The Case for Trump: Trump vs. the Establishment on Amnesty, Interventionism, and Collaboration

Stephen Kershnar

Why Should People Consider Donald Trump?

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

December 21, 2015

Donald Trump is well ahead in the national polls for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump is an undisciplined, unfocused, and unpredictable, so it is worth considering whether voter support for him makes sense. While Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are better choices, support for Trump makes sense for three reasons.  

The argument is that if one’s values freedom, respect for the Constitution, and a non-interventionist foreign policy, Trump’s positions are likely better than his competitors, aside from Cruz and Paul.

First, Trump will likely oppose amnesty and in the long term without such a position most, if not all, of the other libertarian and conservative positions will lose. The argument is that in every recent national election, Hispanics have voted for leftist (Democratic) candidates. Amnesty will result in many more Hispanic voters, enough to result in leftist positions winning across the board. Leftist positions include more government spending, taxes, and regulation, fewer civil liberties, and race preferences, policies that libertarians and conservatives oppose.    

Amnesty will permanently change the country. Even the pandering George W. Bush got no more than 40% of the Hispanic vote in the two elections. Other polling results, show that Hispanics are ideologically committed to the left's agenda. Their voting pattern is similar to that of blacks and Jews. The estimate for the number of illegal aliens is usually 11 million, but is plausibly 20-30 million. Even the lower number will likely be enough to flip Texas, Florida, and a number of state legislatures. Voting for a pro-amnesty candidate, then, is in effect voting for Barack Obama’s and Chuck Schumer’s long-term vision for America.

Democrat support for much larger government can be seen in Bill Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s opposition to any attempt to reduce the size of government and their rabid opposition to tax cuts, a flat tax, tax simplification, etc. Despite his reputation as a moderate, Bill Clinton tried to increase the size of government, but ran head-on into the Republican Congress in 1994. Consider, for example, the Hillary-led attempt to further socialize medicine and how he had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into signing welfare reform.  

Democratic opposition to civil liberties (social freedom) can be seen in that despite the high profile activities on the Michael-Brown-type cases, neither Clinton and Obama, nor the Democratic Congressmen and women have done much to restrict data collection, warrant-less searches, highly aggressive policing (reputation aside, Obama backs the police in most of use-of-force and forfeiture cases), eminent domain, or restrictions on free speech on campuses and in political contexts. With the important exception of abortion, they almost always support expanding government power.

Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Lindsey Graham all have supported or would support some type of amnesty. Why they do so is unclear. Illegal aliens are not especially poor compared to tens of millions of people across the globe would love to live in America. There is little to no indication that they identify with America and even less reason to believe that they would make current American citizens freer or wealthier than they would be were the aliens to leave. They’re not even assimilated to American life as can be seen in their differences with much of America in terms of language, education, and family values.    

Second, Trump also shows some indication of avoiding the fanatical interventionism of other candidates. Candidates who backed, or likely would have backed, most of the following: overthrow of Libya, Egypt, and Syria and boots on the ground to combat ISIS have a Woodrow-Wilson-type view of foreign policy. The view is that foreign policy and the military need not serve American interests, but should instead serve ideals, such as democracy. In the past, this view can be most clearly seen in the United States’ participation in World War I and the Vietnam War, as well as the two U.S. wars against Iraq. Support for the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is a particularly good tests for the Wilsonian view as he was neither a threat to American interests at the time he was overthrown, nor a threat to slaughter civilians.

The candidates’ war against all monsters is arguably inconsistent because the pursuit of the various policies: aggressively confronting Russia, overthrowing Syria’s Bashar Assad, and defeating ISIS conflict with one another.  

This Wilsonian view can also be seen in candidates who want to aggressively confront Russia. Consider, for example, interventionists who want to set up no-fly zones over Iraqi and Syrian airspace when both have given permission to Russian to fly its planes there and who, in the past, supported expanding NATO to include the Baltic States, thereby threatening U.S. involvement were hostilities to erupt.  

