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It’s springtime, which means its college admissions season. And, for thousands of American families cursed to bear the wrong skin color, this means a rude encounter with the new American regime’s priorities.

On Feb. 23, Twitter anon Peachy Keenan relayed the story of a friend’s niece, and her faceplant during last year’s admissions cycle.

Reading the comments leads to an army of angry replies claiming the story is phony. Admittedly, it’s an unnamed person sharing an account from an unnamed source, so of course it’s unproven. But anybody who finds Keenan’s story to be unlikely, or a surprise, is not paying attention to the reality at American colleges today. 

Critics of Keenan’s post pointed out that, thanks to 1996’s Proposition 209 (which survived a repeal push in 2020), California’s public universities are not allowed to use race as a factor in admissions. The response of those with a brain is simple: If you think the UC system is strictly following that law, you’re an idiot.

The UC system is staffed by some of the most archliberal people imaginable, and Prop 209 is a source of unending torment and anguish for them. So they’ve been long at work on ways to evade it. In spring 2021, they even used a lawsuit as an excuse to “negotiate” a settlement where by the system stopped using all test scores to influence admissions decisions. What could possibly be the agenda behind that change?

Last June, Revolver profiled the admissions figures at various American colleges, and found a sharp and immediate drop in the “white” percentages at many of them, roughly matching up with the events of the 2020 “racial reckoning”:

Read More: Colleges Are Ethnically Cleansing America’s White Kulaks

In a follow-up post for her personal Substack, Keenan posted numerous private messages she received describing similar situations of ugly admissions cycles for children with superficially strong academic records.

Are all these stories true? Maybe not. Could some be missing context? Sure. But every American paying the slightest bit of attention knows the truth: college admission, scholarship applications, and job applications in America are not on the level. Should everyone with a 1570 SAT get into Duke? Maybe not. But would any black applicant with that SAT fail to get in? Absolutely not. Having the right skin color (black) rather than the wrong one (white) is worth several hundred SAT points all by itself. And with schools as elite as Columbia now just going “test-optional,” schools have even more tools to fine-tune their preferred racial demographics while ignoring certain applicants with superior qualifications but lower melanin levels.

Many on the right embrace the illusion that, if they and their children are being systematically shut out of top schools, then that just shows that college is a scam, the schools are in decline, and it’s their loss, so ultimately, who cares? This view, at best, requires inhaling a healthy dose of copium.

For all the status they have lost by promoting affirmative action, adopting speech codes, erecting “safe spaces,” and embracing cartoonish politics, America’s universities remain the country’s chief reservoirs of prestige. Admission to these schools is coveted by elites from across the entire planet. To take but one example, China’s President Xi, the leader of America’s chief geopolitical rival, decided to send his daughter to Harvard. In a deep yet intangible way, one might even go so far as to say that America’s superpower status will remain so long as the most privileged children of foreign elites flock to our prized universities for prestige (and perhaps even some education as well). Indeed, however many woke losers and frauds these schools may add to their faculties, they also have many genuinely world-class academics, and so they can always attract the world-class talents who want to study underneath or alongside them.

While a degree from an “elite” school is not the only way to gain access to the top rungs of status and wealth, it is still the most straightforward and direct way to do so. To win admission at Harvard or Stanford or Princeton isn’t just to gain validation as a supposed intellectual elite. It also gives one access to both a vast network of successful alumni and the immense piles of wealth stacked within the schools’ endowments. It drastically improves one’s access to entry-level hiring at top-paying jobs. It improves one’s chances of scoring academic positions. It gives a better network for trying to fund and launch a startup. This accelerator effect is most valuable for those who gain admission from otherwise unremarkable backgrounds — for instance, the academically overachieving child of a lawyer in Fort Wayne, a standardized test wunderkind from Minot, or a budding self-taught math genius from Spokane.

But now, these immensely talented but “uncool” achievers of America’s heartland are being turned away in ever-greater numbers. At Harvard, nearly half of all white students at the school are legacies, athletes, or the children of major donors, a figure that dwarfs the rates for any other race. It’s not that white applicants are overall less qualified, but rather that the school selects its qualified admits from certain favored pools, while “normal” middle Americans are left in the cold.

At first glance, it’s easy to rhapsodize about the transcendent geniuses who might go ignored and underutilized by this unjust system of racial discrimination. When John Nash, the son of a West Virginia electrical engineer, went to university, he attended on a full scholarship financed by the estate of George Westinghouse. Could Nash’s vaunted “beautiful mind” get a full-ride scholarship anywhere worthwhile today?

Or, for a more recent and modest example, consider Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Massie grew up in Vanceburg, Kentucky, where the population is 98% white but 50% of children are in poverty. But Massie turned his particular brand of backcountry genius into a seat at MIT, parlayed that into a personal fortune, and then returned to the backcountry to live off the grid in a house he built with his high school sweetheart — a living indictment of the country that declined to declare him president by acclamation as its most impressive and inspiring citizen. All of that is exciting, but would Massie manage an MIT admission today at all? Or would he risk losing his slot to a less impressive admit picked out to hit a diversity quota?

Young Thomas Massie showing off one of his many inventions.

But these examples might be the most illustrative. Truly impoverished white people may still have a chance. There are dedicated scholarships out there for children from Appalachia, and universities do still like to raise up the truly poor, even if they are white. And in any case, truly world-class geniuses such as John Nash will usually manage to succeed even in a system rigged against them.

