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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Douglas Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris, posted a photo on Twitter celebrating the Jewish American Heritage Month.

Met with Jewish White House staff in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. Our Administration is proud to recognize the Jewish staffers who help carry our nation forward each day and are helping create a more inclusive tomorrow.

I counted, give or take, 155 Jewish Staff Members. There are 474 White House Staff Members in total, meaning that Jews comprise 32% of all staff members. This is a radical over-representation of 1400%, or 14x what should be expected given the population of 2.2%. As everyone pictured is White, presumably this really is a photo with all the Jewish staff members who wanted to participate in the event (otherwise: why no black staffers present?). There may be some not pictured for various work-related or personal reasons, and perhaps some with Jewish spouses pictured. I had difficulty finding the figures on other demographics. According to an authoritative source, 14% of the staff are Black (this just happens to be the same number and is not a typo). I could find nothing on Asian members, but perusing the total list of White House Staff names I calculated give or take 50 with exclusively Asian names; this should be construed as a minimum because of high exogamy rates and names not always being obviously Asian. That puts Asians at 10.5%. Given that Black people sit at 14%, I would go out on a limb and say that the Latino constituents also comprise roughly their makeup in America; let’s peg it at a slightly lower 15% (if someone wants to check from the list of staffers’ names be my guest).

All of this puts the non-Jewish White percent at 28.5%, counting the Turkish and Arab names as White (and ignoring the probably ~2% Native American that Joe slipped in there). And so, among White House staffers, Whites are quite under-represented and Jews are enormously over-represented. This is problematic IMO, because the domestic founding population of a nation shouldn’t be so under-represented, and a single ethnic cluster with a strong activism network and their own influential nation state probably shouldn’t be 14x over-represented among White House staffers without anyone in established media criticizing or noticing. Alas, such topics have been posted frequently, but in previous cases the over-representation was among Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices and so on. This shows that even in a large sample size such as 474, the over-representation remains. If I could put my position into as few words as possible, I would steal from a random tweet on the subject: “Half of the White House staff is Jewish, but we get told that ‘White Supremacists’ run America lol.” What pains me is that while the default white Americans are so under-represented, they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic. It’s important to educate others on the problem of representation, I suppose.

The idea that any given demographic should have the same number of slots in any given position of power based on their representation in the overall population is dumb, whether you're talking about Jews or blacks.

Jews aren't overrepresented, they're just represented. White people may make up a majority of the USA population, but a big chunk of those are useless or stupid and so don't count. If you look at an AP math class in New York and compare that to the makeup of White House staffers, you'll see a more realistic comparison of Jews to whites.

White people and Jews are not the same kind of race. They're wholly different zoom levels, different layers on the cladistic tree of humanity. If white people are a kingdom then Jews are a genus. Jews have way more in common with the average Jew than whites have with the average whites. Whites include people from all corners of Europe in the same category for some stupid reason, Jews only count a single insular subgroup. If Jews are a race, then Anglo-Americans descended from people who lived in Ulster but aren't descended from Irish stock should also be a race. And if those Anglo-Hibernian Americans are counted as their own race, you will see a truly shocking overrepresentation among US Presidents (shocking if you assume that every European ethnicity should be equally likely to be President, which is a weird assumption).

Groups are different. White House staffers are not recruited by lottery. It is normal for their racial makeup to be biased one way or another by the makeup of the sorts of people who would apply for those positions. Also "white people" are a fever dream invented by racist nutjobs and everyone needs to stop pretending that "white people" exist. They don't.

What if you look at AP math class literally anywhere else in the country other than New York? How Jewish is it? Does it also have 1400% overrepresentation?

Well Jewish people tend to concentrate into a few cities, such as New York and Washington DC, so you would want to compare Washington DC to one of the other cities that contain large numbers of Jewish people. I expect that an AP math class in Beijing won't have very many Jews, for example. Cities that you could compare it to include Philadelphia, LA, Boston, and Chicago, all of which I'm sure have the expected demographics in their AP math classes.

such as . . . Washington DC

Contrary to the beliefs of some here that Jews control the government, the pct of the DC metro area that is Jewish appears to be less than that of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, and SF/Oakland

That isn't at all contrary to the claim, regardless of the claim's truth.

I didn't say it was. I was merely suggesting that DC is not a good choice as a comparison.