Or, the Story Behind My Historic Battle Against Racial Hatred and Intolerance.

One trick in the direct mail business is to give people a reason to send back the reply envelope for reasons other than the check.  Everyone does it.  Usually it’s something like a signed membership card for the “vast right-wing conspiracy.”  My employer Team America PAC tries to make these gimmicks actually usually, often sending open letters for our supporters to sign that we will deliver to Congress.

Yesterday, I got perhaps the most interesting response device from “Adoptaplatoon” one of the many organizations that purport to help our troops overseas and their families. Unlike most letters, it was a bit bulky, and inside I found a toothbrush. Presumably there is a shortage of toothbrushes for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, so the idea is that they send me a toothbrush. I can put my name on it so the troops know it came from me, and then I send it back to Adoptaplatoon who sends it to our troops in Afghanistan.   Makes sense to me! 

From Taki

In a height of my anti-Obama frenzy last spring, I decided to give five dollars to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Now I get bombarded with appeals from left-wing groups.  My favorite letter came from the Southern Poverty Law Center.  In addition to a letter written by Toni Morrison urging me to donate, and a special sticker with a laser printed signature by Morris Dees to put inside my gift of his autobiography, A lawyers Tale, which I’ll get if I contribute over $100, I also received a certificate of appreciation for my “important contribution in the ongoing fight against hatred and intolerance in America” signed by Morris Dees.  It’s currently framed in my office. 

From Taki

A lot of conservatives go after the SPLC because of the high percentage of money they spend on fundraising. Personally I’d rather them waste it on overhead than on ruining my career. Rest assured: I returned the business reply envelope with nothing inside—taking $1.14 away from The Man. I do this to every left wing group that sends me a solicitation. While I was berated by my friends for contributing to Hilary Clinton, I think my $5 contribution has probably cost the Left at least $25! Every little bit counts.

When the RNC ask me for any money, I make sure to use my own stamp and send a note saying not to secure our borders. If enough people do this, it’s bound to have an effect. The party has a long tradition of betraying its base, so claiming that we’re all open-borders might be the best strategy for making the GOP get tough on immigration. 

When I first took my job, I would often get elderly women calling up saying that they would try to send 10 or 20 dollars after they got their next social security check came in. I was tempted to tell them to save their money. Now, I want to ask them what their social security number is.

While there is no shortage of direct-mail scam artists in the conservative movement, this tried-and true method is still necessary for a lot of good organizations. (And for the record, I looked up Adoptaplatoon, and it appears to be a legitimate organization doing some good work). It’s easy for us to bemoan direct mail, but the sad truth is that for obvious reasons, you aren’t going to get much money from the big conservative foundations or the millionaire donors by opposing immigration—you have to go to the people. 

Many think the Internet will make direct mail obsolete. Ron Paul certainly used it effectively, and organizations whose focus is Internet based, like NumbersUSA or VDARE.com, can use the Internet for most of their fundraising. But with many donors to conservative causes in their twilight years, direct mail is a necessary evil for the years to come.

The real Right is grossly outspent by the Left, and the neocons have weaseled their way into the big foundations. Taki readers might want to open up their wallets once in a while—and even surrender to those direct-mail gimmicks sometimes. But I strongly urge them do their homework before they give (in). 

Paul Weyrich helped create, and remained at the center, of the modern conservative movement establishment. The dozens of obituaries and tributes to Weyrich noted his involvement in the founding of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority. While these are his best known groups, Weyrich was instrumental in the creation of several other conservative organizations such as the Council on National Policy, the Free Congress Foundation, the American Legislation and Exchange Council, and Conservative Digest.

The off the record meetings, both at the Free Congress Foundation’s dingy basement every Wednesday and at five-star hotels every few months for the CNP, are seen as ultimate insider gatherings for conservatives. Both George Bush and John McCain felt obliged to address the groups (McCain, though, on the record) in hopes of getting conservative support.

This has led the insufferable Max Blumenthal to write,

By the time Weyrich died, the conservative movement he created had grown so vast his imprimatur on its agenda was no longer apparent. But his impact is undeniable. Thanks to his efforts and those of the thousands of cadres he recruited and cultivated, the Republican Party is more ideologically extreme, more disciplined — and more politically marginalized — than at any time since the Goldwater Era.

