Category Archives: Politics

A few years ago Pew did a survey on attitudes to abortion by state, and you can see the results below in the table. What I want to focus on […]

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A few years ago Pew did a survey on attitudes to abortion by state, and you can see the results below in the table. What I want to focus on […]

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I recorded this interview a while back, but we just assumed the case would go down as it did, so it’s totally relevant…

Also, episode #2 of the IBW: Muslims vs. LGBTQIA+.

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Recently Ann Coulter mentioned that Indians don’t have the same concept of free speech that Americans do. That is totally true and evident on these message boards. Ann’s concern is that the Indian-enriched tech work-force won’t see any problems with censoring offensive speech since that’s the norm in their society. That being said, my chest … Continue reading Proud of Rho Khanna

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The New York Times has a quasi-hit piece out on Usha Vance, From Yale to Newsmax, Usha Vance Has Helped J.D. Vance Chart His Path – The Ohio Senate candidate’s wife, an accomplished lawyer, remains ensconced in the milieu he now rails against. I say quasi because there’s nothing bad they could really find except … Continue reading Usha Vance “hit piece”

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Politico has a story up about infighting in Democratic party politics, Drinking Enemies: Two Cocktail Parties that Reveal the Schism in the Millennial Left. It’s pretty interesting. On the merits, […]

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No big surprises it seems. The r-squared of between 2020 election and 2022 ballot measure is ~0.80, so 80% of the variance in the second can be predicted by variance […]

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For about two decades after the Presidency of Andrew Jackson, the South dominated American politics. True, there were Northerners like Martin van Buren who became President, but they headed a […]

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Because our politics have been nationalized, it’s easy to forget there are still regional quirks and variations. Comparing Pew’s 2014 views on abortion by state with 2020 election results, you […]

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Sarah Haider and Tanner Greer both responded to my “disavowal” of sorts of the online Hindu Right. The constitutive unpleasantness is just structurally unappealing. Some reasonable Hindutva people have messaged me that “well, you can’t really be surprised they’re triggered by you, your name is Razib Khan.” My response is of course simple: if you … Continue reading Allies on the Right

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In the conversation between Coleman Hughes and Charles Murray, there was a point where they mooted the idea that white Democrats are smarter than white Republicans. Since the realignment of […]

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Democrats Thought They Bottomed Out in Rural, White America. It Wasn’t the Bottom: Republicans have never had a demographic stronghold as reliable as Black voters have been for Democrats, a […]

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A review of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America by Charles Murray. Encounter Books, 168 pages. (June, 2021) I’ve known about Charles Murray since 1994, when I was a voracious and unsupervised teen reader in rural Oregon grabbing the library’s latest issue of the New Republic the instant it was shelved. It was here that I stumbled upon the shocking views Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein expressed in The Bell Curve about race, class, and inequality in America. I didn’t give those views much deep thought at the time, and so my perception of Murray and his ideas hewed more or less to the dismissive conventional wisdom. It wasn’t until I read a 1998 essay in Commentary magazine by Christopher Chabris that I began to reconsider. Chabris argued that the media furor around The Bell Curve obscured more than it illuminated, and that the consensus among psychologists on the importance of intelligence to life outcomes was indeed close to what Murray and Herrnstein had asserted. To my surprise, in the 21st century, my relationship …

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Modi’s BJP Suffers Setback in West Bengal State Elections: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party fell far short in its attempt to win control in a fiercely contested state election, one in which its aggressive efforts to get out the vote have been criticized as worsening the country’s surge in Covid-19 infections. Official results coming …

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Both Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, authors of The Emerging Democratic Majority, have turned on the major public message of their book, that demography is destiny and the Democrats just […]

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There’s a new think tank, The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that recently started up. It caught my attention because it’s headed by my friend Richard Hanania, […]

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In 1990 Michael Jordan infamously quipped “Republicans buy sneakers too!” The issue here is that Jordan was a Democrat, and people wanted him to weigh in on North Carolina politics, […]

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Slate has published a transparent “hit piece” on Preston Kulkarni, who is likely to win a seat for the Democrats in Houston. I say hit piece because it doesn’t seem deeply reported, but sourced from Pieter Friedrich, who I have mostly seen online as a rather inflammatory activist, not a dispassionate scholar. A reporter in …

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In 2020, much of the public discussion of social issues revolves around notions of identity. Ideas about race, reformulations of gender, and considerations of class or religious confession. But it is not often stated that these identity categories are qualitatively different, and these differences have different implications for the real world. Some reflection on the real-world consequences of identity ought to make this apparent. Why is a party based on working-class solidarity far less sinister than a party based on a racial or ethnic group? Perhaps because being working-class is not a fixed identity, and solidarity is open to all. One’s race or ethnicity is viewed as more static. Most of us can imagine struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over our heads, but few can imagine being another race. Race-thinking is anti-empathetic by its nature. Obviously, most humans have a variety of identities that they balance, synthesize, and are enriched by. Before World War I, socialists expressed their opposition to a conflict that they believed, correctly, would only bring suffering to the …

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Razib Khan