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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   29325 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The Origins of Woke has not become a best seller. As of this writing, the top non-fiction book on both the Publishers Weekly and NYT best sellers lists is The Democrat Party Hates America by Mark R. Levin. While I haven't read Levin's book, I'm sure it's as disposable as any other political tract by a Fox News host, while The Origins of Woke is legitimately the most important conservative book of the last 20 years.

Argument: It's not selling well because of the Huffington Post article that exposed his old blog posts to the masses. Counterargument: Conservatives are the target market, and they tend not to "cancel" people over things like this.

Argument: It's not selling more copies because the name is cringe. Counterargument: Donald J. Trump Jr's book "Triggered" became a best seller.

Argument: It's not selling more copies because Hanania isn't a celebrity. Counterargument: Andy Ngo doesn't host anything or do many public appearances, but his book was still a best-seller.

I don't care whether Hanania is personally successful, but I really, really want the ideas in this book to gain widespread recognition. Hanania offers provide a plausible-enough plan to defeat not only wokeness, but also all of the ideologies that have gained popularity in the wake of Conservative Inc's failure to stop wokeness, including white nationalism and NRx. Speaking as a former white nationalist (or whatever you wanna call VDare readers), people with moderate temperaments adopt extreme beliefs because the mainstream hasn't offered any believable alternative.

Ben Shapiro says that we should just argue people into adopting our views because it'll suddenly work, even though we've been trying for years and it hasn't worked. Peter Brimelow says we should close the border and have white babies. Curtis Yarvin says that we should put a dictator in charge, or at least whatever FDR was. Caldwell says that we should repeal the Civil Rights Act, even though it's as much a part of our national identity at this point as the Constitution.

Hanania's proposal is essentially a modification of Caldwell's that takes political realities into account. Instead of repealing the Civil Rights Act, we should just re-interpret it in an originalist light and repeal the modifications made in the decades afterwards.

I can't say for certain why this book isn't making bank, but I theorize that it has to do with the fact that no mainstream conservative figure like a Ben Shapiro or a Steven Crowder has reviewed it or interviewed him. They're ignoring him, even though his politics are totally aligned with theirs, because they don't want to platform someone who was once a racist. National Review hasn't even reviewed The Origins of Woke.. and they reviewed Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement!

So, here are three questions I have in no particular order.

  1. Why do you think the book isn't doing gangbusters?
  2. Why do you think Hanania's book is being ignored by the big players in conservative media?
  3. Is there a chance that even if the book remains obscure, its ideas will make their way to the people who matter?

Why do you think the book isn't doing gangbusters

Because the thesis of the book is wrong. News recently came out that 94% of new jobs went to PoC in the US, thanks to corporate pledges in the wake of the BLM riots. A straight reading of the civil rights law would have prevented that, so clearly the rulebook isn't as important as Hanania claims. The people who claim that the system is run on anti-White animus are correct and Hanania is wrong.

The actual statistic is that the 2021 hiring (for S&P 100 companies) was 45% white, 20% Hispanic, 12% Asian, and 18% black. This does seem like underrepresentation of whites, but it's not as severe as 94%.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/

The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/bloomberg-flubs-data-for-bombshell-report-that-only-6-of-new-corporate-hires-are-white

A Daily Wire analysis of the same numbers examined by Bloomberg found that, in reality, the demographics of hiring figures for 2021 were barely different from previous years. The percentage of new jobs that went to whites was likely about 46%, eight points below the 54% white makeup of companies’ existing workforces. That’s to be expected given demographic changes in the United States since the time that the currently-retiring baby boomer generation first entered the workforce.

Though Bloomberg spun the tale as a victory for Black Lives Matter, blacks benefited the least of any racial group from the slight decline in whites, according to the analysis. The percentage of black hires was up from the status quo by 1%, while Asians were up by 2%, and Hispanics were up by 4%. That’s also explained by demographics — decades ago, when baby boomers entered the workforce, the U.S. was mostly white and black; in the decades since, the numbers of Hispanics and Asians in the United States have increased.

Here’s how Bloomberg got the story wrong, and how numbers actually work.

Bloomberg based its analysis on a form companies file to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission listing the racial breakdown of their U.S. employees. The forms are filed annually, but they don’t break out stats for employees hired that year; they just provide the total headcount of all employees by race.