The interventionist program can also be seen in candidates who so value the military that they are willing to eliminate the budget sequester, thereby trading increased military spending for allowing Obama to increase domestic spending. It can also be seen in candidates that want to continue NSA dragnet collection of email and cell phone data that violates the Fourth Amendment. 

Establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and John Kasich generally have the Wilsonian view of foreign policy, support the breaking of the sequester, and the trampling on the Fourth Amendment. They support ever deepening military involvement in the Middle East. For someone who thinks American policy should serve American interests, opposes deepening involvement in the Middle East, and prioritizes liberty over military prowess, Cruz and Paul are the best bets. Trump is unpredictable, but shows some signs of being less interventionist. Voting for establishment guys is setting the country up for more wars similar to George W. Bush’s Iraqi and Afghanistan wars and accompanying nation-building.  

Third, the Republican Congressional leadership (John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell) has repeatedly signed off on funding and thereby authorizing the commanding heights of the Obama economic platform (Obamacare, amnesty, debt increases, spending increases that broke the sequester, and increased taxes on businesses and the wealthy). It is reasonable to think that establishment candidates would do the same in office. They likely would value approval from Republican donors, mainstream media, and the other prissy types who get offended at every Trumpism more than cutting government down to size. Were the establishment candidates chosen, this sends the Republican leadership that they should keep on selling out the Republican base. Trump sends the opposite message.

Professors run and hide when the race-circus comes to their campus

Stephen Kershnar

Why the Faculty Remain Silent

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

November 21, 2015

The protests at University of Missouri and Yale University have spread. Campus protesters demand that university positions be handed out in a racial spoils system, blatant nonsense be accepted as fact, and free speech be curtailed. An interesting issue is why the faculty have remained silent.   

At the University of Missouri, black students and their allies demanded quotas (10% of faculty and staff must be black), mandatory diversity training, and fewer black students flunking out or leaving.

At Yale University, a protest over two married professors’ suggestion that decisions about adult students wearing Halloween costumes are best handled by the students themselves rather than the administration quickly led to Yale promising to spend $50 million to hire more black and Hispanic faculty, implement mandatory diversity training for supervising professors and staff, and so on.  

Ivy League competitor Brown University had previously announced a $100 million dollar plan to diversify its campus. It will double the number of black and Hispanic faculty and implicitly lower standards to attract and retain them. Already, 33% of Brown students and 20% of its faculty are not white, but administrators and protesters think that this diversity includes the omnipresent Asians and they add the wrong sort of diversity. The percentages also don’t include the large number of Jewish faculty and students, but again they add the wrong sort of diversity.

Other universities are being hit with similar protests. An elite and traditionally Jewish University (Brandeis University) has been hit with protests demanding quotas (10% of faculty and staff and 15% of students must be black), mandatory diversity training, and increasing funding for black student organizations and programs. Hamilton College protesters demand 13% of the faculty be black and that the next college president and the chairs of certain departments not be white. Similar protests and pressured resignations have occurred at Amherst, Claremont-McKenna, Dartmouth, Duke, Hamilton, Johns Hopkins, and Princeton.

The protests have consistently demanded that a racial spoils system be imposed. This despite the fact that the Supreme Court has clearly and repeatedly held that quotas are unconstitutional. The courts have never held that even race preferences for faculty and staff are constitutional, let alone quotas, and likely would not do so (given its narrow holdings on race preferences). Nevertheless, the protesters demand quotas and preferences and some of the best universities meekly comply and hope no one sues them.

The protesters claim that blacks and Hispanics face unbelievable amount of racial hostility. This is blatant nonsense and the protesters know it. Overt expressions of rare hatred are incredibly rare and with surprisingly frequency turn out to be done by black or Hispanic students trying to get sympathy for their cause. There are no studies that I am aware of showing that such students face regular hostility and anecdotes supporting such claims are few and open to interpretation.  

