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Ron Unz

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Ron Unz
Unz at a 2013 New America symposium
Born
Ronald Keeva Unz

(1961-09-20) September 20, 1961 (age 63)
Los Angeles, California, US
EducationHarvard University (AB)
University of Cambridge
Stanford University
Occupation(s)Businessman, political activist, writer
Political partyRepublican

Ronald Keeva Unz (/ʌnz/; born September 20, 1961) is an American technology entrepreneur, political activist, writer, and publisher. A former businessman, Unz became a financial software multi-millionaire before entering politics.[1] He unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican in the 1994 California gubernatorial election and for U.S. Senator in 2016. He has sponsored multiple ballot propositions promoting structured English immersion education as well as campaign finance reform and minimum wage increases.

Unz was publisher of The American Conservative from 2007 to 2013, and since 2013 has been publisher and editor of The Unz Review, a website which self-describes as presenting "controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American mainstream media."[2] Unz Review has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League for hosting racist and anti-semitic content,[3] and the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a white nationalist publication.[4] Unz has also drawn criticism for funding VDARE and other publications accused of white supremacism.[5]

Early life and career

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Ronald Keeva Unz was born in Los Angeles, California, on September 20, 1961,[6] to a Ukrainian family of Jewish descent. His family migrated to America in the 20th century and was raised household in North Hollywood.[7][8][1] His mother was an anti-war activist[8] who raised her son as a single mother. Unz has said that his childhood as a fatherless child in a single-parent household which received public assistance, was a source of "embarrassment and discomfort".[8]

He attended North Hollywood High School and, in his senior year won first place in the 1979 Westinghouse Science Talent Search.[7] He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and ancient history.[6][9] He then took graduate courses in physics at the University of Cambridge and began a Ph.D. at Stanford University before abandoning the program.[8][9]

Unz worked in the banking industry and wrote software for mortgage securities during his studies. In 1988 he founded the company Wall Street Analytics in New York City, moving it to Palo Alto, California, five years later.[8][9] In 2006 the company was acquired by the ratings firm Moody's.[10]

Political career

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Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the 1994 California gubernatorial election, challenging incumbent Pete Wilson. He ran as a conservative alternative to the more moderate Wilson and was endorsed by the conservative California Republican Assembly.[11] He came in second place to Wilson, receiving 707,431 votes (34.3 percent).[12] Newspapers referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ.[13][11][1][9]

In 1998, Unz sponsored California Proposition 227, which aimed to change the state's bilingual education to an opt-in structured English-language educational system. It was approved by the voters.[14] Proposition 227 did not seek to end bilingual education since special exemptions were made for students to remain in an English immersion class if a parent so desires. However, there were limits (such as age restrictions) for the exemptions, and there were provisions to discipline teachers who refused to teach solely or predominantly in English.[15] Proposition 227 was approved in 1998, but repealed by Proposition 58 in 2016. In 2002, Unz backed a similar initiative, the Massachusetts English Language Education in Public Schools Initiative,[16] which was approved by 61.25% of the voters.[17] He also supported ballot initiatives in other states including Arizona Proposition 203 and Colorado Amendment 31.[18]

In early 1999, Unz introduced a campaign-finance reform ballot initiative known as the California Voters Bill of Rights (Proposition 25).[19] Co-sponsored by California Democrat Tony Miller and endorsed by Senator John McCain,[20] the proposal would have required campaign contributions greater than $1,000 to be declared online within 24 hours, limited individual contributions to $5,000, banned corporate contributions to candidates, and permitted statewide candidates to raise funds only within the 12 months before an election.[21][22] In late 1999 Unz briefly entered the U.S. Senate race to challenge incumbent Dianne Feinstein,[23] declaring his candidacy in October[20] and dropping out by December to focus on fundraising for Proposition 25, which was ultimately defeated in the March 2000 primary election.[24][25]

In 2012 and 2014, Unz worked on a ballot initiative to raise the California minimum wage from $10 to $12, but his campaign failed.[26][27] His proposal was supported by economist James K. Galbraith.[26]

