California -- A Work in Failure

California's Rendezvous With Reality

2/28/2019- Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Californians brag that their state is the world's fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.

Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.

Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left.

But how long will they retain such confidence?

California's 40 million residents depend on less than one-percent of the state's taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California's highest tier of earners tops out at the nation's highest rate of 13.3 percent.

In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 -- a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars.

If even a few thousand of the state's one-percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.

During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built.

Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall -- and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea. Nothing since has been learned.

California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain in February alone. With still no effort to expand California's water-storage capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea (and may be sorely missed next year).

The inability to build reservoirs is especially tragic given that the state's high-speed-rail project has gobbled up more than $5 billion in funds without a single foot of track laid. The total cost soared from an original $40 billion promise to a projected $77 billion. To his credit, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget catastrophe, canceled the statewide project while allowing a few miles of the quarter-built Central Valley "track to nowhere" to be finished.

For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of transportation funds that might have easily updated nightmarish stretches of the Central Valley's Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby ossified Amtrak line became a modern two-track line.

California politicians vie with each other to prove their open-borders bona fides in an effort to appeal to the estimated 27 percent of Californians who were not born in the United States.

But the health, educational and legal costs associated with massive illegal immigration are squeezing the budget. About a third of the California budget goes to the state's Medicare program, Medi-Cal. Half the state's births are funded by Medi-Cal, and in nearly a third of those state-funded births, the mother is an undocumented immigrant.

California is facing a perfect storm of homelessness. Its labyrinth of zoning and building regulations discourages low-cost housing. Its generous welfare benefits, non-enforcement of vagrancy and public health laws, and moderate climate draw in the homeless. Nearly one-third of the nation's welfare recipients live in the state, and nearly one in five live below the poverty line.

The result is that tens of thousands of people live on the streets and sidewalks of the state's major cities, where primeval diseases such as typhus have reappeared.

California's progressive government seems clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive or politically incorrect.

In sum, California has no margin for error.

Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.

No more. Californians may have once derided the state's one-percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.

That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.

A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.

Mandatory E-Verify + Eliminate Benefits = Deportation by Attrition

Make E-Verify the Norm, Not the Exception

2/24/2019 - Mark Thies Townhall.com

Donald Trump has recently issued his most influential executive order on immigration to date. Unfortunately, his order didn't come from the executive branch -- or anywhere in the federal government, for that matter. Instead, it came from the Trump Organization, the president's private company.  

The firm recently announced that its hotels, resorts, and golf clubs would adopt E-Verify  -- the free, online federal program which allows employers to check the legal status of prospective workers.  

Although Trump deserves credit for embracing the program, the vast majority of the nation's employers have yet to follow suit. This widespread refusal to adopt E-Verify has led to an economy that exploits undocumented workers at enormous costs to both native-born Americans and legal immigrants. Making E-Verify mandatory would hold employers accountable for their unlawful hiring practices, while humanely reducing the incentive for workers to make the dangerous trip to come here illegally.

E-Verify has existed in some form since 1996, and it's remarkably easy to use. Enrolled companies simply enter the name, birthdate, and Social Security number from a new hire's I-9 form (which itself is highly subject to fraud) into the online system, and they're quickly told whether or not the employee is legally eligible to work. 

Nearly 99 percent of new hires are verified as eligible within 24-hours. Most of the remaining 1 percent are eventually found to be illegal immigrants.  

E-Verify is free and available to every employer in the country. My employer, Clemson University, has been using E-Verify for years now, and I've never heard of a legal immigrant having a problem.

Unfortunately, most businesses have stayed away from E-Verify, with just 10 percent of employers currently using the program. Why? Because they are lowering operating costs, so they either don't care or don't want to know if they are hiring illegal workers. For example, in a recent survey, 37 percent of illegals in America's three largest cities reported being paid less than the minimum wage, and 85 percent of them received no overtime pay for working more than 40 hours per week. 

Of course, these exploitative practices carry significant financial benefits for businesses. According to Harvard University economist and immigration expert George Borjas, illegals generate as much as $128 billion in added value for their employers each year. How ironic that such a perverse plan of income redistribution from the less to the more fortunate now has almost fanatical support from a significant percentage of politicians – with this support being driven by their goal of importing more potential voters into the country. 

