He is getting talked back up now he is on the mend -- he went to Russia and Serbia a few years ago, right when the Alt Right was anointing him as their intellectual guru, to undergo weird treatments for benzo addictions that are banned in the west...They didn't go so well and he wound up in a coma, but survived. He had to relearn motor functions, a whole bunch of shit...
I am fascinated by the street-level history of the US between the world wars...There was a HUGE white underclass at the time -- immigrants in the northeast and not yet Rusty Rust Belt and my own people, the po' white trash all over the South, many of them still illiterate or close to it. Many were very violent and extremely dangerous -- crime rose to historic levels in the 1920s and much of it in Texas was at the hands of dead-end white sharecroppers' kids. By that time they were being rendered obsolete by farm technology, so they were pouring into oil boomtowns like Borger and Kilgore and cities like Houston and Dallas, where they were building shantytowns on the fringes, where you had all the usual vices in plenty. And they were all uprooted from their old support systems and extended families in the fields and piney woods...To make a long story short, Bonnie & Clyde were just the tip of the iceberg and very late to the game. The whole country was crawling with little roving bands of robbers who'd kill you in a heartbeat if you stood in their way. It got so bad the Texas bankers' association put out a $5k bounty on dead bank robbers, the overwhelming majority of whom were white. Not for live ones -- just dead ones. And so of course you had people finding the town drunk or junkie or some convenient minorities, shooting them, and then trying to arrange their bodies in such a way as to make them seem as if caught in the act of robbing a bank. Ranger Frank Hamer loathed the bounty system; he investigated more than a few of these killings.
So along comes the war and the GI Bill and bada bing, bada boom, the vast majority of this huge White underclass were basically welcomed into the American Dream while Blacks were explicitly not invited. And so now we associate Black people and other minorities now with crime, and there are those stats Sack loves to wield, but the fact is, those at or near the bottom of society tend to commit the most crime, and especially so when there is a very justified sense among those people that they have been cheated, swindled, dealt a shitty hand, and all that less by luck than by deliberate policy and historical fact. This is the difference between poor Black culture and immigrant culture of every race -- their are cultural pathologies descended from slavery and Jim Crow that cannot be stamped out in a few short years. Enforced generational poverty does not end within one generation.
LBJ's reforms were a good first step but not as sweeping as the GI Bill had been. I really wonder what America would be like today if the GI Bill had been applied and enforced equally to all Americans after WW2. And if we stuck with true integration of public schools for more than about five or ten years. But that's a whole other deal...