In 2016, Unz organized the "Free Harvard, Fair Harvard" campaign, a slate of five candidates campaigning for spots on the Harvard Board of Overseers, the governing board of Harvard University. The slate included himself, journalist Stuart Taylor Jr., physicist Stephen Hsu, consumer advocate Ralph Nader, and lawyer Lee C. Cheng. The campaign sought for tuition fees at Harvard to be abolished and for greater transparency in the admissions process.[28][29][30] None of the five candidates were elected to the 30-person board.[31][32]

Unz campaigned on a Republican ticket in California in the 2016 primaries for election to the US Senate intending to succeed Democrat Barbara Boxer.[33] Having previously supported immigration, he now proposed it "should be sharply reduced, probably by 50% or more."[34] Though not hoping to win the nomination, he put himself forward in an attempt to challenge the then proposed repeal of Proposition 227.[33] He was endorsed by former U.S. Representative Ron Paul.[35] In the final result, he gained 64,698 votes (1.3%).[36]

Writing and publishing

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The American Conservative and the "Asian quota" controversy

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An investor in The American Conservative, he was its publisher from 2007 to 2013.[37] He also contributed opinion articles on topics such as immigration, the minimum wage, and urban crime.[16] In an email leaked to National Review magazine, editor Daniel McCarthy wrote that Unz was acting as if he were the editor of The American Conservative and threatened to resign if the publication's board did not support him over Unz.[38]

In 2012 Unz published an article in The American Conservative entitled "The Myth of American Meritocracy". He argued Ivy League universities held an unspoken admissions quota for granting spots to Asian/Asian American applicants an Asian quota similar to earlier Jewish quotas, and that Jewish students are over-represented than merit would suggest, which he claimed was caused by unconscious Jewish bias among administrators.[39][40][41] The article said that the “massive apparent bias” could be attributed to Jewish administrators at those universities.[42][43] His argument for existence of Asian race-based quota was reproduced in a subsequent New York Times special debate feature, "Fears of an Asian Quota in the Ivy League".[44][45] Unz's admissions analysis was contested by academics at Yale, who showed that his data "grossly underestimates the proportion of Asian-Americans".[46] Unz's writings on Ivy League admissions were praised by white supremacist David Duke who said it confirmed Harvard was "now under powerful Jewish influence". The noted antisemite Kevin B. MacDonald said it was similar to his own view that Jews are "at odds with the values of the great majority of non-Jewish White Americans."[40][43]

The Unz Archive

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Unz also compiled the Unz Archive (UNZ.org), a searchable online collection of periodicals, books, and video, that by 2012 held around 25,000 issues of over 120 publications, including The American Mercury, The Literary Digest, Inquiry, Collier's, Marxism Today, New Politics, and various pulp fiction and romance magazines.[47][48][49] Nick Gillespie of Reason called it "one of the Web's great archive projects".[48]

The Unz Review

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In November 2013, Unz launched the website The Unz Review for which he serves as editor-in-chief and publisher.[40]

The Unz Review describes itself as presenting "controversial perspectives largely excluded from the American mainstream media."[2] Unz says he mostly posts articles that have already been published, and "I don't even read most of the articles I publish, and I certainly don't edit them. I'm busy."[43] It has been described by the Associated Press as "a hodgepodge of views from corners of both the left and right"[50] and by the New York Times as "far right".[51] According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2014, the webzine is an "outlet for certain writers to attack Israel and Jews".[40] The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled it a white nationalist publication.[4] In 2016, a research fellow at the ADL said "I haven't seen Ron Unz write anything anti-Semitic himself, but he really gives a platform to anti-Semites."[43]

In 2017, The Unz Review received public attention when former CIA operative Valerie Plame was criticized after tweeting an article by a columnist, counter-terrorism specialist Philip Giraldi, titled "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars" published in the webzine.[52][53]

Relation to anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, homosexuality research, etc.

