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A college professor debunks the myths that have infiltrated America’s school curricula. In 1995, James W. Loewen penned the classic work of criticism Lies My Teacher Told Me, a left-leaning corrective that addressed much of what was sanitized and omitted from American history books. But in the decades that followed, false leftist narratives—as wrong as those they supplanted—have come to dominate American academia and education. Now, in the same spirit but updated for 2024, Wilfred Reilly demolishes the scholastic myths propagated by the left, uncovers fresh angles on “established” events, and turns what we think we know about history upside down. Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me sets the record straight on many of these myths, including that there actually were communists in Hollywood; that the cultural stereotype of Native Americans being peace-loving hippies is both untrue and patronizing; and that history, while almost always bad for Black Americans, was much worse for all of us than we tend to think it was. Smart, irreverent, and deeply researched, Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me will revolutionize your understanding of history and reveal a new and refreshing way to teach and think about the past.

My Summary

Main Ideas, Takeaways & Similarities

Questions

I. What is the problem?
A. How is this problem formulated?
B. Why is this problem important?
C. What is the history of this problem?
D. Which prominent personalities have been interested in this problem?

II. What solutions to the problem are there?
A. What are the conclusions reached?
B. By what argument(s) is the conclusion reached?
C. What facts or assumptions serve as premises?
D. When a prominent personality offers a solution, does he also argue for or against other prominent personalities? Does he raise objections to alternative solutions? Does he consider objections to his own solutions?

III. Evaluation
A. What are the advantages and disadvantages of the alternative formulations to the problem?
B. Has the importance or history of the problem ever been misrepresented?
C. Are the solutions logically related to the premises?
D. Are the facts true? Are the assumptions acceptable? Are the objections answerable?

AI Summary

Highlights

In fact, many of the best-selling social science books of the past few decades focus on the idea that the “real” history of the United States was a virtually unending bloodbath. A short list of influential texts of this kind would have to include Marxist Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, the New York Times–originating recent bestseller The 1619 Project, and … well … James W. Loewen’s 1995 book Lies My Teacher Told Me. This entire body of work draws from and ties into the modern American obsession with racism. (Page 9)

The primary thing that was unique about slavery in the early modern West was that the nations of contemporary Europe and North America set out to end the practice globally, and largely did so British oceangoing fleets blockaded slaving ports around the world, sinking (Page 9)

at least 1,600 slave ships and freeing 150,000 slaves—in what was explicitly an attempt to minimize or end the so-called peculiar institution Notably, in sizable nations of color where trod only briefly the Western galosh, slavery still often endures. The practice exists rather openly in Mauritania, and slavery/chattel serfdom was only banned in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s. (Page 10)

Modern American morality is an aberration. (Page 10)

The reality is that international law defending things like human rights and individual liberty and opposing wars of aggression is a distinctly modern concept. The right to conquest was only banned by an international body after World War Two. (And if we’re honest, “neutral” international bodies often spend most of their time obscuring how seldom non-Western countries actually follow said international law today.) (Page 10)

In their minds, all non-white peoples lived as noble savages in enlightened Gardens of Eden, before being corrupted by contact with grubby foreign invaders. (Page 10)

The (Page 10)

previous ruling power across most of British India was the Turko-Mongol Moghul Empire, which imposed the state religion of Sunni Islam on the Indian subcontinent (if lightly) and taxed peasants at roughly half the value of their annual crop The choice for most Nigerians was between the redcoated rule of the Britishers and the Black Muslim Sokoto Caliphate— then the second-largest slave power in the world. (Page 11)

we should recognize that all of the great heroes of this era are flawed human beings, who will be judged as such down the road by our descendants. Martin Luther King, for example, was in today’s terms an obvious plagiarist, unrepentant sexist, and extreme homophobe. (Page 12)

Lie #1 “Brutal ‘True’ Slavery Was Virtually Unique to America and the West” (Page 13)

In reality, as conservative éminence grise Thomas Sowell says in the “Slavery” chapter of his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), it is probably fair to say that most Westerners think of historical slavery almost entirely in the context of Western white oppression of Blacks during what is technically known as the Atlantic Slave Trade. Almost nothing could be further from empirical truth: American slavery was not unprecedented, it was not uniquely brutal, and it did not invent any new oppressive systems. It was terrible, but talking about it as if it came out of nowhere means we understand less about history and about global norms. Slavery was ubiquitous throughout the ancient and historical world—often the step of human “development” after simply killing and eating one’s defeated foemen. (Page 14)

In an article for the prestigious Chicago-Kent Law Review (and in other venues) Dr. Raymond Westbrook of Johns Hopkins University revealed how pervasive slavery was in truly ancient times, i.e., during the period between 2,500 BC, “when the earliest legal documents concerning slavery were found,” and the conquest of much of the Middle East by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. (Page 14)

Across every significant empire of the Bronze Age and Iron Age world, “namely Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Mitanni, and Hatti,” slavery was extremely common and recognized in statute. (Page 15)

One reason for the ubiquity of slavery was that it provided an alternative to a marginally more brutal practice: the slaughter of prisoners of war. All of these ancient peoples recognized multiple legal sources of human chattel, the most prominent of which was war. As Westbrook bluntly states, “foreigners captured in war were booty” per virtually all ancient law and “could be dealt with as the captor saw fit.” More than two millennia before today’s Geneva Conventions, members of defeated armies or raiding forces could expect to be treated brutally—with their potential fates including not only enslavement but plain massacre, physical and sexual abuse before being ransomed back to their own society, and relocation onto unknown areas of the victor’s demesne as serf labor. (Page 15)

One of the very first written human words, then, was “slave.” (Page 15)

“The safest course was to sell the kidnap victim abroad,” Westbrook dryly notes. (Page 16)

While this varied across societies, slavery was also often hereditary and generational. Westbrook notes that, in multiple Babylonian documents describing the sale of slaves, it is mentioned that an enslaved person was “‘house born’ (wilid bitim)” or “born on the roof.” (Page 16)

Greeks were no better than their regional predecessors when it came to slavery. In fact, they operated one of the more famous slave systems in world history No less a thinker than Aristotle wrote up a famous defense of chattel slavery and—as a current critic notes—“believed that being enslaved was just and even beneficial for many people.” (Page 16)

So a city or state can justly engage in chattel slavery if there exist “some people who are … naturally suited to be slaves.” Aristotle argues that such human beings not only exist but are common: at one point he contends that anyone lacking the full “capacity for rational deliberation” is a “natural slave.” (Page 17)

Dr. Robert Garland, in a lecture for the Great Courses, accurately notes that “even the greatest thinkers could not imagine a world free of slavery … owning a car is the modern-day equivalent of owning a slave.”1 (Page 17)

“one in four of the people” in at least larger Greek cities like Athens were unfree men and women. (Page 18)

ancient Romans were morally no better or worse than their Greek predecessors when it came to slavery but operated on a larger scale. In a fascinatingly technical essay titled “Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves,”12 William Harris of Columbia says that Roman slaves—again, generally held in hereditary bondage—came from a whole variety of sources. (Page 18)

approximately 16 percent and 20 percent of the entire Imperial Roman population of roughly 60 million people “on the eve of the Antonine plague”—meaning that between 9.6 million and 12 million individuals within Roman lands were slaves. (Page 18)

Roman slaves were treated as or more harshly than Greek ones. Harris states openly that there is a “long and tiresome tradition” among academics of minimizing the brutality of classical slavery (often while emphasizing the abuses of white-on-Black New World slavery: he cites Toni Morrison’s Beloved in passing), but that such “takes” are simply inaccurate. Beyond Greece, “even the extremely unpleasant world” of the Caribbean of the 1700s was probably nowhere near as brutal as the slavery of the pre-Christian Roman Empire, which allowed for open torture and literal gladiatorial combat against lions and tigers. (Page 19)

antebellum United States and the non-mainland British possessions, there were “slave codes aimed at limiting the exploitation of slave labor,” while no close analogue existed in Rome. (Page 19)

Claims like those made in The 1619 Project are only possible if we focus on Western history to the exclusion of the vast swath of non-Western brutality. (Page 19)

African slave trade also stretched back over millennia, involving conflicts and emancipations that have often been forgotten for centuries in the West. Roughly 1,200 years ago, for example, the Zanj wars were fought (largely) between Arabs and slaves from civilized regions of West Africa and devastated much of modern-day Iraq. Broadly speaking, the Zanj rebels were members of Black African tribes (Page 19)

who had been captured in Africa following military defeats or raids by Arab slave traders and who were subsequently forced to labor for Arab masters in blistering southern Iraq. (Page 20)

Under a variety of charismatic and soon-dead leaders, the captured African warriors tried to rebel against these “appalling conditions” at least twice (via organized raids from AD 688 to 690, and a more organized rebellion under “the Lion of the Zanj” in 694) before the conflict generally called the Zanj War but were broken and shoved back into the salt marshes on both occasions. (Page 20)

The Zanj War caused destruction on a truly epic, modern scale. Contemporary estimates of the death toll during the fourteen-year conflict generally range between 500,000 and 2.5 million permanent casualties. (Page 20)

Arab trade in enslaved (Page 20)

Africans “can be traced back to antiquity.” The trade became widespread in the AD 600s as Islamic power grew in the Middle East and North Africa, “seven centuries before Europeans explored [Africa] and ten centuries before West Africans were sold across the Atlantic to America,” and it endured until the modern era. (Page 21)

The well-regarded Senegalese scholar Tidiane N’Diaye has argued that at least 17 million Africans were sold into Arab slavery, with 8 million or so shipped from Eastern Africa to the Islamic world “via the Trans-Saharan route to Morocco or Egypt,” and 9 million more “deported to regions on the Red Sea or the Indian Ocean”— then both largely Arab lakes.* (Page 21)

“about three out of four slaves died” before ever reaching their destination and being sold into bondage, from causes including starvation, sickness, and plain “exhaustion after long journeys.” (Page 21)

longer-lasting than Western slavery, with slavery not being (formally) banned in the fairly typical Arab port of Zanzibar until 1873 and not abolished across Muslim East Africa until 1909. (Page 21)

There was in fact—for centuries—a regional slave trade focused entirely on the sale of white battle captives to Arab and Black Muslim masters: the Barbary slave trade. Ohio State’s Robert Davis estimates that Muslim “Barbary” raiders from the North African coast enslaved “about 850,000 captives over the century from 1580 to 1680,” and “easily” as many as 1.25 million between 1530 and 1780. (Page 22)

two and three million mostly European slaves were shipped into the Ottoman Empire from the Black Sea region alone between the mid-1400s and the start of the eighteenth century. (Page 22)

Barbary slavers were famously ruthless and daring—launching militaryscale raids on European cities (Page 23)

Even the United States, half a world away, suffered at the hands of these slavers of color: the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Corps Hymn refers to a punitive mission launched by President Jefferson following repeated and brutal North African attacks on Yankee shipping. (Page 23)

very word “slave” derives from “Slav”—the ethnic demonym for proud but historically “backward” whites occupying eastern Europe, millions of whom were sold into bondage over the centuries by Muslims and others. (Page 23)

However, as books like White Cargo have outlined in painful detail, white indentured servants —“slaves of war” from Ireland and the like—were often no more excited about their new country, or willing to work for free absent physical persuasion, than the captured Africans they labored alongside. (Page 23)

North American slave-masters were also Black: free Blacks were permitted by law to own Black slaves and indeed white indentures. Many did so: the first slave owner in the area that would become the United States was in fact probably African American. (Page 24)

The unhappy Casor was returned to his former master. This case, to a very significant extent, laid the foundation for all chattel slavery in the future USA. It was the first time there’d been a judicial determination in the Thirteen Colonies that a person who had committed no crime could be enslaved for life, and John Casor is thus considered to have been the first (Page 24)

person consigned to chattel slavery by the colonial justice system The first true American slave owner, very probably, was a Black man with African roots. (Page 25)

Native North American and Mesoamerican tribes almost all enslaved captured Native opponents—and later came to extend the same courtesy to white battle captives and purchased African Americans. (Page 25)

When captured Africans began to arrive in North America, many tribes —notably the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the American Southeast— transitioned rapidly from intra-Indigenous to Black slavery. (Page 25)

It seems fair to describe the Cherokee Nation as having been at least as much of a slave state as the white-led Confederacy: 19 percent of all persons living in Cherokee territory by 1860 were enslaved Blacks,* and approximately 10 percent of all families there “held others in slavery.” (Page 25)

Even the official Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, ratified in 1827, mentions Black slavery several times and imposed harsh restrictions on enslaved people. (Page 25)

Choctaw and their Chickasaw allies alone “hold[ing] over 5,000 Blacks in slavery by 1860.” (Page 26)

