Motus Mentis

Michelle Malkin has now joined the small chorus of writers protesting the ruination of Jason Richwine for crimespeak (see our previous entry, just below).

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.