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The ADL and others criticized Unz for a $600,000 grant for research in evolutionary biology to Gregory Cochran, a professor who argued that homosexuality may be caused by a "gay germ".[43] Ralph Nader, while running with Unz for Harvard Board of Overseers called him "a very nuanced guy. He should not be stereotyped as a lot of the world of identity politics does."[30]

The Unz Foundation, of which he is president, has donated to individuals and organizations which are alleged by the ADL to have published or expressed opinions that are antisemitic or anti-Israel. In 2009, 2010 and 2011, it gave $108,000 to Paul Craig Roberts, $74,000 to Philip Giraldi, $75,000 Norman Finkelstein, $80,000 to CounterPunch and $60,000 to Philip Weiss, co-editor of the Mondoweiss website.[40][54] In addition, the Unz Foundation has given grants to Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew.[40] He has donated tens of thousands of dollars to VDARE, which he admits is a "quasi-white nationalist" website, but has said "they write interesting things".[55][5][56]

Since their 2014 article, the ADL commented in October 2018 that Unz "has embraced hardcore anti-Semitism", "denied the Holocaust", and "endorsed the claim that Jews consume the blood of non-Jews", referring to blood libel.[3] In July 2018, in articles for The Unz Review, he wrote about the claims in the Czarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford's The International Jew. Ford's work, a series of antisemitic pamphlets published in the 1920s, appeared to Unz to be "quite plausible and factually-oriented, even sometimes overly cautious in their presentation."[3] He partly accepted the standard consensus on the Protocols but believes they were assembled by "someone who was generally familiar with the secretive machinations of elite international Jews against the existing governments... who drafted the document to outline his view of their strategic plans."[3]

In August 2018, Unz made use of Holocaust denial arguments and wrote, "I think it far more likely than not that the standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly, almost entirely so."[3] That same year, The Unz Review published material written by Holocaust denier Kevin Barrett,[57][37][58][59] while Unz himself defended David Irving, who lost his libel case against Deborah Lipstadt. Unz also implied that Mossad was involved in the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.[37] Writing about the 2001 September 11 attacks in a September 2018 article for his Review, Unz stated: "the vast weight of the evidence clearly points in a single direction, implicating Israel and its Mossad intelligence service, with the case being overwhelmingly strong in motive, means, and opportunity.”[60]

Collection of essays

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In 2016, Unz self-published The Myth of American Meritocracy and Other Essays, a hardcover collection of most of his writings, including nearly all of his print articles.[56]