American workers -- both native-born and legal immigrants -- suffer as a result. After all, if businesses have access to a pool of illegal labor willing to work for less than the minimum wage, why pay legal employees fairly -- or to hire them in the first place? The result, according to Borjas, is that illegal immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans by between $99 and $118 billion a year. 

Mandatory E-Verify would ameliorate many of the problems arising from illegal immigration. As job opportunities for unauthorized workers dried up, the incentive to enter the country unlawfully would plummet, wall or no wall, barrier or no barrier. Overall rates of illegal immigration would plunge, like they did when Trump was first elected – but this time they would stay low. Businesses accustomed to exploiting cheap illegal workers would finally have to pay fair wages to American workers. And Molly Tibbetts, a 20-year old and fellow jogger murdered by an illegal alien whose company didn't use E-Verify, might still be with us.

Oh Yeah! Words Have Meaning -- VDH Proves It!

Changing Reality With Words

2/21/2019 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy "wetlands." Fetid "dumps" are often rebranded as green "landfills."

Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions had so warmed the planet that life as we knew it would soon be imperiled without radical changes in consumer lifestyles.

Yet in the last 30 years, record cold spells, inordinate snow levels and devastating rains have been common. How to square that circle?

Substitute "climate change" for global warming. Presto! Any radical change in weather could be perceived as symptomatic of too much climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Suddenly, blizzards, deluges and subzero temperatures meant that typically unpredictable weather was "haywire" because of affluent Westernized lifestyles.

Affirmative action originated as a means of making up for past prejudices against the African-American community, which comprised about 12 percent of the population.

By the late 1960s, slavery, Jim Crow and institutionalized segregation were finally considered unique stains on the American past, to be redeemed in the present by set-aside programs in college admissions and hiring predicated on racial considerations.

The problem with affirmative action is that the very name implied redress for historical wrongs that could be "affirmed" by compensatory action for a particular minority of the population. But lots of other groups wished to be included in an ever-expanding catalog of the oppressed.

Mexican-Americans were soon added on the basis on past biases. Yet weren't Asian-Americans discriminated against in the past as well, especially during the construction of the railroads in the 19th century and during the Japanese-American internments of World War II?

Then, a host of other nonwhite groups -- especially newly arriving immigrants with no prior experience of supposed American racism -- sought inclusion in set-aside categories. By the 1980s, a new and vaguer term, "diversity," had increasingly replaced "affirmative action."

Diversity meant that it was no longer incumbent upon job or college applicants to claim historical grievances or prove that they were still victims of ongoing and demonstrable discrimination from the white-majority population. Diversity also meant that members of any group that declared itself nonwhite -- from Arab-Americans to Chilean-Americans -- were eligible for advantages in hiring and college admissions.

Unlike affirmative action, diversity meant that approximately 30 percent of the country -- in theory, more than 100 million Americans -- were suffering as aggrieved minorities, regardless of income or class. If united simply by shared nonwhite-victim status, the resulting new pan-minority group could prove a far more formidable catalyst for particular political agendas.

"Illegal alien" -- a term still used by official government agencies -- described any foreign national residing in the U.S. without government sanction. But when the numbers of those who fit the old classification grew, and the number of people invested in relaxed immigration policies expanded across the political spectrum, the term gradually metamorphosed.

If "alien," a Latinate word deriving from the idea of "other" or "different," sounds too outer space-like, why not substitute "immigrant"? Yet "illegal immigrant" still sounded as if breaking federal immigration laws was somehow a serious legal matter. So the vague "undocumented immigrant" superseded the old term.

As the numbers of those crossing the southern border grew and the power of those invested in expanded immigration -- employers, identity-politics activists, Democratic operatives, the Mexican government -- peaked, even more euphemisms emerged to downplay illegality.

Often, "undocumented" was dropped, leaving just "immigrants" -- conflating applicants who waited years for legal entry with those who swarmed the border illegally. Increasingly we now hear just "migrants" -- a vague term that further divorces illegal immigration from reality by conflating the acts of leaving and entering the country.

