American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 21, No. 4	April 2010

CONTENTS

Reflections on the 2010 AR Conference
Who’s Afraid of AR?
Who’s Taking Over?
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

Reflections on the 2010 AR Conference

A setback not just for AR.

by Jared Taylor

As many readers have learned from other sources, the 2010 American Renaissance conference planned for February 19-21 was essentially shut down. Opponents of free speech bullied and threatened four successive hotels into canceling contracts to host our conference, with the last pulling out just two days before guests were to arrive. In the end, some 70 people attended an abbreviated program that was thrown together in cramped quarters at the last minute. To have salvaged anything from the weekend was an accomplishment, but the gathering was a far cry from the smooth-running conference that more than 250 people had planned to attend.

It is shameful that people who hate honest talk about race were able to intimidate hotels and force them to walk away from profitable business and deny us a venue. But what is, if anything, even more shocking is the almost complete lack of media interest in this contemptible behavior. Nothing could more clearly highlight the utter lack of principle of our rulers and elites. If a non-white group — or any other group — had been treated as we were, it would have been a major free speech issue, but the rights of those who dissent from racial orthodoxy appear to be of no concern to our rulers.

A pattern of pressure

AR has held conferences every two years since 1994. They have prompted protests and crank calls, but no hotel has ever canceled its contract. Pressure began to increase, however, at the time of the 2006 conference (see following article). A Dulles airport hotel that had hosted three of our conferences decided it no longer wanted to after unprecedented levels of threats and demonstrations, including a trespasser who shoved lurid leaflets about hosting “racists” under guest-room doors.

In 2008 we contracted with a different airport hotel, which came under even greater pressure. It was swamped with protest calls and the general manger even got death threats at home. Still, the hotel stuck to its contract. At the time of the conference itself, there was a large local police presence, but the dozen or so demonstrators stayed off the property and there was no hint of violence.

The real trouble began in the run up to the 2010 conference. As we always have, we identified the conference hotel and asked registrants to make their own reservations. The hotel got no protest calls, but a spokesman said he had researched what had happened in 2008 and wanted to cancel so as to avoid demonstrations and a police presence.

We found another hotel and slightly changed our procedure. We gave out the identity of the hotel only after people had registered. This was a mild level of security to keep trouble-makers from learning where we were to meet. They soon found out, however, and swamped the hotel with protest calls. Again, someone leafleted the hotel. This second hotel canceled, citing fears for employee safety.

It was now January 19, just one month before the conference was to begin. About a week later we found a third hotel and decided on a different strategy. We kept the identity of the hotel secret and as registrations came in we made the room reservations. We told conferees the general location of the hotel but said we would give its name and location only 48 hours before the conference began on February 19. We assumed opponents would register but when they learned of the location they would have only two days to organize protests.

We knew anti-free-speech activists would call area hotels, so we asked the hotel to maintain our privacy. It appears to have done so, but someone found out the location anyway by calling up all the central reservations offices of all the major hotel chains. On February 9, the pressure began. Like the others, the hotel was flooded with calls. Front office staff threatened to resign after receiving telephoned death threats, including one to the effect that, “If you hold this conference I will go in there and shoot you.” The hotel finally pulled out on February 15 — just four days before the conference was to begin. We regretfully told registrants that we were calling off the 2010 conference.

However, we then learned of a hotel in Washington, DC, that had a reputation for hosting controversial events and standing up to pressure. We told management everything the other hotels had been through: death threats, leafleting, phone calls, threats of demonstrations. The hotel raised its room rate for our group as compensation for the trouble it might face, but management assured us it could handle anything. On February 16, we put out the word that the conference was back on, and urged registrants to make their own reservations at the new hotel.

Despite its promise to hold fast, the hotel crumpled in 24 hours. We do not know all the details of the pressures it faced but we did learn that someone leafleted the hotel. An employee said suppliers were calling to say that they might no longer do business with the hotel if it hosted our conference. He said a high school class was being organized to demonstrate and leaflet. “Anti-racist” web sites wrote of their determination to “shut down” the conference, and urged supporters to converge on the hotel if it did not cancel our contract. On the evening of February 17, therefore, less than 48 hours before the conference was to begin, we sent out a final notice of cancellation.

Not a quiet weekend

We anticipated a quiet weekend — but that was not to be. People wanted to meet anyway, even if there was no conference. Dozens of people called and e-mailed to say they were coming anyway, so we designated yet another hotel as the central lodging/meeting place. We did not publicize the location nor spread the word about it to other conference registrants who had not contacted us.

On Feb. 19, the day the conference would have begun, so many people had gathered at the hotel that it became clear it would be worth putting on a program. That evening, AR staff located a private dining room in a restaurant within walking distance, and threw together an impromptu program.

We still had three of the original conference speakers — the rest had made other plans because of the cancellation — and three excellent replacements came forward. On Saturday, I started off the talks with a summary of the thuggish pressures that had been put on the hotels, and gave an abbreviated version of the speech I had planned for the conference. I recalled the great Sam Francis’s words from the first AR conference in 1994: “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people. . . . I also recalled that at the time I had said the same thing more prosaically: “We have the right to be us, and only we can be us.”

I noted that every one of us in that room had a deep love for the genetic and cultural heritage of Europe, and that we all hoped that heritage would endure forever. I said that my generation, which grew up in the 1950s, had inherited a good country but that just in my lifetime, we had put in motion forces that are destroying it. I said that perhaps never in human history had a single generation done so much damage to a country that had not even suffered occupation by invaders or natural devastation. Instead, my generation has dismantled a once-great country in a time of great scientific and economic advance.

I concluded, however, that our movement has made much progress in the 20 years since I have been publishing American Renaissance. I spoke of my admiration for the large number of thoughtful people who now openly support race realism, and expressed my faith in the young men and women who will take up the struggle when my generation — the one with so much to answer for — has gone.

The final speaker of the morning was Matthew Tait, who is a parliamentary candidate for the British National Party, running for the Windsor seat. He spoke of the recent very encouraging electoral successes of the party: Richard Barnbrook’s seat on the London Assembly and party leader Nick Griffin’s and Andrew Brons’s great victories in the elections for European Parliament.

Mr. Tait discussed in some detail the harassment the party has faced over its constitution, which has, until now, limited membership to “indigenous Caucasians.” There are many organizations in Britain exclusively for blacks or Asians, but whites are not allowed their own groups. The constitution has now been amended, but it is not yet clear whether the new language will withstand court scrutiny.

Mr. Tait also described the prospects and challenges the unprecedentedly large slate of BNP candidates — 98 at last count — face in running for Parliament. Chairman Nick Griffin, who is campaigning in the promising constituency of Barking, has the best chances, but it will be an uphill battle. In any case, the elections will be another first-rate opportunity to tell more patriotic Britons that there is a party that still speaks for them.

After lunch, the conference resumed with a talk by business consultant and former Capitol Hill aide, Louis March. In a talk he dedicated to Sam Francis, Mr. March listed some of the institutions fighting against the interests of our race — business, education, churches, the media — and described the twisted motivations that make whites their own worst enemies.

Mr. March also explained recent scientific findings that leave no doubt as to the reality and importance of race, and recounted the great accomplishments of the European people. He emphasized the tragedy that will befall us if we do not work to save our heritage, and issued a resounding call for continued commitment and action.

Long-term Canadian activist Paul Fromm then spoke of the challenges to free speech in his country. He recounted the absurd legalisms used to persecute dissidents, some of whom have gone to jail for expressing their views. Mr. Fromm described the astonishing travails and humiliations of several ordinary Canadians who were caught up in legal processes that can only be described as deliberately unfair. He described a system of kangaroo commissions that would be unthinkable in the United States. He noted that some of the most egregious laws have been overturned — even if on very narrow grounds — but that obstacles to free speech remain formidable.

As he always does, Sam Dickson, the Atlanta lawyer, closed the conference. His theme this year was “knowing who you are.” He described the ludicrous, spiteful image our opponents have of us and laughed at their alleged ability to read our minds. People at the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, claim to know that we are “haters” and to understand our motives better than we do ourselves. He gave one hilarious example after another of the “links” by which our presumed wickednesses are proven. He affirmed the nobility and goodness of our cause, and urged us to love the comrades with whom we march in this great struggle.

Mr. Dickson also explained his theory of how schizophrenia on race contributes to the rise of white sociopaths to elite positions. He argued that unlike non-whites, who need not strike foolish poses about race and who are free to make healthy demands in the names of their people, prominent whites are so accustomed to lying about the most basic aspects of society that only the most practiced liars ever rise to positions of power. Mr. Dickson’s invariable combination of wit and inspiration was a fitting end to an embattled gathering.

The AR supporters who met over weekend were in high spirits, pleased to have salvaged an excellent program from a wrecked conference. There was much good cheer and conviviality that continued into Sunday. However, there is no denying that we were dealt a serious blow. Instead of what could have been 270 people enjoying a first-rate conference in a comfortable ballroom, only 70 were able to take part in a cramped and sometimes noisy room. Nor were we able to invite the media and get the kind of coverage that helps spread our message.

Many of our supporters blame the hotels for canceling their contracts; some deserve more blame than others. If the first hotel, which faced no pressure at all, had held firm — as had every other hotel AR ever contracted with — the primitives would not have been encouraged to ratchet up their intimidation efforts on successive hotels. Once the second hotel folded, things just got worse for hotels three and four. When hotel staff are getting death threats and threatening to resign, it is not so hard to understand why management might capitulate — though in 2008, the hotel stuck to its contract despite death threats.

Where were the police? Hotel managers said they reported death threats to the authorities, but no action seems to have been taken. We have alerted the FBI — which claims to be studying the matter — but have had no indication whether it will open an investigation.

As one of the scheduled speakers who did not make the rump conference, David Yeagley, has pointed out, there is much irony in the FBI’s inactivity. Not long after he was sworn in, Attorney General Eric Holder complained that Americans are “essentially a nation of cowards” because they do not talk honestly about race. The hallmark, of course, of an AR conference is honest talk about race and that is precisely why the “anti-racists” don’t like them. If Eric Holder really wanted honesty, he would order the FBI to ensure that our conferences had safe venues, but he doesn’t want honesty. He wants whites to apologize and beat their breasts.

Even more shocking than the hotel cancellations and police inactivity, however, is the complete indifference to what happened to us. We issued a press release that went to hundreds of media outlets. We issued notices to hundreds of radio and television programs asking for an opportunity to explain what happened. The Associated Press and National Public Radio at first showed interest but dropped the story. The final tally? Aside from friendly media such as “The Political Cesspool” radio program, only one radio station, in New Orleans, invited me to be a guest.

We are aware of only one liberal who expressed outrage at what his fellow liberals had done. David Kelsey, who describes himself as having “left fundamentalist Judaism,” wrote a column on his blog, “The Kvetcher,” called “Solidarity With Those We Disagree With.” “If we do not allow for free speech for those whom we disagree with and perhaps even scare us just a bit,” he asked, “how much do we truly value free speech?” He went on to call what happened to the conference “horrible.” Is Mr. Kelsey the only honest liberal left in America?

Needless to say, if a non-white group had been denied a venue, there would have been a national uproar. The FBI would be on the case immediately, and other hotels would have lined up to offer their services. Congress might have launched an investigation.

What happened to us passes in silence. Our rulers and elites seem to be so hopelessly stuck on the idea of snaggle-toothed Klansmen terrorizing innocent, law-abiding blacks that anything that doesn’t fit that pattern simply cannot exist. They want free speech for anyone other than their friends and pets no more than Eric Holder wants honest talk about race. They are utterly unprincipled, and seem to have no idea what their indifference says about American society

Foreigners understand this. The London correspondent of the Wall Street Journal — not the reporters in New York or Washington — interviewed me about the cancellations and quoted me on the sad state of freedom of speech and assembly in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Television broadcaster Russia Today invited me to its Washington studio for a very fair news segment on media indifference to the rights of white dissidents. In answer to a Russia Today anchor’s question as to why the pressure is greater against us than in the past, I said our opponents may be increasingly terrified of the AR message because at some level they know it is irrefutable: diversity is a weakness, self-segregation is natural, and whites face a growing crisis.

This cancelation and the lack of principled opposition to it has other implications. AR has always operated on the assumption that American institutions are basically fair, that the views of whites will eventually be reflected in policy, and that change can come through combinations of traditional activism, outreach, and politics. It will continue to do so.

There has always been, however, a segment of the racial right that disagrees. Many race-realist whites believe that American institutions are hopelessly rotten, and that whites will never get justice by conventional means. What happened to AR will encourage this radical rejection of America and its institutions. Those who remember their history will know that even at the height of the McCarthy era, Communists could rent meeting halls and gather freely. Americans understood the need to protect unpopular speech. No longer.

Entirely aside from what happens to AR, the United States is moving in an unstable and possibly dangerous direction. From the call-ins I receive when I am on radio programs and the comments sections of even the most liberal mainstream newspapers, it is clear that many whites now understand what is at stake. And yet, aside from a few publications, web pages, and radio programs, no one speaks for them. In the official world of American institutions, everyone speaks against them.

In European countries not dominated by two parties, increasingly influential “far right” parties reflect the aspirations of whites. In America, there are essentially no political options for whites. Even whites who wish only to meet to discuss their legitimate interests find their meetings shut down by opponents — to the complete indifference of elites who prate about democracy, tolerance, and human rights.

Whites will not stand aside while their country is given away to people who hate them. Since the cancellation, we are twice as determined. Our voices will be heard. But when our rulers are indifferent to the suppression of legitimate debate on the most pressing issues we face, it encourages rage and radicalism, the consequences of which no one can predict.

ARTICLE

Who’s Afraid of AR?

Violent lefties who are allergic to ideas.

by Stephen Webster

Who are the groups opposed to AR conferences? What are they afraid of? Why are they ready to break the law to prevent us from meeting?

Our opponents are a loose collection of groups that call themselves anti-racists, anarchists, and anti-fascists, and they all share a leftist worldview. Some are avowed communists who hate the World Bank and rail against global capitalism. Others worry about animal rights and global warming, while some just seem to hate “bourgeois” society, whatever that is. And they all oppose “racism,” whatever that is. These groups organize protests and run Internet meetings and message boards. Each seems to have a web site or a blog, and they often cross-post each others’ material.

Some of the groups that claimed responsibility for shutting down the AR conference were One People’s Project, led by a militant black named Darryl Jenkins; Responsible for Equality And Liberty (REAL), the brainchild of a confused former FBI employee named Jeffrey Imm; the “Self-Described Anarchist Collective” (SDAC); Indymedia, a network of so-called independent alternative media sites; and even the Mormon Worker, a radical socialist newsletter for left-wing Latter Day Saints. Other groups, including a British labor federation and the United Steelworkers, approved putting pressure on the hotels but had little real effect.

The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center also take notice of AR conferences, but they probably prefer that the conferences take place. Hundreds of “bigots,” all together in one room, make good copy for pressuring donors: Fascism is on the march! The SPLC also likes to send a spy who can then describe the conference in breathless superlatives that will frighten supporters into opening their wallets.

Some of these groups operate under the umbrella of another leftist organization, the Anti-Racist Action Network (ARA). To the extent such a thing is possible, ARA acts as a hub for leftwing groups, and its web site tries to describe the rationale for “anti-racism.” Probably our most crazed opponents subscribe to some version of its thinking.

ARA says its purpose is to “organize a variety of actions to expose, oppose, and confront hate in whatever form threatens the diversity and safety of our communities.” It claims to be “dedicated to building a fun, diverse, liberated and explicitly anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic youth culture,” and it fights “white supremacist groups like the KKK and neo-nazis, police brutality, and religious extremists (to name a few).” Its goal is to “disrupt and ultimately destroy these groups.” Its motto is, “Have fun, stay young, smash the fash [fascists].”

ARA has no hierarchy. Each chapter is free to decide “what issues and problems in their community need to be addressed.” What holds the network together are ARA’s four Points of Unity:

1. We go where they go: Whenever fascists are organizing or active in public, we’re there . . .
2. We don’t rely on the cops or courts to do our work for us: . . . we must rely on ourselves to protect ourselves and stop the fascists.
3. Non-Sectarian defense of other Anti-Fascists: In ARA, we have lots of different groups and individuals. We don’t agree about everything and we have a right to differ openly. But in this movement an attack on one is an attack on us all.
4. We support abortion rights and reproductive freedom. ARA intends to do the hard work necessary to build a broad, strong movement against racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, discrimination against the disabled, the oldest, the youngest and the most oppressed people. We want a classless free society. WE INTEND TO WIN!

ARA has such a well-established reputation for violence, it is compelled to address the subject at some length:

ARA has never advocated violence as a solution to hate. The problem comes when we confront hate groups that are violent . . . ARA reserves the right to defend its members and other people against racist violence . . . We don’t advocate violence as a solution to hate, but we also don’t tell people what is the ‘correct’ way to respond to hate group activity . . . We believe in, uphold and practice the right to self-defense against racist violence!

ARA confuses cause and effect: “Anti-racism doesn’t cause racist violence; it prevents racist violence by making the racists know that a lot of people are prepared to take the steps necessary to prevent them from hurting others. Without strong anti-racist opposition to hate groups, it’s not a question of whether a bigot will hurt an innocent person; it’s a question of when!”

Obviously, these people cannot simply say, “We believe in peaceful protest and abhor all forms of violence.”

At a lecture AR editor Jared Taylor tried to give in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2007, “anti-racists” destroyed leaflets, banged pots and pans, and finally locked arms and pushed Mr. Taylor out of the meeting hall. Did they actually think they were preventing violence? Of course not. They are totalitarians who want, as they say, to “disrupt and ultimately destroy” people they don’t like.

The Halifax “anti-racists” also used a typical leftist tactic; they hid behind bandannas. Some of the protesters at the 2008 AR conference also wore masks. This is their justification: “Racists like to take pictures of anti-racists so that they’ll be able to identify them and attack them later on. To protect our safety, we sometimes choose to wear masks so that we don’t have to worry about racists hurting us, or people close to us, after the action.”

The real reason is to prevent police from identifying them when they break the law, as they did in Halifax. Mr. Taylor pressed assault charges, but the police said they could do nothing because they could not identify the criminals. In many jurisdictions it is against the law to appear in public wearing a mask. Ironically, given that mask-wearing is an almost exclusively leftist practice, most anti-mask ordinances were adopted to stop Klansmen from parading in hoods.

Why doesn’t ARA just ignore “racists,” especially ones who just want to meet peacefully and talk to each other? First, of course, there is the reductio ad Hitlerum:

When Hitler first appeared on the scene in Germany, people thought the best thing to do was to ignore him, hoping he would just go away. That example alone proves how foolish it is to close our eyes and hope that the racists will just disappear on their own.

Then there is the obsession with violence: “Ignoring a problem never makes it go away. If hate groups encounter no opposition to their activities in a community, they’ll take that to mean that they have no opposition there willing to stand up to them and they will act accordingly. This makes it more likely that hate group activity will increase and they will start hurting people.”

Presumably, if an AR conference were not picketed we would rush out and lynch someone. Since ARA members are constantly thinking about violence they believe everyone else is, too.

Some ARA propaganda is funny: “The mainstream media are always giving nazis and racist groups millions of dollars in free publicity on talk shows and in pseudo-documentaries that glamorize white power groups.” If that were so, why not demonstrate against media companies rather than “nazis”?

The ARA knows its tactics violate “liberal” rules of free speech, but its obsession with violence trumps all:

Free speech shouldn’t endanger people’s lives. You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater, because people will probably get hurt trying to get out. We think that hate speech acts in the same way — by trying to make certain kinds of people seem less than human and by glorifying violent acts against them — it’s just a matter of time before a follower or supporter of a hate group puts words into action . . . . If you actively go out of your way to tell people that 90% of the world’s population should be enslaved . . . we think you’ve forfeited your right to free speech.

Aside from the fact that probably no one in America — or probably anywhere in the world — ever proposed enslaving 90 percent of the earth’s people, ARA cannot stop thinking about violence. Anyone who says something ARA doesn’t like can be denied free speech because anything ARA doesn’t like can lead to violence. And, by the way, it’s fine to use violence to stop that kind of speech.

Interestingly, ARA does not call for criminalizing “racist” speech “because we believe people need to take the responsibility to confront and solve these problems ourselves.” ARA also worries “that laws passed to ‘ban the Klan’ would just end up getting used against anti-racists.”

This is an unwitting revelation. ARA thinks everyone is as venomous as it is, so a ban on “hate” speech would apply to them. At the same time, they know that only the left uses strong-arm tactics to silence its opposition. Since they are never the victims of thuggery, they see it as a much better tactic than laws that could harm them. Besides, if the law muzzled “racists” it would take all the fun out of “bash the fash.”

Most of ARA’s allied groups, however, would be happy to see “hate” speech laws applied to groups like AR.

Targeting AR

Lefties love to talk tough. At the time of the 2008 conference, they predicted hundreds of angry protestors would show up to fight “racism.” The police appear to have taken these threats at face value, and deployed a SWAT team. In the end there were maybe a dozen protesters: a few hippies with a sprinkling of militant blacks and Hispanics. There were no incidents or arrests.

The language of the Left, however, reveals its mindset. In 2010, after the first hotel canceled, the Self Described Anarchist Collective (SDAC) wrote:

Yo, so it’s happening: American Renaissance is trying to have their racist, white supremacist conference right here in our own backyard (VA, what up) . . . [SDAC] launched an oral sneak attack on the mothafuckas . . . Proving that there’s power in the phone lines, the hotel reversed their decision on hosting them and gave them the boot! Power to the People. Next stop: the next skeezy hotel that tries to host these bastards. Try it if you dare.