Civilized Tribes Natives owned tens of thousands of slaves, and most of them were frogmarched to the Middle West by their owners. (Page 26)

“the … tribes were deeply committed to slavery, established their own racialized Black codes, immediately reestablished slavery when they arrived in Indian territory, rebuilt their nations with slave labor, and enthusiastically sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.” (Page 26)

part of the reason the U.S. government was so ruthless with the great Southeastern Native nations during this 1850s–1860s era of history was that many of them spoke openly in support of the Southern cause—and fought with the Confederacy when the Civil War began (Page 27)

“Andrew Jackson had a terrible Indian policy and radically expanded American democracy,” he points out. Similarly, the great Cherokee chief John Ross “was a skillful leader … but also a man who deeply believed in and practiced the enslavement of black people.” For almost all of history, an understanding of rather brutal rules of engagement (“Vae victis”) governed the behavior of virtually all human beings alive on earth—and Arabs, West Africans, East Africans, Asians (whom we have yet even to discuss in depth), and Native Americans were no more an exception to this than were white Europeans. (Page 28)

Then what made the modern Western world unique when it came to slavery? The simple if unpopular answer is: Ending the practice of slavery. (Page 28)

Historian Philip D. Morgan writes in a collection of essays from the Organization of American Historians: Unlike other previous forms of slavery, the New World version did not decline over a long period but came to a rather abrupt end. The age of emancipation lasted a little over one hundred years: beginning in 1776 with the first antislavery society in Philadelphia, through the monumental Haitian Revolution of 1792, and ending with Brazilian emancipation in 1888. An institution that had been accepted for thousands of years disappeared in about a century. (Page 28)

While U.S. history is today often described as an essentially unending sequence of white abuses of Blacks, a rock-ribbed American abolitionist movement dates back literally to the founding of the country. As I myself once noted for the online intellectual magazine Quillette, by the late 1770s, Black American veterans of the Revolutionary War—and more than a few of their white former bunkmates—began a petition-writing campaign that targeted Northern state legislatures and demanded an end to slavery. This and similar techniques were essentially successful: by 1795, ten U.S. states the Indiana and soon-to-be-state Territory, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, all of the Northwest Territory, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont, were free land by law. Combined, these contained well over 50 percent of the free population of the United States. including Connecticut, territories, (Page 29)

In 1794, Congress formally barred all American ships from participating in the Atlantic slave trade. Just fourteen years later, in 1808, the same body passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which made it illegal for any ship from any country to bring enslaved people into the United States for sale. Finally, following some fascinating incremental steps and a big war, slavery was formally declared illegal throughout the United States in 1865. (Page 29)

Roughly one in every ten American men of fighting age died during the war: 22.6 percent of Southern white men in their twenties were killed. (Page 29)

“If the USA owed a bill for slavery, we have quite arguably already paid it in blood.” (Page 29)

Following the 1787 establishment of the Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Britain moved along with the United States to outlaw (Page 29)

international slave trading in 1807 to 1808 and then heroically deployed the British Navy around the world to sink slave ships and blockade notorious trading hubs Not long after, slavery was eliminated across the British Empire (notably excepting India) by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. (Page 30)

On the continent, France abolished the practice of slavery throughout the global French Empire in 1794, briefly brought it back under Napoleon in 1802, but then permanently re-abolished it throughout the colonial system in 1848—and sent slaver-hunting French warships to patrol the World Ocean alongside England’s Between France’s abolition of the practice in 1794 (or Haiti’s in 1804, if you prefer) and Brazil’s in 1888, every major Western nation legally barred slavery. (Page 30)

Muslim and Black African countries where the writ of the West never ran, chattel slavery quite often still exists today. A recent report from the International Labour Organization recently found that, “as of 2016,” more than 40 million people currently “perform involuntary servitude of some kind” in situations that they cannot leave In other words, they are slaves. Per one widely read commentary on the report: “Today, there could be more people enslaved than at any time in human history. Chattel bondage still happens today … particularly in Africa.” (Page 30)

“between 529,000 and 869,000” human beings—most of them Black Africans—are currently “bought, owned, sold, and traded by Arab and Black … masters” within just five countries in Africa. Global sources estimate that there are currently 700,000 to 1 million desperate Black African migrants living in Libya alone, and that roughly 50,000 of them have been forced into physical or sexual slavery by Arab Libyans. (Page 30)

An actual public slave auction was held in Libya and videotaped by undercover CNN reporters in 2017 (Page 30)

Islamic republic of Mauritania, “the very structure of society reinforces slavery.” (Page 31)

“10% to 20% of the [Mauritanian] population lives in slavery.” (Page 31)

Interestingly, sources almost invariably describe Mauritania as one of the countries in the world furthest from the West, an “endless sea of sand dunes” where the cuisine, dominant religion, and daily patterns of life show little if any European influence. And that may be the problem. When analyzed by serious people, across the sweep of history, slavery is revealed to have been not a “Western” practice but rather a universal one largely ended by Western arms. (Page 31)

Lie #2 “The ‘Red Scare’ Was a Moral Panic That Caught No Commies” (Page 32)

most of the more prominent persons accused of spying for the Russkis during the Cold War were in fact spying for the Russkis during the Cold War. (Page 32)

There’s just one problem with all of this tear-jerking about “civil rights violations:” Dalton Trumbo was a Communist and so—with the probable exception of most of those on Tail Gunner Joe’s first bad-judgment “list of names”—were most of those accused of espionage or other pro-Soviet activity during this period. Hollywood is repeating the same mistake as the activist lessons, textbooks, and articles that dismiss the Red Scare as a moral panic. (Page 36)

But how did everyone get it so wrong? In part, it’s because the U.S. government concealed the truth. In the 2007 book Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, renowned conservative historian M. Stanton Evans argues that much of the strong and immediate backlash to McCarthy’s allegations occurred because the government wasn’t about to admit how real McCarthy’s worries were about infiltration. U.S. officials from both parties “weren’t eager to have [the reality of] Communist penetration on their watch, and their failure to do much about it,” broken down in front of the general public (Page 36)

Debates about each and every one of these individual cases could go on “in the weeds” for some time, to the delight of no one but the professional wonk community. However, as Evans and interviewers of his such as Robert Novak have suggested, there is a way to resolve them. Very often, Evans argues, “these McCarthy cases were right there in the Soviet cables.” In other words, data recently obtained from no-longer-Soviet Russia demonstrates that specific individuals long thought to be martyrs of a kind were in fact “Communists, Soviet agents, or assets of the KGB—just as McCarthy had suggested.” (Page 37)

And so on. John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, authors of the technically laden Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America have argued that the Venona transcripts specifically identify more than 340 Americans who worked at some point for Soviet intelligence—although less than half of these individuals have so far been matched to confirmed actual-name identities. The OSS, the predecessor agency to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of today, appears to have been a particular hotbed of skullduggery—for obvious reasons—playing host to at least fifteen confirmed Soviet spies over the years. (Page 39)

The influence exerted by some of these proven spies on what became the modern Western order was remarkable—Harry Dexter White, for example, was the chief architect of both the International Monetary Fund and what would become the World Bank. It is no exaggeration to say that Russian espionage during the 1950s and 1960s, far from being some kind of paranoid fairy tale, was a real problem that reached the very highest levels of U.S. and Allied governments. On more than a few occasions (i.e., Alger Hiss at Yalta) Russian agents sat by the American president’s side and gave him advice. (Page 40)

In the mid-twentieth-century United States, the main organization doing the “waiting” and lurking was the Communist Party of the United States of America, or CCPUSA. (Page 40)

An obvious through line so far is: Communist infiltration of the United States, abetted by geopolitical foes like Russia and Red China, was never a made-up bogeyman but rather was—and arguably is—a real threat to American national interests. In a passage worth quoting as one block, the right-leaning website the Other Half of History provides a solid summary of our material thus far:21 Within the United States, a virtual army of Communist spies and sympathizers labored to promote the interests of mass murderers like Stalin and Mao. Soviet spies provided Stalin’s government with the secrets of the atom bomb. Soviet agents in the State Department shaped American policy in ways that facilitated Communist conquest in … Hungary and China. During WWII, Communists in the federal government’s Office of War Information even pressured Hollywood to make movies portraying the Soviet Union in a positive light. But don’t expect to hear those things in a college history class. (Page 41)

As early as 1941, a now declassified report from a Soviet intelligence operative listed no fewer than twenty-two prominent American journalists as actual “agents” inside the United States. (Page 41)

Influence on this scale impacted the very content of American pop culture. Reason magazine writer Kenneth Billingsley points out that CCPUSA functionaries controlled the Screen Writers Guild and Story Analysts Guild for periods of years at a time and were “sometimes able to prevent the production of movies they opposed.” In an article in hard-left publication the Worker, which Billingsley cites in some detail, Dalton Trumbo himself took credit for blocking a whole range of books from being made into films, including Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, James T. Farrell’s Bernard Clare, and the anti-Communist works The Yogi and the Commissar and I Chose Freedom. (Page 43)

And, albeit to a lesser extent, such malign influence continued for decades after the Cold War. Remarkably, the Hollywood of the 1980s and 1990s—which still leaned hard to the left and employed more than a few warhorses from the era before—produced essentially no movies addressing “the actual history of communism, the agony of the millions whose lives were poisoned by it, or the international deceit that obscured communist reality.” With the exception of a few action flicks like Red Dawn, the (Page 43)

defining conflict of the twentieth century was “missing from American cinema.” (Page 44)

“It is as though, since 1945, Hollywood had produced little or nothing about the victory of the allies and the crimes of National Socialism.” (Unsurprisingly, Eastern European filmmakers are more faithful in chronicling communism’s horrors, as in Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s 2019 film Mr. Jones, a narrative dramatizing Welsh journalist Gareth Jones’s exposé of the Holodomor in the early 1930s, or German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Lives of Others, about a Stasi surveillance officer in East Berlin.) (Page 44)

If we’ve lost sight of both the self-inflicted censorship and the real communists in Hollywood, we’ve also forgotten the historic prevalence of communist sympathies in academia. (Page 44)

particular intensity and success on the sector of American secondary and higher education. (Page 45)

The Techniques of Communism In chapter ten, “Invading Education,” Budenz opens: “In undermining a nation such as the United States, the infiltration of the educational process is of prime importance,” (Page 45)

Budenz knows his Commie history, noting that Joseph Stalin described cultural and educational institutions as essential targets during his 1924 Sverdlov University lectures, which focused on outlining a strategy for global Communist revolution. (Page 45)

Per a piece titled “The Prevalence of Marxism in Academia,” posted to the Econlib web archive in 2015— although based on somewhat older data—a remarkable 17.6 percent of (Page 46)

American social scientists currently identify as Marxists. (Page 47)

Things are better over in, for example, business (5.3 percent radical, 3.2 percent activist, 1.9 percent Marxist). However, in the humanities fields, 19 percent of academics identify as radicals, 26.2 percent identify as activists, and 5 percent identify as Marxists. (Page 47)

According to DW’s primary source, a 2018 survey of journalists conducted by professors from Arizona State and Texas A&M, 17.63 percent of the writers and reporters who responded to a recent empirical questionnaire (Page 48)

described themselves as “very liberal,” while 40.84 percent described themselves as liberal but only “somewhat.” (Page 49)

In contrast, exactly 0.46 percent of the journalists surveyed labeled themselves “very conservative,” while another 3.94 percent went with “somewhat conservative.” (Page 49)

Lie #3 “Native Americans Were ‘Peaceful People Who Spent All Day Dancing’” (Page 51)

Mesoamerican peoples like the Aztecs, in particular, shocked even jaded European mercenaries—many of whom had fought their African and West Asian counterparts back in the Old World—with their level of brutality. (Page 54)

A major recent article in Science by Lizzie Wade titled “Feeding the Gods: Hundreds of Skulls Reveal Massive Scale of Human Sacrifice in Aztec Capital” serves as a reminder of how shockingly bloody Aztec society was before any Westerners got here. (Page 54)

main skull rack alone held 130,000 human crania (Page 54)

It was also about 5 meters—15 feet—high, indeed capable of containing the remains of hundreds of thousands of exenemies. (Page 54)

In addition to killing probably millions of people, the Aztecs also ate a ton of them, a practice sure to shock modern sensibilities. (Page 55)

Aztec cannibalism could have satisfied 6.5 percent of all protein needs inside at least the city of Tenochtitlan if the whole bodies of captives were eaten, and well over 2 percent if only selected “extremities” were chosen for consumption. (Page 56)