Democrats used to self-identify as "liberals." The Latin etymology means "free," as in the context of "free" thinkers not burdened by oppressive traditions, ideological straitjackets and unworkable norms.

But the problem with "liberal" is that even conservatives occasionally used the term, as in "classical liberals" who judged issues by facts and reason rather than rigid orthodoxy. Moreover, "liberal" included little notion of evolution and advancement. So gradually, "progressive" has eclipsed the stuffy "liberal."

"Progressive' infers an activist, not a neutral, ideology -- one that is always moving the country in the supposedly correct direction. After all, who favors "regression" in any field over "progression," an inherently positive noun implying beneficial advancement?

A liberal Democrat was once someone seen as a free thinker. But "progressive" implies that one is more action-orientated and has an evolutionary agenda, not just a methodology. Beware of euphemisms. Radical changes in vocabulary are usually admissions that reality is unwelcome or indefensible.

Finally! Presidential Action Against a National Crisis

The President’s Immigration Policy and the Angry Left

2/18/2019- Joel Goodman Townhall.com

The lawsuits have begun.  

Still, the Democrats haven’t yet fired on Fort Sumter, as they did the last time they hated a Republican President this much.

Public Citizen in their just filed law brief claimed:

"Rather than responding to an emergency requiring immediate action, the Declaration seeks to address a long-running disagreement between the President and Congress about whether to build a wall along the southwestern border and Congress’s refusal to appropriate funds for that purpose,..."

“If Trump gets away with this, there's no telling what the next concocted "emergency" will be, who will be targeted and what emergency powers will be claimed. We refuse to tolerate this slide to authoritarianism.”

The Democrats, in addition to being hateful, suffer from Myopia, a condition where one can only see what is close. Add blinkers to a person with Myopia and you can understand how someone can see the President’s Declaration of a National Emergency as a push towards authoritarianism.

Everything the President is doing will enhance the safety of American citizens, save American Citizens money in the long run - and nothing he is doing restricts the freedoms of an American Citizen.

More clearly looked at, was the President disposed towards totalitarianism, knowing that there is a crisis at the border, or even feigning a crisis at the border, as the Democrats are claiming, he would have very early on ignored Congress and unilaterally moved swiftly to a Declared National Emergency.

But rather than being a totalitarian, and just being a President who has taken seriously his oath to defend this nation, he chose to involve a hostile Congress in the decision of how best to fund immigration enforcement at our Southern Border. Instead of working with him, the Democratic-controlled House, who as individuals also took a pledge to protect Americans, chose instead to attack the President politically - initially claiming that they would work with him and then immediately after he agreed to negotiate with them, declared that there will be no funding for a wall / a barrier - whatever it is that needs to be constructed to stop illegal border crossings.

A porous border makes America vulnerable to losing our republican culture, vulnerable to the introduction of bad actors into the country who deal in sex crimes and drugs, and vulnerable to terrorists discretely entering our country.

None of these eventualities mean anything to a political Party adhering to a philosophy of open borders and a demonstrated licentiousness in political matters

So, it is interesting how a non-politician, who at times has been observably awkward in his role as President, when he tries to work with a hostile Congress in solving a crisis, and then finally out of necessity does what must be done to protect the country - is labeled a tyrant.

I believe that the President’s political naïveté led him to believe that the Democrats would not do a 180 on their long-held border security position as a matter of national security. He should have sensed their entrenchment before the shutdown, and rather than threaten a National Emergency afterward, he should have early on signed another ‘disgusting’ Continuing Resolution that didn’t contain immigration legislation, and quickly moved to a Declaration; but, he didn’t.

Adding insult to injury, the Democrats’ largesse with the inclusion of 1.2 Billion Dollars for “border security” in the bill (with many restrictions on its use) is picayune ( and insulting) considering President Obama, who often did what he wanted without consulting Congress, was able to find $1,300,000,000.00 in cash laying around somewhere, and sent it off in the middle of the night to Iran. 

Had Trump acted without all the histrionics and not spoken about declaring an emergency as much and as often as he did, it would now sound more like an emergency. Of course, the reality is, regardless of how much or how little the President spoke about it, the crisis is still a crisis, and the Democrats would still oppose him.

