Good and bad ideas are fairly equally distributed across the political spectrum.
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About 5-10% of all US colleges have an average SAT score that's the equivalent of an IQ of 90 or below.
Since a 90 IQ places a person in the bottom 20% of cognitive ability among white Americans, this means these colleges are enrolling some of the dimmest people in the country.
Only 945 US colleges report their SAT averages. Non-reporting institutions are disproportionately lower-selectivity with lower average SAT scores than those reporting their scores.
If you include only those schools reporting scores, about 10-15% of all these have an SAT mean below 1,000, but a substantial share of those are in the 800s–900s. (Lists of the lowest-average schools start in the low-to-mid 800s.)
If you include the approximately 3,000 non-reporting colleges, the share of all schools with SAT means below 900 greatly increases, by most estimates to as high as 10%.
The Asian-white-Hispanic-black rank order for socially desirable outcomes (and the inverse rank order for socially undesirable outcomes) is the norm in the US, including for:
Examples of socially desirable outcomes in which this rank order prevails:
— IQ and standardized test performance
— Average college GPA
— Percentage degrees earned in the most cognitively-demanding STEM fields
— Law and medical school graduation rates
— Household income
— Household wealth
Below are socially undesirable outcomes in a rank order the reverse of above:
— Violent crime rates
— Most property crime rates
— School disciplinary rates
— Antisocial behavior percentage
— Divorce rates
— Out-of-wedlock birth rates
— Single-parent household rates
— Obesity rates
— Teenage pregnancy rates
— Average age of first sexual intercourse
Performance in the following areas contains an occasional or slight divergence from typical ranking-order, but never involves Hispanics or blacks rising to the top two spots or Asians and whites falling to the bottom two spots:
— Law and medical board professional licensing rates (Asians and whites switch places occasionally)
— Personal (not household) income (very slight lead of blacks over Hispanics explained by fact that 1/3 of Hispanics are foreign-born and about 1/5 have incomplete command of English language)
— Welfare recipients (Asian percentage is often higher than whites, tied to higher percentage of immigrants)
— Scientific innovation and achievement (Whites lead Asians, but gap may be closing)
— Mortgage foreclosure rates (blacks and Hispanics switch third and fourth position occasionally, but are always in the bottom two)
— Bachelor's degree percentage (blacks have higher percentage than Hispanics
Finally, these are major outcomes in which Hispanics or blacks outperform whites or Asians:
— Longevity (Hispanic lead over whites is called the “Hispanic Health Paradox”)
— Prominence and influence of musical artists (blacks outperform all other groups on a per capita basis, and Asians perform worst)
— Athletic achievement in the two most popular American sports (blacks outperform all other groups, and Asians perform worst)
Mass taste is predictably awful. There's only one movie on this list that I saw that I would ever want to watch again.
Most of these you couldn't pay me to sit through.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
@lancecheek seems to be an engagement farming account which simply bulk-posts AI-slop charts with errors. This chart also contains errors. For example, Home Alone was released in 1990 and thus was not 1980's highest grossing film. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Alone 2025's highest grossing film was Minecraft the-numbers.com/market/2025/to…
I'd rather spend an hour with a blue-haired wokepile than five minutes with anyone who thinks most of the movies on that list are good. Because only one of those two people is truly dead inside and not worth talking to.
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Yes.
And mass taste in fiction, art, architecture (especially architecture)...
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The children of the very poorest Asians (lowest decile) end up having higher credit scores than the kids of the wealthiest blacks (highest decile).
Poor white kids at the 20th percentile end up as adults having about the same credit scores as black kids at the 90th.
At the lower deciles, Asians significantly outperform whites.
census.gov/library/working-p…
Lord knows, I've criticized Musk regularly over the past few years, but this is a good defense of a guy who has done more good than harm (at least outside the world of politics).
Musk is broadly directionally correct about a lot of things in the culture wars, even if he frames his views in sledgehammer-like partisan ways and is too eager to buy the most facile conspiracies and pieces of misinfo floating around. Also, his willingness to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into elections is an example of one of the things that's most wrong about American politics.
I actually feel bad for Elon, even though I deeply disagree with him on some things.
Imagine trying to build a car company in California in the mid-2000s, when American manufacturing is being completely offshored and almost all of Wall Street thinks you’re a joke and is rooting for your failure, while the entire oil and gas industry is using all their power and leverage to make you fail.
But against all odds, you actually pull it off. You build cars that make electric vehicles desirable to millions of people, create an enormous number of quality American jobs, and force the global car industry to play catch up and move away from oil and gas.
You would think California would be proud of you and the team. Instead you find yourself having to fight a completely corrupt and incompetent left government impeding all your efforts while you sleep at the factory night after night to avoid collapse. At some point, you would go to the right too.
And because of your politics, it becomes a justification for people to celebrate your companies failing in their personal ideological fight with you. Even threats against you become something people explain away and use mental gymnastics to justify.