Iroquois Confederacy, with an interesting piece titled “Iroquois Cannibalism: Fact Not Fiction” pointing out: “Archaeologists, working on Iroquoian … sites, report that evidence of cannibalism appears in the archaeological record in sites dating about AD 1300 and continues into historic times.” In Ontario, Canada, and the northeastern United States, they quote other researchers as finding that “the practice survived into the historic period but appears to have reached a peak around the mid-16th century… . [A]n overwhelming mass of evidence exists …” (Page 57)

In his excellent article “Predatory Warfare, Social Status, and the North Pacific Slave Trade,” Professor Donald Mitchell of the University of Victoria argues that a key feature of life for Haida tribal members and members of other Pacific Northwest tribes was continual “predatory warfare”: “warfare for the acquisition of slaves and the maintenance or enhancement of high social status.” After looking through what appears to be all of approximately 725 of the primary sources on point, Dr. Mitchell notes that there were essentially no peaceful human groups in the region. (Page 57)

In an economy with no coined or paper money, and apparently no reasonably standardized units of “wampum” or metals, slaves were one of the few universally accepted forms of currency and universally recognized indicators of wealth. (Page 58)

human—the prime motive for violent raiding throughout most or all of this area was “to gain captives for enslavement” and later sale. (Page 58)

Overall, however, slaves were readily exchangeable at similar rates across an area spanning perhaps one-eighth of a continent: “marching money” if not usually “marching meat.” (Page 59)

Long before the arrival of Europeans, the Haida were feared up and down the North American West Coast as “Indian Vikings.” (Page 59)

The aptitude of the Haida and similar peoples for military technology often extended to the fortification of any land touching water. As the Canadian Museum of History points out, forts and entire fortified towns were part of “the defensive strategy of all Northwest Coast groups for at least 2,000 years.” Typical defenses at Haida forts, probably the best of the lot, included log palisades, trapdoors, and hidden entrances, “rolling top-log defenses,” and actual fighting platforms equipped with boulders and other weapons to use against attackers. The famous British naval officer Captain (Page 59)

James Cook christened one such fortification “Hippah Island” because it reminded him of the best of the Maori forts he had seen while campaigning in New Zealand. For centuries both before and after the white man came, the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Coast was the setting for constant, sophisticated, brutal warfare. (Page 60)

forth—modern research increasingly indicates that many major tribes moved into the territories they held when they first encountered Westerners during recorded history or not long before, often conquering them from previously resident populations. (Page 60)

When Anishinaabe tribal members arrived to contest the rice paddies, “constant (Page 60)

warfare with these Ojibway to their east” drove the Santee Sioux down into more temperate southern Minnesota, where they displaced the Teton and Yankton (also generally considered Sioux tribes). (Page 61)

These migrations created a domino effect of displacement and warfare. Displaced by the Santee fleeing the Ojibway, the Teton and Yankton tribes fled to the Great Plains of the U.S. interior, where they took advantage of just-arriving horses to abandon agriculture altogether and become mounted buffalo hunters—and constant raiders of the “Mandan, Arikara, Hidatsa, and Pawnee.” Even the cross-tribal name of “Sioux” dates to this period of intense intra-Native warfare and was originally an Ojibway military insult. The term is a condensation of nadouessioux (rattlesnakes) and originally simply meant “enemy.” (Page 61)

Upon arrival, the Apache wasted little time settling into their new home. Per an encyclopedia account, “before [Western] colonization” began, Apache arms had managed to conquer “east-central and southeastern Arizona, southeastern Colorado, southwestern and eastern New Mexico, and western Texas and (in Mexico) northern Chihuahua and Sonora states.” The Apache held most of this land until the 1700s—“Plains Apache farmers were living along the Dismal River [near Kansas] as recently as 1700”— when they in turn began to experience substantial pressure from horse-andgun-equipped raiders from the Comanche tribe. However, they managed to retain much of the core of the Apacheria even during that series of wars. At some point during all of this, the Apache (“enemy”) label itself was bestowed on members of the tribe by warriors of the Zuni, still another opponent group. (Page 61)

2014 piece from Science 2.0 that summarizes recent academic findings—“The most violent era in American history was before Europeans arrived.” While noting specifically that “there is a mythology about the native Americans … they were all peaceful and in harmony with nature,” the authors point out considerable evidence that the exact reverse was often the case: arguably the most violent per-capita era in American history involved the Native tribes of the American Southwest. (Page 62)

“mysterious depopulation of the northern Southwest, from a population of about 40,000 people in the mid-1200s to none 30 years later.” (Page 62)

Both Western and Native actors had complex motivations, says Bailyn. The Natives—and very arguably the whites, at least at first—“were not genocidal on the whole” in any standard sense of this word. Indian leaders generally wanted settlers, who would have been English in the region of North America under discussion, to exist accessibly at the fringes of Native society “so that they would have the benefit of their treasure, their goods, even their advanced weapons. They wanted that, but under their control.” (Page 63)

Much the same sort of conflict, defined by mutual raiding and breaking of treaties, would go on to define U.S. history until almost the year 1900. For example, the Grattan Fight, the incident that almost single-handedly touched off the bloody First Sioux War, which started off in a surprisingly mundane dispute over stolen livestock that quickly evolved into a violent debacle thanks to the pigheadedness, arrogance, and panic of a group of young men. (Page 64)

Mistrust and nuance lost in cultural translation—egged on by bad actors—can and often did lead to tragedy. (Page 65)

Putting old grudges aside, the Whitmans attempted to treat Cayuse tribal members during the disease outbreak. However, many Native patients died during what was fairly close to a “virgin field” epidemic, and “it was hard for the Indians to understand why so many of their number died, both children and adults, when only one white child at Waiilatpu was taken. They knew nothing of immunity.”29 At least some Cayuse came to believe that Whitman was trying to poison them rather than cure them—perhaps by using medicines laced with strychnine. (Page 65)

long-standing tradition among Native American tribes in the Columbia Plateau region: the absolute right of the “relatives of a deceased person”31 to kill a te-wat, or medicine man, who unsuccessfully attempted to treat their family member.* (Page 66)

Cayuse War, which lasted for five bloody years and largely destroyed the tribe. (Page 66)

The Comanche of Texas and Oklahoma “were reputed to be the most diabolical in their cruelties to captives,” Hampton Sides writes. “Comanches liked to take their victims to a remote stretch of the plains and stake their bodies to the ground. Then the Comanches would slit open their bellies and poke their organs with spears, making a slow study of it, delighting in the bloodcurdling screams, sometimes slicing a bit of a victim’s liver and eating it right in front of him.” (Page 66)

The plan of action behind Comanche raids was, he argues, “straightforward”: “All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured [to death]; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.” (Page 67)

Colonel John Chivington, the “Fighting Parson,” leading his men to massacre at Sand Creek, in Colorado Territory, “150 Cheyenne, mostly women and children … in cold blood that day, in a massacre that is now widely regarded as the worst atrocity committed in all the Indian wars.” (Page 67)

Still, with atrocities like those committed by the Comanche, it’s easy to see why the warfare between the groups became so brutal. The taboo obvious must be said: it is frankly not surprising that most Western settlers, probably including all of those ever to see the aftermath of a Comanche raid, wanted to wipe out the “Lords of the Plains” in their entirety rather than make friends with them. (Page 67)

Many Comanche likely felt the same in reverse: they were being so brutal in order to chase the odd-looking strangers off of their ancient ancestral hunting grounds (which they themselves conquered from the Apache in the “late eighteenth century”). (Page 67)

They also, like their early opponents the Mexicans, had no concept of “allout war or unconditional surrender or treaties that endured beyond a season —these were European concepts,” (Page 67)

The Beaver Wars began when the powerful Native nations of the Iroquois Confederacy sought to achieve monopoly control of the North American fur trade with European merchants. The Iroquois, who were supplied with weapons and sometimes with fighting men by their English and Dutch allies, essentially attempted to conquer the region then known as the “Ohio Country” by defeating the resident Huron and a coalition of Algonquin-speaking tribes. The latter peoples, for their part, were supplied with weapons and matériel by the French, with whom they traded extensively. (Page 68)

of none peoples—white these warrior It is worth noting, re: the prevalent “stewards of the woods” stereotype, that “red”—were environmentalists of any kind. Following the Wars and the Iroquois takeover of the best beavering lands, the North American beaver was largely eradicated in the Northeastern region of the country. The reduction in beaver numbers, in natural ecosystems where their dams played a major ecological large-scale environmental changes occurred in some areas, role, was so sudden and substantial that or (Page 68)

The Dakota War, like most human wars, began over issues of land and money. On three previous occasions—in 1837, 1851, and 1858—the Dakota Sioux had ceded large areas of prime hunting land to the United States government by treaty. However, the powerful tribe was not simply giving land away under duress: the cessations took place in exchange for sizable cash annuities, the payment of some tribal and individual debts, an annual tribute of goods and provisions, and guaranteed ownership of two reservations bordering the Minnesota River and measuring roughly 1,400 square miles in area. The U.S. government apparently expected the Indians to use their money and new river-bottom land to become settled farmers rather than nomadic hunters, although accounts differ as to whether this was effectively communicated to the Dakota and whether the Dakota had any intention of keeping up their side of the deal if it was. (Page 69)

At any rate, they did not do so: in what sounds almost like the punch line to a joke, the most famous of all High Plains warriors never amounted to much as sedentary wheat farmers—and, over the years, the tribe became more and more dependent on annual deliveries of annuities and tribute. Then, finally, in 1861, this somewhat stable system fell apart: a crop failure and subsequent harsh winter destroyed most of what grain the tribe had been growing, and all annuity payments were months late because of budgetary pressures caused by the American Civil War. During this time, Sioux leaders were also aware that many U.S. soldiers had left their previous postings to fight the rebellious South in the Civil War, and that the Army had failed to punish perpetrators of a recent massacre at Spirit Lake By June or July of 1862, the Dakota began to raid white settlements. (Page 69)

The short but brutal conflict had a number of consequences. Disgusted by the atrocities committed by Little Crow’s fighters, a Minnesota militaryjudicial commission sentenced some 303 Dakota men to death by hanging following the conclusion of the war. After reviewing the death sentences, President Abraham Lincoln reprieved all but 38 of the men. However, their mass hanging still stands as the largest single execution in American history: it is often presented, without context, by activists as a prime example of Western brutality against Natives. (Page 70)

In a fairly typical recent article in History Is Now magazine, frankly enough titled “Did Settlers Commit Genocide in America?,”48 the authors take the general position that the answer is: “No.” Citing previous scholars and writers from Daniel L. Smith to Michael Medved, they contend that “the word genocide does not truly apply to the treatment of Native Americans by British colonists or, later, American Settlers.” (Page 71)

“In fact … it is obvious that the blood-thirsty excesses of one group provoked blood-thirsty excesses from the other, in a cycle that lasted with scant interruption for several hundred years.” Further, the majority of even this sanguinary warfare was not conventionally genocidal: the 1862 Dakota War was not fought with the goal of wiping out the Dakota tribe. (Page 71)

The true mass killer of Natives, as well as millions of whites, during the premodern era was the unseen horror of disease. Quoting Guns, Germs, and Steel author Jared Diamond, the History Is Now team notes that “throughout the Americas, diseases introduced [by] Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native population.” (Page 71)

European warriors never even got to fight some of the most advanced and well-armed Native societies, such as the famous Mississippian chiefdoms that built the giant mounds near Cahokia, Illinois, and elsewhere: these were wiped out by fast-spreading disease before any Western explorers ever saw them, leaving behind only empty ruins and vast Golgothas full of bones to greet late-arriving expeditions. Across these fascinating and advanced cultures, and many others, “the main killers were Old World germs”—the product of the dense and stock-breeding human populations in Europe and Asia—“to which Indians had never been exposed” and against which they had no built-up resistance. The largely unintentional annihilation of Native American populations by these microbes was clearly an enormous tragedy, but, argue these authors and others, “in no sense does it represent a crime.” (Page 72)

“homesteading” efforts of thousands of minority pioneers in the historical Northwest Territory—the massive area including most of modern Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin During the process of putting together a genuinely fascinating database, Cox has so far assembled evidence of at least 338 Northwest Territory settlements, established between 1800 and 1860, that consisted of one or more Black-owned farms according to “census records, deeds, and other documents.” (Page 72)

William DeLong, author of the short piece “The Forgotten Black Cowboys of the Wild West”50 and much else, argues that Hollywood has “white-washed the West” and that, in reality, as many as 25 (Page 72)

percent of all cowboys in the Western states during the 1870s and 1880s were of African descent. (Page 73)

arguably the most legendary and brutal Indian-fighting regiments in the history of the U.S. military, the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, were virtually all Black. (Page 73)