The President, though, has more options available to him in controlling illegal immigration besides the declared National Emergency. He can do more to keep people from crossing the border by using the Army and Federalized National Guardsmen more effectively. The President has explicit authority to use the National Guard to enforce Federal law.  

Immigration is Federal law. I am astounded that this hasn’t been done. Using the Guard and the Military in the background at the border is ineffective when more troops are needed at the front. President Eisenhower Federalized the Arkansas National Guard in 1957 in Little Rock to prevent them from interfering with school integration pursuant to the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education. He then called in the 101st Airborne to prevent, the country from “sliding into anarchy”. If today’s mess at the Sothern border with caravans approaching on a weekly basis is not anarchy, I don’t know what would be considered anarchy.

In 1954, during the Eisenhower Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), in cooperation with the Mexican government, rounded up and deported over 1,000,000 illegal aliens.

It is about time to do whatever is necessary to deport those here illegally, from Europeans and Chinese overstaying their Visas to Mexicans and Central Americans crossing the Rio Grande.

While the President is successfully angering the Left, one other measure the President might employ is to challenge the Fourteenth Amendment through the issuance of an Executive Order.

Executive orders are intended to clarify the implementation of legislation vis a vis how the President believes it was intended to be implemented when Congress passed it, or how legislation should be implemented vis a vis the Constitution.

The order would immediately get the Fourteenth Amendment on track to the Supreme Court and we would know very quickly if a new Amendment is needed, or if the current Amendment is fine, being limited to the past and freed slaves and not to tourists or illegal aliens birthing instant baby citizens. That would at least get the ball rolling towards stopping birthright citizenship.

A Nation in Crisis! Seriously? Yes, Seriously!

Asylum Laws: Do They Constitute Treason Against Americans?

2/8/2019 - Ilana Mercer Townhall.com

The wall is crucial, but it’s not everything.  

Caravans of human cargo are filing into the United States because … they can. U.S. law allows it, even invites it. 

Here’s how: Provided you’re not a white, South African farmer—in other words, a real refugee—you may plonk yourself at an American “port of entry,” say San Ysidro in San Diego, and simply assert your right to petition the U.S. for asylum. 

Then and there you claim asylum on the grounds that your race, religion, nationality or politics expose you to persecution in the country you want to leave. 

Compared to a multicultural mecca like America, where faction fighting is rising, Latin American arrivals seem rather homogeneous. Dare I say they’re largely Hispanic Catholics? Dare I ask who’s persecuting them in their homelands? 

By the law’s logic, Muslim terrorists entering the U.S. through its southwestern border should have a far better legal case for asylum than Latin Americans: “I’m from Pakistan. I’m an LGBTQ activist, fleeing Islamic oppression. You’d better believe it.”

If you can’t quite manage to locate the legally designated gate, and a “misguided” U.S. border agent attempts deportation, you may, nevertheless, “defend” yourself against U.S. law by—you’re getting the hang of it!—lodging an asylum claim. 

The American lawmakers and jurists who legislate and adjudicate immigration generally have the migrant’s back, and will right away accept the “credible fear” yarn he spins. He will thus be granted face-time with a judge. Their stupidity (and venality) is also his signal to vamoose, never to be seen again.   

Children are the charm, a magic amulet. Courtesy of the Flores Settlement Agreement, unaccompanied children or adults with children must be released after a brief timeout in well-appointed detention centers. (“Cages,” as Democrat ingrates call this generous gift from the put-upon American taxpayer.)  

All a single male or childless couple needs to do is grab a child. Borrow one if there isn’t one handy, and drag him along for the trip. However hirsute and ink-covered your juvenile is; he cannot be detained for longer than 20 days. 

Next, “the child” and his adopted Caravan “family” (or predatory parent) rest up in detention, fill in asylum applications and are subsequently cut loose in the U.S. with a nod and wink. (“Come back for your court hearing, amigo, know what I mean? Grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more,” as the old Monty Python skit goes.) 

Ludicrous? American lawmakers—incontestable majorities on the Republican side included—don’t think so. Why else would they have kept these aberrant, catch-and-release, mickey-mouse laws in place?! 

U.S. legislators and jurists have crafted laws for Americans which, in another time and era, would have resulted in charges of treason. (Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller can make himself useful: Investigate the special interests colluding in the immigration racket.)

