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In Freakonomics, Leavitt and Dubner relate the story of an Indian-born sociology PhD student, Sudhir Venkatesh, who in the late ’80s – the highpoint of crack-fuelled gangbanger culture – innocently wandered into a Chicago housing project to conduct some field research. Rather than blow him away on sight, the black thugs running the turf he intruded on were puzzled: They didn’t know what to make of Venkatesh. He didn’t seem to be a member of a rival gang... He wasn’t black, wasn’t white. In the end, curiosity won out and the gangbangers who had pulled a gun on the clipboard-wielding student elected to answer his survey questions.
Having survived the toughest hoods of Chicago, Venkatesh is today William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Columbia University. He’s just one of many South Asians who are doing exceptionally well in the United States.
Despite the undeniable success of Indian immigrants in the US, Democratic presidential aspirant Kamala Harris is determinedly downplaying her majority Tamil Brahmin heritage, in preference to bigging up the less than a quarter of her heritage that is black. Victimhood is so hot these days.
Perhaps because, while most of the left and too many of the right are gibbering that them Joos are trying to take over the Anglosphere, it seems to be the Indians who are doing the best job of it.
Kamala might be elected president of the United States in November, and Rishi Sunak was recently prime minister of the United Kingdom.
The vociferously anti-Scottish Pakistani Humza Yousaf was First Minister of Scotland in 2023–2024, while the gay half-Indian Leo Varadkar has served two terms as top dog in Ireland […]
While most of the rest of the world is more resistant to Indian charms than the English-speaking heartland, the half-Goan António Costa was prime minister of Portugal, an ancient ally of England, from 2015 until a 2023 police raid on his home in a corruption probe.
It’s not just the left who are falling prey to the charms of the subcontinental diaspora.
Although Indian-Americans are intensely Democratic (an October 2020 poll found them favoring Biden over Trump by 72–22), in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, Nikki Haley (of Sikh descent) beat Trump in two primaries (which is two more than the competent Florida governor Ron DeSantis managed), while practicing Hindu self-promoter Vivek Ramaswamy also overperformed. The GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance is married to Hindu Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Perhaps, though, the main reason Harris’ Hindu half-heritage isn’t getting much bigging up is that she doesn’t embody South Asians’ well-known strong suits. Indians in America are generally rich, corporate-savvy and smart (scoring higher in average IQ than white Americans).
Kamala isn’t stupid – she passed the tough California bar exam on her second try, and she has so far obeyed her advisers’ suggestions that she not dispel her admirers’ fantasies about her by opening her mouth too much – but nobody has ever accused her of displaying a head for numbers, an articulate prose style, or an incisive grasp of logic.
The success of South Asians in the West, in politics especially, is bad news for another group of uber-smart folks: Jews.
Crazy as it would have sounded in the 1980s, it’s now quite possible that America will have an Indian president before it has a Jewish president…even if Kamala loses.
Jews have, it seems, made the historic blunder of backing the wrong horse: the left.
In fact, the Kamala campaign’s rejection of the vice presidential candidacy of Josh Shapiro, the popular governor of crucial swing state Pennsylvania, for Tim Walz, the aging Teutonic governor of blue Minnesota, raises the possibility that America will never have a Jewish president.
The failure of any Jewish-American to come close to becoming president despite all their accomplishments at becoming billionaires, Supreme Court justices, senators, top campaign donors, and the like is striking […]
Joe Lieberman, Al Gore’s 2000 running mate, is the only Jewish vice presidential nominee ever. And it has become increasingly hard to picture a staunch Zionist like Lieberman winding up on a Democratic ticket in the future […]
Especially now that the Democrats have a nonwhite replacement ethnicity – South Asians – who bring many of the same skills as Jews did, such as linguistic facility, verbal logic, and mathematical ability.
Unfortunately for America’s Jews, the left have discovered that if there’s one thing they really hate it’s them damn Joos.
For all their undeniable smarts, though, too many American Jews are still prone to the same suicidal virtue-signalling as the “Queers for Palestine”. Whether they’ll wake up in time is an open question. After all, even in the mid-’30s, after Hitler strategically dialled back the Jew-baiting stuff, thousands of German Jews who’d fled the Nazi regime decided it was safe to return.
Here’s hoping history doesn’t repeat.