They did so very well, if that word can be used in this context. The Ninth Cavalry played a critical role in American success during the brutal Red River War—fought against the Comanche, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Cheyenne—and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry together defeated hundreds of well-prepared Native warriors during the Battle of Beaver Creek, not long after. By about 1880 the two regiments and their occasional white partners had almost completely “minimized Indian resistance” in their original state of Texas. The Ninth was sent to Indian Territory to tamp down white-Native conflict in what would become the state of Oklahoma, while the Tenth fought through the 1890s in the final borderlands campaigns against the (Page 73)

Apache before relocating to Montana to break the last of the free Cree tribes. (Page 74)

The face of Manifest Destiny, then, was never as white as historians (and racists!) would have us believe. Importantly, the Buffalo Soldiers were neither angels nor devils, but men—capable of great heroism and more than occasionally guilty of atrocity. The exact same was true of their white and Hispanic military counterparts and of their Native American opponents. The original inhabitants of North America were not the bloodthirsty naked savages of traditional U.S. mythology—but nor were they the peaceful Eloi that the newer storytellers of today prefer to falsely describe. They were just people: warriors who fought among themselves from time immemorial and who fought our own ancestors hard and well for four hundred years. Honor to their dead, and living, and to our own. (Page 74)

Lie #4 “Hippies Were the Good Guys, the Sexual Revolution Was Great for Women, and the Vietnam War Was Unpopular and Pointless” (Page 75)

modern-day romanticization of the hippies represents yet another example of modern scholars unable to admit the failure and unpopularity of left-leaning revolutions. Not only has the modern world rejected the hippie aesthetic, but history has proven the key elements of their project to be incorrect. (Page 77)

One of the most popular songs of the era was the hippie-bashing outlaw country ballad “Okie from Muskogee” by Merle Haggard, which included the lines “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee / We don’t take no trips on LSD” and “We never make no party out of lovin’,” played frequently to rapturous audiences, and reached #1 on the Billboard Country charts. (Page 80)

A few weeks later, President Nixon indicated that he basically supported the hippie-stomping workers: he invited the leaders of the Hard Hat Riot and subsequent mass demonstrations to Washington, where he was photographed accepting a “personal” hard hat from these men The specific fellow who gave him the hat, Pete Brennan—then president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York—would in fact go on to become U.S. Secretary of Labor under Nixon. (Page 81)

Data far beyond that just discussed supports the same conclusions. Not only was there significant public distaste for left-wing protesters and agitators, but Americans also displayed majority or near-majority support for the United States’ role in Vietnam until very late in the war. Most wars become more unpopular as they drag on, but serious analysis of cached results from pollsters like Gallup shows that Americans held more positive year-by-year attitudes toward Vietnam than toward many contemporary conflicts, such as the Second Gulf War. (Page 81)

Per the Gallup data, it was not until August of 1968—almost four years into the war—that a slight majority of Americans (53 percent) said that it had been a mistake to put boots on the ground in Vietnam (Page 82)

As recounted by the article’s author, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, and contributor Joe Samberg—both veterans of the youth counterculture—after less than a year, any basic civilizational restraints on the scene essentially disappeared. Printed signs arguing for the most basic limits on behavior (i.e., “No Heroin Dealers Here” in a neighborhood park) —many put up by long-term Black or working-class residents of the area— were almost universally torn down and thrown away. “Over time,” says Samberg, “those … came down and more and more people started using hard drugs. All the [hippie] stuff about higher consciousness was just sort of dropped.” (Page 83)

The “Scene” as it actually was didn’t last very long. As Gritz notes, within a few years—and certainly by the time of the publication of her article—the bright-colored human beings hanging out on Telegraph Avenue “barely even pretend[ed] to be hippies anymore.” Instead of the aspiring revolutionary poets or backroom chemists they had once been, most were simple dope fiends or winos. Samberg, quoted again, makes this point eloquently and explicitly, saying: “There’s no growth for people if they’re continuously on drugs. It started out with all this higher thinking— expanding your mind to become more conscious of what’s really going on in the universe.” But once the hard addictive drugs took over, “all of the big ideas disappeared.” (Page 84)

we now know that the founder of Earth Day was a domestically abusive murderer who killed at least one woman To quote NBC News: “Ira Einhorn was on stage hosting the first Earth Day event at the Fairmount Park in Philadelphia on April 22, 1970. Seven years later, police raided his closet and found the … body of his girlfriend inside a trunk.” Appropriately enough, she had been composted, using at-home techniques. (Page 85)

first—they said openly that they had wanted to trigger a race and class war by killing rich people and police officers and teaching “niggers” how to do the same. Manson’s dreamed-of conflict, which he called “Helter Skelter,” never happened, but not for want of effort. (Page 86)

Then came a true turning point, which some see as the end of the hippie era, at the Altamont rock concert. (Page 87)

As feminists (and quite a few homemakers) have noted, one especially unfortunate society-wide pattern to endure from Altamont until today has been the near-universal embrace of the darker side of the sexual revolution. As feminist writer Virginia Ironside points out for the Daily Mail “The sexual revolution of the swinging 60s—kick-started by the arrival of the pill—seems glamorous, exciting, and seductive when depicted in hit TV shows such as Mad Men. But … there was a bleaker side to such freedom.” (Page 87)

Further—as any veteran of Tinder or Grindr could attest today—another reason 1960s hipster “sex was so grim” was that physical intimacy had become so easy to get that romance and seduction nearly vanished. In an unintentionally hilarious passage, the Mail’s feminist author notes that working-class men temporarily became very attractive to upper-class office ladies because the art of actually talking to women never vanished entirely within their own “saloon society.” However, all too often, these fellows proved no more interested in long-term commitment than the lawyers and dentists they could out-patter. (Page 88)

Have sex only with people you actually like. “After a decade of sleeping around … indiscriminately,” she says, “girls of the 1960s eventually became fairly jaded about sex.” The solution? At least (Page 88)

for this author, recognize that “continual sex with different partners is … joyless, uncomfortable, and humiliating. One of the ingredients of a good sex life is, at the very least, a grain of affection between the two partners involved.” (Page 89)

Another well-known urban female author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, points out that “the days of free love weren’t hippie and care-free” for many young American women From the beginning, modern pop and hip culture was targeted at men, and “sexualized underage girls” to a degree we often forget today. Very young groupies were a constant feature of the 1960s and 1970s music scene, and rockers and movie actors quite openly slept with people who were basically kids. As Schaefer Riley points out, in one of the most famous dalliances of the era: “David Bowie took [famous ‘groupie’] Lori Maddox’s virginity when she was 15; soon afterward she was bedded by Jimmy Page.” In a written response to an entire modern-era article about Bowie’s preference for young women and girls, Harper’s editor and former scenester Rebecca Solnit summed up the zeitgeist of the time thusly: The dregs of the sexual revolution were what remained, and it was really sort of a counterrevolution (guys arguing that since sex was beautiful and everyone should have lots, everything goes and they could go at anyone; young women and girls with no way to say no and no one to help them stay out of harmful dudes’ way). The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls. (Page 89)

It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it OK, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong. (Page 90)

The conservative writer Midge Decter, attempting to sum up all of this in her classic Liberal Parents, Radical Children, famously said that the 1960s-born children of the American professional and managerial class were at once staggeringly spoiled and some of the “most neglected [kids] in the history of the world.” Decter was likely not far wrong, if wrong at all. (Page 90)

From Eisenhower’s perspective, “the loss of Vietnam to Communist control would lead to similar Communist victories in neighboring countries in Southeast Asia,” like Laos, Cambodia, and perhaps Thailand. This school of thought underlying American anti-Communist activity had a name: the domino theory During the Cold War, many senior Western military officers and policy analysts and professional political scientists believed a Communist military victory in one nation-state would lead to “Red” coups or takeovers in neighboring states, with “each falling like a perfectly aligned row of dominoes.” This theory was often invoked specifically in the context of Vietnam, with the U.S. National Security Council discussing it in their 1952 report on what was then called Indochina, and President Eisenhower, the former general, describing the decisive French defeat at Dien Bien Phu as a classic example of a “falling domino” or “domino falling.” (Page 91)

Objectively speaking, Eisenhower was correct: almost exactly this happened. Despite some frankly odd rearguard claims from academics in my field—for example, that “only Laos and Cambodia,” out of the Laos/Cambodia/Thailand triad, fell to communism—the plain reality is that the former North Vietnam, the former South Vietnam, all of Laos, and Cambodia were Communist states within several years of the 1973 U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. In Cambodia, the Communist takeover led directly to the horror of dictator Pol Pot’s killing fields, where “an estimated 1.7 million people died at the hands of the extremist, Communist regime,”23 and millions of other urbanites and intellectuals were forced into agricultural stoop labor and survived near-starvation only by eating (at very least) “frogs, snails, and insects.” (Page 91)

the hippies did “win,” but not in a way we should truly applaud. Their pro–free love, antiestablishment, anti-war, pro-drug ethos left a trail of destruction in its wake. The negative effect that it had on public attitudes toward the Vietnam War was a real, if minor, factor that contributed directly to the defeat of the domino theory strategy. And that defeat had exactly the devastating eventual effect on tens of millions of people that American leaders of the time predicted, as the dominoes fell in the rest of Southeast Asia. To some degree, however small, the Western hippies gleefully chanting “Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!!!” bear responsibility for the killing fields halfway across the world. (Page 92)

Lie #5 “The Founders Counted Slaves as ‘Three-Fifths of a Person’ and ‘the Only Victims of Lynchings’ Were Black” (Page 93)

The reality of both the constitutional three-fifth compromise and later Black history, once again, is far more messy and complex than the accepted narrative will allow. (Page 93)

Swain provides an answer that the various experts quoted so far have not: the three-fifths compromise was the most ethical position that would have been acceptable to both sides around the constitutional bargaining table in 1781. The founders essentially had to agree to it or the end result would have been either no United States at all or a country where the pro-slavery South was far more powerful than ended up being the case. Citing former Emory University president James Wagner, she argues that “the northern and southern states would never have agreed (Page 95)

to form a single union” absent some sort of deal allowing slaves to count toward the census totals at least in percentage form. “No three-fifths compromise,” Swain and Wagner claim, “no United States of America.” (Page 96)

compromise was the antislavery position: it was drawn up by those opposed to slavery, rather than by those who supported it. Put differently: “It wasn’t the racists of the South who wanted to count slave populations less than white populations; it was the abolitionists of the North.” Interestingly, given the commonplace claim that a racist United States once treated Black human beings as “two-thirds of a man,” it is worth noting that the ideal outcome for anti-racists would have been a decision to treat all Black slaves as zero-fifths of a person— reducing the legal population of the South as much as possible. At the time of the passage of the compromise, the only individuals advocating for treating African American slaves as “full men”—sometimes using that exact misleading language—were Southern slave owners! (Page 96)

While it was obviously an imperfect deal, the three-fifths compromise clearly had a positive impact on subsequent U.S. history. As Swain notes, the enslaved population of the American South had grown to more than 4 million persons by the time of the Civil War. Had all of these people each been counted as 100 percent of a voter by their masters—while being allowed to do zero percent of the voting—it is entirely possible that the congressional actions that led up to the War Between the States would never have happened, and slavery might “very well have lasted into the twentieth century.” On the other hand, had the Northern states simply attempted to forbid their Southern peers to count slaves, “the slave states would never have agreed to join the Union: they would have formed their own country.” (Page 96)

three-fifths compromise did not “deny the humanity of Blacks” but rather “affirmed it.” (Page 96)

Levinson states flatly that the Constitution is full of compromises that can accurately be called “lesser evils”—like the rule of senatorial composition that gives Delaware and Rhode Island voting power equal to that of Virginia or California. However, he says accurately, “the greater evil” would have been for these never to have taken place and thus for there to be “no Constitution at all.” More specifically, he makes the point that the three-fifths compromise in particular was an anti-slavery deal: Northern delegates “wanted … to deny slaves their personhood completely” for political purposes, and the ideal outcome for an anti-racist Black American would have been for disenfranchised slaves to count not as “whole men” but for as little as they did or even less. He is not wrong. (Page 97)

Abolitionists did not see the Constitution’s compromises as roadblocks to their future plans for emancipation. Ultimately, slave states agreed with abolitionists that it was a compromise favoring abolitionists, which is why they eventually judged the Constitution such a burden and threat to their way of life that they would secede and write a new slavery-friendly constitution. (Page 98)

Activists tend to see history as a series of simple binary choices. Any choice that involves compromise is unambiguously bad. It’s a way of looking at history that disallows any possibility of partial victories and judges all decisions by the standards of modern America. (Page 98)

very widespread belief among American youngsters is that lynching/posse justice, whipping, and even hanging were exclusively American institutions that exclusively targeted African Americans. (Page 99)

First, to open with the obvious, there are almost no actual lynchings in the United States of (Page 100)