Meanwhile, people like Scott Galloway and Bernie Sanders who have made absolutely nobody better off other than themselves get to lecture you about your value to society and even call for your murder without grounds from their vacation home while you're on 20 hour benders in your factories trying to get things built for all of society. If this were me I would lose my mind.
Criticize his opinions. I do sometimes, especially on Ukraine. But the pleasure people take in wanting to destroy everything he’s built is hideous and frankly suicidal for the masses, especially coming from people who insist they care about workers, the climate, and civilization as a whole.
As you try to make good things for society you are confronted with a world that worships people who care only about the perception of being good people, while they actually fight against your tangible efforts of making improvements for humanity.
I don't think almost anyone would have made it out of that and if they did, they would probably not come away feeling so warm towards the left either. So I am rooting for Elon to succeed, and for humanity.
On one very specific point, this might be the most wrong tweet by Noah Smith, ever. (And I say this as a guy who usually agrees with him.)
In what world would a far-right extremist ever get a tenure-track position in US academia? Normie cons can't even get more than 2% of faculty positions at elite universities.
Leftwing extremists have had a lot of success getting teaching positions in academia because a large minority of the faculty in the humanities and social sciences are situated on the far left. (And I don't mean a rightwinger's idea of a far-leftist. I mean people who actually publicly identify themselves as Marxist or "radical".)
I can't even imagine how a situation might arise, outside some tiny fundamentalist Christian college deep in the heartland, in which a self-described anti-democracy rightwing extremist would be able to obtain a job teaching at a respectable college.
The rate at which individuals with IQs below 90 (the US average is around 98) completed college has increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.
Today, the average college student isn't all that much smarter than the average American. A degree from most colleges signals little more than what a high school diploma signaled 100 years ago.
It's worth noting that the position of the Democratic Party has been that college enrollment should be expanded, and most of the progressive wing of the party believes that college education ought to be subsidized by the taxpayer. In fact, college enrollment should be reduced and hundreds of non-selective colleges should be shuttered.
Most of the online rightoids who throw the term around couldn't coherently describe what Western Civilization even is. To many of them, it's mostly just an imagined bulwark against progressivism and brown immigrants.
But, in their defense, there is a lot to be said for political freedom and reason and the scientific method, all products of Western Civilization's Enlightenment. (Problem is, a lot of these "Western Civ" rightoids don't show a lot of respect for these pillars.)
Western Civ is worth defending because it has produced better results than other civilizations, but what online rightoids don't understand is that it's something that necessarily adjusts to new conditions, and can take on new forms, as long as it doesn't abandon the things about it that matter most: Reason, science, and freedom.
Rufo on midterms: The New Right intelligentsia "was trying to persuade the president to focus on... bringing down the cost of living... and avoiding a war with Iran... these were the most important reasons for the voter shift, plus corruption in the Mar-a-Lago orbit."
However:
Love Ross, but I don't think this is quite right, as the problem seems to be more directly attributable to Trump. If we take Charlie Kirk as a proxy for the more polished New Right, he was trying to persuade the president to focus on kitchen-table economics, bringing down the cost of living for young people, and avoiding a war with Iran. According to exit polls, these were the most important reasons for the voter shift, plus corruption in the Mar-a-Lago orbit, which is distinct from the New Right milieu. Even on the smaller cultural issues like porn and drugs and gambling, the New Right and the president were increasingly on opposite sides.
On policy, it's certainly fair to criticize protectionist tariffs, the DHS hype-reel videos, and the disastrous management of deportations, but for the latter, especially, the failure seems mostly related to Trump's bad cabinet picks, like Noem and Bovino, when he could have achieved significant out-migration without the heavy-handed militarized tactics in cities like Minneapolis, which led voters to the conclusion that "enforcement has gone too far." (Some of us were warning about this after the anti-ICE riots in the summer of 2025.)
The problem for the New Right, and, one could say, its "failure," was that the president doesn't care about the right-wing intelligentsia—he is not ideological in that sense—and pursues his own vision in his own idiosyncratic way. The New Right was an opposition vehicle that Trump used for his campaign, paid back with culture-war wins in the first 100 days, and then mostly abandoned.
i/o retweeted
MAGA hollowed out and weakened the GOP. The fish rots from the head. Trumpism alienated affluent folks who used to vote GOP. It temporarily replaced them with low-propensity voters - who it then also alienated. The party is in shambles.
This tweet, just moments ago, from JD Vance, shows some real self-reflection — exactly what this administration has been sorely lacking.
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One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up.
So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us."
Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026.
There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true.
But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone.
Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:
1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel
Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.)
In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you.
The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night.
If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest.
But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.
I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.
"Change our relationship to Israel" is, in the long-run, the biggest item here.
A few years ago, Hamas made what can only be called an enormous military blunder, but the Israeli reaction to 10/7 may end up ultimately producing a profound shift in the US-Israel relationship as tens of millions of Americans (especially younger ones) turned against the Jewish state after it levelled much of Gaza and guided the US into a war with Iran.
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