Because of the numerous responses to my latest observations, followed by the firm statement of policy by Richard Spencer, I am offering this further comment about our past unpleasantness. Needless to say, I agree with Richard’s message that some system of registration is called for to keep the lunatics and trolls off our website. Otherwise the shameful responses John Zmirak and I in particular have elicited whenever we touch particular issues, are likely to continue to come. We are now in the position that National Review was, before it began its long trek leftward. And we shall have to do the kind of spring-cleaning up that NR probably did, at least when it was not throwing libertarians off the bus. Richard has begun this task by removing hate mail from this website.

One of my respondents asked in a feigned spirit of inquiry whether I could define “€œanti-Semitism.”€ I suspect I was being taunted for advocating the sort of thought-control that is characteristic of the liberal-neocon establishment and its European counterparts. Supposedly I am trying to stifle any challenge to an autocratically imposed pseudo-democratic consensus.  This implied charge deeply offended me, and indeed more so than the ravings against my person and integrity that were placed on this website earlier in the week. By anti-Semitism, it is clear that I was referring to the kind of Hitlerian lunacies that my blog elicited. If the neoconservatives intend to tar us all with a Nazi brush, the authors of these outbursts were providing grist for their mills. Although the neocons are now treating our side as cockroaches unworthy of their attention, Mr. Linder and his buddies have given them ammunition if they do decide to launch a new offensive against us. Mr. Linder should be receiving checks from David Frum and Abe Foxman for the service he has rendered these adversaries of the Right.

I certainly do not equate “€œanti-Semitism”€ with critical comments about the Jewish nationalist component of neoconservative ideology. Nor would I equate anti-Semitism with well-deserved protests against turning the Holocaust into a tool for suppressing dissent and scholarly debate. There is no way that anyone who has read my books could possibly believe that. Despite the use to which mention of this problem can be put, e.g., as a means of maintaining leftist multicultural conformity and of transforming prosperous, self-pitying Jews into a victim minority, anti-Semitism has existed historically. And the examples of this phenomenon that turned up on this website earlier in the week, even if all traceable to a single identification number, would prove that this prejudice is still thriving in some very limited circles.