Tucker Carlson is one of the few hosts on Fox that doesn’t parrot back boiler plate “conservative” talking points. He often asks uncomfortable questions and drills down deeper into issues than anyone else on Fox and certainly more so than hosts on any of the boring, predictably leftist hosts on the network news, CNN, MSNBC, etc. Even someone with his reputation of coloring outside of the lines a bit can come under fire pretty quickly if he asks the wrong questions, and he did the other night when he dared question what has become the new national motto/sacred religious text in America: “Diversity is our greatest strength”. He responded to those that freaked out with a series of tweets, I screenshot them just in case they were memory-holed by the censors at Twitter…
I guess the first question that needs to be asked is just what exactly does that word mean, “diversity”? It doesn’t mean what it used to mean and it doesn’t mean what most people probably think it means. Like “racism” which now means something completely different than it used to, “diversity” really only has one meaning and application: where there are too many white people, too much European/Western culture, it must be reduced. It is not a stretch to say that “diversity” is simply code for “fewer white people”. As an example, the NY Times recently complained that New Hampshire was too white and that this was a problem to be solved but you never see editorials saying that Africa has too many blacks or that Mexico has too many mestizos. Try to find an example of something needing more “diversity” that doesn’t translate to “this country/city/school/church” has too many white people. No one ever says that a historically black college or Christian denomination is too black. The Left is always talking about “dog whistles” but one of the clearest examples of a dog whistle is when they use the word “diversity”.
So having defined diversity, let us then ask: is diversity really our greatest strength? If it is, can you point to an example of why being more diverse is inherently better than being less diverse? Schoolhouse Rock videos about the “melting pot” not withstanding, America has generally not been that diverse of a nation. As recently as when I was born in the 70’s, America was 87.7% white, around 11% black and less than 4.5% Hispanic, with under 1% Asians. The black proportion has stayed fairly constant for the last century, fluctuating between 9.8-12.6%. But since the 70’s our national demographics have changed rather dramatically. As of 2010, America was 72.4% white and 12.6% black, as the population has grown from 203 million to 308 million, a total growth of 105 million. In terms of actual numbers, the number of whites in America as of 1970 was 169,622,593 and in 2010 it was 196,817,552, or an increase of 27 million. So only about a quarter of the population growth in the last 40 years came from whites, and that increase is pretty much through natural growth via childbirth. We are not importing a ton of Europeans like the early 20th century. About 16.5 million of the increase was among black Americans. Less than half of the growth came from growth in the two heritage groups in America, whites and black descendants of slaves. So where did the growth come from? Some of it came from Asians as their numbers grew from 1.5 million to over 15 million which is pretty significant. But the big number came from Hispanics. Hispanics went from 4.4% of the population to 16.3%, in raw numbers from just under 9 million to over 50 million. Not as much of a difference from a percentage standpoint as Asians but in overall numbers it was a huge increase. Whites now outnumber Hispanics by a ratio of around 4 to 1 but in 1970, the year before I was born, the ratio was almost 20 to 1. Depending on who you ask, whites will cease to be an absolute majority in America very soon. As recently as 1990 whites were over 80% of the population, which is a pretty homogeneous racial make-up. So for around 90% of American history, our nation was at least 80% white. In 1940 on the eve of World War II and the era of the “Greatest Generation”, America was at her least diverse with the white population being at the high water mark, just 0.2% shy of 90%. That percentage held mostly steady in the 1950s when America dominated the world in affluence and productivity. Tell me with that in mind: when did “diversity” become our greatest strength?
Of course diversity means more than race. Diversity also means fewer men and more women. Fewer Christians and more anything other than Christians. Fewer sexually normal people and more people with deviant sexual behavior. In the broadest sense, diversity means fewer white, male, heterosexual Christians, or in other words fewer of the very people that explored the globe, discovered the American continent, settled here, conquered and tamed a wilderness continent, and formed a nation that is the envy of the world. So our greatest strength really means fewer of the people that made this nation in the first place. When people today talk about diversity they don’t mean the sort of diversity that was historically the case in America, a significant black population and a bunch of different kinds of Europeans. They just mean less of the historic inhabitants of the U.S.
Back to the question. Why is diversity our greatest strength when historically, for 90% of our history, we have not been diverse by today’s standards? Let me ask it more broadly. Is diversity itself an unqualified good? I really don’t see any indication that it is. Like America, Europe has long been a pretty racially homogeneous continent. For example, the United Kingdom is still 87% white/white British. Germany is ethnically 89% European although that doesn’t give a great racial breakdown. There is pretty significant evidence that as once racially homogeneous nations like the UK, France, Germany and Sweden become more “diverse”, it is causing a great deal of social strain. In a small country like Sweden with a population of less than 10 million, the rapid influx and higher fecundity of non-Swedish immigrants has led to a drastic increase in crime and various social ills. Nations with larger populations like the UK and Germany have been able to absorb the non-European populations so far but in places like London there will quickly be a point, if not already reached, where white British will be a minority. Not coincidentally London and England as a whole has seen a dramatic rise in stabbings, murder, acid attacks and all too frequent terror attacks. That is not because white people are better people but because diversity brings conflict.
