Dilbert Gets Downsized

 

Scott Adams began writing his comic strip Dilbert in 1989.   The strip quickly became popular but I was not a regular reader until it was in its tenth year.   Then on Thursday, 9 September, 1999 the first panel of the strip had Dilbert in the office of his Pointy-Haired Boss saying “I found some numbers that support your strategic plan”.   In the second panel he adds “I had to take the square root of a negative number to do it.”   In the final panel he says “The timeline is on this Mobius strip” which he hands to the Pointy-Haired Boss who responds by saying “Good work”.   I found this to be so hilarious that from that point on Dilbert,  Dogbert, all the assorted other –berts, Wally, Alice, the Pointy-Haired Boss, and company joined Garfield, Snoopy, and Dagwood on the list of characters to whom I would turn for a laugh every time a newspaper was before me.  

 

It appears that most newspaper readers are no longer going to be able to do this.   Over the last week hundreds of newspapers dropped Dilbert and over the weekend the syndicate that carried it dropped it as well.   Here in Winnipeg the strip had been carried by the Winnipeg Free Press which announced on Monday that it was dropping it thus removing the last remaining reason for anyone to ever again pick up a copy of that paper.  Of course with newspaper readership as low as it is pretty soon many of these newspapers are likely to be out of business while Dilbert will still be available to its fans online.   Indeed, I hope that not merely many but most or all of the newspapers that dropped Dilbert will soon be filing for bankruptcy.   Any newspaper that would drop Dilbert for the reason for which it has been dropped is, in my opinion, a rag its community would be better off without. 

 

The media mob that is gunning for Scott Adams has been crying “racist” over remarks he made on his podcast.   Now before looking at what he said and why it is being labelled “racist” a few words are in order about accusations of racism in general.  

 

When someone is accused of committing a crime we hold a trial in which he is given the opportunity to confront and cross-examine his accusers and to mount a defence.   The burden of proof is placed upon his accusers and the bar is set as high as it can go.   The prosecutor must establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.   If the prosecution fails to do so then the accused is entitled to an acquittal.   This is called the principle of the presumption of innocence – that someone accused is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.   This is an ancient principle going back at least as far as the Roman Empire.   While not universal it is the next thing to it, being affirmed in one form or another by all of the Abrahamic religions and being a keystone to the concept of justice embodied in the Common Law of the British Commonwealth and the United States.   It is an essential protection against those who would seek to turn the law into a weapon to destroy their personal enemies through making false accusations.

 

There has never been an equivalent to the principle of the presumption of innocence for non-criminal accusations. It had not been thought that one was necessary.  It was assumed that the worst things people could be accused of were crimes - murder, rape, robbery, etc. – and that therefore accusations of things that were non-crimes would be lesser accusations that would do less harm to the accused’s reputation than criminal accusations.   It was similarly assumed that the socially and culturally imposed consequences of doing things society frowned upon but which were not prohibited by criminal law would be less severe and damaging than the penalties inflicted by the courts upon law breakers.   These assumptions are far less valid today than they were decades or even just a few years ago.

 

In the last three quarters of a century progressive liberals have coined the terms “racism” and “racist” and convinced the public that “racism” is worse than the worst crime and that “racists” are worse than the worst criminals.   Through doing so, they have persuaded the public to be largely indifferent or approving of the way they treat people they accuse of being “racists”.    The way they treat accused “racists” is to utterly destroy them economically and socially.   Since the same progressive liberals have done everything in their power to strip the criminal justice system of any real teeth when it comes to punishing actual crimes this in effect makes the consequences of an accusation of “racism” far more damaging than the consequences of a criminal accusation.    Furthermore, they have managed to attach a presumption of guilt to accusations of “racism”.   By doing all of this, they have successfully bypassed the safeguards in our traditional justice system protecting people from those who seek to use the law and courts as weapons to destroy their enemies through false accusations by establishing an alternative way of destroying their enemies through accusations.   Indeed, they have been so successful at this that they have created a battery of similar weapon words with which to crush and destroy their enemies.

 

The anemic opposition to progressive liberalism that is mainstream “conservatism” has chosen a strategy of responding to this by trying to turn said accusations against their creators and saying that it is the progressive liberals who are the “real racists”.    The most that mainstream conservatives have been able to accomplish through this has been to score a few points against their opponents in academic debates.    What is desperately needed is for the opponents of progressive liberalism to abandon this form of the fallacy of tu quoque that affirms the very false presupposition that, having been instilled in the public mind, enable progressivism to weaponized words in this manner.   Instead they should be attacking those presuppositions, exposing this system of destroying people through weaponized words as being fundamentally unjust, and stripping words like “racist” of their power to destroy.

