If you find that VFR is of value to you and you would like to help support its existence, this would be an excellent time to make a contribution, which you can do by clicking here. Any donations will be deeply appreciated.

My gratitude to readers who have sent a donation and I will be sending them a personal thank you soon. The fundraising campaign will continue for another couple of days.

Clark Coleman writes:

The attached e-mail from the Family Research Council is the first time in a long while that I have seen mainstream conservatives tackle the issue of women in combat. The neocons want to ignore it, as they do all tough social issues these days, so it is nice to see someone mention it, anyway. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:37 PM

I can’t believe it, a reporter at a major news network has actually dug up damaging facts about a national liberal politician. Jake Tapper of ABC gives the lowdown on ten incidents in which Barack Obama shoved the responsibility for his own screw-ups onto his staff. MORE…

Here are excerpts from Stanley Kurtz’s extremely disturbing article on Jeremiah Wright’s magazine The Trumpet: MORE…

The Randian blogger at Rational Passion gets down to the fundamental issue between those who think that the racial composition of a society matters, and those who say that it’s both false and morally “noxious” (that’s his word for me) to think that it matters. It’s an amazing thing to see pure ideology at work. According to the Randian Objectivists, we are to be seen only as individuals who are completely free to choose what we are; and therefore it’s a great sin to see people as belonging to a group or as being in any way sharing or being influenced by group characteristics; and therefore it is immoral to notice the obvious fact that a black African country with an average IQ of 70, or a black American city with an average IQ of 85, will be on a very different level of functioning than a white society with an average IQ of 100. The Randian ideologists of reason have outlawed reason. We’re not supposed to see the world in front of us, because it contradicts Objectivism. MORE…

Alan Roebuck draws my attention to a VFR post from 2005 in which I was exchanging thoughts with Jim Kalb on “Why liberalism prohibits conceptual thought.” This is serendipitous, since I was just pointing out earlier today the irony that certain Ayn Rand followers—strict atheists who supposedly believe in reason—are in alliance with the PC left in seeking to suppress reasoned speech that violates liberal taboos. Once God and the transcendent are banished, a goal on which leftists and Objectivists agree, reasoned speech must also be banished. `

The first part of the 2005 exchange is a lead-in. The main part of it is below: MORE…

Further reflective thoughts have been added to the “Anguish over Obama” thread.

The New York Times lies all the time, we know that. But here is a lie that stuns even the Times watchers at Powerline, and stuns me too. Remember when Obama in a presidential debate several months ago said he would without any pre-conditions meet with radical Muslim leaders including the president of Iran, and Hillary rebuked him for his naivete? Well, the Times now accuses McCain of engaging in a partisan attack on Obama by claiming that Obama said that. Obama said it in a nationally televised presidential debate, and the Times is bald-facedly claiming that he didn’t say it. MORE…

Have you ever noticed how commentators concerned about the Muslim immigrant problem in Europe, as well as about the Mexican immigrant problem in the U.S., will express their worries by saying that the immigrants “are separating instead of assimilating”?

In fact the issue is not that these groups are “separating” from the mainstream culture. It is that they are expanding their numbers and power—the power of their culture, religion, or ethnos—and in the process weakening the culture, sovereignty, and nationhood of the host society. But Western opinion makers almost never state the issue in those terms, because that would mean defending the specific culture of the host society, rather than defending the liberal ideal of the mutual harmonious blending of all peoples. MORE…

Now that one of the Bush daughters has married, I guess I’ll stop using my previous nickname for them, though, in fact, I haven’t written anything about them for a couple of years (see this, this, and this). Come to think about it, it seems I’ve hardly written about their father, the president, for a couple of years either. Is there anything to say about that nonentity that hasn’t been said many times?

Adding to the picture of the president as a nonentity, the black pastor who performed the marriage, by the name of Caldwell, previously gave invocations at the Republican conventions in 2000 and 2004, and is described as a “spiritual advisor” to President Bush. Caldwell now says he supports Obama, and Bush says he has no problem with that.

