Shutter the windows. Bolt the doors. Yank the phone. Turn up the radio so they can't hear us. This subject is taboo, and if the PC thought police find out we're talking about it, we're toast. So here goes: The digital divide is bunk.

Not if you ask Bill Clinton or Al Gore. Pandering shamelessly to their constituents, they've been stumping around the country saying that if you're poor, female, nonwhite, or rural, you're at a terrible Internet disadvantage and need to have the government step in. Their e-rate telephone tax has already coughed up billions for this cause, and they propose showering billions more on it for things like training Native Americans to be IT directors (really). Gore has made this a cornerstone of his campaign.

The Commerce Department takes this even further: "We not only have a digital divide today; we now also have a 'racial ravine.' "

There's only one problem. It's just not true.

According to a massive research project released in February by Norman H. Nie and Lutz Erbring at the Stanford Institute for the Qualitative Study of Society, and based on a national random sample of 4,113 adult Web users and nonusers in 2,689 households, the digital divide is a "myth."

Their finding? "By far the most important factors facilitating or inhibiting Internet access are education and age, and not income—nor race/ethnicity or gender, each of which accounts for less than a 5 percent change in rates of access and is statistically insignificant."

This makes sense if you think about it. Internet access is cheap, or even free. But if you can't read, you're going to have a tough time surfing the Net—and according to a National Adult Literacy Survey done in the last decade, 44 million adults in this country are functionally illiterate. It also helps if you understand English. While the Web is truly worldwide, whether you like it or not, the mainstream Internet speaks the language of Tom Brokaw, Madonna, and Bryant Gumbel. This does put certain groups of people at a disadvantage. But so do road signs, cereal boxes, and TV programs in this country, and it's hardly the class war that liberals make it out to be.

OK, government officials do have their hearts in the right places. Everyone in America needs to get educated, speak the language of technology, and learn how to take advantage of everything the Internet offers. (Fixing the rest of the world will be a bit tougher, since more than half the global population is so technologically backward that it has never even made a single phone call.)

But lefty political hacks are twisting statistical blips about owning computers into a civil rights issue and a new entitlement. To them it's just one more chance to pump up another bloated government bureaucracy and flush billions down the bunghole, money that they'll get from taxing you.

The ironic thing is that the Internet is truly color-, age-, disability-, and gender-blind. Here's all that high-tech employers ask: Do you know C++? Can you understand XML? Are you good at organizing your bookmarks? And do you have a pulse? On the Internet nobody knows if you're a rich Hispanic woman or a poor white guy. Or cares.

When any new technology arrives—television, telephones, satellite, DVD, PalmPilots—the smarter, wealthier early adopters jump on board first. Critics wring their hands and whine about elitism, and then prices come down and everybody gets one. Too bad so many nothingburgers running for president have to flog the culture of victimization and make it look as if the wealthier half of America is electronically oppressing the other half.

That's the real digital divide.

paul_somerson@ziffdavis.com