America today. The official and hard-researched statistics on American lynchings, maintained by Tuskegee (a famous historically Black college) and the University of Missouri at Kansas City, stop in 1968—a year during in which no confirmed lynching took place. (Page 101)

no single year has witnessed more than ten lynchings or posse killings—nationwide and across all races and sexes— since 1936. (Page 101)

All told, more Blacks (3,446) than whites (1,297) were lynched during the usual 1882–1968 period of analysis, and no serious scholar denies this or the role played by racism in this barbaric practice. However, more than 1,000 whites were killed by lynch mobs, apparently before the Hispanic or Native totals are added in—and more whites than Blacks were lynched in a remarkable twenty-three states (Page 101)

extreme racialized violence was centered in the Deep South, with Alabama, for example, killing 299 Blacks and only 48 whites during the period under discussion. (Page 101)

mob justice (or mob “justice”) was very common and not always racial in nature in the wild postbellum and frontier era. (Page 101)

largest lynching in post-1882 American history involved almost entirely Caucasian victims. (Page 102)

Italian immigrants. (Page 102)

“Contrary to present day popular conception,” author Richard Emanuel opens, “lynching was not a crime committed exclusively against Black people.”18 Citing the overall figures provided earlier in this chapter, Emanuel points out that well over a quarter of all American lynchings between 1882 and 1968 involved a white victim. Obviously and horrifically, this “posse” pattern changed following the Civil War, when mob killings of Black Americans intensified. Interestingly, although this may in some cases be an artifact of demographics, seven U.S. states had “lynch law” at one point or another but killed only whites: “Arizona, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wisconsin.” (Page 104)

“The original targets of the Ku Klux Klan were Republicans, both Black and white,” Emanuel writes, and lynchings were simply “by far the most effective” of various forms of political terrorism carried out by the Klan’s night riders and members of similar organizations (Page 104)

The three-fifths compromise and the steady decline of posse killings— which, as noted in passing, involved at very least hundreds of Native Americans20 and Hispanics/Latinos21 in addition to the white and Black totals—hardly stand alone as steps taken by Western and indeed human civilization along the rocky road up from what we would today call barbarism. Let’s not forget: the passage of the American Civil Rights Act granting equal legal rights to U.S. women (1964), full adoption of the Geneva Conventions giving basic rights to all prisoners and civilians during wartime (1949), and plain rejection of the ancient Right of Conquest (1946) all occurred during the most recent eighty years of the existence of the human species. It almost cannot be overemphasized here, again, that life much prior to those dates—for members of all racial and ethnic and regional groups—was unbelievably harsh by the “if it saves JUST ONE LIFE[!!!]” standards of the contemporary era. (Page 106)

Hanging with a knotted rope noose was a common method of legal execution from the Colonial era until the twentieth century, with the first person ever hanged in the future United States being Caucasian cattle thief Daniel Frank. (Page 106)

academics contend that several thousand persons were hanged for witchcraft during the pre-Independence era. (Page 106)

The last American public hanging took place in 1936, in my adopted state of Kentucky, where a crowd of up to 30,000 assembled in Owensboro to watch the painful public execution of convicted rapist Rainey Bethea However, the last plain hanging did not take place until 1996, when Delaware murderer Billy Bailey breathed him his last For that matter, two other men—Charles Rodman Campbell and Westley Allan Dodd, both of the state of Washington—were also hanged during the early to mid1990s. The progress of “civilization” is upward, but slow. (Page 108)

This practice of organized flogging dates back to the very beginning of the country, if not before. The rules governing the American Colonial Navy, set down in 1775, state that a naval commander can whip a seaman up to but not beyond “twelve lashes upon his bare back with a cat-o’-nine tails.” In 1799, a fully independent U.S. Congress formalized this aspect of the naval code, passing a law allowing the commander of an American ship to “apply … twelve lashes on the bare back of a sailor or marine” except in rare cases where even “more were ordered by a court-martial.” (Page 108)

Military flogging and several of these other punishments were not eliminated [in the United States] until just before Southern slaves were freed: on “17 July 1862 … Congress finally abolished flogging entirely.” (Page 109)

Purely civilian whipping lasted even longer than the military variety: the New York Times ran a short and glad piece in 1972[!]33 noting that the last American state—Delaware, as it happens—had retired its civilian whipping post. Not long prior to that date, “the lash had been used as a punishment” for offenders of all races “for crimes ranging from robbery and larceny to wife-beating and embezzling.” (Page 109)

Lie #6 “European Colonialism Was—Empirically—a NoGood, Terrible, Very Bad Thing” (Page 111)

In response to perhaps the most obvious rebuttal to this argument—that the balance of risk and reward for subjects of a medieval-level African or Polynesian kingdom taken over by the British Empire was very different than that for modern American citizens conquered by, say, China would be —Robinson goes on to reject any cost-benefit analysis of colonialism on ethical grounds. Comparing the claim that colonial European rule was better for most of those to fall under it than anything that might have “happened in its absence” to defenses of domestic abuse used by lovers or by siblings like Pip’s loathsome sister in Great Expectations, he contends that this may be true but that does not matter. From his apparent perspective, morality is real and likely ultimate, and constructing hospitals and one-room schoolhouses “doesn’t provide one with a license to rob and murder people.” (Page 113)

The Belgian Congo was an exceptional case—and opponents of Robinson’s brief are quick to point out, a sort of plantation administered directly by the king rather than a “proper” colonial possession of Belgium However, even the British Empire, often lauded as an alternative to Leopold-style brutality, was not without her sins during the colonial era. While Robinson concedes that some British military campaigns, like the suppression of the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya, were “better than the alternative,” he points out that these involved “mass detention” and other practices that would be considered significant violations of human rights law today. (Page 114)

While noting that the building of the Mongol Empire brought “destruction” to Eurasia, authors Jerry H. Bentley, Herbert F. Ziegler, and Heather E. Streets-Salter (also cited briefly back in chapter one) go on to note that the Great Khans also “sponsored interaction among peoples of different societies and linked Eurasian lands more directly than ever before.” In between building monuments out of human crania, they “positively encouraged travel and communication over long distances,” which aided in the expansion of “trade, diplomatic travel, missionary efforts, and movements of peoples to new lands.” Overall, “long distance travel and trade became much less risky,” spawning a sort of new Golden (Page 114)

Age for a group of states stretching from (conquered) Han China to Western Europe (Page 115)

European conquerors? Well, those are treated a bit differently (if, again, not always unfairly). In the same text, the authors say: “The building of empires is an old story in world history. By the 19th century, however, European observers recognized that empires of their day were different from those of earlier times.” Scholars, it is noted, “began to speak of imperialism”—defining it as harsh and generally Western “domination over subject lands in the larger world.” While it is never coherently explained exactly how Western imperial colonies were different from or worse than those of earlier eras, the artificial dichotomy again makes for some entertaining moments: at one point, eighteenth-century Europeans are chided for “interference in the Ottoman and Quing Empires in Southwest and East Asia” (italics mine) Shouldn’t that be an oppressor-oppressor conflict and thus no harm, no foul? (Page 115)

Moral arguments about the objective or unique evil of the colonial era assume the existence and general acceptance—in pre-colonial Black and Arab and Native states —of an essentially modern ethics, where acts like aggressive war or the harsh domination of once-conquered territory were seen as not merely unfortunate in practical terms but evil, and indigenous governments did not themselves often engage in these actions. In reality, there is essentially no evidence that truly modern, post–right-of-conquest moral or legal standards (Page 115)

existed anywhere on earth before the modern era—Iroquois or Hawaiian or Ashanti nobles were probably no more or less ruthless than their white opponents—but there is considerable evidence of the hard material benefits of colonialism. (Page 116)

Objectively speaking, he points out, there is considerable evidence that post-1800 Western colonialism “led to improvements in living conditions” for the majority of people living in the developing world, and certainly that it caused less of a “grave human toll” than subsequent post-or anti-colonial policy regimes like African socialism. (Page 116)

Citing previous work by Juan and Pierskalla, Gilley argues all data shows “significant social, economic, and political gains” under colonialism, which persisted into the postcolonial era for many former colonies. The list of these is extensive, including improvements in schooling, health care, core infrastructure, administration, rights for women and minorities, and even the hated but important category of effective tax and revenue collection. (Page 116)

most Western powers, certainly including Britain and France, eventually ended slavery and peonage where trod their boot, as well as “enfranchis[ing] untouchable and historically excluded communities.” (Page 116)

Western colonial regimes were measurably seen as legitimate by the majority of their nonwhite subjects until very nearly the end of the colonial era. There are several common quantitative metrics of national legitimacy, and per these: “Until very late, European colonialism appears to have been highly legitimate and for good reasons.” Millions of human beings moved into areas of “more intensive colonial rule” from less intensively developed areas or areas of indigenous rule, worked hard for colonial governments, utilized colonial networks services like medical centers and high schools, voted in colonial governments that were often dominated at the local level by Indigenous persons, and most notably often fought to the death in the military and police forces of the sirkars—the Western governments. Until the revolutionary beginning of the truly modern era, “the ‘preservers,’ ‘facilitators’ and [even] ‘collaborators’ of colonialism … far outnumbered the ‘resisters’ …” (Page 117)

the residents “faced grave security threats from rival groups” and preferred being ruled by “a modernized and liberal state” than by their foemen. (Page 117)

In very recent years a few other scholars, mostly housed on the political right, have dared to make similar points. Writing for the Hoover Institution in 2015, Bruce Thornton noted that the very word “colonialism” has become a synonym for oppression and a “crude epithet” used to target the West by representatives of other civilizations As a result, many Westerners—including some capable of making foreign policy decisions— have become consumed by “self-loathing,” which our opponents are glad to take advantage of. However, Thornton argues, this is the result of an amoral strategic gambit: the currently popular Traditions and Encounters–style definition of colonialism as a uniquely Western institution considered illegitimate by the rest of the world was developed specifically by enemies of our society, and most powerful societies in fact engaged in colonialism in the past—sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. (Page 118)

Per Thornton and his sources, “the simplistic discrediting of colonialism and its evil twin, imperialism,” began with Marxist activists during the first (Page 118)

quarter of the twentieth century. Specifically, Communist scholars saw Western colonial activity as providing an exit door explanation for one of their beloved dialectic’s greatest failures: the near-total absence of classbased revolutions in postindustrial western Europe. Vladimir Lenin himself, in 1917, “faced with the failure” of essentially all classical Marxist the European predictions about working-class bourgeoisie, wrote Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued essentially that colonialism made all of the world into one interlinked economic unit, with the peoples of the Third World serving as the proletariat for the globe. All of them by definition had to be oppressed, and these “Indigenous colonized peoples” might well prove the fulcrum to finally topple Evil Global Capitalism. revolution against (Page 119)

As Thornton correctly puts it: “Leftist idealization of the colonial Third World and its demonization of the capitalist West have survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discrediting of Marxism, and become received wisdom both in academe and in popular culture.” (Page 119)

Historically, colonialism, or plain conquest, has been a characteristic of all societies with strength enough to engage in it. (Page 119)

In addition to the Communist and notoriously expansionist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, a short list of famous historical colonizers the might Mediterranean and Southern Asia, the Huns in Eastern Europe, the Mongols in China, the [Ottomans] in the Middle East and the Balkans, the Bantu in include: “the Romans the Arabs throughout in Gaul, (Page 119)

Southern Africa, the Khmer in East Asia, the Aztecs in Mexico, the Iroquois in the Northeast … the Sioux throughout the Great Plains.” Rather clearly, colonial expansion is not a Western “thing,” or a white one, or—looking across these examples—invariably a bad one. (Page 120)

Enthusiasm for at least the material improvements provided by Western colonizers—even if tempered like that of Achebe or the Facts of Indonesia writers—is not difficult to understand. At some baseline level, no one disputes that European colonial powers provided much or most of the essential infrastructure that many Third World states still rely on today. In an interesting and on-point case study, a recent Bloomberg piece (“How Overlooked Colonial Railways Could Revolutionize Transportation in Africa”)21 suggests an innovative way for modern African countries to rapidly revamp their transportation networks: simply by making use of the dozens of colonial-era transit networks that were operated and maintained for decades but are too often now simply crumbling into the landscape. (Page 123)

Prior to colonialism, Africa could perhaps best be described as diverse and dangerous. Focusing on West Africa, the Black How Africans Underdeveloped Africa author describes the region as “a highly heterogeneous place” containing several impressive state-level societies ruled by stable hereditary kings, some intermediate societies including chiefdoms and large tribes, and “numerous small un-stratified tribal entities.” Peace was an extreme rarity: the entire area, to no more or less an (Page 124)

extent than Polynesia or inland eastern Europe, suffered “the usual problems of fractured and fractious tribal regions around the world.” In the least developed tropical forest zones, warfare and raiding between tribal groups were constant, “endemic.” However, even in larger societies like the Islamic and highly “civilized” Sokoto Caliphate, slavery was a key component of the local economy and thus “wars and slave raiding”—the latter often at expedition scale—took place constantly. (Page 125)