Geert Wilders is quoted today at Brussels Journal:

I have no contacts with Vlaams Belang,” Wilders said. “I have no contacts with foreign parties whatsoever. But we will have to establish them with regard to the European elections next year.… We are trying to decide which European group to join. This is not an easy exercise. However, we want to have nothing to do with the Mussolinis and Le Pen and others like them.

Simon F. asks, “How does the pretence that the public have agreed all along with such radical changes continue to escape full acknowledgement?” I reply that this is an example of the weird and unsettling phenomenon, so characteristic of our time, of the radical mainstream.

Jon W. also adds his thoughts to the thread, connecting causes with effects.

Leave the present moment and enter the world of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below),” from Desire (1976). Here I talk about the gypsy-like town in Arizona where I happened to be staying when I first got into this album. MORE…

There is a critical article about me at the Randian website Rational Passion that readers may find of interest. The blogger and his commenters are under the impression that they have refuted and dispensed with my arguments on race and the racism charge, when they have done nothing of the kind. I had corrected Siri Carpenter’s misunderstanding of Jesse Jackson’s famous comment about being afraid of black youth, and I gave the correct meaning of Jackson’s statement, which was that black youth are more dangerous than white youth, not (as Carpenter imagined) that Jackson felt guilty for thinking that black youth are more dangerous than white youth. In the best libertarian/liberal manner, the blogger at Rational Passion piously castigates me for not understanding that black youth “are individuals and must be judged as such”! But it was Jackson who was making the racial generalization, not I. The issue in my blog entry on Carpenter’s article was the correct understanding of Jackson’s statement. So the writer at RP has misconstrued me, as badly as Siri Carpenter misconstrued Jackson. Are there any liberals/libertarians under 40 who can read?

There’s more in the RP discussion about what a dangerous, racist, “insane” influence I am, and I may post something further on it. MORE…

Reader Dan M. sent a donation along with this note:

Keep up the amazing insights and descrimination against the status quo.

Carol Iannone writes:

In this article from the Weekly Standard, Harvard Law School professor William J. Stuntz says that any effort to get illegal aliens to leave is doomed to failure, and, furthermore, that any political party seen as opposing amnesty will be punished at the polls by the children and grandchildren of the illegals. Stuntz writes: MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 07:17 PM

Here is Steven Emerson’s May 2 article detailing the Bush administration’s decision to discourage the use of descriptive words like “jihadist” when referring to jihadists.

It is becoming evident that there is no leftist or anti-American extremism, howsoever vile it may be, that rank and file Democrats will definitively reject. According to Charles Blow writing in the New York Times, a poll conducted by the Times and CBS shows that Barack Obama’s unfavorable rating among white Democrats has increased by only five percent since January, while his favorable rating has also increased by five percent—a wash.

Apart from that very bad and very sobering news, the meaning of which is discussed by Adela G. here, I also want to point out the stereotypical liberal manner in which Blow’s article is written. He doesn’t say that damaging new facts have come out about Obama, and that this has not lessened his support. Rather he says that Hillary Clinton has been “pummeling” Obama, “trafficking in old fears and historic stereotypes” about blacks, and that Democrats have rejected this propagandistic message. For liberals, there are no objective negative facts about liberals; there are only Republican attacks on liberals. And, since Hillary Clinton has been attacking Obama, she is now treated by the Times as though she herself were a Republican.

However, Blow’s remarkably slanted take on the issue ought to remind us of where the Times is coming from and make us suspicious of the Times-CBS polling data that Blow employs. On March 17, in an entry entitled “The Obamage Done,” I quoted a Rasmussen poll showing that 44 percent of Democrats were less likely to vote for Obama as a result of the Rev. Wright revelations. Is it possible that because of Wright almost half of Democrats became less likely to vote for Obama, but that only five percent switched to viewing Obama unfavorably?

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Regarding the survey results showing seven percent of Muslims think the attacks on 9/11 were “completely justified,” I of course agree with your and Robert Satloff’s observation that “radicalism” has been disingenuously defined down by Esposito and Mogahed.