If this is confusing, here’s the magic maxim our immigration scofflaw should follow: Just do it. Cross illegally. All roads lead to Rome—to the creation of an immutable reality on the ground: By and large, illegal migrants get to stay in the U.S., even though fewer than 10 percent of asylum applications are officially approved.  

“If there is no wall, there is no security,” said President Donald Trump on one of the few reliable news outlets he has remaining: POTUS’s Twitter account. 

Too true. Regrettably, the law is in even worse shape than the invisible wall, if that’s at all possible.

Despite two years without any serious political opposition, the Republicans did near to nothing to end the legal limbo described. 

In the early halcyon days of 2017, Republicans floated the RAISE ACT,  “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act.” It was quickly coffined. 

Other than Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, nobody defended or haggled for The Act with any vigor, during the Republican dominance on Capitol Hill, from 2017 till 2019.

Back in 2017, Camarota had raised hell for RAISE:

The “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment,” he argued, would have slashed family reunification immigration by 50 percent—from 11 million people every decade to 5 or 6 million—still a deluge—providing a much-needed respite for economically poor Americans. 

Seventy percent of legal immigrants enter the U.S. through the family reunification visa. No consideration is given to their skill, education or the needs of the American economy. Roughly half of the legal intake is lacking in any useful skills and without so much as a high-school education. Fifty percent of households headed by legal immigrants access one or more of the major welfare programs. 

At current levels, legal immigration suppresses American wages, especially at the bottom rungs of the labor market, and constitutes, inarguably and overall, a fiscal drain.

America’s poor are so very poor, pleaded Camarota on behalf of The Forgotten American. You’d be giving them a raise by lowering levels of legal immigration.

From the missed opportunity of 2017, we fast forward to the border, in 2019. Yes, there is a crisis on the border. Today, that “crisis” is west of Eagle Pass, in Texas. Tomorrow it’s in your neighborhoods. 

Amendment XIV - Read Section 5 Congress MUST Act

The Birthright Rip-Off Is Another Affront To American Citizenship

12/29/2018 - Jan Brewer Townhall.com

Americans are being sold the fairy tale that the whole world has a constitutional right to come here, give birth, and get a free American passport. We’re told it’s “un-American” to dare say otherwise, but the growing phenomenon of “birth tourism” is the real affront to American values.

There are, at this moment, hundreds of companies offering rich foreigners all-inclusive birth vacations to beautiful American tourist destinations. Astonishingly, pregnant jetsetters from around the world step off planes, clear customs with their tourist visas, and are whisked from airports to specialty birth tourism hospitals that exist just for this purpose.

The hotel accommodations are luxurious, the post-partum cocktails expertly mixed, but the greatest allure is provided free of charge by the U.S. government: citizenship in the greatest country on Earth. For the price of a travel package, these wealthy foreigners get lifetime membership in one of the most exclusive clubs on the planet.

This subversive industry exists for one reason: to exploit our laws and literally sell American citizenship. And business is booming.

The most visible cohort has been communist China’s new ruling class, which sends tens of thousands of its expecting mothers to “maternity hotels” in California and U.S. Pacific territories like Guam. With just a quick trip in and out, their children — more than 60,000 of them every year — automatically become American citizens, with all the attendant benefits.

Lately, Russia’s upper class has been getting in on the action, too. South Florida is the birth tourism destination of choice for Vladimir Putin’s cronies, and Miami’s passport merchants are catering to their desires in style. For $50,000, Russian oligarchs can get luxury beachside accommodations and professionals to take care of all the paperwork necessary to mint their own little American citizens.

What’s particularly galling about this phenomenon is how flippantly these wealthy birth tourists treat the concept of American citizenship. Our ancestors fought and died to secure the rights we enjoy as American citizens. They endured terrible hardship to make a new life here and claim the mantle of “American citizen.” Countless millions have risked their lives just for a chance at American citizenship, yet birth tourists treat it like a simple vacation perk before returning to a life of luxury in their home countries.

”I can’t wait to get back to Russia,” one of these Muscovite citizenship-buyers told Bloomberg News. The fact that her daughter was an American seemingly meant nothing to her, even as she made sure she got that blue passport. That was “the last thing on my agenda, literally...Why does Trump think everyone is dying to have one?”