When we contracted with the second hotel, this call went out from SDAC and allied websites:

SHUT DOWN THE RACISTS! The white supremacist newsletter American Renaissance (AmRen) is holding their 9th annual [sic] conference . . . . [The hotel] has not made a decision yet on whether or not they are going to allow the conference to continue. There will be a massive phone-in all day on Tuesday, January, 19th, 2010.

Here is one of the things these groups suggested callers say to the hotel: “I understand that several of the conference speakers have gone to prison for inciting racial violence, and in the interest of the safety of the DC community, and of all people worldwide, I ask that you do not endorse these views.” These sites then urged readers to circulate this message far and wide, and concluded again with “SHUT DOWN THE RACISTS!”

When the hotel at first held firm, the message changed:

SHUT DOWN THE RACISTS! . . . IF THEY DON’T CANCEL THEN WE CONVERGE! THEY WILL NOT PASS!

As the sites explained, “They are apparently alright with Nazis meeting in their hotels. Well . . . if they are going to let that scum stay in their hotels, we aren’t. We tried playing nice, we tried asking, but there is no room for compromise when it comes to fascists trying to organize. The time to ask is over, now we take action. . . . If they don’t cancel we will converge . . . to confront these white supremacists when they crawl out from under their rocks and try to gather! Save the Date, February 20 . . . . We will not let them pass!”

Several hundred more phone calls, combined with threats and leafleting, and the hotel buckled. As its managers explained, they feared for the safety of their employees.

SDAC and is allies used the same tactics on the next hotel:

Shut Down AmRen: Antifa Hooligans Converge February 20th.

If they don’t cancel we converge!

SDAC Eats Racists.

[T]ell the hotel how disgusted you are with their decision to host a racist organization.

When the conference was moved to its final hotel, in Washington, DC, something called DC Direct Action News spread this message:

NOW THEY ARE MEETING IN DC ITSELF INSTEAD! . . . You can see what hatemongering assholes they are by visiting www.amren.com but be sure to have someplace to puke, because this shit is nasty.

One People’s Project was itching for a fight:

[A]ntifa is steppin’ out to play! We are waiting for the official call from other organizations, and when we get them we will post it here, but in the meantime if you were planning to come out, keep those plans. This is going to be damned interesting!

Intimidation and threats of violence work. In the end, lefties were able to deny 300 people the right to assemble, and denied four hotels a piece of profitable business during a slow season.

Why are our opponents so afraid of our message? AR conferences have been going on since 1994 without a hint of violence, so all this talk of stopping mayhem is rubbish. No, our opponents are afraid we are right. They are afraid our message destroys the dogmas of “diversity” and multiculturalism. Tyrants suppress free speech because it undermines tyranny. The same is true of “anti-racists.” If what we say is hopelessly wrong it does not even need a reply — the more we gather and speak, the more ridiculous we appear. At the very least, it should be child’s play to refute what we say. The answer to speech you do not like is not suppression, it is more speech. The Left used to understand that. In their hearts, one suspects, even these scruffies do, too. What they really fear — and for good reason — is that we will crush them in a battle of ideas.

There have been many reactions from readers to the conference cancelation, but this was one of the best: “Maybe you should call [US attorney general] Eric Holder and tell him how you were trying to have a dialogue on race, but a nation of cowards stopped you.”

REVIEW

Who’s Taking Over?

A portrait of the coming majority.

Pew Hispanic Center, Between Two Worlds: How Young Latinos Come of Age in America, December 11, 2009, 162 pp.

reviewed by Richard Spencer

Between Two Worlds, the Pew Research Center’s report on the “values, attitudes, and experiences” of young Hispanics starts like this:

Hispanics are the largest and youngest minority group in the United States. One-in-five schoolchildren is Hispanic. One-in-four newborns is Hispanic. Never before in this country’s history has a minority ethnic group made up so large a share of the youngest Americans. By force of numbers alone, the kinds of adults these young Latinos become will help shape the kind of society America becomes in the 21st century.

The Pew center report suggests that the rest of us might want to know something about Hispanics before we hand the keys to our country and culture over to them, and most Americans have a vague sense that Hispanics bring big changes, even if they may not know the details. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reports that in Los Angeles County, illegal immigrants account for 95 percent of warrants for murder and 75 percent of the most wanted list. Nearly 60 percent of all people living in HUD housing are Hispanic. Hispanics are twice as likely as whites to be in prison or have illegitimate children, and three times more likely not to have medical insurance.

But who are they, exactly? What do they think of themselves? The Pew study, based on a sample of some 2,000 Hispanics age 16 to 25 (hereafter “young Hispanics”), has quantified a number of interesting characteristics.

One point the report underlines is that though any discussion of Hispanics has been informed by clichés about the “immigrant experience,” two-thirds of all American Hispanics are not immigrants; they were born here. They are also young: Their median age is 27 (compared to 31 for blacks, 36 for Asians, and 41 for whites), and Hispanics account for 18 percent of all American 16- to 25-year-olds (blacks are 14 percent). They are a dominant 42 percent of the young people in California and 51 percent in New Mexico.

As the figure above shows, the first-generation — the immigrants — has a median age or 38, not much younger than the median age for whites. This is because very few children immigrate. But once Hispanics get here, they have babies at a great rate — in many cases more than they would have had if they had stayed home. This is consistent with historic findings: When people from poor countries come to wealthy America, their confidence in the future increases and they have more children.

The second generation of Hispanics is therefore dramatically skewed towards youth, with a median age of just 14. This is a younger population than in any nation of the world, though Uganda and the Gaza strip come close, with median ages of 15. Thirty-eight percent of second-generation Hispanics are younger than ten.

Even the third generation is very young, with a median age of 20 — like Ghana or Haiti — and with 30 percent younger than 10. Hispanics are also the only population group that is majority male — 51.3 percent. The American population as a whole is 49 percent male.

No fewer than 72 percent of young Hispanics say they expect to be better off financially than their parents, and another 20 percent expect to do equally well. This is in stark contrast to countless polls that show whites are extremely gloomy about the future. This optimism may simply reflect the relatively humble circumstances of Hispanics’ parents or it may be that Hispanics are counting on their increasing numbers to lift them economically.

Although they are positioned to inherit the country, less than one in five Hispanics think of themselves as Americans first. The rest think of themselves first as Hispanics or as foreign nationals — Mexicans or Guatemalans, for example. Only by the third generation and later do even half of young Hispanics consider themselves Americans first. As the same figure shows, even among Hispanics whose primary language is English, a majority do not think of themselves Americans first.

Likewise, although Hispanics are often lumped in with whites for statistical purposes, few consider themselves white. As the figure above shows, when Hispanics are asked whether they are white, black, Asian, or some other race, 37 percent volunteer that they are none of those and are instead Hispanic. Twenty-six percent say they are white, but probably many of these would have said “Hispanic” if that choice were offered. Young Hispanics are particularly unlikely to say they are white, and this portends an increased hardening of a distinct racial identity. Although the official census position is that Hispanics “can be of any race,” this survey shows that essentially no Hispanics think of themselves as Asian and only a handful consider themselves black.