But what strikes me is this—seven percent is an astoundingly high figure! It means that around the world, nearly one in ten Muslims you are likely to meet sees absolutely no problem with the brutal and deliberate massacre of non-Muslims on basically any scale. This is bone-chilling. To hear people talk, you would think the figure was something more like some fraction of one percent, an infinitesimal minority belonging to a crazed, militant “movement.” MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 04:06 PM

Juan Williams, writing in the New York Daily News, says Hillary’s open questioning of Obama’s lack of appeal to white voters is a legitimate issue, and that the Democratic party leaders are foolish to be shoving it under the table.

Adela Gereth writes:

I wonder if Steve Sailer’s excessively casual blogging attire is preventing him from taking his thoughts to their logical conclusions?

In his latest article, he writes: “How did such a smooth operator as Barack Obama mishandle so ineptly the roadblock that he had to know stood between him and the White House: his intimate two-decade relationship with his far leftist minister, the erudite and articulate Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.? And what, if anything, can he do to repair the damage?”

Sailer then answers his own question: “Obama’s candidacy is based on encouraging white voters to assume naively that his mixed race ancestry means that he is somehow genetically programmed for racial and political moderation.”

Sailer’s answer is superficial and doesn’t really tell us anything. The real answer is that Obama is a sufficiently smooth operator that he knew he didn’t have to worry about how “ineptly” he handled the revelations of his relationship with Wright. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:17 AM

A reader sent me the following article from the Scientific American. The title and sub-title sum up the theme pretty well:

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain
Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them
By Siri Carpenter

Here, from the Washington Post, is the declaration of the latest thought crime—symbolic racism, which, according to Alan Abramowitz, explains why working-class whites prefer Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama:

Racial attitudes have changed dramatically in the United States over the past several decades, of course, and overtly racist beliefs are much less prevalent among white Americans of all classes today. But a more subtle form of prejudice, which social scientists sometimes call symbolic racism, is still out there—especially among working-class whites.

Symbolic racism means believing that African American poverty and other problems are largely the result of lack of ambition and effort, rather than white racism and discrimination. Who holds symbolically racist beliefs? A relatively large portion of white voters in general and white working-class voters in particular, according to the 2004 American National Election Study, the best data available on this topic. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 01:07 PM

When former president Clinton dismissed Obama in South Carolina as just another Jesse Jackson, that was, in my view, a racial insult. I don’t feel the same way about Hillary’s interview with USA Today this week in which she quoted an AP story that, in her words, “found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

But Peggy Noonan, the fragile flower of the Wall Street Journal, is sickened that Hillary would make any explicit reference to—yecchh—white people: MORE…

Writing at the Weekly Standard, Robert Satloff takes apart a new book by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, both of them professional pro-Islam propagandists, published by the Gallup organization, where Mogehed is executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. Satloff shows how, through fraudulent definition of the word “radical,” the authors make it appear that a multi-year study of Muslim opinion worldwide showed that only seven percent of Muslims are radical, when, in reality, by any fair reading of the authors’ own polling data, the correct number is 37 percent. MORE…

In its subtly mind-manipulating photographs conveying an alienated, leftist view of America, the New York Times is tops in the field, and its photo of the triumphant Barack Obama greeting people at the U.S. Capitol yesterday, by Doug Mills, is one of the Times’ best.

Note the artificially dim light, like one of those prime time TV dramas where all the scenes, including in courtrooms, hospitals, and the Oval Office, are in half darkness. Notice how virtually every person in the photo looks nonwhite. Notice how the photo centers on Obama, with all heads turned in unison toward him, giving him an image of mysterious power. In fact, it doesn’t even look like a photo of the United States of America. It looks like a photo of some nonwhite dictatorship. Which is what, in their heart of hearts, white liberals desire. MORE…

John Brummett of the Arkansas News Bureau has an interesting article asking what has led to William Clinton’s wildly inapt behavior that has so damaged his wife’s campaign. (However, as VFR reader Emily B. persuasively argues here, black voters were already tending strongly toward Obama before Clinton’s race comments alienated them further.) First, Brummett shows that inappropriate statements by Clinton are nothing new; throughout his political career he has engaged in self-absorbed conduct that damaged his own side. Then Brummett offers a more particular theory about Clinton’s destructive actions in this race.

