Richwine’s heresy is particularly dangerous because it sprang from the very heart of the Cathedral itself, and was built on solid rock: a patient, rational examination of quantifiable attributes of the real world, by a Harvard-trained expert in the analysis of empirical data. It was not religious or superstitious. It was, in short, everything the secular Left prides itself on: to paraphrase President Obama’s inaugural address, it was Science restored to its rightful place. Veritas!

Yet the result it brought forth was a hideous, damnable thing: a reanimated, tottering corpse, long thought dead for all time; the enemy and anathema of all that the Cathedral has made holy. In its animal truth it reeked of corruption, of worldly filth. Its sweet, rotten stench, filling the nostrils of the faithful, had the power to reawaken forbidden, pagan memories, ancient and dark and seductive.

So: it had to go. Being nothing more than a creation of rational inquiry, though, it couldn’t be fought on its own terms, and so no one has tried. What was needed was a witch-burning. And so Jason Richwine was dragged to the stake.

Not a witch-burning, you say? Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s exactly what it was. For the details, I urge you all to read this excellent post by hbd* chick.

Oh, and don’t miss this, courtesy of @Iowahawk.

We read:

“Our results demonstrate that physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest — just as if disputes over national policies were a matter of direct physical confrontation among small numbers of individuals, rather than abstract electoral dynamics among millions,” [Aarhus University researcher Michael Bang] Petersen said.

Yes, another shocker from the frontiers of Science: “physically weak males are more reluctant than physically strong males to assert their self-interest”. Who knew?

Well, I seem to fit the pattern; I’m six feet tall, sturdily built, strong as an ox, and no socialist. (I first became strong, as a young man, by working hard to earn myself a living as a laborer on the railroad, which of course may have something to do with it.)

This finding is hardly surprising, from an evolutionary, or even common-sense, viewpoint. (The correlation is not observed in women.) It is certainly understandable that a feminized, soft-handed, epicene beta male of the sort seen everywhere in the big cities these days would prefer that people not have to toil or compete for a living. (Leaving aside economic redistribution, I find myself wondering who opens their jars for them.)

Of course it’s atavistic to imagine that competition in this day and age requires physical dominance, but muscle mass likely correlates with testosterone levels, and so in turn with competitiveness.

Update, May 15th: adding Charles Murray and Andrew Sullivan.

It’s becoming clearer by the day why Barack Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate.

More here.

This really matters, folks, and people (at least on the more mainstream, non-HBD Right) are starting to realize it, I think. This man was awarded a doctorate from Harvard on the basis of a carefully researched, quantitative analysis of empirical data. His review panel was a trio of academics of unimpeachable credentials. Yet this meticulously prepared, 166-page thesis is now Exhibit A in his heresy trial.

At the end of Brimelow’s piece, he writes:

Earlier this week, I was talking to a Harvard academic who is familiar with Richwine’s work. He commented that there were simply some subjects the study of which is incompatible with an academic career.

“That’s a remarkable thing in a free country,” I said.

“This isn’t a free country,” he replied.

To be clear: of course it is important that individuals and civil institutions be free to associate or dissociate themselves from other individuals and institutions as they see fit, and there is certainly a still a distinction, here in America, between what has happened to Dr. Richwine and the actual suppression of speech by force of law (for now, at least; not so much in Canada and Europe). But the man has been subjected to serious punishment, including the loss of his livelihood, for doing exactly what I thought we were supposed to be doing: engaging in an “honest” discussion about immigration and race — and for bringing to the discussion not wishful thinking, idealistic bromides, and fashionable opinion, but empirical data, painstakingly gathered under the supervision of America’s foremost academy of higher learning.

We might imagine that this represents a sudden descent into P.C. madness, but in fact it’s nothing new. In Democracy in America (published in 1835), Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

In America the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy. His political career is closed forever, since he has offended the only authority which is able to promote his success. Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before he published his opinions he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence, as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth.

Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has refined the arts of despotism which seemed, however, to have been sufficiently perfected before. The excesses of monarchical power had devised a variety of physical means of oppression: the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as that will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of an individual despot the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul, and the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose superior to the attempt; but such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The sovereign can no longer say, “You shall think as I do on pain of death;” but he says, “You are free to think differently from me, and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but if such be your determination, you are henceforth an alien among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow-citizens if you solicit their suffrages, and they will affect to scorn you if you solicit their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow-creatures will shun you like an impure being, and those who are most persuaded of your innocence will abandon you too, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence in comparably worse than death.

