[Excerpted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively through VDARE.com]

Sesame Place is a Philadelphia  amusement park for kids themed on the TV show Sesame Street. One of its features is that local teenagers desperate for a few dollars dress up as characters in the TV show—encase themselves in what must be stifling hot Muppet outfits, and parade past the kids and parents.

Well, a few days ago in this parade, two little black girls visiting the park reached out to hug one of the dressed-up characters, a Sesame Street regular named Rosita.  To their chagrin, Rosita (quite possibly inadvertently) rebuffed their advances and went right on marching, notwithstanding she had just previously paused to high-five some white kids.

National outrage of course ensued. I don’t think any police stations or car dealerships were torched, but things got pretty bad. Lawsuits are of course under way [Sesame Place Amusement Park Sued For Racial Discrimination, by Marc Griffin, Vibe, August 6, 2022].

The family of the little black girls (and their lawyers) are looking for $25 million.

It was left to TakiMag’s anonymous “The Week That Perished” columnist David Cole—I suspect it was he—to point out what, so far as I am aware, no one else noticed.

This Rosita character, who so shamefully disrespected the little black girls, is Sesame Street’s first bilingual Muppet. She’s supposed to be Mexican.

I’ll let David Cole wrap it up from there:

With that, Sesame Street provided its first useful lesson in fifty years.

Yes, black Americans, the Rositas marching through our open borders don’t like you, don’t want to deal with you, and in the end will render you irrelevant.

These days, that’s a way more important lesson than counting to five cookies.

Which brings me to “Civil Rights.”

I don’t know about you, reader, but I’m at the stage now where, when I hear the phrase “civil rights,“ I reach for my Mossberg.

What do Cultural Marxists do once they’ve driven brave truth-focused researchers who dare to discuss “race,” such as Noah Carl [Cambridge college sacks researcher over links with far right, by Richard Adams, The Guardian, May 1, 2019] or Michael Woodley, out of the universities and forced them to be “independent scholars”? What’s the next step in the drive to suppress empirically accurate research that makes them feel bad? Answer: prevent these scholars from attending any academic conferences in their field—above all if you can intimidate a black putative ally to turn on them.

VDARE.com readers know Emil Kirkegaard, the Danish independent scholar who writes about intelligence. He and I recently collaborated on a study about testicle size and testosterone levels relative to race, so he is obviously unafraid to follow the science where it leads. But his courage did not serve him well in late July when he was scheduled to speak at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research in Vienna, Austria. Kirkegaard has presented at ISIR many times, but that was before the Woke Reformation tightened its hold on science. The keynote speaker, Abdel Abdellaoui [Tweet him], a genetics researcher at  the University of Amsterdam, threatened to boycott the conference if Kirkegaard spoke. Kirkegaard was summarily uninvited. The affair is another example of what’s been happening to scientists who venture into forbidden territory, not least race and IQ. But worse, it proves that the Woke Left can scare one generally sound scientist into attacking another.

Noah Carl, now an “exiled researcher” and “moderate conservative,” as he bills himself, just explained what happened on his Substack.

Kirkegaard was supposed to deliver a paper titled Neuroscience of intelligence in the ABCD study—which, not insignificantly, conference organizers had accepted after Kirkegaard submitted it beforehand.

But that didn’t matter. When the cry that “Kirkegaard Is A Racist!” went up, the organizers ducked into the bushes. Carl writes:

[T]en days before the conference was due to start, Abdel Abdellaoui (the keynote speaker) announced on Twitter that he was boycotting the conference in protest at Kirkegaard’ s participation. He claimed not only that Kirkegaard is “racist,” but

[Research by Edwin S. Rubenstein]

A funny thing happened to the usual cheerleading that greeted the June job report [U.S. Economy Added 372,000 Jobs in June, Defying Slowdown Fears, by  Lydia DePillis, NYT, July 8, 2022]. In fact several funny things: a continued Biden Rush at the southern border; record inflation numbers; and (despite the New York Times’ headlined prediction) a “slowdown” that everyone knows would be called a recession if the GOP were in power [GDP fell 0.9% in the second quarter, the second straight decline and a strong recession signal, by Jeff Cox, CNBC, July 28, 2022]. But the cheerleading was misplaced anyway, because as usual it missed the extent to which immigrants (legal and illegal, government data does not distinguish) are taking native-born Americans’ jobs.

According to the widely cited Survey of Employers, the economy added back 372,000 jobs in June. Average hourly earnings rose a 5.1% year-over-year [Y-O-Y], a level that in most years would translate to large real income gains. Unfortunately, with the latest CPI inflation running at 9.1%, Y-O-Y, average incomes are still falling behind in real, inflation-adjusted, dollars.

[Scorching inflation hits 9.1%, highest since 1981, by Courtenay Brown, Axios, July 13, 2022]

The result: the extraordinary 2017-2021 Trump surge in real incomes, attributable at least in part to his curtailment of immigration through executive action and low inflation, has dramatically busted

Dr. Edward Dutton’s latest book, Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Politics and Religion in the 21st Century, is a collection of 10 essays that use evolutionary theory to explain the decline of the West. It is less narrowly focused than most of the author’s books (Sent Before Their Time, Making Sense of Race, Churchill’s Headmaster), and I warmly recommend it as an introduction to evolutionary thinking about cultural change, and to understand why Leftists promote mass immigration, the Floyd-Hoax-Black-Lives Matter riots, the mad rush to “transgenderism,” and the normalization of pedophilia.

Before 1800, only about half of children survived to adulthood. Those who did tended to be those with the fewest harmful genetic mutations. Then, within the course of a few generations, childhood mortality fell beneath one percent in most advanced countries. This meant that Darwinian natural selection ceased to operate. Children with harmful mutations began surviving to adulthood and passing on their unfavorable traits to offspring, a phenomenon known as “dysgenic fertility.” Since about 84 percent of the human genome relates to brain development, increased mutational load means that people began to think and behave in maladaptive ways. Compounding the problem, such people influence those around them, who might still be genetically healthy, to behave in similarly maladaptive ways. These are the “Spiteful Mutants” of Dutton’s title. Their behavior is “spiteful” because it damages others without bringing any advantage to themselves.

Dutton’s book focuses on two broad areas in which increased mutational load might give rise to maladaptive behavior: religion and sex. He proposes that the rise of sexual confusion and quasi-religious “social justice” movements such as Black Lives Matter are the action of Spiteful Mutants. Plenty of commentators have criticized such cultural trends. But Dutton’s evolutionary approach might explain why they are appearing in our society now and what must be done to fight back effectively. For at bottom the struggle could be as much biological as political.

Natural selection favors religious belief