American Renaissance magazine
Vol. 19, No. 11	November 2008

CONTENTS

Sarah Palin — a Candidate We Can Vote For?
How to Avoid Future McCains
Why Vote for McCain?
A Matter of Perfect Indifference
Common Sense Uncommonly Well Put
O Tempora, O Mores!
Letters

COVER STORY

Sarah Palin — a Candidate We Can Vote For?

Reasons to vote for the McCain ticket.

by Reilly Smith

We face a choice in November between a white amnesty-promoter and a black socialist. Many race realists have argued that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain deserves our support, and that we should stay home or vote for one of the third-party candidates. Some racially aware whites will actually vote for Mr. Obama, in the belief that “worse is better.” I will vote for Senator McCain. I believe his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate actually gives race realists someone they can vote for instead of just sitting out the election.

Needless to say, Mr. McCain was among the worst of the Republican candidates. For me, his stance on immigration ruled him out from the beginning, and I voted against him in the Illinois primary. My candidate was Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, who came the closest to my views on race, immigration and the need to support Western Civilization. Unfortunately, he dropped out of the race too early to have much impact.

By all means, let us encourage more Tancredos in the next election. But for now we are stuck with what we have, and faced with the prospect and symbolism of an Afro-Leninist in the White House, versus a white veteran and a fertile “hockey mom,” I reconsidered my anti-McCain stance. I have begun to think that with Sarah Palin next in line behind an aging president, the cultural, political, and racial landscape of America has been reshaped.

I was amazed, first of all, that John McCain chose Mrs. Palin. The bête noir of the Right and former darling of the liberal media actually reached out to conservatives with this selection. I would have bet money Mr. McCain would choose Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who was elected twice in a state that traditionally goes to Democrats. The Republican convention was held there, and a safe, Midwestern governor who appeals to the religious Right could possibly win Minnesota for Mr. McCain.

But Gov. Pawlenty would have been a very ho-hum pick, a one-day news story like Mr. Obama’s selection of Senator Joe Biden. When I turned on the television and saw an attractive, white woman standing next to Mr. McCain I had to admire his savvy. Mr. Pawlenty might have helped Mr. McCain in Minnesota; Sarah Palin can help in all 50 states. The polls swing up and down wildly, but there is no question Mrs. Palin has reinvigorated the race and changed its dynamic from a race-realist perspective.

Even if Mrs. Palin’s selection smacks of tokenism, and even if she turns out to be wrong on many issues, it won’t matter. The anti-white, leftist rage against her is based on her conservatism, her white fertility, and her muscular evangelical faith, which partly explains her family’s willingness to have a large family.

Whatever one thinks of abortion in the context of race realism, it is clear that the Left wants to convince white women that their babies are disposable. Mrs. Palin clearly thinks otherwise, and this annoys them. She did not have one child the way feminist heroine Hillary Clinton did — or two — but five, and seems successful and happy. The Left is terrified at the thought that young white women could start thinking of babies the way Mrs. Palin does. The idea of four years of that big, happy Palin family on the national and international stage makes the anti-white Left shudder.

Mrs. Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter Bristol is pregnant, but at least she is engaged to the father. What if white women got the idea that they could get married and have children at a young age, like Bristol? Even the fact that Sarah Palin’s youngest child has Down Syndrome carries a pro-white message — it reminds careerist white women in their 30s that once they are in their 40s, the chances of having a Down Syndrome baby rises rapidly. It’s best to get moving if they want a healthy family.

Implicit racial appeal

The package Mrs. Palin presents — small town, conservative, Evangelical — is an implicit appeal to whiteness, and even if most whites are not conscious of it, blacks are. Whoopi Goldberg thought Mrs. Palin’s Republican convention speech sounded pro-Nazi: “I just found the whole thing . . . very much like a Bund rally, but maybe that was just me.”

PBS correspondent Gwen Ifill’s cousin, Sherrilyn Iffil, is a law professor at the University of Maryland. She wrote: “It’s hard to be an average working mom, really hard. And when women who are privileged present as though they have it all together, it’s offensive to black women.”

Some black men seem to be just as afraid of Mrs. Palin. Black rap music celebrity “P. Diddy” posted a YouTube internet video, in which he cowers at the thought of Sarah Palin in the White House:

Sarah Palin — she scares me. She really scares me . . . Sarah Palin: You scare me. You could become the president of the United States . . . John McCain is 72. Sarah Palin could be the president. Boys and girls, vote, please, I beg you.

Black liberal columnist Mary Mitchell wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Sarah Palin makes me sick. I hate that she was able to steal Barack Obama’s mojo just by showing up wearing rimless glasses and a skirt . . . Sarah Palin makes me sick because although black Democrats have been responsible for giving white candidates the boost they needed to beat their Republican opponents in tight races, these voters are now being insulted by feminists who say they will cross over into the McCain camp because of her.

Palin-haters who are white are using the usual technique of sifting every word she says, looking for “code.” She recently attacked Mr. Obama’s associations with 1960s-era bomb-thrower William Ayers, arguing that “our opponent . . . is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.” She added, “This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America.”

Associated Press writer Douglass Daniel thought these words put so much distance between Mrs. Palin and Mr. Obama that she could only have been talking about the fact that he is black, and the headline of his October 5 article was “Analysis: Palin’s Words Carry Racial Tinge.” Mrs. Palin was obviously attacking her opponent’s politics, not his race, but she is, herself, such an embodiment of whiteness that the AP man could see little else.

Mrs. Palin’s racial appeal has not escaped race-realist commentators. The web site, the Occidental Observer, wrote in an editorial that she would:

further the racial polarization of American politics — a prospect that is certainly welcome for us at The Occidental Observer. The image of Palin endorsing small town values and surrounded by her white children on stage at the Republican convention is absolutely nauseating to the hegemonic left . . .

Needless to say, this image of white fertility and small town values is not going to appeal to blacks or Latinos either . . . Palin is a personification of what [UC Long Beach professor] Kevin MacDonald terms implicit whiteness. She has a white political and cultural affiliation even if there are still taboos about saying so explicitly.

All of this, of course, made her the target of lefty viciousness that it is impossible to imagine the media pouring out on a non-white. Vitriol — some of it approaching the pathological — began to flow immediately. Hollywood leftists sneered at her, and actor Matt Damon said she was “like a really bad Disney movie.” Former Saturday Night Live performer Chevy Chase urged his fellow comedians to “decimate” her. “Comedienne” Sandra Bernhard mused about Mrs. Palin being “gang raped” by black men while visiting New York City. Democratic activists broke into her private e-mail account and made it public.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd outdid herself in nastiness. She visited Mrs. Palin’s town of Wasilla and pronounced it a “soulless strip mall without sidewalks.” She called Mrs. Palin a “a political jukebox,” and reveled in the news that she had put a tanning bed in the Alaska governor’s mansion. She called her speaking style “pompom patois and sing-songy jingoism,” and lovingly transcribed ungrammatical answers to interview questions. “At Sarah Palin’s old church in Wasilla, they spoke in tongues,” she wrote. “Maybe that’s where she picked it up.” Her fellow Times columnist, Bob Herbert, wrote that Mrs. Palin was all bounce and no content, complaining that if the Republicans were elected and Mr. McCain died, “the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.”

The liberal women on the television show The View were so hostile to Mrs. Palin, that the lone conservative voice on the program, Elisabeth Hasselback, noted that it must be “Hate Sarah Palin Day.”

Washington Post reporter Sally Quinn wrote that Palin should “rethink her priorities” and concentrate on her family instead of trying to be vice president. It is impossible to imagine a liberal female reporter talking down to a Democratic politician that way.