As this indicates, colonialism frequently brought a reduced level of violence to African territories. The aims of colonizers were not, to be sure, generally noble in today’s terms. In most cases, the two primary goals of colonial powers were (1) developing their post-scramble African territories using then-modern technology and (2) integrating them “into the emerging global economy.” This was all done so that the new lands could be ruthlessly exploited—with products like gold and rubber shipped down proper highways to overseas markets. (Page 126)

And when the hated-and-loved Westerners left, it often departed. Although this has been largely forgotten today, and stable African states like Ghana and Nigeria have certainly joined the mainline global order, the retreat of the colonial powers from Africa was accompanied by an extraordinary orgy of violence. Across the continent, attempts to return to preexisting systems or to restructure governments around newer models like (Page 126)

Marxism—often by intentionally channeling the wine-dark emotions of tribalism—resulted in brutal conflict that reached far beyond the ballot box. (Page 127)

The continent experienced many “revolutions,” like the 1964 Zanzibar massacre of 5,000 to 20,000 Indian and Arab noncombatants by Black Africans, the Kenyan Mau Mau uprising and its aftermath, graphic ethnic violence in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam, and the first modern round of Hutu-Tutsi violence in Rwanda. (Page 127)

Obviously, as left-leaning scholars are wont to point out, some post-1960s bloodshed in Africa traces to the creation of colonial nation-states, which shoved together ill-matched groups that had not previously been in contact to the same degree. However, as a new generation of academics is beginning to note, much of it instead reflected the return of long-running tribal conflicts that had been suppressed or minimized for decades by colonial authorities. (Page 127)

people groups that retain much or all of their precolonial identities are more likely to participate in general violence, suggesting that a significant source of contemporary conflict is the resurgence of old feuds between preexisting tribes. In fact, many weak states can be accurately said to exist as a mere thin veneer over powerful preexisting kingdoms and chiefdoms. Running some regressions and crosstabulations, Paine finds striking evidence that this is true. From the very beginning of the postcolonial era until about 1990, thirty of the thirty-two “major civil war onsets” he analyzes (i.e., 93.8 percent) took place in countries that contained at least one pre-colonial state population. (Page 127)

Indeed, absent contemporary academic and elite media bias, there would be no logical reason for any intelligent person to assume that this was the case. Any short list of the greatest conquerors in history would have to include the Mongols/Moghuls, the Ottoman Turks, the “Black” Moors (who conquered Spain and fought Charles Martel deep inside Europe), the Middle Eastern Muslims after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the New World’s Aztecs and Incas, and so forth. The legendary Mongol leader Genghis Khan alone killed so many people—up to 10 percent of the population of Earth at the time—that he removed 700,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and cooled the climate For most of post-Roman history, the archetypal “colonizer” was a well-mounted brown man waving a sword. (Page 128)

Today, suffice it to say, this is not the case: genetic and linguistic evidence suggests that Bantu dominance of the vast African continent followed not only some assimilation but also a fair amount of displacement and annihilation of preexisting peoples. And once Africa was Black, peace did not arrive. From the eleventh or twelfth century onward, multiple large and aggressive Bantu kingdoms flourished in the new lands—including not merely rough diamonds like Shaka’s Zululand, but also the legendary Mali associated with warrior kings Sundiata Keita and Mansa Musa, and such places as the Mutapa Empire, which ruled over much of what is now Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique from her legendary fortress city of Great Zimbabwe and apparently traded as far afield as China. (Page 129)

Lie #7 “American Use of Nukes to End World War Two Was ‘Evil’ and ‘Unjustified’” (Page 133)

An important element in properly analyzing any historical moment is to view it in context and to truly step into the shoes of the people making difficult-to-impossible choices at that precise point in time. Historical hindsight is 20/20, but truly looking at the messy circumstances of the end of World War Two makes it impossible to justify modern armchair-generals’ analyses that smugly dismiss America as uncomplicatedly evil. (Page 133)

While any human death is tragic, or so it is conventional for humans to pretend, Mesika makes the additional point that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were acts of war that primarily harmed civilians, in violation of the contemporary ethical rule that “wars should be fought between armies.” In Hiroshima, at least 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed by the dropping of Little Boy, but the usual estimate for civilian casualties is far higher and closer to 80,000. Even more remarkably, in Nagasaki, between 50,000 and 80,000 people were killed, but this toll included only “around 150 Japanese soldiers.” In contrast, at least 8,200 Korean semi-slaves, who were being forced to support the Japanese war effort by laboring inside the Mitsubishi munitions plant and other factories producing military matériel, were killed in Nagasaki. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave new meaning to collateral damage,” the Perspective article concludes: “The number of civilians killed seems unreasonably high in relation to the number of soldiers killed.” (Page 134)

Stalin’s government successfully completed its first nuclear weapons in 1949 and “the world … came close to nuclear brinkmanship in 1962” during the Cuban missile crisis. In this context, Mesika contends, the World War Two nuclear bombings can be seen as a triple failure: brutal, fatal mostly to innocents, and ineffective in terms of preventing future wars and conflicts. How, one might wonder, could such nonproductive atrocities ever be morally justified?! (Page 134)

Interestingly, in the same article, McKinney, Sagan, and Weiner make a rarer claim, arguing that we should never have thought it necessary to intimidate Japan to the point of unconditional surrender, which is clearly what the back-to-back American atomic attacks were designed to do. They cite the well-known words of the Potsdam Declaration that laid out the terms for Japanese surrender (“There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest … stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals”)5 … but not approvingly. Instead, these authors note an alternative suggestion that was made during the Potsdam Conference: that the Allies promise not to try Japanese emperor Hirohito for war crimes or other offenses and to grant several additional concessions in exchange for a negotiated Japanese surrender. (Page 136)

The paper’s lengthy and occasionally moving primary article focuses on Claude Eatherly, who participated in the August 6, 1945, bombing of Hiroshima and then spent decades flagellating himself for his role in a way that made him “an international celebrity” within the peace movement. (Page 137)

In 1957 the widely read Newsweek article “American Hero in Handcuffs” described how Eatherly, who had been arrested in Texas after robbing the PO boxes of two Fort Worth–area post offices, had been treated for a variety of mental conditions at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Waco, forged a sizable check in New Orleans, and even “been involved in a series of stick-ups in small town grocery stores.” His defense in the federal post office case, presented by a skilled team involving a lawyer and a psychiatrist, focused on the argument that Eatherly “suffered from a guilt complex stemming … from his role in the bombing of Hiroshima.” (Page 137)

As even one of the “Evil” debaters for the Perspective—albeit the homie Justified Evil—points out in one sentence: “The bombings ended WWII.” Across nearly a month of bickering during the Potsdam Conference and then after the Potsdam Declaration (“between July 17 and August 2, 1945” for the latter), the Supreme War Councillors of Japan simply “could not reach a consensus … regarding whether or not to surrender.” Serious (Page 139)

people expected deliberations to go on for perhaps months longer while tens of thousands of American and Japanese soldiers died in major sea battles. (Page 140)

Instead, the United States dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima August 6, 1945, and Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9. The war ended almost immediately: the final papers announcing Japanese surrender were drafted and signed on August 15, 1945. As the debate site points out: “Hirohito was pushed by America’s destructive bombings to break the deadlock within his War Council and agree to the terms of the declaration. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki officially ended the Second World War.” (Page 140)

Although this is often forgotten or minimized today, one key reason for the staggering military—and civilian—death tolls from the Second World War was the almost totally unregulated use of powerful conventional weapons such as incendiaries and “bunker buster” bombs. While Western militaries went to great lengths to minimize collateral damage during recent conflicts like Gulf War Two, World War Two belligerents not infrequently leveled entire cities, citing what military fiction writer S. M. Stirling has referred to as the “hard cheese: there’s a war on” doctrine (Page 140)

As several of the sources given above point out, just one typical Allied bombing raid over Tokyo, combined with the Japanese attempt to stop the enemy B-29s via aerial combat and the use of ground-based weapons, resulted in the deaths of 120,000 to 130,000 people—many of them burned alive. Had nondeployment of Fat Man and Little Boy resulted in six to (Page 140)

twelve more months of military conflict, “the 250,000 casualties from the atomic bombs could have easily reached millions.” (Page 141)

Citing contemporary supporters of U.S. president Truman, and noting that both the Russki Red Army and the American military (via Operations Coronet and Olympic) had already drawn up plans for enhanced invasion-style operations against the Japanese homeland, Hanson estimates that “a million … casualties and countless Japanese dead were averted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year.” (Page 141)

Mesika’s estimates of American and British losses during the pre-1945 Pacific War are bad enough, but the size and intensity of oceanic World War Two battles were actually increasing substantially as Allied forces “island-hopped” closer to Japan herself. As Hanson says, the Okinawa campaign, the last battle in the island-hopping strategic effort, which was fought between U.S. and Japanese forces from April 1 to July 2 of 1945, provides some actual basis for comparison. That struggle for the (Page 141)

fifth-largest Japanese island, outside of the four much larger mainland islands, caused “the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy.” (Page 142)

Hanson points out that the single firebombing raid against Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945, took more lives than either atomic strike, “incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown.” (Page 142)

Remarkably, as that figure indicates, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki in fact represented “the worst single-day loss of life in military history”—or even during World War Two. (Page 142)

Japan’s army was itself (Page 142)

known and widely criticized for massacres of innocent civilians, and these actions were often widely cheered back among the home islands. (Page 143)

The Imperial Japanese military essentially murdered 10 to 15 million Chinese noncombatants over the course of the war and engaged in similar atrocities “throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria.” Even by the very end of the conflict—late summer of 1945— Hanson notes that Japanese soldiers were actively “killing thousands of Asians each month.” The Japanese not infrequently wiped out entire Indigenous populations before retreating from a particular large island or theater of battle. (Page 143)

In early 1944, for example, the leadership team of a major Japanese prisoner of war camp (“Taiwan POW Camp overall H.Q.”) issued an order blandly titled “Kill All Prisoners Order,”10 which specified exactly when and how recalcitrant prisoners were to be murdered. (Page 143)

legacy of the post-samurai Japanese belief that the act of surrender was inherently dishonorable. (Page 143)

Mengele-like (if far less well-known) Unit 731. (Page 144)

Largely as a result of the combination of forced starvation and forced labor, at least 25 percent of all Allied prisoners of war —both Asian and Western—died during what the History Collection tactfully refers to as “their residences in Japanese encampments” during World War Two. (Page 144)

“a rate more than seven times higher than that of [Western] prisoners of war … under Nazi Germany.” (Page 144)

largest American POW death toll in the entire war took place when a U.S. submarine sank the Arisan Maru, killing 1,783 American servicemen. (Page 144)

Nanjing Massacre, often known in the West as the “Rape of Nanking,” Japanese troops captured the Republican Chinese capital of Nanjing, “disarm[ed] the surrendering (Page 144)

population” of soldiers and militia defenders, and then proceeded to murder 200,000 Chinese males over the next four to six weeks. (Page 145)

Japanese Order “Riku Shi Mitsu No. 198”13 commanded Japanese forces in the field in China to “no longer adhere to the restrictive term ‘prisoner of war,’” a status carrying with it legal protections, such as the right to peacefully surrender. As a result of this terse series of commands, nearly a quarter of a million human beings died, mostly horribly. (Page 145)

One common series of procedures sought “to explore the vertical transmission of … syphilis from mother to child” and involved women being both impregnated via rape and then infected with the disease. Following this initial brace of atrocities, different women “were vivisected at various stages” so that the effect of syphilis on the mother and fetus could be observed as the infection progressed. (Page 145)

After successful Western attacks on the primary Japanese lines of supply left Japanese soldiers without access to food, multiple Imperial units turned to the killing and cannibalism of Allied POWs. (Page 145)

cannibalism was used by Japanese soldiers as a power move even when normal food was also available (Page 146)

“The widespread practice of cannibalism by Japanese soldiers in the Asia-Pacific War was something more than merely random incidents perpetrated by individuals or small groups subject to extreme conditions … [but rather] a systematic and organized military strategy,” and that “cannibalism was often a systematic activity conducted by whole squads and under the command of officers.” (Page 146)