References

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  1. ^ a b c Hornblower, Margot (June 8, 1998). "The Man Behind Prop. 227". CNN. Archived from the original on July 10, 2017. Retrieved June 9, 2018. In 1988 he formed a financial-software firm, Wall Street Analytics, which made him wealthy
  2. ^ a b "Indiana U says it can't fire prof who made 'racist, sexist and homophobic' remarks". CBC Radio. November 25, 2019. Archived from the original on November 9, 2021. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
  3. ^ a b c d e "California Entrepreneur Ron Unz Launches a Series of Rhetorical Attacks on Jews". Anti-Defamation League. October 4, 2018. Archived from the original on June 12, 2019. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  4. ^ a b Gais, Hannah (January 19, 2021). "Meet the White Nationalist Organizer Who Spewed Hate Against Lawmakers". Southern Poverty Law Center. Archived from the original on March 3, 2021. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
  5. ^ a b Krantz, Laura (April 16, 2016). "Harvard critic faces scrutiny on donations". Boston Globe. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  6. ^ a b Willis, Doug (May 1, 1994). "Ron Unz - Science prodigy turns into candidate". The Press-Enterprise. Riverside, CA. Associated Press. p. A16 – via NewsBank.
  7. ^ a b Foster, Douglas (November 24, 1999). "Being Ron Unz". LA Weekly. Archived from the original on June 22, 2018. Retrieved June 22, 2018.
  8. ^ a b c d e Miller, Matthew (July 19, 1999). "Man With a Mission: Ron Unz's Improbable Assault on the Powers That Be in California". The New Republic. Vol. 221. pp. 24–29. ISSN 0028-6583 – via NewsBank.
  9. ^ a b c d Bruni, Frank (June 14, 1998). "The California Entrepreneur who Beat Bilingual Teaching". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 22, 2016. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  10. ^ "Moody's Corporation Acquires Wall Street Analytics". MWSA News. Moody's Corporation. December 18, 2006. Archived from the original on October 28, 2007. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
  11. ^ a b Wallace, Amy (May 8, 1994). "Unlikely Path Led to Wilson Foe's Far-Right Challenge – Politics: A computer 'genius' with a passion for Greek philosophy, Ron Unz has set out to jolt the GOP". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved December 24, 2020.
  12. ^ "1994 Statement of Vote". California Secretary of State. Archived from the original on December 22, 2008.
  13. ^ Reeves, Phil (May 17, 1994). "'Nerds' seek revenge in Californian poll: Apathy marks the run up to the contest for governor". The Independent. Archived from the original on June 9, 2015. Retrieved December 24, 2020.
  14. ^ Arguments in favor Archived December 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine of 1998 California Ballot Proposition 227
  15. ^ Crawford, James (2000). At War with Diversity. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. ISBN 1-85359-505-5.
  16. ^ a b Medina, Jennifer (November 26, 2013). "Conservative Leads Effort to Raise Minimum Wage in California". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 9, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  17. ^ Galvin, William Francis. "Statewide Ballot Questions — Statistics by Year: 1919 - 2018". sec.state.ma.us. Archived from the original on April 9, 2021.
  18. ^ Haver, Johanna J. (2013). English for the Children: Mandated by the People, Skewed by Politicians and Special Interests. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Education. ISBN 9781475802023.
  19. ^ Streisand, Betsy (April 26, 1999). "A one-man band's new song". U.S. News & World Report. Vol. 126, no. 16. p. 42.
  20. ^ a b York, Anthony (October 5, 1999). "Feinstein gets a challenger". Salon.com. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  21. ^ Wood, Daniel B. (April 6, 1999). "Pruning California's political money tree". The Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  22. ^ Purdum, Todd S. (March 25, 1999). "California Republican Tries Altering Campaign Finance". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  23. ^ "Millionaire GOP-er backs wage boost". Politico. Associated Press. January 11, 2014. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  24. ^ Gledhill, Lynda (December 1, 1999). "Unz Bows Out of U.S. Senate Race". The San Francisco Chronicle. p. A3 – via NewsBank.
  25. ^ Wood, Daniel B. (March 9, 2000). "With initiatives, California tilts conservative". The Christian Science Monitor. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  26. ^ a b Patterson, Robert. "The Missing Plank of the GOP Platform". The Natural Family. Archived from the original on June 16, 2018. Retrieved June 16, 2018.
  27. ^ Abramsky, Sasha (April 8, 2014). "What If the Minimum Wage Were $15 an Hour?". The Nation. Archived from the original on May 29, 2018. Retrieved May 29, 2018.
  28. ^ Saul, Stephanie (January 14, 2016). "How Some Would Level the Playing Field: Free Harvard Degrees". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 6, 2017. Retrieved February 18, 2017.
  29. ^ Adamczyk, Alicia (January 15, 2016). "Group Says Harvard Tuition Should Be Free for All Students". Money. Archived from the original on August 12, 2020.