Hispanics cling to their language. Thirty-eight percent of third-generation young people can speak and understand Spanish, even though they were born in the United States to native-born parents who speak English. No fewer than 70 percent of young Hispanics speak the mix of Spanish and English called “Spanglish” at least some of the time, and that is true of 57 percent of third-generation Hispanics. There is historical precedent for a degraded, hybrid language to emerge as a kind of lingua franca in a multicultural nation; “Spanglish” may one day serve that function in parts of the United States.

If Hispanics will inherit the country it will be a poorly educated country. As the figure above shows Hispanics are about twice as likely as blacks and three times as likely as whites to drop out of high school. They are also the racial group least likely to go to college (note the very high attendance rate of young Asians).

One of the most striking and ominous characteristics of Hispanic immigrants is their tendency to do worse from one generation to the next. For example, native-born Hispanics are 50 percent more likely to be in prison than immigrants. Also, compared to the second-generation, third-generation Hispanics are more likely to:

• be below the poverty line.
• be unemployed.
• fail to go to college.
• have sex as teenagers.
• approve of teenagers having sex.
• have been in a fight over the past year.
• have a friend or family member in a gang.

This is the opposite of the traditional immigrant experience, in which each generation does better than its parents. Researchers at Brown University have even wondered, “Is becoming American a developmental risk?”

Why do Hispanics go downhill? The Pew study notes that over the generations, they steadily lose their Catholic faith and that regular church-goers are better behaved. This is no doubt an important correlation, but it is impossible to know which is the cause. More intelligent and better-behaved Hispanics may simply find community in churches rather than in gangs. As they lose their faith, succeeding generations of Hispanics are also increasingly likely to approve of abortion-on-demand and homosexual marriage.

Pew offers no other suggestion as to why Hispanic behavior degrades, but part of the problem may be the adoption by second- and third-generation Hispanics of the orthodox view of “racism.” Only 32 percent of foreign-born Hispanics say they or a close associate has been a victim, whereas 41 percent of native-born Hispanics say this. The longer Hispanics live here, the more sensitive to “racism” and alienated they seem to become. The belief that white “racists” will undermine their efforts is hardly conducive to hard work or success.

At the same time, many first-generation Hispanic immigrants are probably happy merely to be in a country where there is work, where social services are generous, and the police are honest. They gratefully make the most of opportunities they would not have back home.

Succeeding generations, however, quickly appear to adopt the resentments blacks have long cultivated. Young Hispanics are probably much more likely than their parents to think America owes them compensation for the Mexican-American War, “institutional racism,” “white skin privilege,” and all the other grievances liberals encourage. Young Hispanics are certainly much less willing than their elders to do manual labor and to have expectations their abilities could never justify. This leads to alienation and probably helps explain why so many Hispanics are in gangs.

Finally, although the Pew study does not break out fatherlessness rates by generation, they undoubtedly rise from one generation to the next. As Hispanics drop away from the church and pick up the unfortunate habits of blacks, their children are increasingly likely to suffer the burdens of illegitimacy.

Even though the Pew Hispanic Center does not try to explain these disturbing downward trends, it deserves our respect for highlighting them. The people who run the center would certainly prefer to be able to report that Hispanics are assimilating, becoming patriotic Americans, and moving up just as European immigrants did. Their willingness to report contrary findings shows unusual integrity.

Mr. Spencer is the editor of AlternativeRight.com.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

Modern Treasures

Black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose arrest for disorderly conduct outside his home last year drew Barack Obama’s attention and led many whites to question his “post-racial” credentials, says he has donated the handcuffs put on him during his arrest to the Smithsonian Institution’s black history museum. Mr. Gates says the arresting officer, Sgt. James Crowley, gave him the cuffs several months ago, when the two met at a cafe. [Gates Donates Cuffs Used on Him to Smithsonian, AP, Feb. 15, 2010.]

Accused killer O. J. Simpson recently offered one of his suits to the Smithsonian Institution. It was his “lucky suit,” the one he wore on the day in 1995 when he was acquitted of murdering his wife Nicole and her friend Ronald Goldman. The museum, often called America’s attic, contains a lot of notable clutter. The National Museum of American History has Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, the leather jacket Henry Winkler (the “Fonz”) wore on the ABC sitcom Happy Days, the hat Abraham Lincoln wore before he was assassinated, and a piece of a lunch counter from a North Carolina Woolworth’s that was the site of a civil rights sit-in. The Smithsonian doesn’t want Mr. Simpson’s suit. Spokesman Valeska Hilbig says the suit “doesn’t fit” the collection.

Mr. Simpson’s lawyer, Ronald Slates, is disappointed. He says the museum should take the good with the bad. “You don’t see the Smithsonian walking away from days of the Depression — which were certainly horrible days in our history — because it was so horrible,” he says. “So, I thought this would be the museum to house this, even as controversial as it is.” [Smithsonian: O.J.’s Acquittal Suit Doesn’t Fit With Its Collection, CNN, March 2, 2010.]

Still Stupid

The late Samuel Francis called the Republican Party the Stupid Party (the Democrats were the Evil Party), in part because they refused to see that non-white immigration dooms them. Another inveterate Republican stupidity is the belief that Hispanics are “natural conservatives” who will flock to the party if only GOP troglodytes stopped opposing amnesty.

Among the Republicans still mouthing this silliness is former Texas congressman Henry Bonilla, who lost his seat to a Hispanic Democrat in 2006 after seven terms. “If you don’t go out and bring more Hispanics to our party, the math isn’t there to win, no matter what the other side does,” says Mr. Bonilla. Republican strategists such as Whit Ayres cite the rapid increase in Hispanics and the impending displacement of whites as proof that Republicans must pander harder than ever. “If Republicans don’t do better among Hispanics,” he says, “we’re not going to be talking about how to get Florida back in the Republican column, we’re going to be talking about how not to lose Texas.”

Dan Bartlett, an adviser to former president George W. Bush, says Republicans need “an authentic relationship” with Hispanics. “The Hispanics are going to be a dominant political force in the state of Texas and around the country for the next 100 years, and the Republican Party’s blowing it,” he says. “There’s a real dearth of smart thinking on the Republican side of the aisle.”

GOP chairmen are among the worst offenders. Current chairman Michael Steele says opposition to amnesty “harkens back, quite frankly, to the Southern strategy that the Republicans embraced in the 1960s, causing black Republicans to abandon the party,” and that immigration “hotheads” are alienating Hispanics.

Former chairman Ed Gillespie says Republicans need to “run inclusive campaigns” instead of “indulging in the anti-immigration rhetoric of the past.” He notes that George W. Bush won 54 percent of the white vote and ended up in a virtual tie with Al Gore, while John McCain got 55 percent of the white vote and lost to Barack Obama. “If the current voting percentages among white, black, Asian and Hispanic stay the same,” he says, “the Republican nominee will lose by 14 points in 2020.” [Peter Slevin, Republicans Look to Rebuild Their Traction With Hispanic Voters, Washington Post, Feb. 21, 2010.]

The Stupid Party misses three obvious points. First, the Hispanicization of America is not inevitable. Republicans could improve their prospects by slowing or reversing population trends. A moratorium on immigration and a crackdown on illegals would be a good start. Second, Hispanics will vote Democrat no matter what the Republicans do. Hispanics are poorer than whites and will always vote for the party that promises the most handouts. Third, the GOP could appeal to more whites. If John McCain had won 60 percent of the white vote, he would have coasted to victory.