I haven’t read it yet, but Alyssa Lappin has an article at FrontPage Magazine on the rules of finance under sharia law. An Islamic scholar claims that the subprime mortgage disaster could not have occurred under sharia. But of course the entire Western world couldn’t have occurred under sharia.

KPA writes from Canada:

A couple of nights ago, Mark Stein was on a Canadian current affairs program to talk about his Macleans magazine article (mostly it is on demographics), and the consequent complaint filed against him by three Muslims to the Human Rights Commission for his “promotion of hate.”

Through his own quite admirable aggressive request, he was allowed to sit on a panel with them after his initial interview with the host Steve Paiken. The three Muslims had originally declined to have him on their panel.

This was one of the few times when everything Steyn said was laudable, especially as compared to the three whining and arrogant Muslims who are making outrageous demands, including trying to force Macleans to give them editorial rebuttal in the magazine.

But during the show I also realized Steyn’s intellectual arrogance and superficiality, despite my 100 percent preference for his character, including his jokes, over the three Muslims. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:37 PM

In today’s world, we assume that people, including politicians, are woefully lacking in their general knowledge of the world, including history, geography, literature, science, and so on. But we also assume that people who work at a high level in some technical field are highly knowledgeable and competent in that field. Well, here’s something genuinely shocking, from Time magazine via the Corner. As of last year, when Mark Penn was already working as Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, he was not aware that all the Democratic primaries award delegates to candidates based on their proportion of the vote, rather than on a winner-take-all basis. He thought California was winner-take-all. MORE…

Stephen F. writes:

Is this a first? The presumably defeated Hillary is actually saying she’s a better candidate because WHITE VOTERS prefer her (she perhaps unintentionally characterizes the whites who support her as “hard working,” in contrast to…?):

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters—including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:53 PM

Jason writes:

I understand why the Republicans are in trouble. I understand that the current president is going to go down in history as one of our worst. I understand why the Congress changed hands, because we elected people who claimed to be conservatives but governed as liberals. I get all of it.

But has it gotten to be so bad that we are actually going to elect an anti-American, unpatriotic racist? MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:09 AM

Here’s another example of why I do not give much weight to birth rate projections, and especially to assured doomsday scenarios based on low present birth rates: birth rates change. In fact, fluctuations in birthrates are normal, with high fertility leading to low fertility, and low fertility, such as is now the case in Europe, leading to high fertility. Writers who issue certain predictions of distant future events by projecting present fertility far into the future are acting more like techno-geeks than thinkers. They seem to get a frisson from imagining that they have the ability to discern the shape of History, including, perversely, such horrible events as the disappearance of Italy or the extinction of Europe, the inevitability of which they declare with great authority and relish. We need less dime-store Hegelianism about the death of the West, and more thought about ways to save it. MORE…

A reader recommended an undated video of Arthur Kemp of the BNP giving a speech. I liked it for a while, as Kemp was speaking forcefully about the right of British people, white people, to maintain their own country. This is an argument that needs to be made openly and unabashedly. But then Kemp bizarrely veered off into such statements as that terrorism exists because of the “illegal war on Iraq,” and that Tony Blair must be “tried for war crimes” for supporting the U.S. in the Iraq war, and that terrorism is caused by British foreign policy, and that the Iraq war was waged for Israel’s sake.

I know that Nick Griffin, the head of the BNP, had rejected such views in recent years. But the marriage of legitimate concern about Western cultural and demographic survival with anti-Israel obsessiveness and leftist-style whitewashing of Islam—of the type seen most clearly in America at the misnamed The American Conservative, a magazine published and edited by a passionate partisan of the Palestinian cause, Scott McConnell—exemplify a right wing that has tragically gone off the rails. I have been arguing against such right-wing delusions for the entire history of this website.