In the December 1946 issue of the Atlantic magazine, in a piece to which President Harry Truman later responded in print, prominent American physicist and (secondary) atomic bomb designer Karl T. Compton quoted an “intelligent, well-informed” Japanese officer as to what would have happened absent both atomic bombings. Per that fellow, directly: “We [Japanese] would have kept fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would have not been defeated.” By this, the man meant something unique and culturally specific, which more than likely explains Japanese treatment of Allied captives who gave up voluntarily: in that scenario, the Japanese nation would have been broken on the horns of war but “would not have been disgraced by surrender.” (Page 147)

easy in retrospect “to look back and say that Japan was already a beaten nation” but that there was almost no contemporary evidence of this. (Page 147)

Compton reminds readers that most Japanese rankers believed—Baghdad Bob style—that they were winning the war until almost the day it ended. (Page 147)

To many, even major defeats like the bloody loss of Iwo Jima “were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced on and utterly annihilated.” While the specific soldier Compton relies on did not believe this, being made suspicious by “inconsistencies in official reports,” he claims that “none” of his barracks mates understood the desperate nature of Japan’s actual military position until “one night … at ten-thirty, his regiment was called to hear the reading of the surrender proclamation.” (Page 147)

And, notably, that would have been a best-case rather than a worst-case scenario. In a darkly plausible worst-case scenario that was war-gamed for by MacArthur, “the Japanese government lost control of its people and … millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerilla warfare” within the mountain forests that cover the larger islands of the Japanese archipelago, and it might well have taken “a million American troops ten years to master the situation.” Compton argues convincingly that this was fully possible, if not likely. As he points out, there was even an attempted coup d’état by militarists against the Japanese government as World War Two drew to an end, now referred to as the Kyūjō Incident. Even following the American deployment of nuclear weapons, Compton wrote, “for several days it was touch and go” as to whether the Japanese population would agree to their state’s formal surrender, or whether a pro-war faction would “seize control and continue the war.” (Page 148)

As Compton and several other sources for this chapter point out, the original Potsdam ultimatum from the United States and the Allies, which called for the unconditional surrender of Japan, was given on July 26, 1945. The Japanese premier totally rejected this demand in a formal statement just a few days later, “scorning [it] as unworthy of official notice.” Then, on August 6 and 9, the sun bombs were deployed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “On the following day, August 10, Japan declared its intention to surrender,” the leadership of the island powerhouse accepting exactly the Potsdam terms on August 14, 1945. Millions lived. (Page 148)

This was the peace that the West wanted, deserved, and—thanks to temporary technological superiority—got. Once Hitler’s proudest and strongest ally, Japan today may well fill that same role for the United States. As the writer Paul Fussell once said, controversially but accurately: “Thank God for the atom bomb.” (Page 149)

Lie #8 “Unprovoked ‘White Flight,’ Caused by Pure Racism, Ruined America’s Cities” (Page 150)

tellings of this story—“fled” American cities for racist and unethical reasons, leaving behind decaying slums, and then used harsh and unprovoked legal strictures like the Rockefeller Drug Laws to replace previous systems of racialized oppression. (Page 150)

“racism” as a very primary reason for what she calls white flight, alongside a few economic motives Boustan also contends that the urban whites of the 1960s abandoned their former homes because of a biased desire to avoid “a large black migration from the rural South.” (Page 150)

In recent academic writings, this kind of take on racist white flight is often combined with the idea that unnecessarily harsh codes of law are today used to regulate minority populations by modern whites, especially those whites “left behind” in diverse integrated areas. One of the bestselling books in modern social science, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow—a text assigned in probably hundreds of schools, which has its own curricular materials and study guides available online6—makes exactly this latter claim. To Alexander, the conventional assumption that institutional racism ended in the 1950s and 1960s (via Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, etc.) is incorrect. Instead, the White (Page 151)

Man uses tools like the War on Drugs as a substitute for the Black Codes of segregation. (Page 152)

If this even needs to be said, there are serious practical and logical problems with Alexander’s major claims. Most Black and Hispanic citizens are not convicted felons, and—unlike historical serfs—most people who are felons (rapists, etc.) have diminished social status because they personally chose to do something very bad. Nonviolent drug offenders actually make up less than 10 percent of prisoners held in the state and federal hoosegows nationally, and even a left-leaning site like Felonvoting.procon.org admits that the most common single crime for which male offenders (across all races) are incarcerated is murder. (Page 152)

In a fascinating and dead-serious academic article published in the Journal of Urban Economics back in 1992,9 Robert A. Margo finds that one big factor driving American population mobility was the simple fact that, post–World War Two and post-Levittown, suburbs existed and many or most people suddenly had the money to move to them. Using census data from 1950 onward, Margo finds the unsurprising but rarely noted “significant positive effect of [rising] household income on the probability of a suburban residence.” According to his tables and summary abstract, about half of all “population suburbanization between 1950 and 1980” can be attributed solely to the then-contemporary rise in American household income. This was true across all races, in statistical models with other major variables adjusted for. (Page 153)

In probably my favorite example of this trend, in the field of education, the legendary John Ogbu cut through a fog of complex concepts like “stereotype threat” and “implicit assumptions” and “embedded subtle bias” to point out an obvious primary predictor of the relatively low performance of many minority students and good-time kids: they study a lot less on average than their peers Similarly, the heterodox social scientist John R. Lott Jr. has on various occasions taken the time to point out what empirically seems to actually reduce crime: respectively, more good cops on the street and taxpayers keeping legal guns at home The same sort of commonsensically obvious predictors exist here: the largest factor driving Americans to move to the suburbs was simply that, by the 1960s, they existed. (Page 154)

Here again we encounter the strange face of well-done but almost forgotten history: the fact that many roads were made of dirt or gravel, and the fact that most Yanks simply did not have two nice cars per household until very recently. The impact of these norms changing was significant. (Page 154)

Between the years 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of those U.S. central cities that had existed in 1950 “declined by 17 percent” despite large-scale population growth inside the country overall and a population surge of “72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole” (italics mine). After running this calculation, Baum-Snow comes to the obvious conclusion that “the construction of new … highways has contributed markedly to center-city population decline.” His explanation for why this happened (“changes in the amenity value of suburbs”) is simplicity itself: suburbs and exurbs become pleasant places to live—rather than God-forsaken rural hinterlands—when people can easily get to them and work in them. (Page 155)

that They conclude this model explains about 60 percent of suburbanization at least between 1940 and 1970—and that “falling automobile prices,” along with the “rising real incomes” that were also mentioned by Dr. Margo, was the most important of the factors that they analyze. Again, Kopecky and Suen’s explanation for the pattern they observe is not rocket surgery: “The adoption of the private vehicle … combined with rising income levels, encouraged movement to less dense areas where housing was more affordable.” Interestingly, urban population growth during this same period—which obviously would have included the Black and immigrant migrations that are often described almost as the only force behind white out-migration—turned out to have fairly little impact on suburbanization when examined as a dependent variable in a multivariate academic model. (Page 156)

Simply put, the sole reason for a white taxpayer not wanting to move to 1990s Harlem or send their son to Compton Centennial High School might not be “racism,” and racism alone does not explain urban white departure in the wake of Black (or Third World) migration. Ethnic groups often clash with one another and frequently boast very different crime rates. An entire academic paradigm known as the racial proxy hypothesis centers on the argument that post-integration “white exodus … is primarily motivated by socioeconomic rather than racial concerns.” (Page 157)

In 1999, the academic authors Julie Berry Cullen and Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) assessed the impact of crime on urban, particularly white “out-migration.”18 Strikingly, across a set of good-size cities, they find a direct and measurable relationship: “Each additional reported crime is associated with a roughly one-person decline in city population.” Put another way, a roughly 10% increase in crime within a typical city would “correspond to a 1% decline” in the population of the city. (Page 157)

crime causes urban decay, which is then followed by increasing poverty. Or, more precisely put: “Causality appears to run from rising crime rates to city depopulation,” and not infrequently from there to urban collapse. Detroit wept. (Page 158)

Between 1963 and 1993, following a number of liberalizing changes to the criminal justice system murders jumped from a baseline of 8,640 to a peak of 24,530. Forcible rapes increased from 17,650 to 106,010. Robberies, armed and otherwise, surged from 116,470 to 659,870. Violent aggravated assaults leapt from 174,210 to an unbelievable 1,135,610.20 This crime was concentrated in large urban areas to a remarkable degree—Cullen and Levitt accurately note that the large-city crime rate in 1993 was four times the small-city rate and seven times the rural rate—and due heavily if not primarily to minority “perps.” (Page 158)

While this has often been minimized by social scientists, the 1960s riots had significant negative impacts on many typical American cities where they took place (Page 159)

Thomas Sowell noted that, before the 1967 and 1968 riots, “Detroit’s black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country” and a rate of unemployment not far above 3 percent. Contra the prevailing—and academically taught— narrative that the deep-seated misery and despair of Black Detroiters caused the riots, Sowell points out that these mass disturbances themselves caused “the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair.” Since 1968 (per 1970 decennial census data), the population of Detroit has fallen from 1,514,063 to just 632,464, an astonishing decline of 58 percent Those who fled the convulsing city came in all shades. (Page 160)

Urban desegregation busing, like many another bad idea, began with legal rulings and noble intentions. Obviously, in 1954, the landmark Brown v. Board decision of the United States Supreme Court legally desegregated all American schools. However, because of the racially (and even ethnically) homogenous nature of many American neighborhoods during this period, the majority of American schools remained primarily ebony or alabaster institutions. In response to this “problem,” SCOTUS issued a later and lesser-known decision, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971), which ruled that lesser federal courts could mandate busing—long-distance transshipment of students—as “a further integration tool to achieve racial balance.” (Page 160)

A widely discussed large-sample Gallup poll conducted in 1973 found that only 4 percent of whites and 9 percent of Blacks supported the busing of schoolchildren beyond their immediate neighborhoods. (Page 160)

Across the United States, non-white students generally had to travel even greater distances than white ones to get to their new bad school because of the relative sizes of the two populations and their distribution regionally. “It’s abusive to our children, who need to be in their own neighborhood,” one Black mother in St. Louis said poignantly. “Why uproot our babies?”31 Despite this, however, most major cities adopted the practice and kept it around for years—albeit sometimes unwillingly, given that essentially any federal judge could order busing between two nearby districts. (Page 161)

Once again, more than a few weary urbanites responded by leaving for the green grass of suburbia: the adoption of unpopular “mandatory integration” policies and the resulting increase in in-school conflict led to still more white flight. Ironically, this migration, coupled with the movement of many other white children into Catholic and private schools, effectively neutralized most pro-integration effects that busing could have had. Most large urban school districts rapidly became majority non-white— and remain so to a striking extent today. In contemporary Boston, the inside-city-limits population is more than 50 percent white, but only 13 percent of Boston Public Schools students are non-Hispanic whites. (Page 161)

the idea of nonaggressive “community policing,” and decades of liberal dominance of most big-city judiciaries. (Page 162)

backlash in favor of “Broken Windows Policing,” and increasing police and prosecutorial head-count, finally ended “the new normal for crime” in the mid-1990s (Page 162)

toward policing Following the riots after the death of George Floyd in May of 2020, a civic and even official backlash left departments “demoralized, debilitated, and in some cases, defunded.” The impact of this can be measured empirically, with the key independent variable being police stops and arrests—the most basic one-on-one interactions between law enforcement officers and potentially criminal citizens. In New York City, the NYPD “logged 45,000 fewer” arrests between June and December 2020 than they had the year before—and the city saw 100+ homicides more than had previously been the case, an increase of 58 percent. In Chicago, the exact same pattern was visible: Windy City cops “made 31,000 fewer arrests—a 53% decline as murders rose 65%.” In the Kentucky metroplex of Louisville, stops (vehicle) dropped 35 percent and arrests dropped 42 percent, while “homicides jumped 87%.” (Page 162)

In Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd was killed and a city that I focus on during the piece, police reduced their routine traffic stops an astonishing 80 percent from 2019 levels beginning the week after May 25, 2020. May 25 of that year was the specific date Mr. Floyd died. In addition to the decline in routine auto stops, stops of suspicious cars, “defined as those thought to have been involved in a crime,” dropped 24 percent. Stops of suspicious persons/individuals declined 39 percent. Obviously, crime surged—“And data from Chicago and other cities indicate that Minneapolis officers hardly pulled back alone.” A detailed article in Bloomberg, from which I drew some of these stats, stated the obvious: the primary explanation for all this was likely “pullback—police reducing their proactive activity in the wake of public criticism of their performance.” (Page 163)

From the start of the year to last week [March 31, 2016], police made only 20,908 recorded investigative stops… . [O]ver the same period last year, there were 157,346 recorded stops.”* (Page 164)

