[O]nly Charles Murray and I noticed that Tiger Mother was awfully funny. Most of the press, which is heavily driven by the primal resentments of Jewish women writers and editors, was outraged by Chua’s act.
First, she steals our husbands, and then she steals our children’s spots at Harvard!
Now Chua has gone back to the theme of her first book, World on Fire: market-dominant minorities.
Here in America, we assume that discussions of minorities, ethnic and/or sexual, controlling certain industries is just conspiracy theory crazy talk. But in many countries that don’t have long histories of intelligent nationalism, a majority of business assets actually are owned by enterprising but insular outsiders, such as the Lebanese in some West African countries or the Chinese in Southeast Asia. (…)
Similarly, the Lebanese Carlos Slim launched himself on his improbable ascent to challenging Bill Gates for the title of World’s Richest Man by being a close personal friend of Mexican president Carlos Salinas when privatization was the fad in the early 1990s.
It’s extraordinary that Slim has been able to squeeze so much out of the supposedly poor country of Mexico, but he understands that Mexico, lucrative as it is, is still the minor leagues compared to having influence in America. Over the last half-decade, Slim has moved closer to the center of global power by bailing out the agenda-setting New York Times. He now may own as much as a fifth of the stock. His investment in the Grey Lady has been lavishly paid back, both in financial instruments and in Narrative.
The telecom monopolist profits exorbitantly from phone calls between illegal immigrants and their friends and family in Mexico, and the Times has dutifully demonized all immigration restrictionists as despicable racists.
