Demographic trends setting U.S. up for race wars in coming decades?

By David McElroy · April 23, 2012

Is the United States heading for some form of race war? I’m getting more concerned about that. I see the convergence of several trends that mean we need to be thinking seriously about what’s coming.

The old estimate was that white people would be a minority in the country by 2050, but accelerating demographic trends mean that might happen more quickly. Demographers now estimate that it will happen as soon as 2042. Already, white babies are in the minority. Blacks are reproducing at a higher rate than whites, and Hispanics are reproducing at a higher rate than either group.

So what’s it going to mean? Conflict between groups over culture and economic resources. White people have control of a greatly disproportionate amount of the income and wealth. I don’t happen to believe that it’s because of racism, but a high percentage of the non-white groups believe it’s unfair and racist that it’s this way. As whites become a minority, there will be increasing political pressure to take more from “the rich” and give it to “the poor” in one way or other.

Many black and Hispanic politicians are going to enjoy the increasing power that’s going to come from representing more people like them. At the same time, a large proportion of whites are going to feel that their country is “being taken away” from them. It’s going to be a potentially volatile mix.

We already see some evidence of it in the reaction to the Trayvon Martin killing. Blacks and whites have radically different views about the situation, on average. Only 38 percent of white say the killing of Martin was unjustified, but 80 percent of blacks say it was unjustified. That’s a huge disparity.

What’s more is that it almost doesn’t matter who’s right, because there is enough simmering anger among some blacks that some have been attacking white people in isolated incidents as payback for George Zimmerman’s killing of Martin. There was a case in Gainesville, Fla., a couple of weeks ago in which half a dozen or so blacks attacked a white man while yelling, “Trayvon!” Last Tuesday, a black man in a Chicago suburb beat up a white man and said it was because he was angry about the Martin killing. There have been others, so these are just a couple of examples.

The case of Martin and Zimmerman will eventually fade, but it’s doing damage in the meantime. If Zimmerman is found not guilty — as I suspect he will be — many blacks are going to feel that it’s another example of blacks getting a raw deal in this country. Will there be riots? Very possibly. Will they cause lasting damage? It depends on how you mean it. That sort of riots won’t destroy the country, but they’ll be laying even more of a foundation for racial distrust that the demographic trends are going to expose.

The most frustrating thing about the whole racial mess is that I don’t see things as black against white against Hispanic. I see it as a bunch of individuals of different skin tones — some good people, some bad people, most somewhere in between. And the “good” and “bad” don’t correlate with their races. Unfortunately, as group conflict gets more and more likely, most people are going to tend to see each other as parts of groups, not as individuals. It’s not something I’m looking forward to.

I’ve talked before about the economic collapse that I see coming. There’s no way debt can continue to increase as it has been — and it can’t continue to be paid for (and even more borrowed) without absolutely confiscating wealth. When you combine economic collapse with the group conflict that’s going to come as whites lose power and black and Hispanics gain power, you get a powder keg that’s going to set off an ugly explosion. I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I think it’s safe to say that this country won’t survive in anything like its current form.

We’re going to see a rise of “white power” movements and “white rights” groups in response to this. We’re going to see some blacks and Hispanics who feel they’ve waited long enough to live in the fancy white suburbs, so they’re going to want to use their power to take money from those who have it.

Is it any wonder that I hope to have found someplace else to live and raise a family while this plays out? I fear it’s going to be ugly. I honestly can’t see any other way it can play itself out. I hope I’m wrong.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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