The hatred for Sarah Palin is visceral, as much because she is a standing insult to aging women’s-libbers as because she is white. Judah Friedman wrote in the American Spectator about the crazed reactions of Hollywood feminists:

What could be worse for a woman who has chosen a barren existence, in the name of a movement, than to see a woman get ahead who has already actually gotten so many great things out of life? If Sarah Plain gets elected it would sort of imply that their lives have had no meaning, and would leave open the question: ‘For what have they done any of this?’ Sadly, this has to be how they see it.

Miss Friedman continued: “Whether or not Sarah Palin is the next vice president, one thing is for certain. She has shown you [the feminists] for the frauds that you are, for Pandora’s box has been opened and you will never be able to close it. You are not the role models for the next generation of women. You have lost all of your credibility. There is a new type of woman out there who can juggle both a family and a career. You had your chance to get on board and you blew it.”

Even Obama supporter and libertarian feminist Camille Paglia, wrote with grudging admiration for Mrs. Palin:

The gun-toting Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did — which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Noemie Emery, writing in the Weekly Standard captured the fury over Sarah Palin perhaps better than anyone:

[I]t may turn out that the main contribution she makes to his [Mr. McCain’s] effort is in goading the Democrats into spasms of self-defeating and entirely lunatic rage. Somehow, every element of her life — the dual offense of being a beauty-queen and hunter; the Down syndrome baby who wasn’t aborted; the teenage daughter about to get married, whose baby also wasn’t aborted; the non-metrosexual husband working the nightshift; the very fact of five children — touched a nerve on the liberal template, and sent the whole beast into convulsions, opening an intriguing and somewhat frightening window into the turbulent id of the left.

Some mainstream conservatives have a new name for all this leftist frothing: “Palin Derangement Syndrome.” Anyone who can evoke so much apoplexy in the anti-white establishment is clearly on to something.

Internet commentator Steve Sailer thinks it is because she is a “tribal fertility goddess:”

[I]t’s all about . . . female fertility. Human beings have extremely strong emotions on the topic of fertility. The Blue Whites are alarmed and outraged to be reminded that the Red whites can afford to outbreed them and are outbreeding them. Modern people tell themselves they don’t care about stuff like that, but they do, oh, they do.

A few traditional conservatives think Mr. McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin is wrong because it smacks of affirmative action and shoves her into a place where women do not belong. They say it is not good to glorify working mothers, that Vice President Palin could not help but neglect her family, and that her job demeans her husband.

No doubt Denis Thatcher could have used Margaret around the home a bit more, but should she have refused to be prime minister? The “Iron Lady,” as the Soviets dubbed her, was an inspiration to her nation and proved that liberalism hardly speaks for all women. What is more, the Palin family seems to be a happy one despite Mrs. Palin’s prominence.

It is unfortunate that liberal fury over Mrs. Palin — and the entertainment this has provided conservatives — is far more common than straightforward, heartfelt praise for Mrs. Palin. Former presidential candidate and commentator Pat Buchanan is something of an exception:

In choosing Palin, McCain may also have changed the course of history as much as Ike did with his choice of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan did with his choice of George H.W. Bush. For should this ticket win, Palin will eclipse every other Republican as heir apparent to the presidency and will have her own power base among Lifers, Evangelicals, gun folks and conservatives — wholly independent of President McCain . . .

A traditional conservative on social issues, Palin has become, overnight, the most priceless political asset the movement has.

Mr. Buchanan also brushed aside complaints about Mrs. Palin’s inexperience:

[T]he lady has more executive experience than McCain, Joe Biden and Obama put together. None of them has ever started or run a business as Palin did. None of them has run a giant state like Alaska, which is larger than California and Texas put together. And though Alaska is not populous, Gov. Palin has as many constituents as Nancy Pelosi or Biden.

She has no foreign policy experience, we are told . . . But from the day she takes office, Palin will get daily briefings and sit on the National Security Council with the president and secretaries of state, treasury and defense . . . And her experience as governor of Alaska, dealing with the oil industry and pipeline agreements with Canada, certainly compares favorably with that of Barack Obama, a community organizer who dealt in the mommy issues of food stamps and rent subsidies.

Mr. Buchanan may have a soft spot for female vice presidential candidates with short resumes. When he headed the Reform Party ticket in 2000, his VP selection was Ezola Foster, a black conservative activist who had spent 33 years as a high-school typing teacher.

Worse is better?

Some on the racial Right will not vote for Mr. McCain because they have adopted Lenin’s slogan, “worse is better.” They believe whites will somehow “wake up” if Obama is elected, and they want to punish Mr. McCain for his many betrayals. I’m not sure worse is better. That may work for the anarchic Left, but for conservatives and whites in general, worse is usually worse.

Whites in Southern Africa, for example, face the most harrowing conditions of whites anywhere, yet many still parrot the New York Times view on race. If they can’t wake up, how bad does it have to get?

Some people also think that if the Left controls all branches of government again, it will prompt conservatives to come roaring back as they did in 1994 when they captured control of the Congress, or in 1980 when Ronald Reagan took over after the “malaise days” of Jimmy Carter.

A strategy of “worse is better” is fraught with too many risks. In my home state of Illinois, some activists thought that a Democratic sweep of the state would allow “real” conservatives within the Republican Party to mount a heroic counterattack. What actually happened is that Republican fundraising and candidate recruitment plummeted. Formerly Republican strongholds became vulnerable. There is nothing in Illinois now and in the foreseeable future that will stop the Democrats, no matter how inept they are.

There are some on the racial Right who will join the white liberals in voting for Obama, not because they want to be absolved of racial guilt but because they think it will take the air out of black hucksters like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. They think shouts of “institutional racism” will get only a horse laugh if there is a black man in the White House. I disagree. Chicago has had two black mayors, but that never stopped blacks from putting the screws on whitey.

Nor did the “role models” offered by Mayors Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer change black neighborhoods. They were about as violent and crime-ridden after the terms of two black mayors as they were before. If “role models” made a difference, black-run Detroit, Washington, and Akron would be full of prosperous, well-adjusted blacks.

A black, Democratic administration will produce at the national level the same effects — both political and behavioral — that similar victories have produced locally. Black crime and poverty rates will be unchanged, and it will all still be the white man’s fault. At the same time, Democratic control of the entire federal government will mean fundraising for all Republicans, including conservatives, will plummet, along with Republican candidate recruitment. Democratic administrative and judicial appointments, including Supreme Court appointments, will chip away our liberties faster than ever.

Some commentators say many blacks will riot if Mr. Obama loses. If that is true, it is perhaps the best reason of all to vote for Mr. McCain. Nothing could be more eye-opening, nothing would do more to awaken white racial consciousness than blacks burning up their neighborhoods just because the vote did not go their way.

Liberal white commentators would tell us it was all because of “racism,” and would try to keep the worst of the TV images off the air. The media have changed since the 1992 Los Angeles riots, however, and even if the networks were squeamish, there would be graphic footage on YouTube. It would be like the O.J. Simpson verdict and Hurricane Katrina all over again.

The head of the ticket

To return to the candidates, however, any politician, even one that inspires the Right as Mrs. Palin does, has to be carefully watched and lobbied. All politicians compromise, and even someone like Mrs. Palin is not likely to be any different. Nevertheless, she stands as a sharp rebuke to liberal, feminist thinking of the past 50 years, and could inspire millions of young whites to take on the difficult task of forming new families. She gives nationalists and race realists a reason to vote for the McCain-Palin ticket, and not just against an Obama-Biden one.

