In my latest column on the 20th anniversary of The Bell Curve in Taki’s Magazine, a commenter takes issue with my contention that Herrnstein and Murray hadn’t been cynical enough about what the cognitive elite would do with its urban underclass:

As I recall, rather than being a sinister plan, Liberals supported moving minorities out to the suburbs because it was thought that concentrating them in city slums was working against them and that dispersing them among the middle class would improve the chances that their children would turn out better. Flawed idea for many reasons that Steve has written about before, but it also didn’t account for the fact that middle class people would react and the poor would just end up “concentrated” in specific suburban neighborhoods that others abandoned. Rather than face the fact that “culture” and “attitudes” might be holding minorities back, Liberals are much more likely to be attracted to ideas that simply move the deck chairs around. Now it certainly might have been a sinister plan on the part of the redevelopers.

But we have a superb case study in front of our noses involving the liberal Friends of Barack in Chicago who picked out and groomed the current President for higher office. Were they solely disinterested social theorists? Or were they remarkably concentrated among people who had financial and political interests in gentrifying Chicago, such as Obama’s campaign finance chair Penny Pritzker, his first White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, his second chief of staff William Daley, his closest adviser Valerie Jarrett, his best friend Martin Nesbitt, and personal home-purchase facilitator Tony Rezko?

Shortly after Obama’s 2008 election victory, old-fashioned lefty Robert Fitch gave a fascinating lecture to the Harlem Tenants Association connecting the dots. For example: