The Wall Street Journal is really trying my patience. I don’t expect to be spoon-fed conservative-biased reporting like some Instagram algorithm, but I have come to expect them to offer some degree of support for conservative candidates, especially when one considers the radical alternatives offered by the democrats. But they've steadily skewed left, are distinctly negative when reporting on Trump policies, and don’t even get me started on Peggy Noonan’s weekly demonstrations of end-stage TDS. Their latest editorial, seemingly ripped from the pages of the New York Times, claims that a segment of the Republican Party has become “hostile to ethnic and religious minorities” and uses the recent comments by Bo French as an example. Who, you ask? Exactly. The author of this editorial, Mr. Sadanand Dhume, is trying to support his thesis based on the rantings of a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission? But perhaps you are being a bit sensitive, Sadanand. Or perhaps biased yourself. The aforementioned Mr. French does indeed have a history of making some racially controversial comments, perhaps the only reason anyone would even know that the TRC exists, let alone the fact that Bo French is a candidate for the office. But this particular comment pointed out that the University of Texas student body, in a candid photo, appeared more representative of Mumbai's population than Austin's. So what. As an observation, that is a rational conclusion that would be apparent to any objective observer, albeit based on a single photograph. And in a state that prides itself on football, oil, cowboys, cattle and the American frontier, wouldn’t it be disconcerting to an old Texan like Mr. French that the University that bears the state’s name may be losing its Texas identity? In the name of worshipping at the altar of diversity, must everywhere look the same as everywhere else? Now Bo could have left it at that, but he spun it as a negative by simply stating “it’s worse than I thought.” But if by “worse” he means not representative of Texas, he may indeed be correct. The population of the state of Texas remains majority White at 53.93%, with Hispanics making up the next largest ethnic group at 39.3%. The University of Texas, however, does not reflect those state statistics, with 31.57% of the student body White and 28.28% Hispanic. Surprisingly, Asians make up 25.37% of the student population, despite accounting for only 5% of the state population. The University does not break down the racial groups any finer than that, so we might conclude that Indians (as in India) may be included in the group labeled as Asian. Also surprising is that the Black population of Texas accounts for 11.9%, whereas they make up only 4.67% of the student body. And that in itself is interesting. If DEI policies have been abandoned, then perhaps meritocracy is the reason why high-performing Asian students are overrepresented, a phenomenon that has appeared at most Ivy League and highly selective universities, most notably Harvard, which have been accused of discriminating against Asians in their admissions process. Maybe by “worse than I thought,” Mr. French was actually lamenting the underrepresentation of white and Hispanic students compared to Texas’ population, which would suggest their academic performance is falling behind their Asian counterparts. Depends on how you spin it