One might still argue that it is all very well to wax enthusiastic about Sarah Palin, but what about the man at the head of the ticket? What about John McCain? It is impossible not to admire the fact that he was counted out so many times but kept coming back. Tenaciousness is one of his better qualities. He was considered “gone for good” after then-Gov. George W. Bush defeated him in the 2000 Republican primaries. Just last July, his presidential ambitions seemed hopeless after his campaign squandered all its money. Somehow, he regrouped, lived off the political land, and went on to capture the nomination.

There’s a quality of grit and perseverance there, which we have never seen from Mr. Obama. Everything Mr. Obama ever got was handed to him. He never overcame anything the way Mr. McCain has, which makes Mr. McCain the more impressive of the two.

This means Mr. McCain will handle the presidency better than an untested Mr. Obama. Reluctantly, therefore, I have to concede that the stakes of who will control the White House are higher for our race and nation than my immediate disagreement with Mr. McCain over my main issues. A McCain-Palin administration will be far from perfect, but it will provide a necessary check on the Democrats and guarantee that the Right can live to fight another day.

White Women and Feminism The agonies the feminist Left has gone into over Sarah Palin raise once more the question of the role feminism has played in the demoralization of whites. Do we want white women barefoot and pregnant? Working and single until they are 35? It is worth noting that except for a few brief prosperous periods, such as the Victorian Era or the Eisenhower years, most families in the West have not gotten by with just one breadwinner. Until the 20th century, most of the world, including the white world, lived on farms. Women had to work as hard as men just to survive. In the halcyon days of the 1950s, conditions emerged that freed many women from work. This was after previous do-gooders had labored to get women out of factories and other drudgery. Ironically, it was feminists, starting with Betty Friedan, who wanted to put women back to work. The challenge facing us is how best to harness the mental energies of women while preserving their central role in family formation. There are some women, indeed many highly gifted women, who spend all their time and energy on their families. Some mix work and family; some choose neither. It is the anti-white leftist feminists who convinced many women that if they worked they couldn’t have large families like Sarah Palin’s. Feminists want to shoehorn all women into the same workaholic life without families. When all women are just like the feminists, they no longer have to justify their own narrow lives. Many white women have stopped at one child or had none at all in order to pursue degrees and careers, and worldwide white fertility is now well below replacement levels. Someone like Mrs. Palin can demonstrate to white women that they can break out of the feminist mold. If Mrs. Palin were to move on to the presidency, it would be even more apparent to young white women that their barren feminist elders were wrong. While her selection does hint of tokenism, it has a deeper, urgent appeal to white women.

Reilly Smith is has been involved in political campaigns since 1988 either on staff or as a consultant.

ARTICLE

How to Avoid Future McCains

In future elections, race realists and nationalists need to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work necessary to get our ideas on the political map. Second Amendment activists and the religious right work tirelessly to make support for their issues the litmus test for Republican candidates. We have been unable to do the same, even with our most important issue: immigration.

Republican presidential candidates who want any chance of winning the nomination have to be acceptable to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and various religious and pro-family organizations, such as the National Right to Life Committee (NRTL). Sen John McCain was no exception, cultivating support among both groups. In many cases, they exert a veto over which candidate wins a primary and who gets re-elected and who gets defeated. Christians and gun owners have developed so much influence within the Republican Party that the GOP elites must accept them, even if grudgingly.

It is very much to our discredit that patriotic immigration reform activists have nothing comparable to the NRA or NRTL. If we did, immigration control would be as essential an issue to Republican candidates as the Second Amendment and abortion.

Neither the NRA nor the NRTL were able to exert pressure on politicians overnight. It took years of grassroots activism to build up these organizations, with millions of people donating time and money, making phone calls, stuffing envelopes and going door-to-door. As these organizations grew, they became listened to, respected, and feared. People are passionate about their guns and their religious beliefs. Patriotic immigration reform activists need to make immigration just as personal.

Having an immigration pressure network is a realistic long-term goal for race realists, and without such a network, we have no right to complain that the Republicans fail to produce candidates to our liking.

In 2000, no Republican presidential candidate talked about immigration. In 2004, neither George Bush nor John Kerry made much of it. In 2008, however, one candidate made it his number-one issue: Congressman Tom Tancredo. Unfortunately, the conservative vote split between Mr. Tancredo and other candidates. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee got the religious vote and Congressman Ron Paul of Texas got the libertarian and anti-war votes.

Mr. Tancredo ran his campaign on a shoestring but changed the terms of the debate simply by running. Every Republican debate he appeared in raised questions about immigration. All the GOP candidates had to answer those questions, and stories were finally written about them.

Mr. Tancredo dropped out and threw his support behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, hoping this would help stop Mr. McCain. In hindsight, it would have been better for Mr. Tancredo to stay in until the end and force Mr. McCain to debate the issue. The liberal media could have been counted on to play up the differences between Mr. Tancredo and Mr. McCain, and this would have kept the issue alive.

But what Mr. Tancredo needed most was better organizational support from immigration control groups. There are many such groups, but they do not have the power to keep politicians in line. We will know we have succeeded when any candidate who calls himself “conservative” will automatically be just as tough on immigration as he is on guns and abortion. But until we have our own immigration version of the NRA, in this election we should support the “implicitly” white ticket of McCain-Palin.

ARTICLE

Why Vote for McCain?

by Michael Hart

I suspect most AR readers will not vote for Barack Obama but are reluctant to vote for John McCain either. I urge you to vote for Mr. McCain, however, for a very simple reason: If Mr. Obama wins this election it will never again be possible to elect a president who supports immigration control. This is because a President Obama would promptly push an “immigration reform act” through Congress to grant amnesty to virtually all of the 14 million illegal immigrants already here, and would do nothing to stop the inflow of millions more.

The influx of Hispanics has been going on for decades and has drastically altered the electorate, making it more difficult in each election cycle to end that influx. California — which was once a swing state — is now completely out of play in presidential elections. If there is an Obama amnesty, Texas, Florida, and probably several other states could be out of play in 2012. Later elections will be even more hopeless for any candidate who opposes large-scale immigration. If we lose this election we may never have another chance, and our Anglo-American civilization will be swamped.

You may say Mr. McCain is just as bad, but he is not. It is true that he has made it plain he wants a “path to citizenship,” that is, an eventual amnesty, for most illegal immigrants. But after popular pressure defeated his bills in 2006 and 2007, he agreed not to seek a “comprehensive settlement” until after our borders are secured. He has made this promise repeatedly during the campaign. He has agreed to put up a border fence, and to enforce existing penalties against businesses that hire illegal aliens. Only when there is general agreement that our borders are secure will he proceed to comprehensive reform.

The Democrats will oppose the border fence at every stage, both in Congress and in the courts, so very little of it will have been built by the time the primary season for the 2012 elections begins in 2011. This means the border will not be secure, and if Mr. McCain keeps his word, that means no “path to citizenship.” In 2012, we may have an opportunity to elect someone who opposes both further immigration and amnesty for illegals, and that might be Sarah Palin.

Might Mr. McCain break his word? Yes, he might, but that is not certain, and even if he does, it will be easier to thwart a president who is plainly violating his campaign promise than one — Mr. Obama — who is only doing what he promised to do, and will have a clear mandate for it. Voting for Mr. McCain does not guarantee victory for those who do not want our country destroyed by large-scale immigration, but voting for Mr. Obama certainly leads to defeat.

We are facing a demographic crisis that threatens our civilization. I don’t like John McCain either, but voting for him is the only way to stop Barack Obama.

Dr. Hart is the author of Understanding Human History.

ARTICLE

A Matter of Perfect Indifference

Each ticket is as bad as the other.

by Jared Taylor

I hate to throw cold water on Mr. Smith’s enthusiasm for Sarah Palin, but I fear there is a dose of wishful thinking and even fantasy in his analysis. Let us summarize his reasons for liking Mrs. Palin: (1) Blacks, leftists, and feminists hate her. (2) She has five children. (3) She is white.