What about America though? Is diversity a strength? Not to be flippant but apart from music and food, has an influx of diversity made America “better”? How would you define that? For many on the Left who see white male heterosexual Christians as the Source Of All That Is Bad™, even though most of the most vocal and vicious critics of white men are wildly benefited by structures and institutions created by those very white heterosexual male Christians, simply reducing or eliminating white heterosexual Christian men is itself an intrinsically good thing. But can you say objectively that things are better now and getting better in the future as America becomes more diverse, in other words less white?
Are things in America better in 2018 than they were in 89.5% white 1950? Well we have new civil rights protections for blacks, so that is good. On the other hand the absolute state of black America is awful right now. As economist Walter Williams points out:
Today’s black illegitimacy rate of nearly 75 percent is also entirely new. In 1940, black illegitimacy stood at 14 percent. It had risen to 25 percent by 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” and was widely condemned as a racist. By 1980, the black illegitimacy rate had more than doubled, to 56 percent, and it has been growing since. Both during slavery and as late as 1920, a teenage girl raising a child without a man present was rare among blacks.
There is no surer way to ensure a life of poverty than being an unwed young mother. As the black family has collapsed, generational poverty and inter-racial violence have skyrocketed. Every weekend hundreds of young black men are shot and often killed by other young black men in our most “diverse” cities. For example, here are the five most violent per capita cities in the U.S. with their percentage of black population in parenthesis in 2010: Baltimore (63.7%); Milwaukee (40%); Memphis (63%); Detroit (82%) and the champion St. Louis (49%). In St. Louis, crime statistics indicate that an enormous percentage of the violent crime, especially murder, is concentrated in the black community. On the other hand, in similarly sized cities with the lowest crime like San Jose, with a violent crime rate one fifth of the rate of St. Louis, the black population is 3.2% or Portland where the black population is only around 6%. This is reflected in another statistic. Although blacks are around 13% of the population, they are around 40% of the U.S. prison population. For comparison, Hispanics are 16% of the total population and are 20% of the prison population. I know, I know. The common response is “It is not their fault! Poverty! Lack of jobs and after school programs!”. We are supposed to believe that poverty causes crime but I think the opposite is true: crime causes poverty. More on that on a different day.
Depending on which stats you use, over 20% of blacks live in poverty (around 20% of Hispanics do as well, versus 9% for whites). Whites have a home ownership rate of over 70% (2000 data) but blacks and Hispanics are both well under 50% and that rate might have fallen since. America is more divided than we have been since the Civil War and political violence is becoming more common. As the competing tribes and identities gain numerical prominence, our political world has turned become a huge exercise in identity politics.
Based on an awful lot of factors, I don’t see that things are improving much in America as we have gotten more “diverse” and a lot of things are worse. I am not really sure that the American system, which is still better than most any other system ever tried, is really appropriate for a nation of 350 million people spread out over 3.5 million square miles that is increasingly made up of a diverse population that doesn’t share any common values, are actively competing based on identity with other citizens and often times really, really despise each other. We are often told/scolded that America is a propositional nation, we are not “blood and soil” like old Europe but a nation of ideas and as long as you share those ideas you are as American as someone with a family lineage stretching back to the pre-Revolutionary War era. I don’t think that is true anymore and probably never was. How can we be a nation held together by shared ideals when no one seems to agree what those ideals are in the first place?
We are told over and over that “diversity is our greatest strength” but when you ask why diversity is our greatest strength you are called a racist and yet no one can seem to point to any concrete way that diversity makes things better at all. For most of our history America was not a very diverse country, overwhelmingly white with a significant black population that were segregated, literally and figuratively, from every day American life. Far from being our greatest strength, I believe that ultimately “diversity” is going to spell the end of America as it has existed. You might consider that to be great news but I don’t. Whether you think diversity is swell or not, there is no doubt that America of 2050 is going to be a radically different place from America of 1950, assuming America survives intact.
It is one of the rules that I live by to assume that the questions we are not allowed to ask are precisely the sort of questions we must be asking. Tucker Carlson’s question deserves a serious response and just as importantly we need to be ready to ask some follow-up questions based on what we find. Unfortunately there are very few prominent people even willing to ask the question he did and fewer still who will face the ramifications of the answer.