The protests have also been surprisingly hostile to free speech. At Missouri, protesters at a state university repeatedly shoved a reporter. A Communication professor called for violence to remove a reporter she surely knew was acting within his rights. At Dartmouth, protesters aggressively insulted, pushed, and shoved students in the library. Sit-ins (also known as trespasses) have also occurred at several campuses, including Princeton. At UCLA, protesters demanded that a professor be punished for an article of his that appeared in a top-flight academic journal.   

At almost all of the campuses hit by protests, students have demanded mandatory diversity-education classes. These classes consist of little more than propaganda and are devoid of academic content. They limit free speech by mandating a correct view on race, gender, and sexual orientation much as would a mandatory pledge of allegiance.  

The faculty at these universities know all of this. They do the hiring and promoting and are well aware that they are not discriminating against blacks and Hispanics and in favor of Jews and Asians. In fact, they go out of their way to favor black and Hispanic applicants (and often women) and do so openly. They know full well that quotas are illegal and that free speech is central to what they do and yet hide quietly when the race-circus comes to town.   

Why have the faculty stayed quiet? Some likely agree with the movement and don’t care that the racial spoils system is illegal, the claims of victimization are false, or free speech is being disrespected.

Others likely disagree, but don’t want the howling mob or their colleagues turning on them. No faculty member wants to get pounded in the way the Yale professors did. The fact that administrators can and do quietly punish faculty members who bring controversy to their campuses makes it wise to stay silent.  

Also, faculty seem to be increasingly quiet people, removed from public life. This can be seen the surprising absence of academics (aside from lawyers) in Congress and especially the Congressional leadership. Also, in the recent past, no major presidential candidate has been a legitimate academic.   

On a side note, SUNY-Fredonia is ripe for protest. At Fredonia, black students had, and likely still do have, SATs that are, on average, much worse than those of white students and are far less likely to graduate in four years. As the percentage of the student body that is black or Hispanic has roughly tripled and doubled respectively (2005-2014), the lower graduation rate is increasingly noticeable and relevant to the college. Some minority faculty claimed to have faced a hostile climate and left. There has even been a protest and tense meeting on racial matters involving a previous president (Dennis Hefner) and a controversy involving speech on racial issues (disclosure: It involved me). Some of this led to the hiring of a full-time diversity officer. It is an interesting question how Fredonia faculty would respond to protests or demands like those faced by its elite counterparts.    

A Campus Protests About Nothing: Racial grievances used to lever quotas and money

Stephen Kershnar

Missouri and Yale: Race-Based Takings

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

November 21, 2015

The academic world is focused on recent protests at University of Missouri and Yale University.

At the University of Missouri, black students and their allies claimed the administration was racially insensitive. This led to protests, a threatened boycott by the football team, and a single student going on a hunger strike, which in turn led to the resignation of the chancellor of the university and the president of the University of Missouri system. The movement was led by a group (Concerned Student 1950) that demanded quotas (10% of faculty and staff must be black), mandatory diversity training, and fewer black students flunking out or leaving.

At Yale University, a protest over two married professors’ mild replies to the university’s sensitivity hectoring on Halloween costumes led to students angrily confronting one of them over his strong support of free speech. In response to the confrontation and related protests, Yale decided to buy off the protesters. It promised to spend $50 million to hire more black and Hispanic faculty, implement mandatory diversity training for supervising professors and staff, increase financial aid to low income students (they already pay little to no tuition), and put more money into its racial and ethnic cultural centers.  

Other universities are being hit with similar protests. An elite and traditionally Jewish University (Brandeis University) has been hit with protests demanding, you guessed it, quotas (10% of faculty and staff and 15% of students must be black), mandatory diversity training, and increasing funding for black student organizations and programs. Similar protests and pressured resignations have occurred at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Claremont-McKenna College.