This is thin gruel. Please note that Mr. Smith never says a word about what Mrs. Palin may or may not think about the questions that matter to us. Her record on immigration is a total blank. We have no idea of her views on racial preferences. There is no hint she has ever thought about multiculturalism. Mr. Smith cheerfully reads into these voids whatever suits him.

It may be that the Left hates her as much as it does because it, too, reads some of the same things into those voids, but liberals have plenty of other reasons to hate her. Also, they have been rummaging through her past with great energy, and we can be sure that if Mrs. Palin had ever uttered an unorthodox thought on race or immigration or Mexicans or even standardized testing, her enemies would have pounced on it long ago. Mr. Smith cannot produce for us one scrap of evidence that Mrs. Palin’s mind contains anything but clichés, and clichés about race are some of the hardest to dislodge.

It is true that we can imagine otherwise. Mr. Todd Palin was once a member of an Alaska independence party, and that shows an unconventional turn of mind. As a fisherman and oil worker, he has spent a lot of time around a class of men who speak their minds far more freely than professional Republican operatives. But again, if he has ever whispered heresy to his wife, there is no sign of it.

Furthermore, whatever Mrs. Palin’s instincts may be, she is now in the toils of party hacks who are, without exception, stuffing her with standard Republican nonsense. If she is ever elected vice president, her limousine will never get lost in a black neighborhood, her children will never be the only English-speakers in their classes, and she will never read a single word that was not put before her by her handlers.

The most likely reason she has no record on any of the things we care about is because she has never thought about them, and especially now, she is not going to have a single thought that has not been pre-digested 17 times by people loyal to John McCain. If she had dissident ideas about race, and held them with enough strength to resist her current cram coarse in orthodoxy, there would have been some hint of it.

Like Mr. Smith, I can’t help liking Sarah Palin. She has an attractive, unpolished manner that underlines how wooden all the Washington place-holders are, and our enemies are practically choking to death on their hatred for her. Unfortunately, they hate her for the wrong reasons, and when it comes to race, the enemies of our enemies can very well be our enemies, too. I fear that on every question that really matters to us, Mrs. Palin is an empty vessel, and does not appear to have the independence of mind to resist being filled with rubbish.

I am not persuaded by Dr. Hart either. Despite Mr. McCain’s promises about securing the border, he has recently been telling Hispanic audiences that he will take up border control and amnesty together, and will make them one of his first priorities. Some semi-mainstream immigration control advocates think we are more likely to get an amnesty from Mr. McCain than from Mr. Obama.

Mr. Obama has not so far shown any real passion for anything, and there is no sign he has any more love for Mexicans than the minimum liberalism requires. Mr. McCain is the one who has the amnesty bit between his teeth and who seems to take it personally. Republicans from heavily Hispanic states — like Mr. McCain and the Bush brothers — seem to have an infatuation with Mexicans that blinds them to political reality. Mr. Smith reminds us that Mr. McCain is tenacious, but when a man is wrong, that is the last quality you want him to have. What is more, Republicans in Congress could put their hearts into the fight against an Obama amnesty, whereas if Mr. McCain pushed one, especially during the “honeymoon,” he could get all the support he needs.

Mr. McCain will also pursue an arrogant, militarist foreign policy, whereas Mr. Obama is likely to be more pragmatic.

None of this is meant to suggest that I support Mr. Obama. If Mr. Smith is right, and the fact of Sarah Palin on the national stage for four years will encourage white women to have families, what will the fact of Barack Obama in the White House encourage them to do? Get knocked up by an itinerant African in the hope that Baby will go to Harvard and then become president of the United States? I don’t think white women are that simple-minded, but the symbolism of a black man in the Oval Office — especially a black man with the militant record and associations this one has — is still staggering.

The Democrats and Republicans are undoubtedly offering us very different candidates. They are so different, in fact, that it should be a mathematical impossibility for their many defects to add up to exactly the same level of badness, which is what it should take for me to be genuinely indifferent as to who wins — but that is how I feel.

Since Mr. Smith has pointed the way, let us close with a bit of fantasy: The McCain-Palin ticket gets a minority of the popular vote but wins by a single electoral vote. Blacks burn down their neighborhoods. Hispanics join the fun and burn down theirs. This spectacle is highly educational to millions of whites; indeed, President McCain is so educated by watching the evening news that he has a stroke and dies. Newly inaugurated President Palin turns out to have been a long-time secret fan of columnist Sam Francis . . .

BOOK REVIEW

Common Sense Uncommonly Well Put

Why immigrants should stay home.

Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal, Sentinel Books (Penguin Group), 2008, 294 pp., $25.95.

reviewed by Thomas Jackson

Mark Krikorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, and probably the most frequently quoted spokesman for immigration restriction. His group does excellent research — from how H-1B visas really work to whether immigrants will bail out the Social Security system — and it was entirely to be expected that Mr. Krikorian would make strong arguments in his book, The New Case Against Immigration. As we will see, one of his basic points — the very one he calls “new” — is hopelessly wrong, but it hardly matters. The more people read this book, the better the country will be.

One powerful reason to oppose immigration is that it has driven 80 to 90 percent of our population growth over the past several decades. As Mr. Krikorian points out, Americans have, in effect, made a collective decision to have just enough children to keep the population stable. Our government has overruled that decision by importing more than a million people a year, making us the one developed country that is growing at Third-World rates. In 1945, we had a population of about 125 million, and no one thought that wasn’t enough. There are now 300 million of us crammed into the same country, and the Census Bureau predicts 500 million by 2050.

Some of the consequences are obvious: urban sprawl, crowded schools, bad traffic. Mr. Krikorian notes that in 1982, 12 percent of all car travel took place during times of peak congestion. Twenty-one years later it was 40 percent. In the same period, the number of cities with awful traffic went from 5 to 51. We claim to be working towards energy independence, yet we keep importing more people for whom we will have to import more oil.

Mr. Krikorian also makes the interesting point that the denser the population, the denser the laws and the more pervasive the government. Wyoming, one of the most lightly settled states, with a population of only half a million, has a part-time legislature of 90 people that meets no more than 40 days a year. They get the laws right and then go home; would that Congress could do the same.

Mr. Krikorian also refutes the idea that immigrant-fueled population growth will keep Social Security solvent. Many immigrants are manual laborers who contribute little to the system or may even work off the books; they are not the high-wage earners who could actually help. Immigrants also get old and want benefits, so even millions more of them will not do much for the Social Security system.

Mr. Krikorian notes that while immigrants add to our population they dilute our national identity. Many people have noted that the United States makes nothing like the effort it once did to assimilate immigrants, and Mr. Krikorian blames “post-American elites” who promote multi-culturalism rather than the “patriotic assimilation” he advocates. Today, our public schools de-Americanize children, and Mr. Krikorian quotes a study that finds that the more years immigrant children stay in school, the more hyphenated they feel.

The law has changed, too. Traditionally, Americans could lose their citizenship if they served in a foreign army or voted in someone else’s election, but in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that no American could be stripped of citizenship for any cause. The Supreme Court has also held that the oath of naturalization, in which new citizens forswear all loyalty to other nations, need not be taken literally.

Modern travel and communications also make it easy for immigrants to keep close ties with their homelands, which is important to the more than 80 percent who come from countries that permit dual citizenship. At the same time, Hispanics have taken root in such numbers that they create huge foreign enclaves where one need hardly be American at all. Loss of native confidence combined with stronger-than-ever old-country ties means immigrants are “overloading the society with more diversity than it can handle.”