The updated version of the Word document, “VFR articles arranged by topic,” has just been uploaded. It can be accessed from the sidebar, as can the special Google utility which searches just VFR. The Google utility had stopped working for a while, now it is working again.

Yesterday I posted an article about Frank Gaffney’s discovery, from an article by Youssef Ibrahim at Pajamas Media, that our fighting them “there” doesn’t necessarily protect us from their developing an “Islamist” regime “here,” an idea that Gaffney seemed to suggest had never occurred to him before. He wrote: MORE…

The below is a comment posted by me in a VFR discussion in 2003. A more precise word than teleological in this context would be holistic, meaning that the whole is drawing the parts of which it is the whole toward itself. Thus a planet with a pressurized atmosphere brings forth organisms with wings. Thus God, the ultimate whole, brings forth beings who are made in his image and likeness and who can know him. MORE…

Do you believe that one third of the student body at Minico High School in Rupert, Idaho is Hispanic?

A Mexican student there has complained that that a gym teacher took away the Mexican flag the student was waving in class to celebrate Cinco de Mayo.

Here’s Lucianne Goldberg with her editorial comments on her “must reads of the day.” She and her L-dotters are still living in 1998, living forever on endless malicious cheap shots against Hillary Clinton, not realizing that the candidate to whom Hillary is losing would be far worse. (The links to the articles at Lucianne.com will only be active for a couple of days.) MORE…

In the midst of such gloomy news, this story, from the Wall Street Journal, will make your day. A former “lit-crit” feminist composition instructor at Dartmouth who taught that science is only about advancing the patriarchy is threatening to sue her former students because, she says, their fascist anti-intellectualism (i.e., they were openly skeptical of her ideas) violated her civil rights.

The teacher, Priya Venkatesan, who comes from South Asia, has also accused the students of racism.

Venkatesan is obviously a prime candidate for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Obama administration. MORE…

As I’ve said before, even when stating my strong preference for Hillary over Obama (“Vote for the crook, not the messiah”) and McCain, we must never forget the Clintons’ history of criminality. So, as much as I regret Hillary’s failure to stop Obama, there is justice in it, too. Powerline has a photo of Hillary speaking last night that captures her combined expression of determination and defeat, and, behind her, her husband with a sad and hangdog tilt to his head. Above the photo, Powerline puts this caption:

Howard Sutherland writes:

America today is truly a weird and wonderful place. If the pundits who are saying his North Carolina win ices the Democratic nomination for Obama are right, then we have the bizarre spectacle of blacks and white Leftists at places like Duke and Chapel Hill joining forces to, in effect, elect a Republican president!

Then again, thinking ahead has never been a strong suit of either group. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 12:46 PM

It is an inconceivable historical disaster that the Democrats seem to be moving toward choosing as their nominee, over Bill Clinton’s honestly corrupt socialist wife, a man who has repeatedly expressed contempt for white people, who has belonged to an anti-American Farrakhanite church for 20 years, and whose despicable lies about his involvement in it have transcended in scale and importance Clinton’s lies. MORE…

Erich, the author of the website Jihad Watch Watch, the only other conservative writer I know of who actually looks for intellectual consistency from prominent Islam critics, writes: MORE…

Following an article at Politico on GOP House leaders’ fears that they face electoral disaster in November, this comment was posted: MORE…

Below are comments that came in yesterday about my eulogy to my sister. MORE…

Mike Berman writes:

Yesterday I attended an event at NYU sponsored by the NYU Objectivist Society where Daniel Pipes was one of the speakers. A man rose during the Q&A and advocated the deportation of Muslims. Pipes’s retort was to ask how the questioner would feel if it were his convert-sister who was one of those being deported.