 

Let us now take a look at the accusations against Scott Adams.   In his Real Coffee with Scott Adams podcast he was commenting on the results of a poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports.    The poll asked Americans whether “it’s okay to be white” and reported its findings by race.   The number of blacks that did not agree that “it’s okay be white” was just under 50%, and while these were divided almost equally among those who outright disagreed and those who were not sure, those who outright disagreed were the larger percentage, 26% as opposed to the 21% who were not certain.   Adams, in response to this said that while he had been identifying as black for years – this seems to be an ongoing joke about the translunacy that has engulfed Western culture since the apogynosis of Bruce Jenner – this poll had led him to reconsider this decision because it amounted to joining a hate group and advised whites that the best advice he could give them was to “get the hell away from black people”.

 

Those who have been denouncing Adams in print over the last week all seem to share the same defect in their ability to reason.  Everything Adams said was reasonable if the Rasmussen Reports poll and its results are taken at face value.   If you don’t agree with “it’s okay to be white” than you either think “it is not okay to be white” or “it might not be okay to be white”, the first of which translates into “whites should not exist” and the second into an openness to the idea that whites should not exist.   It is entirely fair to interpret someone’s saying that someone else should not exist as an expression of hate and it is also fair to interpret the expression of uncertainty as to whether someone should exist or not as expressing a weaker form of the same hate.   When a poll, therefore, tells us that such hate exists among 47% of a population it indicates that said population has a serious problem with hate.  Adam’s advice to the objects of this hate is actually quite moderate.   He advised them to get away from those who hate them, not to hate them back or launch some sort of preemptive hate strike against them. 

 

Adams’ denouncers, unsurprisingly, have taken the position that what one thinks of the expression "it's okay to be white” should be based upon who purportedly coined the phrase rather than what the phrase means.   According to self-appointed and self-important anti-“hate” watchdog groups, the slogan “It’s okay to be white” was coined by “neo-Nazis” and “white supremacists” on 4chan.   Therefore, according to these supposed experts, the right thing to do is to denounce the slogan because of the people who came up with it.   This way of thinking, applied by Adams’ denouncers to the Rasmussen poll, means that the 47% of blacks polled who did not agree with the statement were in the right because they were disagreeing with “white supremacists”.   This is ridiculous, however, for many reasons.   Whether or not we agree or disagree with a statement ought to be based on the truth or not of what the statement says not on who said it.   Statements that in terms of their content are true and good do not become otherwise through contamination by those who say them.   If it were otherwise, and “it’s okay to be white” were somehow contaminated by the white supremacy that those who coined it are accused of holding, then “black lives matter” is similarly contaminated by the looting and rioting and vandalism of the movement that coined it as its slogan and “every child matters” is contaminated with the Christophobia that spawned the arson and vandalism of almost seventy churches in the biggest hate crime spree in Canadian history.   Indeed, if the 47% of black respondents to the Rasmussen poll who did not agree with the statement “it’s okay to be white” are to be applauded because of the alleged origin of the statement then what does that say about the 53% of black respondents who agreed with it?

 

The Rasmussen poll did not ask people what they thought of the people who originally coined the phrase “it’s okay to be white”.   It did not even mention them.   Rather, it asked people whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement.   Scott Adams took the poll at face value and rightly drew from it the conclusion that an alarmingly large number of black people openly express some degree of hate towards white people and that this is cause for concern on the part of those targeted by that hate.   His response to the poll was reasonable.   His accusers’ response to his podcast was not.   Unfortunately his accusers were many and powerful and so Dilbert will no longer be available in the comics section of most newspapers.   Once again the humourless, self-righteous, watchdogs of anti-racism will have robbed countless people of something that brought a smile to their face and mirth to their hearts.

 

As Phil the Prince of Insufficient Light would say:  Darn them all to Heck!

Canada and Confederation are Worthy of Celebration

 

July 1^st is the anniversary of the day Canada became a country in 1867.   When I was born the annual commemoration of this event was still called Dominion Day.    This name, steeped in Canada’s history, was much better than “Canada Day” to which it was changed in 1982, prompting Robertson Davies to write to the Globe and Mail expressing his righteous indignation at the “folly” of the “handful of parliamentarians” who so trashed the “splendid title” of Dominion Day “in favour of the wet ‘Canada Day’ – only one letter removed from the name of a soft drink” which folly he described as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed”.   The old name incorporated the title that the Fathers of Confederation had chosen themselves to designate the federation that was to be formed out of the provinces of Canada (formerly Upper and Lower Canada, which were separated again into Ontario and Quebec when the Dominion war formed), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, to which five other provinces would soon after be added (1), and governed by its own Parliament modelled after the Mother Parliament of Westminster, under the reign of our shared monarch.    The new name simply adds “day” to the name of the country.    This would be like the Americans renaming “Independence Day” as “United States Day” – although, admittedly, it seems to be far more often simply referred to as the Fourth of July than by its official designation – or any other country renaming its main national celebration “Italy Day”, “France Day” or the like.   For this reason, and because the change was not accomplished constitutionally – the private member’s bill making the change passed all three readings on a single day in July when there were only thirteen members of the House of Commons, present, not near enough to constitute a quorum – I continue to use the older and better name.

 

This year, a movement to “cancel Canada Day” has arisen which has nothing to do with preference for the older name for the anniversary.    It is part of the “cancel culture” phenomenon associated with the radical, cultural Maoist, Left, and it is Canada herself, the country and her institutions that these crazies are really seeking to “cancel”.   It is a loony fringe movement that is opposed by the vast majority of Canadians.   It nevertheless has a powerful ally in the mainstream Canadian media, including, disgustingly, the Crown broadcaster, the CBC.   The media has provided its support to these radicals, by dishonestly spinning the discovery of the locations of unmarked cemeteries on the grounds of Indian Residential Schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan as revealing something new about these schools (that they were there to be found has been known all along) and worse than what had been alleged against them in the past (that the bodies are of mass murder victims is extremely implausible).

 

Mercifully, there have been plenty of voices speaking out on behalf of Canada and why she should still be celebrated.   Lord Black gave us the sound advice to “Celebrate Canada, but not its political leaders or its propensity for self-flagellation”, meaning by “its political leaders” the current ones.   Even Erin O’Toole, the leader of the Conservative Party and of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, who in neither role has done much previously to inspire respect and confidence rather than disgust, was almost impressive when he correctly pointed out to his caucus last Wednesday that these wacko activists were attacking “the very idea of Canada itself” and observed that “there is not a place on the planet whose history can stand such close scrutiny” but that “there is a difference between acknowledging where we have fallen short, a difference between legitimate criticism and tearing down the country; always being on the side of those who run Canada down, always seeing the bad and never the good” and that “it’s time to build Canada up, not tear it down”.    Maxime Bernier of the People’s Party said it better when he tweeted “Every society in the world has injustices in its past and present.  The strategy of the far left is to exaggerate them so as to cancel our history, destroy our identity, and weaken our institutions.   They will then build their Marxist utopia on the smoking ruins.”  

 

Sadly, among Canada’s most prominent vocal defenders, those willing to say that the Emperor has no clothes with regards to the narrative being spun against her have been much fewer in number.   This would involve pointing out the difference between newly located graves and newly discovered deaths and saying that one of the great things about Canada is that traditionally we do not allow a man to be condemned after listening only to his accusers and telling his defenders to shut up, and that we are therefore no longer going to allow this to be done to the Churches, our historical figures, and the country as a whole, as has been done up until now with the Residential School narrative.

 

A common theme among those who have spoken and written in Canada’s defence is to praise her diversity.     They are obviously seeking to counter the charges of “racism” made by her accusers who are generally people who profess a very high regard for diversity, other than diversity of thought.    This is not the approach that I would take.   There are a few reasons for this, among them being that while I think diversity of the type mentioned has its advantages, I recognize its disadvantages too, and do not think that it should be turned into the object of cultish veneration the way it has.  The one most relevant in this context, however, is that the high degree of this type of diversity that exists in Canada today is the product of immigration policies introduced by the Liberals in the 1960s, primarily for the purpose of effecting a demographic change in the electorate that would, in their view, make it more likely to keep their party in government in perpetuity.   Since the main targets of those wishing to “cancel” Canada have been the Fathers of Confederation and the men who led the country prior to this period, this is not a particularly good counter to their accusations.   A better means would be to challenge the very idea that anything less than a full embrace of the widest diversity possible constitutes “racism”.