Mexicans

Mr. Krikorian emphasizes the dangers of massive Mexican immigration, noting that the 12 million Mexicans here now account for a greater number than all the immigrants from the next ten immigrant-sending countries combined. Sixty-two percent of Mexican immigrants have not finished high school, and when Mexican women come to America their lifetime fertility rises: from 2.4 in Mexico to 3.5 here. Mexicans, especially, are close to their homeland, and their loyalties are constantly rejuvenated by newcomers. Almost 80 percent of Hispanics, whether immigrants or native born, watch Spanish-language television, and it is the primary form of television for half of them.

The Mexican government has long worked to keep Mexican-Americans loyal to Mexico. The current president, Felipe Calderon, was firmly in the national tradition when he said in his September 2007 state-of-the-union speech that “Mexico does not end at its borders . . . Where there is a Mexican there is Mexico.”

As of 2007, Mexico had 56 consulates and consular agencies in 26 American states and the District of Columbia, the largest such network anywhere in the world. Their work goes well beyond looking after citizens to open meddling in American affairs. Mexican consular officers push for driver’s licenses and in-state tuition for illegal aliens, and protest any effort by local police to enforce immigration laws. If there are local government deliberations about immigrants, they rally claques to flood the gallery and intimidate elected officials.

Mr. Krikorian says there will never be reconquista in the traditional, territorial sense, but that the Mexican government will assume more and more power at all levels of government over decisions that affect immigrants. One obvious attempt to subvert our immigration policy is for consulates to issue a form of identification known as the matricula consular. Legal immigrants all have legal forms of identification, so the only people who need the matricula are illegals, and to recognize it is to recognize them. To the delight of the Mexican government, Wells Fargo Bank has opened more than 500,000 accounts for people who can show nothing more than a matricula.

In 2005 the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles gave the school district nearly 100,000 Mexican textbooks for 1,500 schools. The consulate has been distributing books for years, and the total probably runs to millions. The history books refer to the American flag as “the enemy flag” and say “we love our country because it is ours.” In Salinas, California, a consular official went even further. He organized a “Mexican Flag Day” at a public school, to promote Mexican patriotism.

One of the most blatant demonstrations of disloyalty is for American citizens to run for office in foreign countries. Several “Americans” have now won seats in national and state legislatures in Mexico and are mayors of Mexicans towns.

National security

Since September 11, 2001, Americans are supposed to have taken a heightened interest in security, but Mr. Krikorian reports that our efforts to keep out terrorists are laughable. Part of the problem is sheer volume. Every year immigration officials process about 180 million entries by foreigners as well as 240 million entries by returning citizens and permanent residents. In 2005, 800 visa officers issued six million visas, or 7,500 per officer. It is not humanly possible to give all these visitors and visas the scrutiny they require. At the same time, the State Department still thinks in terms of customer service rather than security, and officials are rewarded for pushing through lots of applications, not for keeping out miscreants. The theory is that visa-granting can be automated through computerization, but a lot of the work involves examining papers from Third-World countries that have to be checked by hand.

There is supposed to be an exit-control system — otherwise, we have no way of knowing whether temporary visitors have actually left — but it is not working yet. There is also a terrific amount of fraud. One study found false information in a majority of applications for “labor certification,” the process of demonstrating that there are no Americans who will do a particular job at a certain wage.

The Border Patrol does catch some one million illegals every year, but many get through, and once they are past the border, there is little chance of catching them. The biggest joke are the “other than Mexicans,” who are caught on the Southern border. Because Mexico will not take them back, and because we do not have the space to detain them, we turn them loose inside the Unites States after they promise to turn themselves in some other time.

Not enough people make another of Mr. Krikorian’s arguments: That the presence of large numbers of foreigners makes it easy for terrorists to hide out unobserved. It is only because we have throngs of Middle Easterners in many cities that the September 11 hijackers were able to live here for months and get flight training without attracting attention.

Asians are not a crime/poverty/illegitimacy problem, but they pose a different security challenge. Mr. Krikorian quotes a joint FBI/CIA report: “When approaching an individual of Chinese origin, the Chinese intelligence services attempt to secure his or her cooperation by playing on this shared ancestry.” Sometimes it works, of course, but any attempt to keep Chinese-Americans out of sensitive military work would be met with howls of “racial profiling.”

At the same time, we now have so many Mexicans in the country — and our officials are so afraid of offending them — that we can hardly press our interests firmly upon Mexico. Whether it is water rights to the Rio Grande or extradition of killers, we humbly seek favors from Mexico, not the other way around.

Yet another consequence of mass immigration is lowered investment in automation. With so much stoop labor going begging, we have made practically no progress in machine harvesting — to the point that Mr. Krikorian warns competitors even in some developed countries who have invested in mechanization will soon be underselling us. As he explains, “Japan gets robots; we get Mexicans.”

Unlettered immigrants bring down wages for our own high-school dropouts, especially blacks and earlier immigrants. One hundred years ago, many immigrants were better off than natives, and even when they were not, their children and grandchildren caught up. Now, every new generation falls further behind, meaning that immigration increases inequality and is building a new, Hispanic underclass to go with the black one.

There is a benefit, of course, to having a reserve army of labor. The rest of us get services that are a little bit cheaper, with the result that, as Mr. Krikorian explains, we are about two tenths of one percent richer than we would be otherwise. That gain is more than wiped out by the increased taxes we pay to support immigrants.

Mr. Krikorian persuasively makes the point that welfare of the kind we have today simply cannot coexist with mass immigration: Millions of poor people would love to come just to go on the dole. He points out that a century ago, the federal government spent $178 per American in today’s dollars. Now it spends $9,000 per person. In 1900, government spending at all levels accounted for 5.5 percent of the total economy whereas it is 36 percent today. Much as we may hate it, big government and massive transfer payments are here to stay; it will be much easier to curb immigration than to throttle the nanny state.

Mexican prune pickers may therefore seem like a good deal for the growers but they are a terrible deal for the country because they and their families pay very little in taxes and soak up government services. Mr. Krikorian cites two studies: “The average immigrant-headed household in California used almost $3,500 more in state and local services than it paid in taxes, amounting to an extra tax burden for each native-headed household of nearly $1,200 per year,” and “the average lifetime cost to the taxpayer of each low-skilled immigrant household is $1.2 million.” In a rational society, these facts alone would be enough to close the borders.

Here are some of the details that account for these figures: It costs $12 billion a year to educate illegal-alien children, and another $17 billion to educate the US-born children of illegals. Half of all Mexican immigrant households are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (a kind of reverse income tax for the working poor) compared to only 15 percent of native families. From 1998 to 2003, immigrants accounted for 86 percent of the growth in the medically uninsured, and in California the majority of the uninsured are immigrants.

When the uninsured need patching up they go to emergency rooms — the most expensive form of first aid — and hospitals are required by federal law to treat them. Some cannot afford to. From 1993 to 2003, the number of hospitals with emergency rooms declined by 9 percent. In Los Angeles, no fewer than 60 hospitals closed emergency rooms over the last decade. As Mr. Krikorian explains, “Mass immigration is almost perfectly designed to overwhelm modern America’s welfare system.”

Mr. Krikorian has good ideas about what we should do about all this. As he explains, the real problem is not illegal as opposed to legal immigration, but the fact that we have immigration at all. He recommends letting in just enough people — about 250,000 a year — to make up for Americans who leave. He would also sharply cut back on family migration and refugees: “Only the most desperate people on the planet should be offered resettlement in the United States,” and they should be sent back as soon as things calm down at home.

