Who Needs Facts?

Steve Sailer May 03, 2023 

A central conundrum of the 2020s is why respectable opinion has gotten so out of touch with reality on questions touching race, such as crime. Are mainstream pundits lying, intimidated, deluded, hate-filled, or just stupid?  It’s an important and difficult question.  I ponder this because I’ve developed a reputation as the go-to guy on Twitter when celebrities say something smugly stupid about crime statistics. Most every day I see a tweet summoning me by showing Batman staring up at the Bat-Signal of my avatar, the 18th hole at Cypress Point Golf Club. (Yeah, it’s pretty cool.)  “When I pointed out the facts to Hasan, the author of Win Every Argument despaired and blocked me.”.............In contrast, we have the entire academic specialty of criminology, along with adjacent fields such as sociology and political science. But it’s hard to get a straight story out of any but a literal handful of them on this decade’s big topic of race and crime. So nobody seems to know anything.

For instance, last week, MSNBC talking head Mehdi Hasan, author of the New York Times best-seller Win Every Argument, became outraged that comedian Bill Maher had pointed out the high rate of black-on-black killings in Chicago. Hasan tweeted:

White people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people & yet you never hear anyone complaining about ‘white on white crime.’ These aren’t points of sage wisdom from Maher. They are classic racist dog whistles.

.........Obviously, it’s not true that “white people kill other white people at almost the same rate black people kill other black people.” The fundamental reality of American criminal justice is that black people kill at a huge rate, even compared to Hispanics, much less whites or Asians............  In 2021, for instance, the FBI reported that blacks made up 60.4 percent of all known homicide offenders (a new record—apparently, something went very wrong in America on May 25, 2020).........There are multiple sophistries going on here..............To Read More...