“I Hate Whites”

Like most Southern cities, Augusta, Georgia has a monument dedicated to Confederate soldiers. The granite and marble structure stands 76-feet high. One inscription reads, “In honor of the men of Richmond County who died in the cause of the Confederate States” and another, “No Nation Rose So White and Fair; None Fell So Pure of Crime.” The monument is composed of statues of four Civil War generals: Thomas R. R. Cobb, Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and William Henry Talbot. It was dedicated in 1878, before a crowd of 10,000 people.

Last fall, vandals defaced the monument with spray-painted anti-white graffiti reading, “Black Power,” “F*** White People,” “I Hate Whites,” and “Cracker Killers.” Police have no suspects. [Downtown Confederate Monument Defaced With Anti-White Messages, Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 29, 2010.]

Diversity and MIT

The faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) includes many of the best scientists in the world. There is very little faculty “diversity,” however, which embarrasses the institute. A just-completed two-year “comprehensive” study found that blacks and Hispanics make up just 6 percent of the teaching staff. There are plenty of Asian professors and students, but they are “overrepresented minorities” and don’t count. MIT wants the faculty to reflect the nation, which is 30 percent “underrepresented minority.”

That will be tough. Some departments, such as chemistry, mathematics, nuclear science, and engineering haven’t hired a single black or Hispanic in the last 20 years, and the ones who are hired may not be happy. The report notes that in 2006, for example, a black biological-engineering professor who had been denied tenure charged MIT with racial discrimination and went on a hunger strike. “These issues become difficult to address because of a general discomfort in openly discussing matters of race in the academic setting of MIT,” moans the report, and notes ominously that many white profs don’t understand the importance of diversity.

Paula Hammond, a black chemical-engineering professor who led the project, is upbeat. “We believe that inclusiveness can lead to excellence, rather than impede it,” she insists. [Tracy Jan, MIT Lags in Hiring, Promoting Black, Hispanic Faculty, Internal Report Says, Boston Globe, Jan. 14, 2010.]

Flag Flap

Despite the best efforts of the NAACP, the Confederate Battle Flag continues to fly on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse, and people still travel to South Carolina and do business there. In January, NAACP president Benjamin Jealous addressed a South Carolina meeting honoring Martin Luther King and pledged to bring more publicity to the pressure group’s flagging economic boycott of the state.

In the 1960s, South Carolina began flying the battle flag over the statehouse dome — under the national and state flags. This was to commemorate South Carolina’s role in the War Between the States, but the NAACP and other liberal groups claim it was to protest the civil rights movement. In 2000, after a rally that brought 50,000 protesters to the statehouse grounds, the legislature voted to take the flag down from the dome and fly it in front of a monument to Confederate soldiers. That did nothing to mollify the NAACP.

“Dr. King knew it was put there as an act of intimidation and hatred. Moving it from right up top to smack in front doesn’t change things,” Mr. Jealous says. “In some ways it worsens the problem. You stand there and look at that flag and see how big it is to you and you look up at the American flag and see how small it is.” [Jeffrey Collins, NAACP Vows Stronger Confederate Flag Fight in SC, Sun News (Myrtle Beach), Jan. 18, 2010.]

Deep-Sixing 209

Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative that banned racial preferences in university admissions, has survived many court challenges but opponents are trying again. In February, two left-wing pressure groups — the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration, and Immigrant Rights; and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) — sued in federal court in San Francisco, claiming that the proposition violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment by creating “a racial caste system in which the state’s most prestigious schools train mostly white students and students from some Asian backgrounds.” The suit also claims UC admissions standards are “discriminatory” because they emphasize high school grades and test scores.

The US Supreme Court rejected a challenge to Proposition 209 in 1997, but BAMN attorney George Washington thinks things have changed since then. He hopes the court will follow the reasoning in its 2003 decision in the University of Michigan law school case, which lets colleges consider race as a factor in admissions, so long as there are no firm quotas. [Larry Gordon, Federal Suit Planned Against UC Over Ban on Affirmative Action, Los Angeles Times, Feb. 16, 2010.]

Too Rich, Too White

The Education Trust, a non-profit foundation dedicated to closing the racial achievement gap, is lamenting the “whitening” of America’s flagship state universities. It claims the entering and graduating classes at many leading state schools are far less diverse than they should be. Director Kati Haycock says the nation’s top 50 state universities are wrong “to enroll students who are far richer and far whiter” than their state populations. [Mary Beth Marklein, Report: Public Universities Becoming ‘Far Richer, Far Whiter,’ USA Today, Jan. 13, 2010.]

Farrakhan Speaks

Twenty thousand people filled the United Center in Chicago for the Nation of Islam’s annual convention on February 28. In a four-hour speech worthy of Fidel Castro or Nikita Khrushchev, NOI’s 76-year-old leader Louis Farrakhan told the crowd that the “white right” was conspiring to ensure President Obama served only one term, and was trying to force him into a disastrous war with Iran. He urged Mr. Obama to “use your bully pulpit” to speak for the poor and the weak.

Mostly, though, Rev. Farrakhan talked about himself. He went on about a vision he had in Mexico in 1985, in which he went aboard a UFO and met the late Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. He says Muhammad showed him glimpses of the future, including the US bombing of Libya in 1986, and gave him the power to discern the “warning signs” in natural disasters, such as the recent earthquake in Chile. Such events, Rev. Farrakhan helpfully explained, mean trouble ahead. “The word ‘prophet’ is too cheap a word,” he concluded about himself. “I am a light in the midst of darkness.” The crowd replied with shouts of “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”). [‘White Right’ Wants Obama to Be One-Term President, Farrakhan Says, AP, Feb. 28, 2010.]

O’Connor Speaks

In her 2003 opinion in the University of Michigan racial preferences case, Grutter v. Bollinger, former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously wrote, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Many people criticized the decision for kicking the affirmative action can down the road for a future Court to rule on. But the decision did suggest that in a generation or so whites might no longer face official racial discrimination. In 2007, Justice O’Connor encouraged this view in a speech in which she said the Court majority in Grutter “had tried to be careful in stressing that affirmative action should be a temporary bandage rather than a permanent cure.”

The retired justice has now changed direction in an essay she co-authored with Stewart J. Schwab, one of her former clerks who is now dean of Cornell Law School, and that appears in a new book, The Next 25 Years: Affirmative Action in Higher Education in the United States and South Africa. She now sees the time limit differently: “That 25-year expectation is, of course, far from binding on any justices who may be responsible for entertaining a challenge to an affirmative-action program in 2028. . . . When the time comes to reassess the constitutionality of considering race in higher-education admissions we will need social scientists to clearly demonstrate the educational benefits of diverse student bodies, and to better understand the links between role models in one generation and aspirations and achievements of succeeding generations.” This sounds like a permanent cure.

Terence J. Pell is president of the Center for Individual Rights, which represented Jennifer Grutter, the plaintiff in the original case. “What I found surprising,” he says, “was the extent to which the authors confirmed everyone’s worst fears about this 25-year limit — namely, that it is not a limit at all, but rather an opening bid in an effort to justify the use of race preferences in perpetuity.” Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, says simply: “I am glad she is no longer on the Supreme Court.” [Peter Schmidt, Sandra Day O’Connor Revisits and Revives Affirmative-Action Controversy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 14, 2010.]