 

 

That having been said, there is an element of this appeal to diversity that can be salvaged and incorporated into a sounder defense of Canada.   As already observed the high degree of diversity that can be found in Canada today has been produced by the immigration policies of the last fifty years or so.    Immigration policy by itself cannot attract immigrants, however.   Imagine that the most repressive Communist regime on earth also had the most open, welcoming, immigration policy.   Not many people would want to take advantage of the latter.   Repressive regimes of this type typically have problems with too much emigration rather than too much immigration.   The Berlin Wall was there to keep East Germans in, not to keep other people out.

 

Therefore, the diversity that progressives have turned into a cult and which is the first thing to which most of Canada’s defenders turn, testifies to how Canada herself was attractive and appealing to a wide swathe of different people.   Now the basis of this attraction was not the opening, welcoming, immigration policy, since as seen in the previous paragraph this is insufficient in itself to constitute such an attraction.   Nor could it have been the diversity that is so much talked about today since this came later as a result of this immigration.     What appealed to and attracted so many different people, from so many different places, was Canada herself and, since the open immigration policy was one of the earliest changes introduced in the radically transformative – mostly not for the better – two decades of Liberal misrule under Pearson and Trudeau the Elder from the mid ‘60’s to the early ‘80’s, this means that it was Canada as she was prior to all the Liberal changes that was this appealing and attractive.

 

Could it be that what made Canada so attractive was the high degree of individual freedom that she, like other Western and especially English-speaking countries possessed, the protection of law that is largely absent from the autocracies and kleptocracies of the world, the parliamentary government built upon the Westminster model that has proven itself time and again to be vastly superior to all the strong-man dictatorships, military juntas, and peoples’ republics of the world, all the rights and freedoms protected by prescription, tradition, and constitution long before the Liberals added the Charter such as the right alluded to above not to be condemned on the basis of non-cross-examined accusations without a fair defense, and all the opportunities to make a decent life for yourself and your family afforded by all of the above?

 

That question, of course, was rhetorical, of the sort where the answer is yes.    It used to be that one did not have to point such things out.

 

Before proceeding, I must say that while all of these things are indeed what made Canada an attractive immigration destination for so many different people of so many different kinds from so many different places it is not the fact that these things were so attractive to so many that makes these things laudable.   They would be worth celebrating even if the only people to ever appreciate them had been the Canadians of the Dominion’s first century.   This is because these things are in themselves a blessing to the country fortunate enough to have them.

 

This cannot be emphasized enough, first, because all of those things were true of the Dominion of Canada from July 1^st, 1867 onward and we therefore owe a huge debt of gratitude to the Fathers of Confederation for establishing the country in such a way that all of these things, mostly inherited from the older British tradition, were true of Canada, and secondly, because those who are attacking the old Canada as being “racist” today rely heavily upon rhetoric borrowed from an ideology which thinks all of those things, or any others thought of as having been normative of white, European, Christian, Western Civilization, down to and including the notion that 2+2=4,  are themselves intrinsically “racist”.    Anytime you hear the expression “systemic racism”, (2) or “settler” used disparagingly, or some form of “colonize” used with people rather than a place as its object, you are hearing examples of the rhetoric of this insane ideology.   Perhaps the Canadian leaders of 1867 were not as “enlightened” on racial and cultural matters as today’s pampered and solipsistic generation like to think of themselves as being, but at least they were not so foolish that they could be taken in by such a vile ideological outlook, the product of decades of academic decline during which left-wing radicals took over most of our institutions of higher education and transformed them from traditional places of study and learning into mockeries of the same which more closely resemble Communist indoctrination camps.

 

I had intended to devote my Dominion Day essay for this year to Donald Creighton, who was, in my opinion, the greatest of Canadian historians, followed closely by W. L. Morton.    Current events have pre-empted this topic yet again.   I will say this about Creighton here, however, that throughout his career as a historian, he fiercely opposed what he mocked as “the Authorized Version”, that is to say, the interpretation of Canadian history associated with the Liberal Party that read Canada’s story as a version of the American story – a struggle to attain nationhood by achieving independence from the British Empire – by the boring means of diplomacy rather than the exciting means of war.    The Liberal version was, of course, the opposite of the reality of the Canadian story – the choice to grow up into nationhood within the British Empire as it evolved into the Commonwealth, by rejecting the American path and choosing the old loyalties and connections as a protection against encroaching Americanism.  We can only imagine what Creighton, who died in 1979, would have said could he have looked into the future and seen the day when much of the mainstream media would lend its support to a neo-Marxist re-interpretation of Canadian history which radical activists are using to trash the country and demand her “cancellation”.     We can be sure that he would not see it as leading us in any direction we would like to go.   His frequent warning that those who forget their past have no future applies all the more so to those who declare war on their past.

