Ron Unz

Ron Unz
Born	Ron Keeva Unz (1961-09-20) September 20, 1961 North Hollywood, California, United States
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Cambridge
Occupation(s)	Businessman, political activist, writer
Political party	Republican

Ron Keeva Unz (born September 20, 1961) is an American former businessman, known for an unsuccessful race in the California gubernatorial election, 1994, and for sponsoring propositions promoting structured English immersion education. He was publisher of The American Conservative from March 2007 to August 2013. He now publishes The Unz Review.

Early life and career

Born in California, to a Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant, Unz was raised in a Yiddish speaking household. His mother, Esther-Laio Avrutin, met his father on an airplane heading for Israel. A professor from the Midwest, he later briefly became her lover when visiting her on a few occasions in Los Angeles. She unilaterally decided to have a child with him, but Unz's father was already married, and his wife opened a letter from Avrutin telling him about her pregnancy. She was an anti-war activist, who raised her son as a single mother, though Unz was given his father's surname, and soon moved back to her family's home after her son's birth.

He says that his childhood as a fatherless child in a single parent household which was on the dole, was a source of "embarrassment and discomfort." Unz attended North Hollywood High School and, in his senior year, won first place in the 1979 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He attended Harvard University, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and ancient history. He then took graduate courses in physics at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University.

Unz worked in the banking industry writing software for mortgage securities during his studies, and founded a company called Wall Street Analytics in Palo Alto, California. In 2006 his company was acquired by the ratings firm Moody's.

Political career

Unz made an unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination in the California gubernatorial election, 1994. He received 707,431 votes (34.3 percent) in the primary race against the incumbent Pete Wilson, who won the primary with 1,266,832 votes (61.4 percent). Newspapers referred to Unz's candidacy as a Revenge of the Nerds and often quoted his claim of a 214 IQ.

In 1994, he was opposed to California Proposition 187, a 1994 ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibit undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services in the State of California. During his gubernatorial campaign, Unz was a featured speaker at a 70,000 person anti-Prop. 187 rally held in Los Angeles, which he claims was "the largest pro-immigrant protest in American history." Unz helped organize this event with the assistance of future California Senate President Kevin de Leon.

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 and which was approved by the voters despite opposition from language education researchers. Proposition 227 did not seek to end bilingual education, as 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 that refused to teach solely or predominantly in English. Proposition 227 was approved in June 1998; it was repealed by Proposition 58 in November 2016. In 2002, Unz backed a similar initiative, the Massachusetts English Language Education in Public Schools Initiative, which was approved by voters.

The book English for the Children: Mandated by the People, Skewed by Politicians and Special Interests by Johanna Haver (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2013) recounts the controversies and political action resulting from Unz's California and subsequent ballot initiatives: Arizona Proposition 203, Colorado Amendment 31, and Massachusetts Question 2.

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

An article by Unz for The American Conservative published in 2012 was entitled "The Myth of American Meritocracy." As well as suggesting Jews are an "alien presence" in the United States, he wrote about the supposed over-representation of Jews at Ivy League institutions, which he claimed was caused by "Jewish bias" among administrators. Unz's methodology in the article was disputed by a blogger on the Algemeiner Journal and he over-estimated the number of Jews enrolled at Harvard. In 2016, Unz started the "Free Harvard, Fair Harvard" campaign, centered on the Harvard Board of Overseers. Its slate of candidates included Unz, Lee Cheng, Stuart Taylor, Jr., Stephen Hsu, and Ralph Nader. The campaign sought for tuition fees at Harvard to be abolished and for greater transparency in the admissions process.

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

An investor in The American Conservative, he was its publisher from 2007 to 2013. In an email leaked to National Review magazine, then editor Daniel McCarthy wrote that Unz was acting as if he was the editor of TAC, and threatened to resign if the publication's board did not support him over Unz.

The Unz Review and other activities

In November 2013, Unz launched the website The Unz Review, for which he serves as editor-in-chief and publisher. Intended as an outlet for non-mainstream opinion formers, by 2016 Paul Craig Roberts and Norman Finkelstein had contributed to the site.

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2014, the webzine is an "outlet for certain writers to attack Israel and Jews." It has also been described as "an alternative conservative website," "far right," "a mix of far-right and far-left anti-Semitic crackpottery."

The Unz Foundation, of which he is president, has donated to individuals and organizations. All are alleged by the ADL to have published or expressed anti-semitic opinions or, in the case of Norman Finkelstein, are anti-Israel. In 2009, 2010 and 2011, it gave Paul Craig Roberts, $108,000, $74,000 to Philip Giraldi, $75,000 to Finkelstein, $80,000 to CounterPunch and $60,000 to Philip Weiss, co-editor of the Mondoweiss website. In addition, the Unz Foundation has given grants to Alison Weir, founder of If Americans Knew. 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." In 2017, he was a keynote speaker at VDARE's first national conference.

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. As a result, Giraldi was suspended from writing articles for The American Conservative, which he explained in another Unz Review column.

Since their 2014 article, the ADL commented in October 2018 that Unz "has embraced hardcore anti-Semitism" and "has denied the Holocaust." 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." 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."

In August 2018, Unz made use of Holocaust denial arguments, writing "I think it far more likely than not that the standard Holocaust narrative is at least substantially false, and quite possibly, almost entirely so." That same year, The Unz Review published material by the Holocaust deniers Kevin Barrett and David Irving, and Unz himself implied Mossad was involved in the murders of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.

Further reading

• Ingall, Marjorie (February 2, 2018). "Alt-Right Publication Accuses Jews of Attempting to Indoctrinate America's Young Via Subversive Children's Books". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved November 30, 2018. {{cite web}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)