[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now availableexclusivelyon VDARE.com]
I hope readers will forgive me for yet another long grumble about New York State, where I live. I believe there are some general deductions to be made — issues bigger than just the Empire State.
I recycled that in last week’s podcast to make the point that as bad as New York State is, New York City is worse.
I looked back to a town hall meeting that New York City Mayor Eric Adams had held at the end of January. Referring to a video clip of the meeting, I told you that Hizzoner was
…standing holding a mike, out in front of citizens who’d come to watch him speak. Seated in a long row some way behind him were twenty officers of the city, people Adams had appointed.
Watching that video clip later with more attention to the panning shots, I think the actual number of city officials in that row was 39, not twenty. Twenty-two were female, that’s 56 percent.
Identification by race and ethnicity defeated me. These were background shots, faces seen at a distance.
New York City — the city that Eric Adams is the Mayor of — is 31 percent non-Hispanic white, 29 percent Hispanic, 23 percent black, 17 percent other.
From what I could figure out, the city officers on show there were a little blacker than that, though not by much. How many of the whites were Hispanic, I can’t say. The opening address was given in English but with the Spanish text scrolling on a screen.
The main point of the meeting was for Mayor Adams to blame his dismal showing in opinions polls on racism. In aid of that he asked five of his Deputy Mayors to stand and show themselves.
Why an all-minority mayoral cabinet would by itself generate the poll numbers plaguing Adams is a mystery.
And, perhaps more to the point, the only white male in a major elected leadership role across all of New York is state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli.
Everybody else — the governor, state legislative leaders, New York’s attorney general, the chief judge of the Court of Appeals and the speaker of the New York City Council — is either of color, female, or both.
At that point, the following thought leapt right to the front of my mind, unbidden. Thought: “That’s your problem, right there.”
I didn’t mean Mayor Adams’ problem, I meant New York State’s larger cultural, legal, and political problem, of which the state’s crazy Attorney General Letitia James is merely an example.
Only one white male in a major elected leadership role across all of New York State?
There are some matters of definition to be sorted out there.
What about Senator Chuck Schumer? And the current Mayor of Binghamton is a non-Hispanic white guy. McManus can’t plead that he only meant people with just state-wide authority, having included the New York City Council Speaker in his list.
If we allow a little latitude for Pundit’s License, though, McManus probably isn’t far off. A position of executive, legislative, or judicial authority in New York State? White men need not apply.
Black women, on the other hand, need hardly go to the trouble of applying. They will be eagerly sought out and pushed forward by the current political apparatus.
Reading the news about our universities taking the side of Hamas after October 7th, I was a bit surprised to see that the President of Harvard University is a black woman.
I really shouldn’t have been. Black women zoomed to the top of the status ranks when I wasn’t paying attention. Educated black women are in terrific demand; every organization wants one. President of Harvard? Oh, definitely — got to be a black woman.
In February 2020, on the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised that if, as President, he got the opportunity to nominate a Supreme Court justice, he would nominate a black woman. He accordingly did so.
New York City Mayor Adams believes that by appointing five nonwhite females to be Deputy Mayors, he was striking a mighty blow against entrenched prejudice — boldly, fearlessly defying the established way of doing things.
In fact he was just scurrying along obediently with early 21st-century Western cultural fashion, like the midwit conformist he is.
Two more cases of social and cultural fashion for prejudice against white men showed up in news stories this week.
The first of them concerned those numbers out of the Writers Guild of America West that Steve Sailer posted at VDARE.com on Tuesday.
Executive summary: In the ten years from 2011 to 2020, staff writers for American TV series — I guess that means sitcoms and dramas — went from 35 percent female to 63 percent and from 72 percent white to 44 percent white. In other words the female proportion went from just over one third to almost two thirds, the white proportion from a tad less than three quarters to well below one half.