Another Russian mother of a new American was more pragmatic. “I don't know whether my daughter will end up using the passport or not, but it's good to have different options,” she explained, suggesting it might be helpful for getting into college, or maybe starting a business. These oligarch babies may never need welfare, but they will be as eligible as any American for government assistance and the many other benefits that are due any citizen of our country.

These birth tourists are a far cry from the impoverished single mothers Democrats like to talk about when they’re arguing against border security, but they benefit every bit as much from the radical open-borders lobby that holds sway in the Democrat Party.

Curiously, the same American liberals who are hysterically searching for Russians connected to the 2016 Trump Campaign and preposterously claiming that Russian social media posts are a threat to our electoral integrity are evidently unconcerned about giving citizenship to thousands of Russians with no real connection to this country.

These liberals tell us that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution mandates birthright citizenship, and that it’s “un-American” for us to complain. Whatever you think of the approximately 300,000 “anchor babies” born to illegal aliens in the U.S. every year, the prevalence of birth tourism is indefensible as a matter of either law or morality.

As more and more legal scholars recognize, birthright citizenship is simply not what the drafters of the 14th Amendment intended. In fact, the policy actually puts the U.S. at odds with most of the world — only 30 countries, mostly in South America, recognize birthright citizenship, and Canada is the only other developed country to do so.

Luckily, President Trump is doing something about this sorry state of affairs. On the campaign trail before the midterm elections, he called out the birth tourism industry by name and revealed that he’s contemplating using either an executive order or legislative action to clarify that the 14th Amendment doesn’t require American citizenship be on sale for the price of a plane ticket.

Valuing American citizenship is not “un-American.” Neither is dispelling the fairy tale of universal birthright citizenship.

Jan Brewer is the former governor of Arizona and a member of the Donald J. Trump for President Inc. Advisory Board.

Diversity and Inclusion Borders on Insanity

Diversity and Inclusion Harm

6/13/2018 - Walter E. Williams Townhall.com

In conversations with most college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hustlers, it's not long before the magical words "diversity" and "inclusiveness" drop from their lips. Racial minorities are the intended targets of this sociological largesse, but women are included, as well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in the process of leading the nation to decline in a number of areas. We're told how it's doing so in science, in an article by Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, titled "How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences".

Mac Donald says that identity politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on American campuses. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the diversity and inclusiveness czars, the STEM fields don't have a pleasing mixture of blacks, Hispanics and women. The effort to get this "pleasing mix" is doing great damage to how science is taught and evaluated, threatening innovation and American competitiveness.

Universities and other institutions have started watering down standards and requirements in order to attract more minorities and women. Some of the arguments for doing so border on insanity. A math education professor at the University of Illinois wrote that "mathematics itself operates as Whiteness." She says that the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates "unearned privilege" among whites. A professor at Purdue University's School of Engineering Education published an article in a peer-reviewed journal positing that academic rigor is a "dirty deed" that upholds "white male heterosexual privilege," adding that "scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing."

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research and support postdoctoral education for physicians. Both agencies are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology. The NSF and NIH can yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the college has not supported a sufficient number of "underrepresented minorities." Mac Donald quotes a UCLA scientist who reports: "All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by 'changing' (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?" Mac Donald observes, "Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind."

Focusing on mathematical problem-solving and academic rigor, at least for black students at the college level, is a day late and a dollar short. The 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation's Report Card, reported that only 17 percent of black students tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math. In some predominantly black high schools, not a single black student scored proficient in math. The academic and federal STEM busybodies ought to focus on the academic destruction of black youngsters between kindergarten and 12th grade and the conferring of fraudulent high school diplomas. Black people should not allow themselves to be used at the college level to help white liberals feel better about themselves and keep their federal grant money.

Mac Donald answers the question of whether scientific progress depends on diversity. She says: "Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on 'diversity.' Those 'un-diverse' scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses." She might have added that there wasn't even diversity among those white Nobel laureates. Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. One wonders what diversity and inclusion czars might propose to promote ethnic diversity among Nobel Prize winners.