Journalist Chris Dorsey’s recent article on the leftugee phenomenon opens: “America is on the move like never before… . [T]he top five states seeing a mass exodus are all Democrat-controlled.”40 According to U.S. Census data, the sizable blue states of California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York have lost a total of 4 million residents in the recent past—just since the latest decennial census, with migration picking up speed more recently. Remarkably, the population of the state of California declined between 2010 and 2020, apparently for the first time on record. In contrast—this time according to data provided by U-Haul—“the top five states to see the greatest influx of new residents include the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona.” (Page 165)

Following a hushed answer of “Apparently not,” many citizens fled, and population losses for Denver accrued to the benefit of nearby suburbs like Sterling Ranch. Local builder Brock Smethills, senior executive of the Sterling Ranch Development Company, summed up post-riot growth in one sentence: “People are migrating to places where they feel safe and secure (Page 165)

and can be left alone.” Throughout what sometimes sounds like an ad for the burbs—the inner Denver suburbs are described in one paragraph as “model communit[ies] of the future,” combining “natural open lands … and … smart home technologies”—Forbes essentially approves, saying: “For Denver residents who witnessed the lawlessness of last August’s riots, Sterling Ranch is not only a smart community … it was also a smart move.” (Page 166)

the data-rich final pages of Dorsey’s article make the point that citizens living in many post–George Floyd, post-COVID blue cities would like to GTFO. According to one recent survey, “42 percent of San Francisco Bay Area tech workers and about 40 percent of New Yorkers” would leave their cities immediately if they could find another in-person job elsewhere or permanently work on a fully remote basis. Dorsey sums up the poll’s findings as “It’s not that they want to live in these expensive [and violent] urban centers”; it’s that they want to keep eating. “They feel they have to if they want to stay employed … for now.” (Page 166)

Lie #9 “‘Southern Strategy’ Racism Turned the Solid South Republican” (Page 167)

A (literally) textbook version of this thesis can be found in A People and a Nation. The authors state that “Nixon pursued a highly pragmatic ‘southern strategy’ to attract white southerners to the Republican Party”1 (which American Pageant calls “a clever but cynical plan” that involved “appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, soft pedaling civil rights, and opposing school busing”). (Page 167)

As the iconic Carol Swain of Vanderbilt University notes, in an address that became a widely viewed video from Prager University, the Democratic Party opposed “virtually every major civil rights initiative” from its founding until the modern era. In a sentence worth quoting in full, Swain points out that “the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, imposed segregation, perpetrated lynchings, and fought against the Civil Rights Acts of the 1950s and 1960s.” (Page 171)

The American Democratic Party, appropriately symbolized by the jackass, began in 1829 as a rightleaning populist party headed by Andrew Jackson, with a heavy base of support in the slave states. In contrast, the Republican Party was established in 1854 as an explicitly anti-slavery party, with a primary political goal of blocking “the spread of slavery into the new western territories of the United States.” When this effort failed, and the time came for the future of the peculiar institution to be decided on the battle-field, a Republican president—Abraham Lincoln—served as supreme commander of the American/Union forces throughout the 1861–1865 Civil War, which broke the Confederacy. Barely a week after the final surrender of Confederate forces, Mr. Lincoln was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth—a partisan Democrat. (Page 171)

if the two political parties flipped quickly and significantly on issues of civil rights, “one would expect that to show up in the electoral results” during the election years that followed in immediate sequence after 1964. In fact, this simply did not occur. As we saw with former Dixiecrats, only one of the twenty-one Democratic senators who voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act ever changed parties to became a Republican. (Page 174)

In full context, Atwater’s point seems to be that, while “dog whistles” may sometimes (Page 174)

work, race qua race was, by a date more than forty years in the past, already a fairly insignificant driver of voter behavior. (Page 175)

The man once described by P. J. O’Rourke as “a synthesis of Huck Finn and Machiavelli” went on to drop a rarely quoted bomb that seems pretty damn noteworthy: that Ron Reagan himself “did not … do a Southern strategy for two reasons,” and that most of Atwater’s primary clients had abandoned the technique by the time he spoke. (Page 175)

The attorney and historical researcher Dan McLaughlin, along with several other modern scholars, argues that the slow political shift that resulted in the Newt Gingrich–led Republican Revolution of the 1990s actually began decades before. In an excellent analysis of Sean Trende’s book The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs— and Who Will Take It for the political website RedState McLaughlin argues that the increase in support for the GOP among Southern whites was in fact “steady” if gradual between 1928 and 2010, when this support essentially peaked. He attributes this creeping growth to the simple fact that, as the Republican Party platform evolved toward what it currently is, white Southrons became substantially more compatible with “the national Republican agenda and coalition” than with the Democratic Party equivalent. (Page 177)

Indeed, the primary factor that slowed the regional transition from blue to red, along with plain partisan loyalties “dating back to Reconstruction,” was very arguably the strategic use of racial appeals over the years by the Democrats. To quote the article directly: “If you take race out of the picture, (Page 177)

it is likely that white Southerners would have switched parties earlier and in greater numbers.” Very arguably, as McLaughlin claims, the first and most effective Southern strategy was pursued by the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. (Page 178)

In probably the best book about this transition, The End of Southern Exceptionalism the political scientists Richard Johnston (University of Pennsylvania) and Byron E. Shafer (University of Wisconsin–Madison) argue that the Southern transition from Democratic to Republican control was “overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth.”25 Per the two authors, in the era following World War Two, the American South semi-intentionally transitioned from a famously “backward” region to one of the “engine[s] of the national economy”—which led to the development of a large new suburban upper middle class. These citizens, many of them originally from the North, began to vote or continued to vote for Republicans. (Page 179)

The South currently contains 33 percent of the American citizenry, the West Coast and interior West 26 percent, the East Coast and New England just 22 percent, and the once “Mighty” Midwest only 19 percent. Between 1970 and 2010, the South added approximately 30 million new residents, the West 22 million, the Midwest 5.6 million, and the East just 3.2 million. Forty-nine percent of all growth during the period took place in the South, defined as the states that made up the former Confederacy. (Page 180)

#10 Bonus Lie: The Continuing Oppression Narrative (Page 182)

“contemporary oppression narrative” (CON), the “CRT” idea that the United States of today has not progressed far beyond our bloody past: we remain a racially fraught country characterized by widespread police murder of young and especially Black men, constant back-and-forth inter-ethnic conflict (with whites generally getting the better of it), and structures of “systemic racism,” “institutional bias,” and “white privilege” designed to oppress minorities around every turn. (Page 182)

As the race relations data indicates, many Americans truly believe what Mystal and James are selling—and what they themselves have surely been sold. In 2021, an astonishing study from the respected Skeptic Research Center titled “How Informed Are Americans About Race and Policing?” found that “over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views” believe that more than 1,000 unarmed Black men were killed in 2019 by American police To be more specific, 31.43 percent of “very liberal” respondents and leftists estimated that “about 1,000” unarmed Black men were killed by police officers—while 14.21 percent put the toll at “about 10,000” and 7.86 percent thought the true figure had to be higher than that. (Page 185)

To the left of the 1619 Project and the Pulitzer Center (and how often does one get to say those words?), the Marxist Zinn Education Project also provides elementary and secondary school teaching materials. Named after Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States, the ZEP offers up prepared lessons and recommended books that—among other things—argue that the Second Amendment of the Constitution is racist (Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment; The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America), praise the Puerto Rican Young Lords street gang for commandeering a public hospital in the 1970s (Takeover: How We Occupied a Hospital and Changed Public Health Care),* provide a “learning companion” to the ruminations of activist former NFL pass thrower Colin Kaepernick (Colin in Black and White: The Kaepernick Curriculum), detail Native American resistance to a series of proposed oil pipelines during the recent NoDAPL protests (Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance; Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the nodapl Movement), and argue against educational testing (More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing). (Page 188)

While the United States of America is indeed an imperfect humanfounded country with a bloody history, virtually every major empirical claim made by contemporary race activists is just factually false. The Crump-Biko argument that American police officers are “murdering” or “genociding” hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands?) of innocent Black men annually provides the clearest possible illustration of this. As I note in my book Taboo, well-maintained databases of police homicides, such as Killed by Police and the Washington Post newspaper’s The Counted project have existed online for years Per the Post, only about 1,000 citizens total are shot and killed by on-duty police officers in a typical year: across all races, sexes, and weapons categories and out of up to 60 million annual police-citizen encounters. Nine hundred and ninety-seven such killings occurred in 2015, 963 in 2016, 987 in 2017, 983 in 2018, 999 in 2019, and 1,020 in 2020. (Page 190)

The number of unarmed Black men killed annually by police is tiny even in comparison to the number of overall and African American police killings. To review the same years in order—hopefully without becoming mind-numbingly dull—the United States saw 38 shootings of unarmed Black citizens (17 by white cops) in the somewhat atypical year of 2015; 20 in 2016; 21 in 2017; 22 in 2018; 12 in 2019; and 18 in 2020 (Page 190)

It might be objected that this is because the police-shootings data, if nothing else, reveal Blacks’ overrepresentation among victims of law enforcement violence. African Americans, after all, make up less than 14 percent of the United States population but did represent more than 20 percent of cop-killing victims in every year on record—which might indicate racism However, a very simple reason for this apparent discrepancy exists: the Black crime rate (and thus police encounter rate) is currently significantly higher than the white rate. This can be easily established using uncontested data provided annually by the federal government, such as the annual Bureau of Justice Statistics abstracts from the United States DOJ. (Page 191)

Rather remarkably, “classic interracial crimes”— violent offenses involving either a white or a Black perpetrator and a victim of the other race—made up only 11 percent of the pool of violent Index crimes that we are discussing (607,726 offenses out of 5,479,590) and just 3 percent of the 20,828,040 crimes of all kinds reported across the United States during 2018. (Page 192)

interracial serious crime involving only Blacks and whites has been more than 70 percent Black-on-white during every recent year for which data exists. (Page 193)

Simply put, Black Americans assault and otherwise target white Americans far more often than the reverse happens. (Page 193)

Serious social scientists, many themselves members of minority groups—Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, John Ogbu, Amy Chua, Heather Mac Donald, June O’Neill, William Julius Wilson on the leftward side of the fence—have pointed out for perhaps fifty years that large human populations differ in performance because of literally dozens of factors stretching far beyond the simplistic dual options of “genes” and “racism.” As a first-stage proof of case here, the range in household income between non-Hispanic American white groups is more than 100 percent, with Iraqi Christian migrants ($49,315) earning less than half as much on average as Australians ($100,856)—and gigantic populations like Italian Americans ($82,106), Irishmen ($76,036), and Cajuns ($68,383) falling in between. (Page 194)

Test scores themselves obviously vary widely among populations and in turn predict income and other success metrics. According to a well-done analysis by Inside Higher Ed several years back, the average SAT scores for U.S.-born test-takers are currently 941 for Blacks/African Americans, 963 for Native Americans and Alaskan “Eskimos,” 986 for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, 987 for Hispanics or Latinos, 1,118 for whites, and almost 1,200 for Asian Americans. (Page 195)

The left-leaning Brookings Institution (of all places) recently released a report showing that “white high school students study nearly twice as much as Black high-school students, with Hispanics falling in between the two”22 and Asian Americans outperforming everybody else. Once again, these score and study differences are highly predictive of other dependent variables, including not only later-life income but also high school grades and the decision to attend college. (Page 195)

To quote from one quantitative review of her piece: “Overall, Black men earned 82.9 percent of the white wage.” However, simply “adjusting for Black-white difference in geographic region, schooling, and age raises the ratio to 87.7 percent; adding differences in [standardized] test scores raises the ratio to 95.5 percent, and adding differences in years of work experiences raises the ratio to 99.1 percent.”24 As I note in my book Taboo, “At least in the modern era, less than 1 percent of the wage gap between Black and white males appears directly attributable to racism.” (Page 196)

In 2017, perhaps most notably, Harvard University’s Roland Fryer found no statistically significant differences between the rates at which whites and African Americans are shot by police officers—after adding basic controls for “civilian behavior” and other “important context.”25 Indeed, white suspects proved to be 27.5 percent more likely to be shot by police officers than Black suspects, with all else held equal. (Page 196)

level, At some is completely this “shocking” result logically unsurprising. The actual and rather obvious reason that Black Americans encounter the police more often than whites, in the first place, is simply that the Black rate of violent crime is 2.4 times the white rate And, when such encounters do happen, police officers—few of whom are extreme bigots and more than a third of whom are themselves minorities27—tend to be what Fryer calls “utility maximizers,” who certainly do not want their careers ruined by claims of involvement in a racist murder. Racism, in any real sense, exists only where otherwise identical individuals are treated differently due to the single variable of race. In this context as in many others, empirical comparison of the experiences of very similar people of different races strongly indicates that contemporary systemic racism does not exist at all. (Page 196)