So yes: White men need not apply. The prize being sought by recruiters at the TV companies is that figure shining down at us there from the top of the identitarian totem pole, the same figure that Joe Biden gazed up at longingly when he needed a Supreme Court nominee, the same figure the trustees of Harvard University pushed forward as their president: a black female.
What effect will this have on TV shows? With the traditional 7:30-every-Tuesday-evening TV sitcom fading away into cultural history, it’s hard to work up much interest in the question.
Steve notes that TV sitcom screenwriting and production have been heavily Jewish occupations. Norman Lear, Chuck Lorre, Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, … yes, sure looks like it.
Will ladies of color do as well? Given, as I said, the overall decline in traditional patterns of TV watching, it may not matter much. Comedically talented Jewish males will have fewer job opportunities; but hey, there are still movies, miniseries, YouTube, and comedy clubs.
Setting aside the special case of Jews, on the larger questions of whether women in the generality have better comedy sense than men, or blacks than nonblacks, I’m agnostic.
It’s too easy to think of funny women (although, browsing a few of my favorites, I was distressed to see that YouTube seems to have canceled most of French and Saunders’ Gone With The Wind spoof).
Mrs. Derbyshire makes lame jokes at about the same frequency as myself, and we laugh at the same movies. There aren’t any blacks I know as well as I know my lady wife, but I’ve had laughs out of The Jeffersons and Chris Rock.
So likely no great civilizational loss here. Perhaps there really is a black female equivalent of Norman Lear out there, who knows? We’ll find out, unless we stop watching TV altogether.
Here’s the second story:
Google has a chatbot named Gemini … Hey, that’s my birth sign!
No, I’ve never used Gemini, nor any other chatbot. I don’t really see the point of them. That’s a geezer attitude, though. If chatbots are your thing, I’m fine with it.
What goes into a chatbot is a vast mass of text gathered from the internet together with statistical relationships between words derived by applying certain general rules.
The text comes from all over, but some of those guiding rules are supplied by a small corps of human beings employed by the firm creating the chatbot. In the case of Gemini that is Google.
One of the things Gemini can do is create images in response to requests from the user. The rules guiding that image creation are, we learned this week, ludicrously Woke.
In particular, those rules include the same principle used by Mayor Adams in choosing his Deputy Mayors, the same principle the TV companies apply when hiring staffers to write scripts for their series: No white men need apply!
Asked to create an image of a pope, for example, Gemini created two. One showed a full-blood Negro male in papal dress, the other a dark-skinned female of apparently Southeast Asian origin, likewise attired.
So Google has been infiltrated by resentful black activists, right?
Er, no. The main player here seems to be a chap named Jack Krawczyk, who has a leading position in Google’s AI product line. Mr. Krawczyk is as white as the driven snow, but he hates himself for it.
People have been digging up a long social-media trail of Krawczyk’s white ethnomasochism. Samples from Twitter, as it then was, all apparently dated 2018:
[After commenting on having seen disrespect shown to black colleagues]: “We obviously have egregious racism in this country, but the small shit like this is part of what enables it.”
”White privilege is f***Ing real. Don’t be an asshole and act guilty about it — do your part in recognizing bias at all levels of egregious.”
”nah, jesus only cares about white kids. i’m pretty sure that’s in the bible? let’s confirm w/ jeff sessions.”
Then in 2020, apparently after casting a vote against Donald Trump in that year’s presidential election, Krawczyk tweeted that, tweet:
”I’ve been crying in intermittent bursts for the past 24 hours since casting my ballot. Filling in that Biden/Harris line felt cathartic.”
When that one came to light earlier this week it drew a comment on X, as it now is, from Elon Musk himself. (Like Tucker’s interview with Lydia Brimelow!) This one made me laugh. Musk:
Then he called his Mommy, drank a whole case of soy milk & binge-watched Rachel Maddow.
Then he called his Mommy, drank a whole case of soy milk & bing-watched Rachel Maddow pic.twitter.com/B1yV0OqhQr