The true victims of today’s soft de-kulakization are not principally the extremely poor or world-class talents. Instead, the chief victims of America’s anti-white, anti-“privilege” ruling ideology are the declining remnants of America’s heritage middle class. These are the children of dentists and account managers and successful blue collar entrepreneurs. Lacking any easily-digested narrative of oppression, they have become the most oppressed. As Revolver has written before, the regime ridicules, downplays  and ignores this group at every opportunity:

The modern American regime is built on explicit, institutionalized hostility to the people who most resemble the great Americans of the past. It is anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian, anti-rural, and anti-middle class. The more of these traits a person has, the more worthy of hate they become. The more the Globalist American Empire decays and squanders the inheritance it was given, the more bile and hatred it directs against those who symbolize what came before.

…

The white American middle class have become America’s kulaks — Blamed for every problem, vilified for every success, and deserving of every punishment. Their destruction has become a fundamental goal of American political life.

Read More: Are You Ready to Be an American Kulak?

Yet this is the demographic that, more than any other, built and sustained America as a triumphant global superpower. It built the factories and staffed the companies that made America, at its peak, close to fifty percent of global economic output. It supplied the tens of thousands of engineers and technicians who staffed the Apollo program. The overblown “Hidden Figures” might get the movies, but it was an army of capable well-educated and diligent middle Americans who made the program tick.

Today, these men’s grandchildren are told their 1550s are not good enough for USC, unless they can find a Hispanic ancestor.

But now, these excellent but not world-class intellects are getting shunned on American campuses. As long as American universities have their pick of the most supremely talented and the most supremely connected (sons of presidents, including foreign presidents), the truth is that they have a lot of room to deny plenty of smart white kids with 1570 SATs who didn’t get perfect scores in the Math Olympiad. And that reverberates further down the prestige hierarchy. At the top, America is shunning the descendants of those who built NASA. In the middle, America is shunning the people who built and maintained America’s once world-class, now crumbling infrastructure. 

Charles Murray, one of America’s most important social scientists, grew up the son of a Maytag executive in Newton, Iowa. He gained admission to Harvard in 1965 with an excellent score on the SAT. Today, with the SAT dumbed down and on its way out as an admissions factor, what are the odds that Murray would attract the attention of Harvard, or any other Ivy League school?

Kelly Johnson, leader of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” and creator of aircraft like the SR-71 Blackbird, was the son of a construction company manager in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Ernest Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, was the son of two high school teachers in Canton, South Dakota. Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a machinist who had repeated disciplinary problems in high school. How many of them would get a fair shake at admission to any of today’s most elite schools?

A friend once said that Kelly Johnson could “see air.” But could he see color?

And for those whites who do still aspire to break into elite schools, it’s not just that doing so is harder, but that it requires a much higher amount of busywork, diligence, and pandering to the obsessions of admissions counselors. Anybody who has participated in the peacock dance of elite college admissions within the past two decades is well-acquainted with what one is expected to do. As Keenan’s stories above indicate, a perfect GPA is practically the bare minimum to even have one’s application looked at. Participating in extracurriculars is a must, but taking leadership positions is essential as well, and the best stunt of all is starting one’s own extracurricular (pertaining to the most fashionable causes, of course), leading to a profusion of sham leadership posts and parent-erected “non-profits” to bolster a child’s admission chances.

This is all bad news for anyone excellent whose skills don’t fit neatly into the box of perfect rule-following conscientiousness. Stephen Smale is one of the greatest mathematicians of the past century; but he came from an undistinguished family in Flint, Michigan and was “brilliant but lazy” throughout his youth. If a young Stephen Smale exists today, instead of doing work that will win him a Fields Medal, odds are good that he’s instead a NEET getting really good at optimizing playthroughs of Europa Universalis IV.

Almost any system will risk having people like Smale fall through the cracks. But today’s system may be the most flagrant about it. America’s single greatest reservoir of untapped talent may well be middle-class young men, yet America is obsessed with eliminating the means of identifying them, like standardized tests, and elevating literally every other group first.

As a result, America’s regime is doing two things at the same time. First, it’s systematically discriminating against whites by pushing them down the prestige ladder based on skin color. Second, it’s remaking the nature of who is allowed to break through, by particularly sabotaging those who don’t adhere to a lifelong series of checkboxes and homework assignments.

Once one accepts that this great shift is happening, the natural follow-up is, why? When top schools traffic in prestige and a founding myth that they attract and train the best, why do these schools then shunt merit aside in favor of diversity picks and teacher’s pets? One theory is that these very ordinary middle-class talented folk represent the chief existential danger to the regime.

This is what might be called the “Bioleninist” hypothesis: the current regime elevates its true insiders, and then a vast army of ideology-affirming lickspittles, diversity picks, and LGBTQ+ freak shows who could never reach or hold distinguished positions without the entire system being rigged in their favor. Deep down, theses groups are very aware of what is going on, and so they will fight tenaciously to preserve the system that has so unjustifiably elevated them. And so, the system is safely preserved from all serious attempts at reforming it.

This is a compelling theory, though other explanations may work better. The simplest one may be the most correct: America worships victimhood, and worships diversity, and middle class whites are the ones most easily sacrificed to make room for a parade of victims. They are guilty of the great crime of having built and sustained America. Now, their curse is to be blamed for everything as others tear America down.

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