 

Let us not let the small minority of crazy radicals who want to cancel our country and her history win.  

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the Queen!

 

 (1)   Newfoundland, which joined Confederation as the tenth province, did so much later in 1949.

(2)   “Systemic racism”, when used by neo-Marxists, especially of the Critical Race Theory type, does not mean, as many or perhaps most others think, either ideas and practices in Western institutions or attitudes on the part of those who administer them, that are to some degree or another “racist” in the meaning of the word that was conventional fifty years ago, but rather the entire Western way of doing everything conceived of as being irredeemably and wholesale “racist”.

Early Antecedents of Cancel Culture

Bernard D. Davis is not a household name, unless, of course, your household happens to closely resemble those of the characters on the popular television sitcom The Big Bang Theory. He was a noted microbiologist and the 1989 recipient of the National Academy of the Sciences’ Selman A. Waxman Award in that field. He had been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, where he was Adele Lehmann Professor of Bacterial Physiology, since 1957. He passed away from prostate cancer in 1994 at the age of 78. He was a pioneer in the research of bacterial genetics, noted for developing a technique for using penicillin to isolate mutant bacteria strains.

In 1976 he found himself in the middle of a controversy regarding Harvard’s affirmative action policy. At first, the policy had merely been to set a quota – a minimum of fifteen places would be reserved for blacks in the medical school. Then, when they had difficulty filling those places with students who met their qualification standards, they lowered the admissions standards for black students, justifying this to eyebrow-raising faculty members by promising that graduation standards would not be similarly lowered. For the sake of expediency, however, that promise was soon abandoned. The school’s methods of evaluating student performance were also tinkered with, for the same reason. Unsurprisingly, this started to have a negative effect on the standing of Harvard’s medical graduates with the examination board that issues medical licences.

Dr. Davis, not one to put up with this sort of nonsense, fired off a memo to the Faculty Council telling them in no uncertain terms, that however laudable the goals of affirmative action may be, lowering their standards in this way and potentially turning the school into a degree mill for incompetent quacks, was hardly the way to go about it. He also submitted an article along the same lines to the New England Journal of Medicine and they published it.

That was when the stercus hit the vannus.

The New York Times, which then as now specialized in muckraking, character assassination, and the lowest, basest, sort of yellow gutter journalism, all in the service of an extreme progressive agenda, ran a hit piece on Davis. Other newspapers, with even lower standards, followed suit. Then he came under attack at his own university.

Three years prior to this Dr. Richard C. Lewontin had been appointed the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Biology at Harvard University. Like his frequent collaborator, "paleontologist" Stephen Jay Gould, who was promoted to Professor of Geology that same year, Lewontin belonged to the far left activist group Science for the People, and made accusing other scientists of racism, especially his Harvard colleagues, his pet project. The year before Davis’ article came out, another Harvard professor, entomologist Dr. Edward O. Wilson had published a book entitled Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Lewontin and Gould condemned the book, as well as the entire field of research related to it, and even founded a “Sociobiology Study Group” entirely for the purposes of attacking it. A few years later, this group arranged for a symposium to be held at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in which both sides could exchange their viewpoints. Something called the International Committee Against Racism – a front for the (Communist) Progressive Labor Party of the United States – showed up at the symposium, and before Wilson’s scheduled speech stormed the stage, surrounded the microphone, chanting imbecilic slogans like “Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide”, and then dumped a pitcher of water on Wilson’s head. Although Lewontin and Gould disavowed the specific actions of this group, they had obviously created the hostile intellectual climate in which such an event could take place. The “genocide” Wilson was charged with, consisted of incorporating his research from his career studying the social lives of ants and other communal insects, into a general theory about the evolutionary and genetic basis of the social behaviour of animals and human beings. For his account of the way Lewontin, Gould, et al., had responded to his theory, see his memoir Naturalist (Shearwater Books, 1994). For the history of these left wing activist-scientists’ attempts to scupper this entire field of research see Ullica Segerstråle’s Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Lewontin, as you have probably inferred from the account of him in the previous paragraph, condemned Dr. Davis, called him a racist, accused him of holding all sorts of absurd views, and refused to apologize when called upon to account for his unprofessional attacks on a colleague. Then, a pattern of events that was relatively new at the time but which has since become all too familiar, started. The calls for Dr. Davis to be sacked started coming in, radicals disrupted his lectures and organized protests wherever he was invited to speak, and colleagues started shunning him.