Yet the truth is the conservative movement that he helped create became an alien creature by the time he died. In a 2006 article in the American Conservative, he wrote

Conservatism has become so weak in ideas that during the presidency of George W. Bush, the word “conservative” could be and was applied with scant objection to policies that were starkly anti-conservative. Americans witnessed “conservative” Wilsonianism, if not Jacobinism, in foreign policy and an unnecessary foreign war;… major “conservative” expansions of the power of the federal government at the expense of traditional liberties; and nonchalant “conservative” de-industrialization and dispossession of the middle class in the name of free trade.

These “starkly anti-conservative views” are seen at The Heritage Foundation and some of the other organizations he founded. At the American Conservative blog, Jon Utley fondly recollected how Weyrich would allow him to promote his antiwar views at the Wednesday Luncheons. Yet he also notes that Weyrich was so under pressure by other attendees to disinvite Utley that he was asked to reign them in.  Weyrich kept his own antiwar views to himself until after Bush was reelected.

Unlike Weyrich, Samuel Huntington was anything but a conservative movement populist. He spent his life in the establishment of the establishment. He taught political science at Harvard, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Summered on Martha’s Vineyard where he died. He voted for John Kerry in 2004.

While not “one of us,” Professor Huntington gave us some of the most powerful intellectual ammunition for our cause. His seminal 1968 work, Political Order in Changing Societies countered the liberal view that liberal democracies would inevitably follow economic growth and modernization. Many neoconservatives are often said to advocate the “The Clash of Civilizations thesis,” named from his in his penultimate work. In reality, however, the book is largely a refutation of the neoconservative vision of an “End of History,” in which, it was said, liberal democracies under the guidance of American imperialism would flourish forever. Islam is one of the many clashing civilizations discussed in the book, but its main thesis is that the 21st century will see increased ethnic, cultural, and clash conflict now that the ideological battles of the 20th century are over.

His last major work, Who Are We? was published in 2004 and became the most serious intellectual assault on mass immigration in generations. Huntington argued , “high levels of Hispanic immigration threaten to disrupt the political and cultural integrity of the United States,” and “the United States faces the loss of its ‘core Anglo-Protestant culture’ and may soon be divided into ‘two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).’” 

The book both infuriated and baffled the establishment. When interviewing him for the New York Times, Deborah Solomon expressed her shock that “a man like yourself, a Harvard professor and an eminent political scientist, would see the trend toward bilingualism as such a threat.”

Those arguments were supposed to be made by people like, well, Pat Buchanan. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Alan Wolfe called the book “Patrick Buchanan with footnotes,” while Slate Magazine deemed Huntington him “The thinking man’s Pat Buchanan.”

Of course Pat does his fair share of thinking and his books are filled with footnotes—many from Hungtington’s works. But for better or worse, it is much harder to marginalize controversial arguments when they are made by a man by a Harvard don.

Though they operated in different worlds and they held different beliefs, both Samuel Huntington and Paul Weyrich made innumerable contributions to our cause and will both be missed.

Block also offerred to debate any of his critics. In their denounciations of him, few even bothered to do more than offer up critiques like, “Professor Walter Block’s reductionist statements about the productivity of African Americans and women in the marketplace ignore critical factors and structural patterns of inequality” (even though Block explicitly said that “structural” patterns might be the cause of the productivity gap), and “hordes of scholars have rejected [The Bell Curve‘s] thesis” (even though no experts in the field actually have).

Certainly, if Block’s ideas are as dangerous and risible as his critics claim, they could easily defeat him in a debate. But for some reason, no one has taken up Block’s challenge.

If I may redeem myself a little bit, I am not saying everyone should go out and vote for McCain.  Living in Virginia, I will most likely vote for him.  However, if I lived in Alabama or Massachusetts, I could see the arguments of voting for Bob Barr or Chuck Baldwin, writing in Pat Buchananan or Ron Paul, or just plain old staying at home.  Nonetheless, I have no reservations in saying a McCain presidency will be relatively more tolerable than four years of Obama.

Without a doubt McCain’s biggest liability is his immigration policy.  McCain was the biggest promoter for amnesty for illegal aliens in Senate.  Whatever maneuvering he made in the primaries has been negated by his (and for that matter Sarah Palin’s) statements in favor of amnesty in the last few months.  That being said, Obama’s voting record on immigration is even worse than McCain’s.  Given that the entire Senate Republican leadership was willing to buck George Bush, I don’t see much in the argument that we will be more likely to mount a resistance to an Obama amnesty than a McCain amnesty, especially given the fact that we will need a number of Democrats to oppose it as well.  God forbid we get amnesty, A McCain amnesty is more likely to have a slightly longer “path to citizenship,” which will give us a few extra years to act before we get 20 million new Hispanic voters. 