Bloomberg, reaching for a way to isolate recent numbers, focused on the fact that companies increased their cumulative headcount by some 320,000 in 2021. Then they made a flawed leap of logic: They took the increase of minorities across the entire workforce, and divided it by the number of new positions — not the number of actual hires, which overwhelmingly come from replacing people who leave the company. In short, they got the denominator wrong.

“Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms…. Overall, these companies increased their headcount by 323,094 employees in 2021,” the outlet wrote. “Bloomberg then analyzed the racial makeup of those additional workers, finding that 94% of them were people of color.”

But it’s not possible from the data to say that those additional “people of color” took the 320,000 newly created positions. Most of them were almost certainly hired as part of a much larger group: replacements for existing jobs that were vacated by retirees or people changing jobs.

Thanks. I did not know that US statistics make a difference between new positions and replacements. In my country, they are all grouped together.

There is no straight reading of the Civil Rights Act and there hasn't been since 1979.

That statistic is net gain in employment. If 100 whites are hired, 20 blacks are hired. 99 whites retire and 10 blacks retire. Then 10/11 or 91% of net jobs created went to blacks but the hiring situation isn't nearly so dire.

You should also try actually reading the book. He goes into detail about how it is not the plain reading of the laws that matters but a series of precedent setting cases and executive decisions that have shaped their enforcement.

News recently came out that 94% of new jobs went to PoC in the US, thanks to corporate pledges in the wake of the BLM riots.

That sounds very implausible. do you have a cite?

[EDIT] - A quick googling provides this

Or, more precisely, what the pool of new workers minus the pool of departing workers looked like. Net change is what we’re able to see. It’s not that 94% of S&P 100 hires in 2021 were people of color, for example, it’s that when you look at S&P 100 employment totals after a year of arrivals and departures, people of color accounted for 94% of the net increase.

...If I'm understanding this properly, this doesn't seem to support your statement. POC have significantly higher unemployment, and reducing POC unemployment specifically doesn't seem like a bad thing. Unless we assume that the labor market is zero-sum, that POC getting any job at all means a non-POC doesn't get any job at all, it doesn't seem that POC being 94% of the net increase is proof of descrimination.

Not to mention that because of different age distributions, most retirees each year are non-Hispanic whites. The WaPo article also says that 90% of people who entered the workforce in the last year were non-Hispanic whites. So that 94% claim sure seems to be "figures don’t lie, but liars figure."

  1. The question (which I don’t know) is whether the young white population is the same size as the older white population. If so, then you’d expect new hires to roughly equal departures. On the other hand, if the younger population is larger, then you’d be hiring more POC relative to whites.

  2. That per se isn’t a problem if the POC are more qualified compared to whites. However in my experience at a large firm we have relaxed standards for POC hires (and relaxed standards once hired) and we know the traditional tools to determine quality at more entry position are corrupted by college level affirmative action.

The question (which I don’t know) is whether the young white population is the same size as the older white population.

Percentage of white population is decreasing over time, so no, the young white population is smaller.

As long as you're counting by the one drop rule, yes.

I was under the impression that this was the result of US census data, which I'm pretty sure was not compiled via the one drop rule. I'm open to being corrected if that impression is false.

Slightly complicated.

Census is based on self-ID. To the extent that the culture at large uses the one drop rule to define people - which it mostly does, in practice - the census will do the same.

Next layer of complexity is that the census allows you to select as many racial ids as you want, so you can say you are a white black hispanic asian if you want to.

This leads to the situation where people reporting on the census can parse categories in multiple ways, such as 'any white' (white plus other categories) vs. 'white alone' (white and no other categories).

Usually when someone cites a number that shows shrinking white populations, they are citing the 'white alone' number without mentioning that they are doing so to their audience. Which is about 18% lower than the 'any white' number.

The vast majority those people are Hispanics who aren't white and no amount of gaslighting about "White Hispanics" will change that.

I don’t think that’s the right metric. Let’s say there were 100 people and 80 were white and 20 were black. Full employment.

Now there are 120 people and 90 are white and 30 are black. If jobs scale with population, there would still be more total number of white jobs even if the percentage of white jobs decreased.

Looking at the population pyramid of non-hispanic whites in the US, shows the absolute population declining with age. Peak NHW population was 60 in 2020 with a smaller echo at 30 and from the 30 down it's in decline.

Yeah, this statistic is meaningless. You can even quite easily have PoC taking 120% of all new jobs created if you shift the numbers slightly. But that would just reveal its absurdity to everyone, so because this number was in the small band between almost 100% and 100% people decided to run with it.

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