These efforts to destroy his career failed. Although Harvard denounced him, they did not fire him and he went on to win the aforementioned Waxman Award. Much to his credit, he did not back down in the face of this sort of bullying. In 1986, Prometheus Books published his Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment and Public Policy which expanded the thesis of his controversial New England Journal of Medicine article into a blistering take-down of this intrusion of left-wing political ideology into science and academics, which he described as a “neo-Lysenkoism.” It included a devastating review of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, the classic example of a work of left-wing political propaganda wearing the guise of “pop science” which had met with gushing acclaim from those who were least informed about the subjects it addressed and critical scorn from those who were most informed. Davis’ own book, by contrast, while dismissed by Gould, met with largely favourable reviews, and not only by those such as Dr. Edward O. Wilson who reviewed it for the November 1986 issue of Commentary and whom one might expect to sympathize due to having received similar treatment from the same people, but from the scientific community at large and even from some from whom one would have expected a more frosty reception.

In the account given above we can see what are clearly predecessors of what, in the age of the internet, has come to be called “cancel culture.” Other examples could be given. Indeed, the point could be argued that the deaths of Socrates and Jesus Christ were very early examples of “woke mobs” demanding that somebody or, in the case of Jesus, Somebody be “cancelled.” Examples that are closer in both time and detail to what happened to Dr. Davis are the examples of Dr. Arthur Jensen, Dr. Hans Eysenck, and Dr. J. Philippe Rushton.

Dr. Arthur R. Jensen, who passed away eight years ago, was the Professor of Educational Psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Like Dr. Davis, his politics, ironically, were those that would have been described as progressive liberal in the United States in the period in which he grew up. In February of 1969, the Harvard Educational Review published his article “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” He argued that programs like “Head Start”, which were designed to eliminate the interracial gap in academic achievement based on the assumption that it was due entirely to poverty and discrimination were failing – as they were – because they did not take into account the hereditary factor in intelligence, which Jensen called the general factor or g. Protests, death threats against him and his family, vandalism, demands that he be fired, disruption of his lectures, all ensued.

Dr. Hans J. Eysenck, who was born in Germany but moved to the United Kingdom in the 1930s out of disgust with Hitler and the Nazis, was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry in King’s College, London from 1953 until his retirement in 1983. Up until his death from brain cancer in 1997 he was known as the “world’s most cited psychologist.” Like Jensen, he argued that the evidence all points to there being a large hereditary general factor in intelligence, and, indeed, published an entire book on the subject a couple of years after Jensen’s article, entitled Race, Intelligence and Education (1) which he followed up another couple of years later with The Inequality of Man. He received similar abuse, to the point where he was physically assaulted when invited to give a lecture at the London School of Economics, and at one point had to temporarily change his family name to protect his children.

Dr. J. Philippe Rushton was a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1989, he presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science about the evolutionary origins of the differences between races. He focused on three particular races, whites, blacks, and Asians for which he used the terms “Caucasoids”, “Negroids” and “Mongoloids” respectively, and a wide assortment of statistical differences. The point of his paper was not to argue that these differences are real – that is well-established – but to explain their existence. He did so on the basis of the r/K selection hypothesis that Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson had postulated in 1967. Liberal newspapers – which are the vast majority of them – condemned his paper as “racist”, the province’s Attorney General asked the police to investigate Rushton, left-wing student activists filed complaints with the provincial Human Rights Tribunal, David Peterson, the Liberal premier of Ontario at the time, asked the president of the University to fire him, and he received all the of the same sort of harassment than Davis, Jensen, Wilson and Eysenck had received, especially after he gave his thesis a book length treatment in Race, Evolution, and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (Transaction Books, 1995).

In none of these cases did the left-wing activists succeed in destroying the careers of the individuals they subjected to their attacks, although they made their jobs and lives a living hell. Sadly, the dawn of the Digital Age has provided them with shiny new tools for stirring up mobs to ruin people and their lives, and they have become much more successful at it. They were, however, successful at one thing. The left, which had dominated sociology since the nineteenth century, spread into anthropology and the remaining social sciences in the early twentieth century, and took over the humanities with the development of Critical Theory in the mid-twentieth century, through these tactics was able to impose at least a lip service to its thought paradigms even on those hard sciences within the STEM disciplines most resistant to their control due to their familiarity with hard data which flatly contradicts their false view of reality. This, rather than the destruction of their targets, may very well have been what they were truly aiming at all along.

(1) This was the title of the original British edition. His American publisher gave it the less-inflammatory title The IQ Question.