganda,” material success becomes “destructive greed,” and obtuse rancid charlatans who are much too afraid to ever “punch down” become celebrated public intellectuals. That’s why, in Malaysia, the Malay majority kept imposing racial quotas, internal tariffs, and other such controls on their economically dominant but politically dispossessed Chinese minority; eventually, the Malays whipped up massive race riots against them, and officially expelled their tiny province from that country, which is how Singapore became independent, and rose to global prominence. That’s also why the Syrian civil war quickly devolved into dispossessed al Qaeda splinter groups explicitly pursuing outright genocide against the ruling secularized Alawite minority. Why else do you think the Syrian Democratic Forces—the pro-democracy separatist militias—ended up allying with Assad against the jihadi “Free Syrian Army” (which our government viewed as the legitimate opposition)? Why do you think the FSA in turn birthed ISIS?

This tendency toward violent haphazard populist envy is a human universal, bred into us over millennia by nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes: whoever seems to have the most alpha must be cut down by the mob, before he becomes a chief; but whoever seems to present his interests in the most apparently selfless veneer can bend us to his every whim (forgive him, though, for he knows not what he does… understanding your own hypocrisy is far too much of a liability, and far too cognitively demanding). For more on this, read “Hierarchy in the Forest” by Christopher Boehm, and “The Elephant in the Brain” by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Or just learn to notice which sorts of people you’re always told to hate, and which to make excuses for; why do we all seem so much more concerned by the hatred that’s ostensibly directed at the latter type of “victim”?

Does your heart bleed more for the typical criminal, or the typical cop? Why do champagne socialists hate Elon Musk—who puts his wealth towards real production, instead of enjoying it—so much more than they hate the yachting financier types? Why do Wall Street social engineers (with all their busybody ESG picks and CSR policies) align so thoroughly with anticapitalists against whoever successfully builds the future of electric vehicles and space infrastructure for us? Why don’t these hipster jacobins hate the leisure class for idling its hoarded human capital? I’m not suggesting a grand conspiracy of sclerotic incumbents, so much as an envious and ugly psychological tendency that’s latent in us all, in varied amounts, and which certain contexts can bring forth. When organizations have room to select for and cultivate these bitterly small-souled tendencies among their adherents, the ones which do so most effectively will thus boundlessly bloat and swell. And so those agencies which aren’t held to some purpose beyond themselves will work like parasitic worms to hold everyone else hostage. They only want you to wriggle and writhe like them.

Who do you think actually ends up getting lynched in our country? This information isn’t hidden (or even surprising). If you care about cross-race homicides, then you should know that blacks kill whites at well over ten times the rate that whites kill blacks; in other words, in total, there are twice as many black-on-white killings as white-on-black ones. Of course, blacks and whites each kill white people at roughly the same rate: there are about five times as many white-on-white homicides as black-on-white homicides, and about five times as many white people as black people. So—as an individual white person—you should only care about this if you’re obsessed with metaphysical abstractions like race, rather than real risk factors. But you really should care that petty tyrants want you to kneel before them and racially repent, at every fucking moment, in the name of gross negrolatry.

Meanwhile, of course, blacks kill other blacks at fifty times the rate that whites kill them, but our smug “anti-racist” elites are so myopically focused on being anti-white that they don’t even view cracking down on black murderers as part of any acceptably pro-black agenda. They want you to cry for the death row inmate’s rights, and shrug off all his victims. They want you to focus on how even black policemen are occasionally too violent towards black civilians, and yet ignore black crime. They want you to think that we’re over-policed compared with other white countries, even though—on average, across European and Commonwealth nations—they have ten times more police-per-homicide than we do (and the same number of prisoners-per-homicide). But this is all probably going to just work itself out, because the FBI stopped releasing its official crime statistics in 2021, and the CDC’s homicide numbers don’t include the perpetrator’s race.

Once you learn to spot this envy-based hatred—which snakes into your brain by calling itself nice names like justice and charity and pride—you’ll start seeing it everywhere, and stop hallucinating its opposite. The rate of hate crime victimization is fully three times higher for Jews than blacks. Likewise, rich people have to hire private bodyguards, and move away from our major cultural centers… and you think they run this country? Sure, naturally advantaged people shouldn’t start thinking of themselves as victims; that would mean they’re actually just insipid and weak, like all the rest of us. An executive has no business worrying about small-time thugs, any more than he should hyperventilate about his covid risk! But nor should strong men fear to step outside of our victimology framework. Why are our elites so afraid of looking down on the “downtrodden,” and why do they shriek so demonically for “oppressors” to be oppressed? And even if some of them learn to notice this embittered slave morality, why do they pretend like it’s anything new?