The Bloom is Off

During the 2008 election campaign, and especially after Barack Obama took office, liberal media commentators assured us that the nation’s first black president would heal America’s racial divisions. A recent poll found just 41 percent of Americans believe Mr. Obama has helped race relations, down from 58 percent a year ago on the eve of his inauguration. The decline is sharpest among blacks, with a drop of 75 percent to 51 percent. [Tabassum Zakaria, Fewer See Obama Advancing Racial Ties, Reuters, Jan. 19, 2010.]

Sauce for the Gander

Blacks and other non-whites have complained for years about how they are portrayed on television and in films, which is why most TV judges, surgeons, and other authority figures are now black. Whites never complain, which is why crooks are always white and white fathers and husbands are buffoons. Whites are also about the only people Hollywood dares stereotype: WASPs are greedy and emotionally inhibited, the Irish are drunkards, and Italians are gangsters and thugs.

The Italians, at least, have had enough. UNICO National is an Italian-American service organization established in 1922 to “engage in charitable works, support higher education, and perform patriotic deeds.” It is blasting a new MTV “reality show” called “Jersey Shore,” which highlights the antics of Italian-American beachgoers living in a rented beach house. Promos for the show call the participants the “hottest, tannest, craziest Guidos” who “keep their hair high, their muscles juiced and their fists pumping all summer long!” UNICO says “Jersey Shore” fosters crude stereotypes, highlighting cursing, bad behavior and violence, and wants MTV to dump the program. [Italian Group Asks MTV to Cancel ‘Jersey Shore,’ AP, Nov. 24, 2009.]

Sacrilege!

Wadsworth Avenue Elementary School in South Los Angeles is 93 percent Hispanic and seven percent black, but students still celebrate Black History Month. One way they do that is to parade around holding pictures of famous black “role models.” This year, students held up pictures of O.J. Simpson, tattooed NBA thug Dennis Rodman, and celebrity drag queen RuPaul. Someone in the audience was offended and complained to the local NAACP, which complained to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which put the three teachers on administrative leave while it investigates. The head of the local NAACP wants the teachers fired, but many parents, say the incident isn’t a big deal. “I kind of laughed at it,” says Sharon Tinson, race unspecified, who has two daughters at the school. [Christina Hoag, 3 LA Teachers Removed Over Choice of Black Heroes, AP, March 3, 2010.]

The suspended teachers are said to be white men, but we are skeptical. How many white men teach at elementary schools that are 90 percent Hispanic? On March 8, when this issue was going to press, the web page for Wadsworth Elementary was not working. When we telephoned to ask if the suspended teachers were Hispanic, the woman who answered the phone refused to talk about the incident at all.

“Hate” at UCSD

The University of California at San Diego (USCD) is in turmoil over a series of “racist” incidents. The first was on February 15, when a white fraternity reportedly held a “Compton Cookout.” Invitations suggested that men wear a “white T (size XXXL smallest acceptable).” Women were asked to come as “ghetto chicks” who “don’t speak well, have short, nappy hair” and “usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes.” Guests reportedly “ate watermelon and fried chicken, drank malt liquor, and listened to rap music.”

Campus blacks, lefties, race hustlers, and grievance-mongers all shrieked. They held emergency meetings and issued proclamations and demanded more giveaways for blacks. The reaction was so hysterical that a USCD student-run humor publication The Koala, mocked the party: “The Koala would like to condemn the organizers of the Compton Cookout. If history has shown us anything, you need more black people at your party to have enough black-on-black violence to actually justify the name ‘Compton.’ Shame on you. SHAME.” Student body president Utsav Gupta was so shocked by this that he shut down 33 student-run groups.

On February 25, someone hung a noose inside the campus library. Outraged students marched on Chancellor Marye Anne Fox’s office and occupied it for six hours. At UC Berkeley, students set trash cans on fire and broke into a library, where they smashed windows and sprayed graffiti.

UCSD Chancellor Fox launched a “Battle Against Hate” website, where she fumed about “these horrific and repugnant acts.” She promised to meet with blacks and lather more favoritism on them.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, nothing was as it seemed. The “Compton Cookout” was not held by a white fraternity, but by a black comedian named Nipsey Washington, who uses the stage name Jiggaboo Jones. He says he’s been throwing similar parties across the country for years. Some of them he calls “Nigga Nights.” Mr. Washington pestered the university and the local media with the truth, but they ignored him. They were not about to let the facts ruin a juicy story about “racism.”

Likewise, it turns out the student who hung the noose is “a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent issues on campus.” No matter. UCSD is still seething with racism and blacks will get more coddling.

The saga continues. On March 1, someone put a white pillowcase over the head of a campus statue of Theodore Geisel, otherwise known as Doctor Seuss. There is no evidence that this had anything to do with “racism” but university police say it looks like a Klan hood and are trying to get DNA and fingerprint evidence from the pillowcase to bring the perpetrator to justice. [Ellison Lodge, Diversity is Strength! It’s Also . . . The Incredible UCSD Hate Crime Hoax, VDARE.com, March 3, 2010.]

Felony Littering

The University of Missouri at Columbia is in uproar because two white students scattered cotton balls outside the campus black culture center during Black History Month. The students, 21-year-old senior Zachary Tucker and 19-year-old freshman Sean Fitzgerald, were arrested in early March and charged with one count each of “tampering” in the second degree (whatever that is), with hate crime enhancements — which makes it a Class D felony.

Blacks say the cotton balls were an overt act of racism intended to intimidate them by invoking slavery. The two suspects say it was an innocent prank, for which they have apologized. University chancellor Brady Deaton has temporarily suspended the students, but the black cultural center’s director wants them expelled.

On March 1, there was a forum for people who wanted to worry about race relations, which are said to be poor on the 30,0000-student campus. Three hundred people turned up, which means only one percent were worried enough to attend. [Janese Heavin, Two Students Arrested After Cotton Display, Columbia Daily Tribune, March 3, 2010.]

Insanity

Laith Alani is an Iraqi who immigrated to Britain as a child more than 20 years ago. In 1990, Mr. Alani sought to have a tattoo — a picture of an eagle above the words “Republic of Iraq” — removed from his arm because he suddenly discovered that such adornment was against his religion. The British health service referred Mr. Alani to two plastic surgeons, Michael Masser and Kenneth Paton. During the consultation, Mr. Alani attacked the surgeons, stabbing them to death. After his arrest, Mr. Alani told police, “It was a command from Allah. I have had visions from Allah and you can’t be more right than Allah.”

At trial, Mr. Alani pleaded guilty to manslaughter due to diminished responsibility — he has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic — and was confined indefinitely to a maximum security psychiatric hospital. Doctors began treating Mr. Alani with the anti-psychotic drug clozapine ten years ago, and say he has improved. He was transferred to a less secure facility in 2005, and in 2008, moved to a 12-bed residential care home in preparation for release.

At that point, the British Home Office said it would send Mr. Alani back to Iraq, in keeping with Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pledge to deport criminal aliens after they complete their sentences. Mr. Alani appealed the deportation order to Britain’s Asylum and Immigration Tribunal, where a panel led by immigration judge Lance Waumsley ruled that deporting Mr. Alani would violate his human rights and also endanger the people of Iraq. The panel argued that in Iraq he would probably not get his clozapine and could go crazy and attack people. The ruling adds that deporting Mr. Alani would violate his right to a private and family life because he moved to the UK with his parents as a child. Dorothy Paton, Dr. Paton’s widow, is appalled. “I think he should be deported,” she says. “I argued that at the time of the trial. I think he is going to be a danger to people in Britain. He is a dangerous man.”