  30. ^ a b Gerstein, Josh (May 19, 2016). "Ralph Nader declares war on Harvard". Politico. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  31. ^ DeCosta-Klipa, Nik (May 23, 2016). "Ralph Nader fails in bid to be elected to Harvard board". Boston.com. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  32. ^ Gerstein, Josh (May 23, 2016). "Nader bid for Harvard board comes up short". Politico. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  33. ^ a b Wildermuth, John (April 17, 2016). "Ron Unz's U.S. Senate race raises concerns of splintered GOP vote". San Francisco Chronicle. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  34. ^ Krikorian, Mark (May 27, 2016). "Ron Unz, Immigration Convert". National Review. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  35. ^ Cadelago, Christopher. "Ron Paul endorses Ron Unz for California's U.S. Senate seat". The Sacramento Bee. Archived from the original on September 7, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  36. ^ "California Primary Results, June 7". The New York Times. September 29, 2016. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  37. ^ a b c Sixsmith, Ben (September 15, 2018). "The curious case of Ron Unz". The Spectator. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019. In June, Unz published an essay saluting the 'remarkable' historiography of David Irving. In his legal fight against the historian Deborah Lipstadt, Unz wrote, Irving's work was analyzed 'line-by-line, footnote-by-footnote' by historians who 'came up empty'. Readers of expert witness Richard J. Evans's report on Irving's scholarship will know this to be false. Unz followed this essay with an approving appraisal of the National Socialists' treatment of France that never once mentioned their millions of murders in Central and Eastern Europe, long articles implicating Mossad in the killings of John and Robert Kennedy and a series of analyses of Jewish history which concluded that Judaism entails 'the enslavement or execution of all non-Jews', that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is 'a classic of political thought', that the Holocaust almost certainly did not take place in a recognizable form and that anti-Semitism has in general been well-founded.
  38. ^ Woodruff, Betsy (August 1, 2013). "The American Conservative, Unfused?". The National Review. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  39. ^ Scheer, Jacob (August 1, 2018). "The American Jewish Affirmative Action About-Face". Tablet. Archived from the original on August 9, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  40. ^ a b c d e f "Ron Unz: Controversial Writer and Funder of Anti-Israel Activists". Anti-Defamation League. January 20, 2014. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2018.
  41. ^ Pinker, Steven (September 4, 2014). "The Trouble With Harvard". The New Republic. ISSN 0028-6583. Archived from the original on February 27, 2018.
  42. ^ Ingall, Marjorie (February 2, 2018). "Alt-Right Publication Accuses Jews of Attempting to Indoctrinate America's Young Via Subversive Children's Books". Tablet Magazine. Archived from the original on November 23, 2020. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  43. ^ a b c d e Wilson, Phil (April 25, 2016). "Controversial English-only crusader sets his sights on California's Senate race". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on January 16, 2021. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  44. ^ Lubin, Gus. "It's Pretty Clear That The Ivy League Discriminates Against Asians". Business Insider. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  45. ^ Friedersdorf, Conor (December 21, 2012). "Is the Ivy League Fair to Asian Americans?". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on November 11, 2021. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  46. ^ "UP CLOSE: What's next for affirmative action?". Yale Daily News. September 22, 2014. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved March 4, 2021.
  47. ^ Bates, Stephen (Spring 2012). "The Periodical Table" (PDF). The Wilson Quarterly. 36 (2): 15. Archived (PDF) from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  48. ^ a b Gillespie, Nick (October 3, 2012). "Why The Internet is Great or, "The Influence of Encounter" and UNZ.org". Reason.com. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  49. ^ Wood, Mike (April 18, 2012). "Learning about our tradition". Solidarity. No. 242. p. 10.
  50. ^ Oxford, Andrew (September 21, 2017). "Ex-CIA agent sparks Twitter controversy by sharing commentary on Jews". AP News. Associated Press. Archived from the original on March 14, 2022. Retrieved November 11, 2021.
  51. ^ "Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)". The New York Times. October 17, 2018. Archived from the original on October 17, 2018. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  52. ^ Tatum, Sophie (September 22, 2017). "Ex-CIA operative apologizes for tweet". CNN. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved November 30, 2018.
  53. ^ Kirchick, James (September 25, 2017). "Valerie Plame's Real Blunder". Tablet. Archived from the original on May 31, 2019. Retrieved May 20, 2019.
  54. ^ Elder of Ziyon (December 12, 2013). "New York Times, Others Praised Anti-Semitic and Slanderous Article". The Algemeiner. Archived from the original on April 21, 2019. Retrieved April 21, 2019.
  55. ^ Duehren, Andrew M; Thompson, Daphne C (April 16, 2016). "Overseers Candidate Donates to 'Quasi-White Nationalist' Group". The Harvard Crimson. Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved April 19, 2019.
  56. ^ a b Rosenberg, John S. (April 26, 2016). "The Quiet Campaign". Harvard Magazine. Archived from the original on November 28, 2020. Retrieved December 2, 2020.
  57. ^ Ross, Alexander Reid (March 14, 2019). "World News". Haaretz.com. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  58. ^ "Following Sacha Baron Cohen's speech, here is ADL's short list of social media accounts that should have been removed long ago". Anti-Defamation League. November 25, 2019. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  59. ^ "Ron Unz - L'Observatoire du conspirationnisme". Conspiracy Watch | L'Observatoire du conspirationnisme (in French). November 8, 2021. Archived from the original on November 10, 2021. Retrieved November 10, 2021.
  60. ^ "Antisemitic Conspiracies About 9/11 Endure 20 Years Later". Anti-Defamation League. September 9, 2021. Archived from the original on June 13, 2022. Retrieved June 22, 2022.

Further reading

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