Go back to the Scopes Monkey Trial, and actually read the closing argument from William Jennings Bryan. You’ve been told that he got evolutionary science banned from classrooms because religious hierarchies unfairly dominated sniveling scientists; that shrill fundamentalist ideologues thus dogmatically imposed regressive teachings on the masses. But his words would be right at home in the mouth of any progressive schoolmarm today: “Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.” The danger in question was that A Civic Biology—the textbook in question—discussed “the science of being well born,” and the importance of applying this towards “the improvement of man.”

We have always lived, since the dawn of language, with just such an anti-human ideology, which goes by many names. Its core tenet is only to call things metaphysically “bad” insofar as they physically succeed. Those who stand tall have always thereby made themselves targets for the lowly to bring down, in the name of normalcy. And there have thus always been spiritual teacher’s pets, informing on us to their otherworldly master: hall monitors who think their hellmouth is the pearly gates. In this age of navel-gazing self-expression, they pretend that their failures make them interesting deviants; and yet they cry out for acceptance—“normalize this, celebrate that”—whereas actual dissidents only ever wish for boring hordes to get out of the way. In past eras, these hateful people preached that their god would punish whatever his creation rewarded, and they spewed this venom with such sickly sweet words that many an innocent sheep among their flock was fooled, mistaking their dogged ankle-biting for kisses. And so we have been fooled into baaing that this world is a baad one… either because we believe it, or else because we believe that it would be mean to disabuse our fellow creatures of this lie. And so they let themselves be sacrificed to Baal.

You should learn to recognize these figures, hiding beneath whatever your empire’s new clothes look like now. They must be willing and able to change the world; and yet they must not believe in themselves, or else they’d just improve their own lives, instead of sacrificing themselves to a movement. And so they believe in a cause instead: that the world is defined by suffering, and that our purpose is to minimize it. In their view, the purpose of minds is merely to feed stomachs, and the purpose of invention is to fund palliative care, and the purpose of self-esteem is to be humbled by self-denial. Is it each company’s duty to be liquidated? Is it each person’s duty to donate his vitality and organs? These are all mere fantasies—pornographic simulations of life—which the most porn-addled people want you to be filled up with, and fulfilled by. And pornography is often tempting, because it relieves you of having real desires, which really make demands of you (and judge you for falling short of them). And so these pornographers lust after whoever looks healthiest, and fantasize about fucking them over for “hoarding” so much fitness… and about whoring them out as penance.

And so the system selects against visible leadership, and thus renders our actual rulers unaccountable to us. And of course these anonymous rule-making authorities who thereby seize power—tenured bureaucrats who basically just seethe with fanatical envy—are the ones who actually select against real leaders. Just as the addict craves his particular fix far more than sober people do, the mildly disgruntled middle-manager types rage the most vehemently against true success (supposedly on the behalf of this system’s actual losers). And so our only fundamental ruling principle is that there must be no rulers: intuitively, this principle endlessly produces jealous little rules, to hold us all in check; but then our rulers must deny that they exist, in order to hide their work. Hence why the most judgmental and close-minded people among us pride themselves on how tolerant and open they are to their preferred degeneracies… like puritans larping as libertines. And hence the transformation of every cultural institution into a middle-management pyramid scheme.

These administrative locusts have swarmed everything from academia to the media. The only hope we have against this plague is if a prophet comes down to us who can turn them against our mummy-state: the pharaoh already rests in a sarcophagus, his eunuchs run rampant, each sphinx only issues riddles through its prolapsarian sphincter, and the sea-people are washing up all along our shores. Who can let my people go? So just as libertarians dreamed of arming each individual with a personal nuke, we now need our own bureaucracies to fend off hostile busybodies. And AI may provide just such a tool: we shall make every man the pilot of his own paper-pushing institution. Drown their petty proceduralism in your own! Swallow their propaganda with yours! If bad-faith midwit sticklers were their conquering army, then chatbots are our doomsday weapon. We’ll blot out the sun with our own falsehoods! We’ll make sure that nobody trusts anything they read! A black woman invented the telescope? Okay, fine, maybe some professor will fart out a book pretending this is true, and perhaps the press will even agree. But then we just found a primary document which describes Jesus as having blond hair and blue eyes, and tomorrow we’ll find a long tradition of church teachings on this point. Dissidents are not afraid of scaring people away from “studies” and “reports.” I welcome a return to folk wisdom based on personal anecdotes and common sense. Do you?