Furthermore, there are other dimensions of the immigration debate besides amnesty.  During the last two years of the Bush administration there has actually been some improvement in workplace enforcement; both through E-Verify and DHS raids.  I am certain McCain justice department will do better than Obama in enforcing our laws, and that McCain will be less likely to kill E-Verify.  Furthermore, McCain’s court picks are more likely to uphold the tough state laws on the books. 

I admit that McCain is worse than Obama on foreign policy.  I’m not going to make the “only Nixon can go to China” argument that McCain will somehow end the war in Iraq.  However this is the only area that Obama would be preferable.  I have opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning, and am terrified about a confrontation with Iran; but America has been bogged down in bigger battles and survived.  Foreign policy is important, but not enough to support Obama. 

Everyone already knows that Obama will be worse on the economy and the courts; so I will leave those issues aside.  What people need to keep in mind is that there are a number of issues that have barely been discussed in the last decade; but could become a real possibility with a Democratic Congress and an Obama presidency.  These include: the Fairness Doctrine, Pay Equity, Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, hate crimes legislation, reparations for slavery, and the increased funding left wing groups like ACORN and La Raza with government money.

An Obama presidency would not just mean bad policies, it would further fund and entrench the left with more money and more voters; making it more difficult to launch any resistance in the future.

This last point makes all the arguments about “Conservatives will have a stronger reaction against Obama than McCain” or the “Worst the Better” moot.  Yes it is possible conservatives will oppose Obama stronger, but they will be facing a much stronger enemy with Obama. 

McCain will be a terrible president; but America is well past the 11th hour.  The best we can do now is slow down the clock and buy a few more minutes. 

John Wiley Price, a black commissioner, loudly objected that it should be called a “white hole,” and then a black judge Thomas Jones demanded an apology for Mayfield’s insensitivity.

This was all on camera, (hopefully video will come out soon) and eventually the offended politicians were placated after an elementary science lesson.

Rod Dreher has compared this to the much more publicized case of David Howard, an aide to then DC mayor Anthony Williams. During budget proceedings in 1999, Howard said they needed to be “niggardly” in the use of city funds, and a black colleague Marshall Brown took offense and filed a complaint.  Howard was so guilt-ridden that he resigned.

In part because Howard had impeccable PC credentials as a homosexual ally of a black mayor, there was a backlash against the incident. Williams, who had earlier accepted Howard’s resignation, reversed himself and refused to accept it, and even liberals showed some indignation over the extreme political correctness.

While there is some overlap between the “black hole” and “niggardly” incidents, there are serious differences. Chances are, this will not become as big of a controversy. Unlike Howard, Mayfield does not appear to be a spineless leftist. He stood up for himself, and I don’t imagine that he will resign. His antagonists may not be too intelligent, but they are probably wise enough to not make any more complaints, so the brouhaha has probably ended at the meeting.

However, I find the reactions of Jones and Price even less understandable than Brown’s. When the Howard incident occurred, I was a sophomore in high school. I will be the first to admit that at the time I didn’t know what the word “niggardly” meant. I would like to think that public servants in the District of Columbia with college degrees would have had a better vocabulary than a high school sophomore, but I’m not all that shocked that they did not. It seems that many Americans had not heard of the word, as most of the news accounts had to explain the etymology.

In contrast, I knew what a black hole was when I was in second grade. If only from watching “Homeboys in Outerspace”. I’d expect Price and Jones to know better.

Moreover, though this was plainly the furthest thing from Pat’s mind when he wrote the book, its thesis is devastating for antiwar conservatives. What of those of us who have spent the last five to ten years arguing that not every tinpot Balkan or Middle Eastern dictator whom The Weekly Standard decides to label “The New Hitler” is a serious threat to America? Are we now supposed to embrace the idea the real Hitler was not a great problem either? If one wanted to concoct a recipe for making antiwar conservatives completely irrelevant to contemporary America, this would be hard to improve upon.

Just as Scott seems to fail to recognize that Pat Buchanan is the reason why The American Conservative is relevant, he also fails to recognize that Pat Buchanan is the reason why antiwar conservatives are relevant. I have a great deal of respect for Tom Fleming, Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, and for that matter Scott McConnell; but through no fault of their own, they are completely shut out by the mainstream media. They’ve done a great job at building counter-institutions, but their reach has been limited. 