Another good recommendation is for Congress to force the IRS to share tax information with immigration authorities. Every year, it accepts millions of returns from people who are not eligible for a Social Security number and use an individual tax identification number instead. The overwhelming majority of those people don’t belong here, but the IRS refuses to identify them.

As for the illegals themselves, snuffing out their jobs is the best cure. Mr. Krikorian points out that electronic verification of immigration status works very well. If all employers were forced to use it, no one would have the advantage of being able to use cheap, illegal labor. Without jobs, a huge number of illegals would save us the trouble of deporting them and would go home. Mr. Krikorian also wants a new enforcement climate: a few high-profile raids are all it takes to scare millions of illegals and make the old country seem awfully attractive.

Mr. Krikorian has strong views about foreign students. He points out that even if they pay full tariff — and many get financial aid — they are still enjoying taxpayer subsidies that average about $8,000 a head. With 565,000 foreigners at our universities, that works out to $4.5 billion — money we should spend on Americans. Ten percent of foreigners attend community colleges. Mr. Krikorian points out that these schools were established for Americans who cannot enroll in full-time or elite institutions, and foreigners should not be allowed.

Mr. Krikorian would limit foreigners to 1 percent of the student population — that would cut their numbers to 150,000 — and doesn’t want any student body to be more than 5 percent foreigners. Today, 20 percent of the students at Columbia and Stanford are foreign. Mr. Krikorian would ban scholarships for foreigners and charge them double the full tariff to make sure they don’t milk us.

So what is wrong with this book? Surprisingly, it does not call for an end to birth-right citizenship, something Congress could probably do with an up-and-down vote. Ending automatic citizenship for the children of tourists and illegals would be consistent with everything else the book proposes. Elsewhere, Mr. Krikorian has written that he actually favors birthright citizenship.

More serious is Mr. Krikorian’s genuflection to race orthodoxy. His argument against immigration is “new,” he says, because “what’s different about immigration today as opposed to a century ago is not the characteristics of the newcomers but the characteristics of our society.” Mexicans and Haitians and Hmong would have made fine Americans back when we needed mill workers and sod busters, but now that we have welfare and need people with skills — and have forgotten how to assimilate foreigners — they just won’t do. The trouble is us, not them. Likewise, if our European forebears had missed the boat and showed up today, they would be no more use than Guatemalans.

It’s a pity conservatives seem to feel compelled to write things like that. This book would be just as strong without egalitarian protestations, and singing the it’s-our-fault chorus doesn’t work anyway: It will not make Mr. Krikorian’s other arguments any more palatable to liberals. Fortunately, this is a small, easily overlooked part of an otherwise first-rate book that has the potential to do a great deal of good.

IN THE NEWS

O Tempora, O Mores!

For the Children

In 2006, before either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama began campaigning for the White House, researchers at the University of Texas interviewed 205 schoolchildren from “diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds” about their views of the presidency. The researchers wanted to know what the children thought about the fact that all US presidents have been white men. According to the study, one third of the children said it was because of “racial and gender bias.” Another third said no minority has become president because non-whites and women “lacked the skills to hold the position.” One in four children said they thought it was “illegal” for women or non-whites to be president.

“If Obama loses his bid for the presidency, there may be little change in children’s attitudes, but it could fuel their perception that American voters are racially prejudiced,” says study author Rebecca Bigler, a psychology professor at the University of Kansas. “In contrast, if Obama wins, children may believe that exclusionary laws and racial prejudice no longer shape the outcomes of the presidential elections.” [Children Aware of Voter Prejudice in the US, AFP, Oct. 5, 2008.]

Race Card

Latrice Bryant is a top aide to Philadelphia city councilman W. Wilson Goode, Jr., son of the former Philadelphia mayor. She earns $90,000 a year, and the local Fox affiliate has been looking into her relationship with her boss. For 10 days during the summer, Fox reporters followed Miss Bryant around, and found that several times Miss Bryant arrived at her office around noon but claimed on her time sheets that she showed up at 9 a.m. They also filmed her leaving her office at 12:30 p.m. and going to Mr. Goode’s house, where she remained for three hours.

When reporter Jeff Cole tried to interview the councilman about Miss Bryant’s work habits, Mr. Goode warned him, “Don’t you ever disrespect a black woman again.” Miss Bryant protested Fox’s interest in her by holding up handwritten signs during a city council meeting on September 18 that read, “Fox 29 are racist” and “Jeff Cole KKK.” Mr. Cole is white; Miss Bryant and Mr. Goode are black.

This caused a stir, and on September 28, Miss Bryant sent a letter of apology — to her boss. “I apologize for my public, albeit silent, display of the handwritten signs,” she wrote. “What I did was inappropriate and inexcusable.” She also hinted at a possible libel suit against Fox for its “relentless paparazzi-like conduct.”

Fox may have the last laugh. On October 1, the station aired photographs of Mr. Goode and Miss Bryant on vacation together at the Grand Lido Negril Resort and Spa in Jamaica. Mr. Goode denies the two are romantically involved, but the photos show them looking very cozy. It isn’t a question of infidelity — both are single — but it does raise questions of propriety. The president of the city council — also black — says she may start an investigation. [Vernon Clark, Aide to Goode Issues an Apology, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 29, 2008. Photos of Goode and Aide On Getaway, Fox 29, Philadelphia, Oct. 1, 2008.]

Savagely Obtuse

As part of our efforts to challenge racial orthodoxy, we occasionally send media pitches to TV and talk radio. Over the years, American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor has appeared on hundreds of TV and radio programs to discuss racial issues. This has been one of our most successful ways to reach new people, as many subscribers say they first heard of AR through such media appearances.

In September, we sent the following pitch to a number of radio hosts:

Race and the 2008 Election

As one of the most anticipated presidential races in US history heads to a tight finish, the issue of race has increasingly crept into both campaigns. An AP-Yahoo poll claims that Obama could lose up to 6 points for being black. But some conservative commentators point to the almost unanimous black support for Obama as evidence of black discrimination.

From CNN’s Jack Cafferty stating that a vote for McCain is a vote for racism to comic Sandra Bernhard’s joke about Sarah Palin being gang raped by blacks, this election is turning into a referendum on race.

Race relations expert Jared Taylor is the editor of American Renaissance magazine and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. He has a lot to say about race and the election and can address points such as these:

• Is the election becoming a racial head count?
• Will there be riots if Obama loses?
• Can the GOP attract Asian and Hispanic votes?
• Why do almost all blacks support Obama?
• Is McCain doing enough to win the white vote?
• Will McCain dare to bring up connection to Rev. Wright?
• Will affirmative action move to the forefront of the debate?
• How can both sides use race to their advantage?

One of the programs to which we sent the pitch was The Savage Nation, hosted by Michael Savage. Mr. Savage is perhaps the most outspoken conservative host on radio. His trademark line is “Liberalism is a mental disorder,” and he repeatedly touts the importance of “borders, language and culture” on his show and in his books. His website features articles such as “Obama’s pastor’s hate speech” and “Obama and Ayers pushed radicalism on schools.” Mr. Savage routinely dresses down black race activists such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and tried to countersue the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) after it sued him for supposedly denouncing Islam.

All of this would seem to make Mr. Savage at least open to a discussion of politically incorrect thoughts on the role of race in the 2008 election. Yet here is his emailed response to our pitch, exactly as he sent it, in all capital letters:

STOP YOUR LIES. OBAMA IS TOO GREEN NOT TOO BLACK. DROP MY NAME FROM YOUR EMAIL LIST OR I WILL TURN YOUR ORGANIZATION’S NAME OVER TO THE FBI FOR HARASSMENT.