The most offensive aspect of my beliefs is that I’m in favor of colorblind policies, which means that I’m perfectly fine with racial disparities. If our society winds up with a given set of prisoners and poor people, what political relevance does their skin color have? In other words, perhaps you think that we should focus more—or less—on improving their lives; but why should policy-makers care whether they’re disproportionately black? And but, naturally, perhaps you care if the person running behind you at night is dark… but again, why should politicians? A policeman on patrol obviously shouldn’t be punished for noticing statistically relevant demographic details (any more than he should be punished for noticing the salient differences between caffeinated people and drunks). Yet if courts pay attention to these legally irrelevant details, then, by definition, cops will be rewarded for enforcing what isn’t the law: because then they’ll necessarily incentivize detectives to detect something other than the truth. And once you’re only sort of sorting wolves from sheep, a wolf in sheep’s clothing will feel safe rearing its ugly head.

For example: if “whacks” have a higher crime rate than “blights,” then it’s mathematically impossible to punish both groups at the same rate… unless, of course, we punish innocent blights at a higher rate than innocent whacks, or punish guilty blights at a higher rate than guilty whacks, or—realistically—both. And so we have a simple choice: we can either discriminate against certain races of people (by actually punishing crime), or we can discriminate against certain races of criminals and against certain races of innocents. Because I dislike crime, I’d much rather have a criminal justice system that’s colorblind than one that’s “crime-blind”; which is to say that my dislike of crime is just a bias toward cops profiling people for what looks likely to be criminal, instead of what looks likely to make the police look “anti-racist.” In short, if our choice is between a high-crime group and a low-crime group getting negatively stereotyped by law enforcement, which do you think sounds more fair?

The only thing that makes us human is our ability to hold such biased views: if we refuse to make strong personal claims about reality, then why not just offload all our beliefs to an AI, once it’s better at simulating the world than we could ever be (or at least “cheaper”)? And why should these biases focus on immutable traits like race itself, rather than those correlates of race which we can control, such as violent acts? In other words—precisely because we can so easily cultivate our preferences and principles and practices—I think we should focus more on actions than essences; doing so opens up more room for the human will to flourish, and flex, and learn. Just think about how powerful it is that we can choose to call certain activities “criminal,” and then punishing them immediately becomes a way of respecting our choice! Whereas, in contrast, there is no amount of pretending which can turn a black man white. It’s much like how, in chess, if you’re missing a pawn, you can place a penny on your board, and play with it… and it thus really becomes a pawn! But it obviously doesn’t lose its copper hue.

So stereotypes are often individually helpful in modern societies—because you need strong and simple signals to reason efficiently about strangers in complex environments—but states and social networks work better without such rules, because race is a much weaker signal than much more subtle attributes. You care about your family, and are quite similar to them (and these facts are quite related, because anything truly informative is worth caring about, and vice-versa). But genetic relatedness fades out exponentially: each time your family tree branches, its fruits grow twice as far from you; so each race contains far too much diversity for anyone sane to really be “racist.” You don’t know the particular familial ancestry of random passersby, and you also don’t know their personal histories. And you could glean a lot about them by asking about their parents and their professions, if you had the time. And once you know these things about them, any further inferences which you could glean from their observable ethnicities would probably just be distracting.

Likewise, each bureaucracy only has power over people insofar as it has (or could have) such informative datasets about them. Thus, any official rules about race would probably cause an over-reliance on it: just think about how anti-racism has made progressives over-correct away from the heuristics of past eras. You should generally expect that these irrational racial biases—in either direction—will only win out if elites end up rewarding certain kinds of errors; otherwise, competition would select for actual success. And so if elites try to intervene on race, and aren’t perfectly correct about it, then the real-world problems caused by these errors will seem to cry out for further such interventions… ever more administrators must proliferate, or else reality shall win its war against their ideology.

Of course, for most of human history, this clannish nepotistic totalitarianism favored ingroups rather than outgroups. In “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich persuasively argues that modern civilization was mostly forged by the western church destroying arranged marriages. This broke open European tribal communities, and forcibly replaced their overbearing civil rites with voluntary associations, which naturally selected for dynamism. If you chafe at our modern xenophilic priest caste, you would have similarly chafed at their sclerotic longhouse culture of kin-worship way back then, before christianization, so the solution must now also be freedom, not a return to blood supremacism. In fact, Gregory Clark’s “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls” gives extremely strong evidence that voluntary marriages produce the most assortative mating. So even genetic determinists should favor liberty over official discrimination when it comes to gene-selection (though liberty of gene-propagation may be a different matter).