Tocqueville ascribes this frightful power to “the majority”, but he also notes that “those who think without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence.” Given that Dr. Richwine’s heretical utterances are nothing more than expressions of what appears to be empirical truth (and truth having a way of making itself apparent, even if people don’t like to talk about it), the “majority” behind his excommunication may in fact be smaller than we think. We must refuse to abandon Dr. Richwine in silence; perhaps we may embolden others to do the same, and so put an end to this suicidal folly.

She writes:

Richwine’s 166-page dissertation, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” is now being used to smear him – and by extension, all of Heritage’s scholarship – as “racist.” While the punditocracy and political establishment sanctimoniously call for “honest discussions” on race, they rush to crush bona fide, dispassionate academic inquiries into the controversial subjects of intelligence, racial and ethnic differences, and domestic policy.

Richwine’s entire thesis, “IQ and Immigration Policy,” is now online here. Part One reviews the science of IQ. Part Two delves into empirical research comparing IQs of the native-born American population with that of immigrant groups, with the Hispanic population broken out. Richwine explores the causes of an immigrant IQ deficit that appears to persist among Hispanic immigrants to the U.S. through several generations.

The thesis analyzes social policy consequences of these findings and uses a model of the labor market “to show how immigrant IQ affects the economic surplus accruing to natives and the wage impact on low-skill natives.

The smug dismissal of Richwine’s credentials and scholarship is to be expected by liberal hacks and clown operatives. But a reckless and cowardly pile-up of knee-jerk dilettantes on the Right — including former McCain campaign co-chair Ana Navarro and conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin – have joined the character assassins of the Soros-sphere, MSNBC, and Mother Jones in deeming Richwine a “racist.” The drooling attack dogs of far Left blog Daily Kos have now launched a pressure campaign against the JFK School demanding to know “why the school awarded Richwine a PhD and what they plan to do in the future to prevent it from happening again.”

No researcher or academic institution is safe if this smear campaign succeeds…

… The willingness of Republican Gang of 8’ers to allow a young conservative researcher and married father of two to be strung up by the p.c. lynch mob for the crime of unflinching social science research is chilling, sickening, and suicidal.
These are serious people doing serious work. The crucifiers of Jason Richwine pretend to defend sound science. But if it is now inherently racist to study racial and ethnic differences among demographic groups, then it’s time to shut down every social sciences department in the country.

“Chilling, sickening, and suicidal” is about right. A friend and fellow blogger wrote to me earlier today:

The Jason Richwine ritual crucifixion is almost literally making me sick. Even after Watson, Summers, Kanazawa, and others, I’m amazed at how dishonest his “critics” are.

I replied:

Things suddenly seem to me to have got much, much worse… What’s telling about the Richwine thing is that nobody is, as far as I can see, even bothering to rebut his position on the merits (if indeed they could); they don’t even feel the need to try. He is simply being denounced, dragged through the mud, his career ruined, just for threatening the ideological hegemony of the Cathedral.

This is, of course, a natural consequence of the triumph of radical multiculturalism, and of the displacement of mostly homogeneous societies by jumbles of miscellaneous, and largely immiscible, subpopulations: the necessary, dogmatic, and ruthlessly enforced denial of all meaningful human distinctions.

I continued:

The only way to keep the peace is to limit allowable public discourse [and eventually even private discourse, as in the case of Lars Hedegaard] to the shrinking area in the middle of the Venn diagram where nobody can be offended. It’s like modern-day Rwanda: nobody dares to utter a word. It’s sickening. Like you say. And it’s scary.

I’d expect Steven Pinker to weigh in on this shameful episode sometime soon — Richwine’s offending dissertation was written at Harvard, and he and Pinker probably know each other. I hope he does. Meanwhile, you can read the rest of Ms. Malkin’s piece here.

John Derbyshire, who last year rode the strappado for a related offense, comments here. Steve Sailer comments also, here.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post — which as, readers of a certain age will remember, was responsible for some very consequential investigative journalism some years back, but which now stands watch in the Cathedral’s Swiss Guard — had only this to say about the investigation of another Executive Branch, forty years on:

Who's tweeting about Benghazi? Rich, middle-aged men and Chick-fil-A lovers wapo.st/18YFgKP

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) May 8, 2013

 
I knew times had changed, and not for the better, but I didn’t know we had fallen quite this far. Gone is even the least pretense of impartiality, or even dignity.

We’ll see who laughs last.

Spoiler: it’s a lot.

I wonder why that could be?

Two things are clear. One is that if the Democrats couldn’t even manage to beat the odious Sanford there is reason for us conservatives to be guardedly optimistic about 2014. The other is that, given how quickly the disgraced former governor has risen from the dead, we all have good reason to fear an impending zombie apocalypse.

My darkest fear, though, in light of this surprising result, can be summed up in three terrifying words:

Mayor Anthony Weiner.