That’s the knee-jerk reaction of a liberal, and proof that Pipes is a liberal. For liberals, as I always say, the wrongness of discrimination transcends all other values. So that, for example, if any government action, even one that is vitally necessary to preserve a country, will arguably result in an act of discrimination against even one individual, the contemplated government action is immoral and must not be done. MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:55 PM

Steve Sailer quotes the anguished reflections of William Saletan of Slate as he grapples with the issue of race and IQ. I haven’t read Saletan’s article yet, but, based on the intense conflict he expresses between his commitment to equality on one side, and the science that indicates inequality on the other, even as the science produces in him feelings of moral horror and revulsion, I feel like simply saying to the guy: If you’re running into an unresolvable contradiction, check your premises. One of them will be wrong.

Come to think of it, if all libs would simply check their premises, liberalism would be gone by tomorrow!

Update: I underestimated, or rather overestimated, Saletan. He manages to find a fancy, specious way out of his dilemma.

Frank Gaffney, the neoconservative movement’s leading spokesman on “Islamism,” has just discovered to his great shock and consternation that the people he variously calls “Islamists,” “Islamo-fascists,” and “jihadists”—but never, you know, “Muslims”—are ensconced in America and gaining a foothold in the corridors of power. Paraphrasing the title of Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia, he calls this new regime “Amerabia.”

May I ask where Gaffney has been? It is now May 2008. Steven Emerson’s extremely alarming, mind-altering documentary Jihad in America, showing the profound inroads that jihadist and terror-supporting communities had made in heartland cities across this country, was broadcast on PBS in 1994. Just in case Mr. Gaffney misses the significance of that last sentence, I’ll help him out:

It’s been a known fact for at least 14 years that Mideast-based jihadist communities and organizations are widely established in America. MORE…

“I think,” [Obama] mused to New York Times reporter James Traub, “that if I am the face of American foreign policy and American power … if you can tell people ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who’s half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,’ then they’re going to think that he may have a better sense of what’s going on in our lives and in our country. And they’d be right.” MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 10:59 AM

Today is the fifth anniversary of the funeral of my sister, Karen Levy. Last night as I was re-reading the eulogy I gave at her funeral, the thought occurred of posting it here in her memory. I had some misgivings about posting something so personal, but it felt like the right thing to do, so here it is. MORE…

At the website ShrinkWrapped, where “A Psychoanalyst Attempts to Understand Our World,” the anonymous author says about Israel exactly what I have been feeling and saying, though not writing, for some time, that there seem to be no fight left in the Israeli people. Yes, we know that Israel’s government is led by despicable weaklings and fools who are surrendering their country, allowing it to be attacked, and planning further retreats. But how can the Israeli people be so passive about this situation? This is why I have not been writing about Israel’s plight in recent months. It is difficult to care about people unless they care about themselves and show that they have some desire to live. But lately the Israelis have shown no such desire.

The Israeli politician Arieh Eldad (also spelled Aldad) says the reason the Israeli people do nothing is that the present government is locked into place until the next election and does not need to pay any attention to them. He points out that 400,000 people (almost one tenth of the Israeli Jewish population!) demonstrated in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv protesting the Gaza pullout, and it had zero effect, it was as though it never happened. The government went ahead with the withdrawal, with exactly the disastrous results that were foreseen, and now the government plans further pullouts from the West Bank. Given this experience, it is understandable that the Israelis would conclude that demonstrations are pointless. My reply to them is that they need to go beyond legal and peaceful protests, to illegal protests, to violent protests, to national strikes. They need to exert their will to national survival against the government’s will to national surrender. But they haven’t done this. The idea doesn’t even seem to have occurred to them. They’ve given up, just as their government has given up.

The psychoanalyst writes: MORE…

For a concise explanation of liberalism from a traditionalist point of view, see my comment, beginning “I respectfully disagree with Margaret,” in the November 2006 thread entitled “Thoughts on gyneocracy and liberalism.”. The comment is also copied below. MORE…

(Note: Ron L. kindly posted this article at Free Republic, and there is discussion of it over there, but mostly it’s clueless.)