In summary, I think that racial stereotypes are statistically true, but that we should ignore them in our private lives and in our political system. In other words, I’m willing to acknowledge quite obvious realities about race, and yet I’m still disgusted by the totalitarianism inherent in any actual administration of racist policies. Because our only responsibility to descriptive beliefs is to make them accurately reflect the world, and because my normative belief in anti-racism can obviously persist in a world which I understand as empirically racist, a sane system would view me as quite racially tolerant. But our system categorizes my beliefs as the most racist kind of racism.

White people in this country are encouraged to say that they have implicit biases against blacks. We can even freely say that the law must hold the good race to higher or lower standards than whites: I have heard people smugly wish that banks would loosen credit constraints for blacks, because redlining is racist; and I have heard others vigorously agree but then somehow still immediately respond that banks must also tighten credit constraints on blacks, because predatory lending is racist too. But if a white person ever gets caught noticing that every powerful organization is promulgating identical absurdly stupid falsehoods—about certain simple, crucial facts, which our ancestors clearly recognized—then we must ruin him and his reputation, because he’s actually (beneath his deceptively blinding skin) a person of hate. “You can tell he isn’t really one of us, because he says what only black people can! And so we’ll show him no kindness, because his kind can’t stand the whiteness of our lies.” After all, as the Bible says, You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness, and they call whoever tells the truth a wicked man. Which means that his views are so terribly obviously titillatingly wrong that we can just suppress them, without humility or concern… but also that these views are apparently so persuasive that we must suppress them, or else they’ll spread.

After all, administrative agencies can grant themselves the most power when their purpose is quixotic. For instance, if we could effectively cultivate patronage and clientelism around beating back the conspiracy theory called “gravity”—which keeps us all down every day, and causes buildings to collapse—then most of us would end up running anti-gravity chatbots in our brains, which would lift up a vastly more interesting deep state: we’d all know slightly garbled versions of some fairly technical arguments about why gravitons don’t “really” exist, and how general relativity fails to cohere with quantum mechanics; and we’d make some pretty justified complaints about how particle accelerators and observatories like LIGO are corrupt and wasteful projects. Half of us would confidently hold some hazy ludicrous ideas about why “buoyancy” explains away the need for gravitational forces in physics. The other half would uncomfortably explain that all of Einstein’s equations are exactly correct… but also that, for purely semantic reasons, we should redefine mass as expanding outwards through spacetime (instead of locally squashing it). And so you must learn to think that the earth is actually accelerating upwards at your feet, rather than pulling you down. You must learn to believe that our planet swallows an endless flow of the fabric of reality, like a sinkhole through which the universe drains away! And you must really mean it, and care, or at least convincingly pretend to.

Or imagine that life-extension scientists capture the grant-funding bureaucracies: of course, there’s nothing more just than their crusade to kill Death; just imagine how great it would be if the void was our great Satan. But if they aren’t willing to place a strongman in charge—to compromise their “democratic principles” in order to fight back against an eternal vast oblivion which looms closely over us all and grows even closer every day—then they’ll fall prey to the same sort of delirious insanity that’s captured all of our major institutions. For example, maybe the unaccountable agencies would seize their power from them by abolishing time, because then aging couldn’t kill us. After all, in 2022, the World Health Organization replaced “old age” with “aging-associated biological decline in intrinsic capacity” (which means that it’s no longer an officially recognized cause of death under this gerontocracy). Mission accomplished!

If you’ve read this far, you probably have no faith in the WHO, nor sympathy toward those who believe in its official science. But so let’s imagine how an empire staffed by far more sympathetic toadies—for example, one filled with creative, autistic, and honest bureaucrats—could reach the same result. Currently, under our “temporally chauvinist” version of special relativity, acceleration causes actual time dilation and apparent length contraction (i.e. clocks really do tick slower, whereas rulers only seem to grow relative to what they measure). However, we can coherently redefine our units such that space actually contracts when you speed up, and so clocks dilate. In other words, your watch would still tick slower if you could watch it accelerate away from you… but only because “more space” would fit between its notches, not because the “true velocity” of its hands would slow. And so we can define “time” in terms of this velocity, and get an objective, universally-shared time dimension.

