[guest post by Dana]

After the New York Democratic mayoral primary win of Eric Adams, how can any Democrat argue with this? I’m just not sure how relevant James Carville is these days, and whether he carries any serious weight within the Democratic Party. But after making these comments, it’s pretty clear that his name is mud with the “fringe element” of his party:

Carville said the victory of Eric Adams in the New York Democratic mayoral primary shows that running against the “defund the police” movement is a political winner, and that voters want politicians to be more interested in their lives than “someone else’s pronouns”: The most important constituents in our party are Blacks and suburban women. They’re not into this. Alright? And again, we’re seeing it time and time again. We’re letting a noisy wing of our party define the rest of us. And my point is we can’t do that. I think these people are kind of nice people. I think they’re very naive and they’re all into language and identity, and that’s all right. They’re not storming the Capitol, but they’re not winning elections. And I think people sort of see this for what it is, and people way more interested in their lives and how to improve them than they are in somebody else’s pronouns or something.

Of course, California doesn’t seem to fit into Carville’s assessment. The “noisy wing” of his party is the supermajority in the Golden State, and that doesn’t seem likely to change any time soon. This especially as there is a good chance that Gov. Newsom will survive the recall election on Sept. 14.

–Dana

My latest newsletter, for paid subscribers, discusses the content of Charles Murray’s latest book: Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. It’s 5,000 words and heavy on links, analysis, and ideas. I’m pretty proud of it. But once I was done, I realized that nobody wants to read 5,000 words in a single email. So I decided to split it up into three parts. I’ll send the next missive in about three days, and the final one about three days after that.

Excerpt:

The description at the Amazon page for the book aptly summarizes what the “two truths” are: “American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.”

. . . .

Racial disparities in crime statistics are a touchy subject, but nowhere near as touchy as racial disparities in mean IQ scores. So, in discussing the content of the portions of Murray’s book addressing racial and ethnic disparities in mean scores on tests of cognitive ability, I think the most cautious approach — by which I mean the approach designed to ensure maximum accuracy and to avoid disputes over hotly contested side issues — is to identify the parts of Murray’s argument that aren’t really disputed by his critics, like Ezra Klein and the Vox crowd. I actually think the things everyone agrees about are probably more salient and important than the things they disagree about — or what Murray’s critics think they disagree with him about, since these critics often declare disagreement with positions that they attribute to Murray, but which he does not necessarily hold.

In short, I have zero intention of defending or even addressing the issue of whether genes play a role in mean group differences in cognitive ability.

There’s still plenty to talk about.

Access the post here.

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