The Asylum Immigration Tribunal routinely overturns attempts by the Home Office to deport foreign criminals. Even murderers and child molesters have used similar arguments to stay in Britain. [David Barrett, Killer Can’t Be Deported Because He Might Kill Again, Telegraph (London), Jan. 23, 2010.]

Too White

Vancouver, British Columbia, is one of Canada’s most diverse cities; non-whites, called “visible minorities” in Canada, make up 51 percent of the population. The city transformed itself into a majority non-white city virtually overnight; as recently as 1981, it was 93 percent white. A third of the population is Chinese, which has given rise to nicknames like Hongcouver and Vankong.

Non-whites are beefing that February’s Winter Olympics 2½ hour opening ceremony did not showcase them. “Out of 13 people [who carried the Olympic flag or acted as torch bearers] there isn’t one outstanding visible minority that you could think of?” asks Sukhi Sandhu, a Canadian-born South Asian. “Our nation is a cultural mosaic, and our diversity is our strength and frankly I am surprised in 2010 we need to continue educating our leaders on this Canadian value.” Peter Kwok, who leads an immigrant support agency for “Chinese Canadians” agrees. He says his Chinese friends “wish that they had a bit more portrayal of the multiculturalism in Canada.” Even the government was upset: “There should have been more French,” complained Federal Heritage Minister James Moore. [More Visible Minorities at Closing, VANOC Hints, CBC, Feb. 18, 2010.]

DeparDon’t

L’Autre Dumas is a new French film that tells a fictionalized story of 19th century French author Alexandre Dumas’s relationship with his assistant, Auguste Maquet. Maquet worked out the plots for some of Dumas’s most famous works, such as the Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers, and Dumas filled in the dialogue and other details. The movie is being criticized by non-whites, some Dumas experts, and black organizations for casting legendary French actor Gérard Depardieu in the title role. Dumas, the grandson of a former Haitian slave, was one-quarter black. He was mocked for his African features and he called himself un nègre. Mr. Depardieu appears in the film with wooly hair and darkened skin, but he is a blond, blue-eyed white man.

“In 150 years time could the role of Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig? Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?” asks Patrick Lozès, the president of the Council of Black Associations of France. His group says the producers missed a chance to celebrate ethnic diversity and remind the world of the Dumas’s Haitian origins. It also says the film gives Maquet too much credit and takes away from the quadroon’s achievements: “Possibly for commercial reasons they are whitewashing Dumas in order to blacken him further,” the group says, somewhat incoherently.

Both the producer and director defend the choice of Mr. Depardieu. “The vividness of Depardieu is the perfect embodiment of Dumas,” says producer Frank Le Wita. Director Safy Nebbou, who is multiracial himself, says, “It would have been an historic error to have chosen a mixed-blood actor . . . [Dumas] had blue eyes like Depardieu.” [Charles Brenner, Gérard Depardieu Sparks Racism Row Over Role as Mixed-Race Dumas, Times (London), Feb. 15, 2010.]

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — There’s a first for everything, and here’s my first angry letter to American Renaissance, in response to the article by neocon warmonger David Gibson in the January issue (see “Fort Hood Shooting is Only the Latest”).

The neocons want American servicemen to fight and die all over the Middle East and Southwest Asia to kill as many Muslims and Arabs as possible. Mr. Gibson obviously has a file chock-full of every crime, attempted crime, and naughty comment made by a Muslim anywhere in the world, and he uses this as a casus belli for his neocon jihad against the Muslim world. As a subscriber since the magazine’s debut issue, I can say with absolute certainty that a column like that from David Gibson doesn’t belong in American Renaissance.

The neocons are masters of infiltration. They’ve taken over National Review, the Conservative Book Club, the Philadelphia Society, and several other once-conservative periodicals and organizations. Is AR now in their cross hairs?

Kenneth Reynolds, Bronx, N.Y.

Sir — The recent brouhaha over Senator Harry Reid’s allegedly “racist” remarks about President Obama during the 2008 campaign has once again put the spotlight on “racial sensitivity.” Many are now calling for free and open conversation on race.

In this country? Are they kidding? One need look no further than the article, “Walking on Eggshells,” by Samuel Truaxe to see how such a dialogue has been rendered impossible by the “diversity/sensitivity” boosters. America, which has always been seen as a beacon of free expression, has now become a country whose white citizens must watch their every word and opinion on racial matters.

No matter how much he grovels, anyone “guilty” of saying the “wrong” thing can face social ostracism, loss of job, and any number of other punishments. One can only hope that Mr. Truaxe’s report will get wide circulation, so people can wake up to this mockery of free speech that has overtaken America and paralyzed its white citizens.

David Shapiro

Sir — Mr. Truaxe’s cover story certainly rings true. Back when I grew up, the Knights of Columbus put on an annual blackface minstrel show. Not any more, the cowards! Now they boast about having a “green” pope.

Here is another incident to add to Mr. Truaxe’s list of white humiliations. Last fall on the ESPN cable sports channel, two announcers were working a football game. During a lull, the topic of NASCAR came up, and the men began discussing the top five pole sitters for the next race.

Sportscaster #1: How come Juan Pablo Montoya isn’t in the top five?

Sportscaster #2: He was probably out getting a taco.

I thought that was funny, on-your-feet thinking, but the ESPN suits were not amused, and ordered Sportscaster #2 to take a week off without pay.

Practically every day I see something that proves my long-deceased father’s prescient observation — made in the mid-’60s — that the white man will give America away!

Steve Medve, Canton, N.Y.

Sir — I commend Reilly Smith for his activism and wish him the best with his AR club. That said, I am a little surprised that he seems almost proud to have Hispanic members and Arabs interested in joining. If we are to achieve our goals, we need to recognize that “diversity” is the biggest threat, and we should not be practicing this kind of inclusion. If the Founding Fathers could have foreseen the present day, they would have written “Whites Only” in the first line of the Constitution. Let’s learn from their mistake.

Shawn Rodenbeck, Kern Valley State Prison, Delano, California

Sir — As I followed how the AR conference was shut down, and see how high-pitched, non-rational means are used to stop public Internet discussion, I cannot tell whether this marks a waxing or waning of the race-realist movement. On the one hand, it is of course ominous to see citizens who should enjoy free speech not merely shut down but branded as the intolerant ones, and as your magazine documents constantly, it seems that the truth-tellers are increasingly marginalized and even demonized. On the other hand, when the other side turns up the volume that loud, it usually means they have run out of rebuttals.

Two unrelated incidents lead me to believe that, at least this week, the race-realist view is waxing. The first is the electoral success of Geert Wilders’ party in Holland. The second, although much less dramatic and newsworthy, is a short article in this week’s (March 4) Economist detailing the plight of white Africans, and even referring to the situation in Zimbabwe as “one of Africa’s great tragedies.” Granted, the author uses this phrase to refer generally to the “ruin of the country” and the “moral bankruptcy of the government,” but the gist of the piece is clear: whites are being targeted and terrorized. An article like this in a mainstream journal is something of a baby step when one compares the truth with the meagerness of what may be said, but it is still a significant leap forward. Again, a good week for race realism.

Name Withheld, Hong Kong

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