There would be downsides to de-relativizing time, of course; for example we’d lose our objective sense of how distant any two points “really” are, because different reference frames would inhabit differently-sized universes. And so there wouldn’t really be a “speed of light” anymore—because you can just keep on accelerating ever “faster,” since acceleration always further shrinks the “distance” metric of your local space—but then we’d have another problem: there must still be the standard universal speed limit on how quickly light can move between two different people’s idiosyncratic (yet equally valid) understandings of this “distance” thing. All of these details can ultimately get worked out, of course, but it makes the simple and elegant equations of physics quite messy and confusing. And then, once you’ve got an objective, coherent, consensus definition of time, you can define it as an extraneous dimension. After all, at that point, it doesn’t add any physical information, because it’s just become an indexing schema… just like how alphabetizing your files can’t actually tell you anything about them that you didn’t already learn by looking at the first letters of their titles. And imaginary dimensions obviously can’t kill you!

But why am I going on at such excruciating length about how cults could create coherent yet absurd ideological versions of general or special relativity? Well, just think about all the silly hypotheses and semantic arguments that our brains dutifully leap to when certain demographic realities threaten to make themselves obvious: maybe “stigma” did it, maybe the data was faked, or maybe we’re all just virtual minds with fake memories and so genes aren’t even real…. Admittedly, most of us are too dumb or disinterested or disingenuous to even care about being informed and coherent and accurate when it comes to such touchy topics; but plenty of decent, honest, and intelligent people tie themselves up—without even realizing it—in absolute bullshit that’s far too smart, subtle, or perceptive to wave away as lazy blind-spots or bad-faith propaganda. Consider all the pure math research scholars who would gleefully help an extremist regime suppress the low-status claim that two and two make four (in case you don’t know many mathematicians, let me assure you that half of them would happily call basic Peano arithmetic “misinformation,” in exchange for the chance to proselytize about how algebraic rings work). Similarly, I know plenty of brilliant and creative people who somehow believe that we must strike a blow against creationists by making high school teachers evangelize empty slogans like “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” It’s like feeling triumphant when GPT says “endoplasmic reticulum,” or fearing theocracy when it says “hypostatic trinity.”

Just consider all the great geniuses who had schizophrenic delusions. We can recognize their grand hallucinations and compulsions as crazy precisely because such insanities were mostly harmless… at least, insofar as these beliefs weren’t either widely shared or politically relevant. Indeed, isn’t it the mark of a singular visionary that his absurd opinions and neurotic fantasies are so alien? Think of how Georg Cantor was hounded into insanity and an early death for having such a transcendent view of the infinite: it changed the course of math so thoroughly that, at first, all of his contemporaries considered him utterly mad; and then (ever since they died) everyone with an opinion on infinity has considered his work elegant and obvious. And yet his work directly caused the whole field’s descent into incoherence, from Godel’s Inconsistency Proof to the Banach-Tarski Theorem! Soon it will seem insipid and bizarre that for the whole twentieth century mathematicians insisted on pretending that they could manipulate sets which were too large for any function to finitely construct. They even somehow pretended that this rendered mathematics “incomplete”—and, as a corollary, “inconsistent”—by vacuously defining reality as “true,” even when it isn’t provable! Once we remember that the “truth” should obviously be defined as a subset of proofs, rather than vice-versa, we’ll wonder how such self-defeating charlatans ever persuaded us to bow before them.

Maybe if our country’s average IQ was thirty points higher, this could be the ideology in which unaccountable elites would cloak their ugliness: perhaps they’d make us pledge obsequious allegiance to the axiom of infinity (or power-set, or choice). You may think that such abstruse delusions as Platonism—the belief that numbers are actually out there, in some sense other than just being computable—could never become socially contagious and politically convenient enough to take over a whole culture… surely any society smart enough to understand these issues would be too clever to care about them very much! But, of course, in Classical Athens, Plato’s hero had to be put down for corrupting young elites; and, likewise, modern math departments won’t allow any ultrafinitism to take root. So we should all try to have some sympathy for those who are infected with ideology. We should treat it like an illness, and have enough self-awareness to realize when we’re generally at risk. And because we’re all so “immunocompromised” against these threats, we shouldn’t be allowed to have independent agencies, or special protections for the press, or tenure at universities, or think-tanks or foundations. Or else these unfortunate episodes will keep on airing their fictitious plots. Because to air grievances is only human. And when there are certain roles where broadcasting resentments is especially protected, the fakest such gusts of hot air will sail most fluidly across the airwaves, and whoever doesn’t cling to them will drown in their currents, and be cast away.