Of course, there are no lies in the pitch we sent to Mr. Savage. And nowhere does the pitch say or even imply that Obama is “too black.” We sent the same pitch to left-wing broadcasters such as Air America, NPR, PBS and MSNBC. None reacted as angrily as Mr. Savage. In fact, many of these broadcasters have invited Mr. Taylor on their programs.

While we are happy to drop Mr. Savage’s email from out list, his point about turning us over to the FBI for harassment is nothing short of hysterical. Liberalism is, indeed, a mental disorder.

Shaping the Landscape

In the 2004 election, 67 percent of whites cast ballots, as did 60 percent of blacks, but just 47 percent of Hispanics. A coalition of Hispanic pressure groups, led by the National Council of La Raza, and Spanish language media wants one million more Hispanics to vote this year. The campaign, Ya es Hora, Ve y Vota!  — “It’s Time, Go Vote” — is aimed at newly-minted Hispanic citizens. Spanish language publisher impreMedia plans to insert nearly a million voter registration cards into its publications in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas. Univision and other Spanish-language broadcasters will air commercials urging viewers to vote. “This effort will not only put voter registration forms in the hands of Latinos, but also may help shape the political landscape,” says La Raza president Janet Murgia.

Hispanics are expected to heavily favor Democrats in November, but organizers say the registration drive is non-partisan. “This is neither a pro-Democratic or a pro-Republican effort,” says Mike Fernandez, vice president of public relations for State Farm Insurance, one of the companies bankrolling the effort. “It’s pro-voting, and pro-American.” [Massive Latino Voter Registration Drive Launched, AP, Sept. 25, 2008.]

Coincidence?

Washington Mutual (WaMu) was the largest savings and loan association in the United States — until it went belly-up in September and had to be seized by government regulators in the largest bank failure in US history. As it foundered, it was still trumpeting its commitment to “diversity.” This is from its last press release, filed the day before it declared bankruptcy:

Hispanic Business magazine recently ranked WaMu sixth in its annual Diversity Elite list, which names the top 60 companies for Hispanics. The company was honored specifically for its efforts to recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations.

‘Diversity is an integral part of cultivating a welcoming, innovative and dynamic workplace here at WaMu. We are proud to be recognized for the opportunities and benefits we offer to all of our employees, including the specific efforts we have made to engage Hispanics and the GLBT community,’ said Steve Rotella, WaMu president and COO.

“Engaging” Hispanic customers through mortgages they couldn’t afford helped sink WaMu. [Kate Stouffer, WaMu Recognized as Top Diverse Employer — Again, Washington Mutual press release, Sept. 24, 2008.]

Slavery as Salvation

A Jamaican writes about slavery:

Have we ever stopped to consider where we black people, especially those of us in the West, would be right now if it weren’t for the Atlantic Slave Trade? . . . Do you think that we would have been better off without slavery? I don’t think so!

When the Europeans went to Africa to buy slaves, what did they find? They found a society and people vastly inferior to theirs. While the Europeans had emerged from their feudal practices, our ancestors in Africa, for the most part, had not developed for many centuries . . . Science and technology (and innovations in these areas) were non-existent in black Africa of the 15th and 16th centuries . . . In many respects, we were uncivilized . . .

Our relatively stable societies today, especially in the West, are testaments to the benefits of slavery. While it is true that black Africa has, for the most part, squandered the opportunities that slavery offered in the past, the positive influence of European civilization cannot be denied. The black nation states of Africa and the Caribbean have given black people a sense of nation, a sense of identity, a sense of order and a sense of purpose — things we never had before . . .

We blacks were changed, for the better, I might add, on account of slavery. We are a better race today because our ancestors went through slavery. The millions of lives lost were not lost in vain. The Europeans proclaimed the need for us to be civilized through slavery and though this may be hard to understand, they were right. Indeed, based on what is happening in black Africa today — slavery for us in the West was, in many respects, our salvation.

[Michael Dingwall, Slavery Was Good for the Black Man, Jamaica Observer, Aug. 9, 2008.]

Hijab and Sash?

There are about 2.6 million girl scouts in the US, about one out of every ten girls. The number of girl scouts may have remained steady, but not the composition. Troop 12119 in Minneapolis is increasingly typical. As enrollment declined, it filled its ranks with the children of immigrants, and is now one of 10 majority-Muslim troops in the Minneapolis area. Muslim scouts are just like regular girls scouts — except they eat halal hot dogs and pledge on their honor to “try to serve Allah and my country.”

Historian Susan Miller says scouting has always been a way for immigrants to assimilate. “These girls can wear the Girl Scout sash and they can wear the hijab at the same time. This is not a contradiction.” [Diversity in the Girl Scouts, Fox 12 (Mankato, Minnesota), Sept. 21, 2008.]

Bad Aussies

According to a new study, 40 percent of Australians believe certain types of people — mainly Middle Easterners and Muslims — do not belong in the country. The study also claims that up to ten percent of Australians are “outwardly racist.” Study author Kevin Dunn, a professor of human geography and urban studies at the University of Western Sydney, says Australian racial attitudes have improved over the years but that the overall level of “racism” is still something to worry about. “It’s only about one in 10 people now in Australia across the different states that would have that sort of view — the racial supremacists for instance. That’s still quite high I suppose — there’s a lot of concern that comes out of that.”

New South Wales (NSW), Australia’s most populous state, is also its most “racist.” The study, Challenging Racism: The Anti-Racism Research Project, found 46 percent of NSW residents harboring retrograde attitudes toward immigrants, primarily Muslims. Prof. Dunn believes this is because NSW is home to Sydney, where most immigrants to Australia settle. “There’s just more cultural diversity here — there’s more opportunity for cross-cultural contact and that means some of them will not be positive ones,” he explains. [Study Reveals Australian Racist Views, National Nine News (Sydney), Sept. 29, 2008.]

Bad Brits

The British Council, an education charity in the UK, conducted a survey of 2,000 young Britons, aged 18 to 35, to learn what they thought about immigration and national identity. It found that nearly 60 percent believe the presence of large numbers of foreigners is diluting the British national identity, 25 percent say immigrants are a threat to the jobs of British workers, and 12 percent think mass immigration poses a threat to national security and public order. The Council says its findings are “worrying.” [Young People ‘Think Immigrants are a Threat to National Identity and Jobs, Daily Mail (London), Sept. 27, 2008.]

Austrian Right Gains

Austria shook the European Union back in 1999, when the nationalist Freedom Party, led by Jörg Haider, won 27 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections. The press labeled Mr. Haider an anti-Semite and Nazi-sympathizer, and the EU actually imposed short-lived economic sanctions on Austria for letting the party serve in a coalition government. This was a breach of the so-called cordon sanitaire, under which European parties refuse to work with anyone the press calls a “right-wing extremist.” (The cordon sanitaire keeps the Vlaams Belang out of the government in Belgium.) The Freedom Party peaked under Mr. Haider in the 1999 election, and while he has achieved personal success as the long-serving governor of the Austrian state of Carinthia, the Freedom Party was nearly wiped out in the 2004 elections for the European Parliament. Mr. Haider left the Freedom Party shortly thereafter due to infighting and formed a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria.

Mr. Haider’s successor as Freedom Party chairman is Heinz-Christian Strache, a one-time Haider protégé. Mr. Strache describes Muslim immigrant women who wear Islamic dress as “female ninjas” and says “the minaret has no place in Austria.” The Freedom Party wants to keep Turkey out of the European Union, and to take Austria out of the EU. During the campaign for September’s parliamentary election, a senior party member complained that immigration had brought an end to the good old days when Austrians ate Wiener schnitzel and sausages instead of “kebabs, falafel and couscous, or whatever that stuff is called.” Mr. Strache pledged to set up a government ministry with the sole task of deporting unwanted foreigners.