The overall pattern is stunning. First, even if all the alleged acts of race hatred at Missouri did occur, they are so few and minor as to not warrant much attention, let alone a panicked response, by top-level administrators running massive universities (their budgets and resources are sometimes in the billions).  

Second, many, if not all, of the high profile acts of race hatred probably didn’t happen. Over the years, many of the high profile acts of alleged race hatred, and probably most, have turned out to be hoaxes. By this I mean that the perpetrator was black, Hispanic, or a liberal white trying to make a statement rather than an expression of white hatred.

As Ashley Thorne writing for the National Association of Scholars points out, there have been a series of documented campus hoax crimes in recent years, such as those at Trinity International University (2005), George Washington University (2007), the University of Virginia (2007), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011), Central Connecticut State University (2012), University of Wisconsin at Parkside (2012), Montclair State University (2012), and Vassar College (2013). Overreactions and hoaxes have also occurred at elite institutions, such as Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Williams.

Third, some of the protests have been accompanied by thuggery. Witness, for example, the shoving and physical intimidation of reporters at the University of Missouri and the violence that broke out at Dartmouth. The toleration of thuggery to intimidate faculty and students and lever the administration is an ominous sign.  

Fourth, the hypocrisy is troubling. As Victor Davis Hanson in National Review points out, the black Missouri football threatened to boycott games based racial underrepresentation when blacks were 50% of the team, roughly four times their percentage of the population. Apparently, overrepresentation of blacks in football is not an issue but overrepresentation of whites and Asians in theoretical physics is.

The real issue, though, is the attempt to use dubious racial grievances to replace white and Asian students and faculty (and especially Jews at elite institutions) with blacks.  

It is uncontroversial that, on average, black (and Hispanic) students at elite institutions have significantly less academic ability than their white and Asian counterparts. Consider, for example, University of Michigan. In 2005, University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot reports that the average black student had SATs roughly 200 points lower than the average white student and 250 points lower than the average Asian. Were a white or Asian student to have the scores of the average black student, he would have a 1% chance (if white) and 0% (if Asian) of being accepted. This matters because IQ scores correlate with SATs and are a strong predictor of academic and job performance. Having (on average) lower scores predictably leads to black students having worse grades, lower graduation rates, and switching from rigorous majors (for example, hard sciences) to easier ones.   

UCLA law professor Richard Sander and others have shown that ratcheting up black students into schools in which their competition outclasses them hurts them. It leads to their failing or dropping out more often than they would were they to attend schools in which they were better matched with their peers. It also leads to their being unable to pass professional entrance exams (for example, medical boards and the bar) more often than would occur if they were better matched.  

For example, Sander showed that the average black law student was in the bottom 10% of his class. This is entirely unsurprising given that they had an academic index score more than two standard deviations below their average white competitor. How would you do in a race in which your best times going into the race were well below those of most of the other runners? Is it any wonder, then, that black students get discouraged and firms and clients are wary of black lawyers and doctors?

The lowered standards also lead to executives, engineers, doctors, and lawyers who perform worse than would a white or Asian who would otherwise have received the educational slot. This leads to worse decisions in these fields and thereby hams consumers and employers. For example, putting a subpar teacher in the classroom, on average, harms decades of students. The same is true for subpar executives and doctors. The ratcheting effect also leads to wasted resources as black law and medical students flunk the entrance exams with disturbing frequency and sometimes never end up passing, thereby wasting the resources that went into educating them.

Perhaps the harm is outweighed by the benefits that come about through role-modelling, diverse ideas, or improved interracial relations, but I am unaware of any study that shows these benefits outweigh the costs. In addition, it is implausible that this is true. No one thinks that the New England Patriots would do better if they replaced black and Hispanic players with less meritorious Jews or Asians. There is little reason to think that boardrooms or operating rooms are different.

The protesters are trying to use racial grievances, dubious and in any case infrequent, to implement quotas and to shift money, educational spots, and jobs from whites and Asians to Blacks. This is not good for the country or academia and probably not even good for blacks.