The only conservative other than Pat with any visibility in the mainstream media who opposed the War in Iraq was Robert Novak. While his position was admirable, he had the little issue of the Valerie Plame leak which—rightly or wrongly—pretty much destroyed his antiwar credibility. Furthermore, Novak went out of his way to marginalize all other conservative opponents against the war in Iraq (besides, interestingly enough, Pat Buchanan) both in his column following Frum’s piece and later in his autobiography. In contrast, Pat—especially through his patronage of The American Conservative—helped highlight that there were other antiwar conservatives.

So were it not for Pat Buchanan, the conventional wisdom would have been that there was absolutely no conservative opposition to the war.  Things have improved. Ron Paul has become a near household name and Tucker Carlson has become a principle supporter of non-intervention. A young writer can keep a job at The American Spectator or Human Events and oppose the war if they don’t create too much of a stink.  Nonetheless, given that Paul is more of a libertarian, Pat is still the most “relevant” antiwar voice from the Right.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no evidence that Pat’s book has hurt the image of the antiwar Right. I have yet to see a single antiwar conservative other than Scott say this makes it harder to make their point. More importantly, I haven’t seen a single neocon or liberal hawk try to show that this makes antiwar conservatives Nazis. Maybe I’m missing something, but given how closely I have followed this book; it is safe to say that if I haven’t seen it yet, it’s not going to do much to create that impression.

Now some will call Pat a Nazi sympathizer because of this book, but they always have, and he has always weathered those accusations. There is no doubt in my mind that Pat will continue to be the most effective voice of an America First foreign policy no matter what Christopher Hitchens or Victor Davis Hanson say about this book. I do wonder what will happen to The American Conservative if more and more Buchanan supporters continue to remove their support from the magazine. I have already gotten a dozen phone calls and e-mails to my office from angry subscribers telling me they are canceling their subscriptions. 

The question that I guess most lay-readers are asking: “Isn’t this Pat Buchanan’s magazine?”  The answer is no.  Occasionally, people are under the impression that my employer

The American Cause is associated with TAC. We will receive checks for subscription (which, for the record, I forward), some phone calls from people who are unhappy with certain content in the magazine and even Katrina vanden Heuvel asking us to join a coalition against increases in bulk postage rates.

Pat Buchanan is listed as “editor emeritus” at TAC.  His columns in the magazine are now all syndicated and he hasn’t written an original article for the magazine in over a year.  Nonetheless, whenever the magazine is given any sort of attention outside of the blogosphere it is referred to as “Pat Buchanan’s Magazine.”

While Pat Buchanan is a large name in and of himself, he is the figure most associated with a brand of conservatism that could be called “old right,” “paleoconservative,” “America First,” or even “Buchananite” or “Pat Buchanan Conservative”

Whatever you want to call it, neither TAC editor Scott McConnell nor the magazine fit into any of those categories. When David Frum attacked the magazine as “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” both Taki and Buchanan were still editors. The difference of Taki’s and McConnell’s response should serve as a good indicator of what you can now expect at Taki Mag and the TAC. McConnell emphasized his continued respect for the original neoconservatives as well as his differences with the paleoconservatives. Taki challenged Frum to a duel. 

None of this is meant to belittle McConnell, who I have a great deal of respect for, but to clarify exactly where the magazine fits into the greater ideological spectrum. I can’t speak to what compelled TAC to run such a negative review, but I suspect it was in part to make the same clarification.

Among his differences with paleoconservatives that McConnell expressed after “Unpatriotic Conservatives” was that “my views on Lincoln and Churchill were and remain boringly conventional.” Fair enough, but John Lukacs views on Churchill are not conventional. He regards Churchill as the greatest man of the century if not of centuries and the savior of the West. His crusade against David Irving (a point I’ll return to shortly) has as much to do with the historian’s dislike of Churchill as much as his admiration of Hitler.  In other words, he is someone who you’d expect to hate this book more than David Frum. 

I find Lukacs to be a fascinating writer, but his passion for this issue seems to have blurred any rationality in his review. I plan on reviewing the book at length, so I will not go into all the details now, but there are a number of incredible whoppers.