On Sept. 28, Austrian voters turned out strongly for both the Freedom Party and Mr. Haider’s Alliance for the Future of Austria, with the former receiving 18 percent of the vote, and the latter, 11 percent. The combined 29 percent for the nationalist right was just short of the 30 percent won by the leading party, the Social Democrats. Once again, the European mainstream press was stunned by what it described as a “bombshell.”

Austrian president Heinz Fischer asked the Social Democrats to form the new government, but leader Werner Faymann may have trouble forming a coalition. His party previously was in coalition with the center-right People’s Party, but squabbles led to its collapse after 18 months. Many observers think it will be difficult for Mr. Haider and Mr. Strache to cooperate politically — the two men reportedly don’t like each other — but after meeting on October 8 both say they will cooperate in order to have a chance at entering the government. “If you’re in politics and also have responsibility, then it’s not about personal sensitivities,” Mr. Strache said after the meeting. “It was a get-together of winners,” said Mr. Haider. “We’re not adversarial brothers who march against each other in strife, we are two self-confident parties.” If the Social Democrats cannot form a coalition, Pres. Fischer is likely to ask the People’s Party to form a government, which would almost certainly have to include the nationalist right. [Tony Paterson, Far Right Leader Claims He is ‘Real Victor’ in Austria, Independent (London), Sept. 30, 2008. Veronika Oleksyn, Austrian Social Democrats Asked to Form Government, AP, Oct. 8, 2008.]

Silver Lining

Thanks to the economic downturn and stepped up enforcement, the number of illegal aliens coming to the US has slowed. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that from 2000 to 2005, the illegal population grew by more than 525,000 each year, but since 2005 has grown only by 275,000 annually. Demographer Jeffrey S. Passel says there are now more legal than illegal immigrants. Overall, illegals make up 30 percent of the nation’s 39 million foreign-born residents. Eighty percent of illegal aliens are Latin American, with Mexico accounting for 58 percent, or seven of the current estimated 12 million. [Flow of Illegal Immigrants Slows, Pew Center Finds, CNN, Oct. 2, 2008.]

The slowing US economy is slowing Mexico’s. The Bank of Mexico says remittances in the second quarter were $6.28 billion, down 1.1 percent from the second quarter of 2007, while in the first six months of the year, remittances were $11.6 billion, a 2.2 percent decline from the first half of 2007. Remittances were a record $24 billion in 2007, and the decline is one reason the Bank of Mexico is lowering its forecast for Mexican economic growth. [US Slowdown Hits Mexico as Remittances Drop, Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2008.]

One to Watch

This November, voters in most of Westchester and parts of Rockland County, New York, will be able to vote for a congressional candidate who wants to abolish affirmative action and control immigration. Jim Russell, a 54-year-old computer consultant, who has the backing of both the Republican and Conservative Parties, is running against Nita Lowey, a 71-year-old, ten-term liberal Democrat who votes against immigration control and in favor of affirmative action. She has a grade of D- from Americans for Better Immigration.

Mr. Russell is the founder of Westchester-Rockland Citizens for Immigration Control and the author of Breach of Faith: American Churches and the Immigration Crisis. He opposes hiring centers for “day laborers,” would enforce current immigration law, and would deport illegal alien criminals immediately after their sentences are served. He even says he will “work to reform our system of legal immigration to better accommodate those residents of European nations who wish to emigrate legally to America, but, because of existing rules, are often unable to do so.” On racial preferences, he writes: “Affirmative action plans in businesses and colleges which provide unfair advantages for some, while penalizing others, must be abolished.  When hiring and promotions in police and fire departments are not based solely on merit, our public safety is placed in jeopardy.”

LETTERS FROM READERS

Sir — I wish to commend American Renaissance for the interest it takes in the destiny of South Africa’s Afrikaner people, including the informative article in the September issue by Arthur Kemp on the Battle of Blood River.

However, the final part of Mr. Kemp’s piece argues that the use of non-white labor alone led to the demise of Afrikaner-ruled South Africa. Without disputing Auguste Comte’s famous dictum, “demography is destiny,” I feel one should beware of simple truisms that explain political and social change. Writers as diverse as Arnold Toynbee and Friedrich Nietzsche emphasized the role of the will in determining outcomes.

Not so long ago, five million or so whites in South Africa had the will to defend their sovereignty and their land against 30 million blacks inside the country as well as 500 million (now 600 million) in sub-Saharan Africa. In the same way, the classical Egyptians — who were probably a Caucasian race — ruled over a slave state for thousands of years. The Spartans held their own among the Helots who outnumbered them ten to one for 300 years. In feudal times, European aristocrats managed to maintain their supremacy and blood lines for centuries.

In the end demography takes its toll, but we Afrikaners are today strangers in our land because of political, diplomatic, and even military action taken by other white nations. Some of those nations represent exactly the type of all-white, homogeneous societies advocated by Mr. Kemp!

In April 2004, the Swedish ambassador to this country boasted during a radio interview that without the financial and diplomatic support of his country, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) would never have come to power in South Africa. In fact, the Swedish parliament voted a secret fund of up to $100 million per year for the ANC, which it used to bomb supermarkets and bars, and to set up guerilla camps in Zambia and Angola. It also funded the hate campaign against South Africa in the global media.

It seems that an all-white society does not necessarily produce white consciousness and can even lead to anti-white policies like those of Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s. Also, what is the use of an all-white country if its people have traded its classical Western culture for one that is black in all but name, with white youth taking drugs, wearing sneakers and baseball caps back to front, and listening to hip-hop?

Up to some limit, culture and will are more important than racial demographics. Alain de Benoist also once said that the borders of blood were far more fundamental than geographic ones.

The greatest struggle for a nation is to retain its sense of cohesion and kinship and to refuse absorption by another race, even in times of demographic and political domination. This is the challenge we Afrikaners face so acutely today.

Dan Roodt, Johannesburg, South Africa

Sir — I admire Arthur Kemp enormously as a great speaker and writer in the cause of white survival, and we here in Britain have been very fortunate to have him among us. At a recent meeting his speech brought tears to my eyes, something I don’t recall happening since I was aged about eleven!

That said, I hope he will not mind my challenging one assertion he made in his article, “When the River Ran Red,” in your September issue. He writes: “Those who form the majority population of a territory will rule that territory, no matter how powerful a ruling elite may be . . . A majority-European population will create a society that reflects European values and norms.”

Surely as matters now stand the opposite is true? Nowhere in the world is there now a white-majority territory where the ruling elite has failed to impose essentially non-European and even anti-European values and norms. Unless a colossal pro-white counter revolution sweeps the Western world within the next few decades, no majority-European populations will even remain.

Anthony Young, London, England

Sir — After reading your article about Malaysia, let me say that I have great sympathy for the Malays. The Chinese are interlopers brought in by foreign imperialists for their own purposes. Left to their own devices, the Chinese would dominate Malaysian society and the Malays would become second-class citizens in their own land. This applies to our own country. I recently accompanied my son on a tour of a University of California campus. One would have thought we were in Peking! The 1.5 billion Chinese and their overseas progeny have more than enough students to dominate university systems built for our children, and the same is happening in Australia with the blessings of the Australian elite. I no more want my state or country to be dominated by the Chinese than do the Malays.

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Sir — I think you make a good point in your article on Malaysia, cleverly using the strife in Malaysia as a warning to the US. However, it makes perfect sense for the Malays to run their country in their own interest. They must always outnumber the non-Malays living in their country, and deport foreign felons. Anyone who is not Malay and living in Malaysia is “lucky to be in their country.” Americans should never have lost sight of this attitude.

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