I invite the reader to a thought experiment. Imagine that it is the late 1930s, and “conservative” intellectuals in Western Europe and the United States formulate an ideology which says that their countries should be open without discrimination to all people of all political persuasions. Then imagine that large numbers of immigrants of all political persuasions begin entering and settling in those countries, including many Nazi immigrants from Germany and Austria. Then imagine that the Nazi immigrants, following the Nazi ideology as laid out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, begin promoting the spread and institutionalization Nazism in their new countries, while also using verbal intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence to silence critics of Nazism. MORE…

Clark Coleman writes:

The most concise rebuttal to African Lady’s optimism about Barack Obama’s opposition to the kind of American blacks who cling to perpetual victimhood and seek to blame their troubles on Whitey is this: He is married to one of these very same people.

Which reminds me of certain lachrymose hit song from (I think) the Seventies. MORE…

The smile! The eyes! The kindness and grace. The excellent voice, sweet and low. The ineffable … Michelleness of her.

Michelle O. is to female charm what her husband is to male forthrightness.

(Note to readers: click on the above link at your own risk.)

Adela G. writes:

No need to ask who Michelle’s role model is: the charming “Aunt Esther” from the old TV sit-com, Sanford and Son. Evidently, during her formative years, Michelle took that abrasive, truculent character too much to spleen—I mean, to heart.

John D. writes:

I’ve spent some time in the last few days re-reading some of your previous posts and other articles from Front Page that I’ve bookmarked as some of your most important and relevant (to me) work. Back in January I sent you a link to an article by George MacDonald Fraser in which he decried the effects of PC on our culture. You replied with this post. I believe it is probably one of your most paramount, succinct articulations of the problem of liberalism that I’ve had the privilege of reading. In the first sentence of your closing paragraph your wrote:

“Once we understand what liberalism is, and what liberalism is not, we can start building up a counter vision to liberalism—the seeds and cells of a new society.” MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 02:12 AM

It seems that all the songs from Bob Dylan’s albums are available in their original recordings on YouTube. Here is “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” from Bringing It All Back Home (1965).

(Below, we discuss Robert Spencer’s advocacy of U.S. asylum for Muslim women fleeing female genital mutilation.)

Things thought too long can be no longer thought.
—W.B. Yeats, “The Gyres”

In fact, the whole experience in watching the dynamic of him and other people in the Muslim community throughout the trial was a real eye-opener for me. I wanted to believe in 1993 the stuff that we were putting out, you know, that he basically perverted what was otherwise a peaceful doctrine. But what I found going through all of his thousands of pages of transcripts and statements, was that when he cited scripture to justify acts of terrorism, to the extent he was quoting scripture or referring to it, he did it accurately, which shouldn’t be a surprise… MORE…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at 11:42 PM

Last autumn, VFR had an exceptionally interesting discussion in which readers contributed their thoughts toward a traditionalist alternative to liberalism, the idea being to lead up to some kind of manifesto of traditionalism. In gathering and organizing ideas toward such a statement, I’ve just re-read the thread, and, while doing so, in order to make it easier to form an overall picture of the main ideas, I created an abridged version of the entry, down to 5,000 words, half its original length. The shortened version is posted below. However, I would remind readers that the parts I’ve left out of this abridged version are as good as the parts I’ve left in.

One thing readers should keep in mind when reading either the original or the abridged entry is that while all of it is interesting, much of it focuses on the question of how traditionalists are to persuade liberals or at least not drive them away. Thus the blogger Mencius Moldbug argued that we should seek to defeat liberalism rather than to advance traditionalism, since the latter would only trigger a massive anti-traditionalist reaction on the part of liberals and defeat our purpose. As he paradoxically put it, “If the victory of traditionalism is your minimum goal and this assessment is accurate, traditionalist politics is useless. Or worse than useless, as it’s a great way to motivate liberals.” Several commenters then responded to Mencius’ ideas. But this focus, as Terry Morris pointed out in the concluding comment, was not what the discussion was supposed to be about: MORE…