He says the “deeper problem” of the book is “Buchanan’s sincerity” because Buchanan is not an admirer of the British Empire. Well yes, Pat does not have any real fealty to the empire, but this cannot mean he can believe that the way it fell after WWII was good for the West.  Buchanan has lamented for years that the British have lost pride in their empire. Nor is it a terrible idea to point out that Churchill fought the War in large part to save the Empire, and it was destroyed in Pyrrhic victory

Lukacs twice invokes David Irving to smear the book,

Here is a difference between Patrick Buchanan and David Irving. The latter employs falsehoods; Buchanan employs half-truths. But, as Thomas Aquinas once put it, “a half-truth is more dangerous than a lie.”

Nowhere in the book is Irving cited, and other than the fact that neither of them agree with Lukacs assessment of Churchill, there is absolutely nothing that he cites that suggests that there is anything in common with Irving and Buchanan. Given that the ADL, the neoconservatives, and their lackies frequently accuse Buchanan as a “Holocaust Denier” and that this slur is strong enough to get Irving jailed in Europe, (Something that the TAC editorial board does not seem to be completely opposed to.  When editorializing against hate speech, they qualified, “Perhaps laws prohibiting Holocaust denial constitute a special case”) this is something that you think Lukacs would have avoided unless it had any real substance.

Lukacs concludes the review:

But there is a fatal contradiction in Buchanan’s theses: Hitler’s regime—including, one may think, its expansion—was evil, but warring against him was unnecessary and wrong. Either thesis may be argued, but not both.

This statement would only be logical to a neoconservative. That something is “evil” does not necessitate that you must fight against it. Lukacs opposed both the Cold War and the invasion of Iraq. Does that mean that neither Sadaam Hussein nor Joseph Stalin were evil?

All of Pat’s book have been savaged by both the liberal and “conservative” establishment, and he has weathered the storm. In the past, they were able to preface their attacks with “Even Bill Buckley…” Now they can say “Even his own magazine…”

The May 19 issue of TAC has an excellent article by Peter Hitchens, a man who admires Churchill and has disagreed with Buchanan’s nostalgia for the America First movement. Nonetheless, he managed to write a very thoughtful review of The Unnecessary War for the London Daily Mail.  It is a shame that TAC did not ask him instead of Lukacs. 

Murray Rothbard rightly warned us to be wary of statistics, which are, of necessity, the instrument of government social engineers, and I would venture to say that Roach’s invocation of them in this instance reflects another sort of tribalism “in an undeniable and often depressing way.”

Looking at Rothbard’s article that Justin refers us to, it seems that his objection to statistics is that the government spends too much money on collecting them, and they allow the government to help plan the economy. He is not saying that statistical data is ipso facto suspect. 

VDARE has an article yesterday on the end of paleolibertarianism (another debate I’ll try to sit out on) that links to an essay on The Bell Curve by Murray Rothbard.  To say the least, Rothbard takes a very un-Raimondo view of racial differences:

Until literally mid-October 1994, it was shameful and taboo for anyone to talk publicly or write about, home truths which everyone, and I mean everyone, knew in their hearts and in private: that is, almost self-evident truths about race, intelligence, and heritability… Essentially, I mean the almost self-evident fact that individuals, ethnic groups, and races differ among themselves in intelligence and in many other traits, and that intelligence, as well as less controversial traits of temperament, are in large part hereditary.

In fact, insofar as Rothbard has a problem with statistics in the book is that “the Herrnstein-Murray book almost drowns its subject in statistics and qualifications, and it tries to downplay the entire race issue, devoting most of its space to inheritable differences among individuals within each ethnic or racial group.” 
As for government social engineers, Rothbard writes,

If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance… In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

I would go a step further than Rothbard. If statistics and social science studies are the health of the state, then we should look at what studies the social engineers are creating. They have study after summit after symposium on “how to bridge the achievement gap” which consider every single possible explanation—except genetics.

This is no accident.  If the social pathologies of the black population are due to environment rather than genetics then presumably state intervention can remedy the differences through Head Start, affirmative action, No Child Left Behind, and a plethora of other programs. 

When those programs don’t work, then there must be another reason to consider. Maybe it’s that our standards are too Eurocentric so we can bridge the gap by reading about Toni Morison, Martin Luther King, and George Washington Carver instead of Shakespeare, George Washington, and Thomas Edison.
If that fails then we must fix black self esteem by instituting hate crime laws, removing any remnant of the Confederacy or other signs that are racist etc. When that fails we need to find more and more types of “institutional” and “structural” causes to uproot.

If, hypothetically, there are genetic differences in intelligence, then all of these interventions would be futile and counterproductive.  I’m not saying that these differences necessarily exist, but arguing that they do certainly does not help the cause of the State and its social engineers.