On this, the holiest day of modern America’s liturgical calendar, we should revisit Samuel Francis’s writing on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.

Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own holidays in honor of King have been vilified and threatened with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a “racist” — but due also to the political utility of the King holiday for those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major universities and in many areas of public and private life…

To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

Sam is all too correct that “MLK writ large” has become the foundation of American identity; and in many ways, the situation is far worse than he depicted it in this 1998 article (which appeared in American Renaissance).

At the time, Sam described a pitched battle between MLK’s egalitarian “Dream” and “traditional American social and cultural institutions,” which he describes, in Cold War language, as “anti-Communist foreign policy” and Constitutional liberty.

As I'm sure you know by now, America's patron saint of Multiculturalism, Black Empowerment, and White Guilt has been memorialized on the Washington Mall, in gargantuan fashion.

There is, of course, a patent incongruity to the Black civil-rights activist sharing the same grounds as aristocratic salve-holders and a 19th-century nationalist who sought to “de-colonize” the American Negro back to Africa.

But in the end, the massive, laughable kitsch that has been erected is a fitting tribute to the man, as well as to the federal government that, in so many ways, has been reconstructed in his image.

Many have expressed alarm that the commissioned sculptor was Chinese, and that the work has a certain...Maoist...quality to it. They shouldn't be surprised. When it comes to MLK depictions, for decades, artists have been stuck in an aesthetic rut, remaking the heroic, statist works of prewar totalitarianism.

In a wash of Holocaust memorials and cool corporate abstraction, the only kind of public art that is allowed to express brute masculinity must involve Negro advancement. 

Take, for instance, Patrick Morelli's “Behold,” which graces Atlanta's corrupt and dilapidated King Center for Nonviolent Social Change (which functions mainly as a tax-payer funded cash cow for various King offspring.) “Behold” was erected in 1990, and yet, when I first laid eyes on it, I sensed that the artist must be, quite consciously, channelling Arno Breker. (I hesitate to associate such an ghastly work with Breker, whose genius has been unfairly shrouded by his association with German National Socialism.)

I'm reminded as well of the massive mural that hovers above the baggage-claim exit of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, which I am convinced was painted by a crypto-bigot as some kind of elaborate joke.

(Interestingly, by the '60s and '70s, Communists sculptors had moved beyond the pompous style of the '30s and embraced postmodernism and abstraction. Tito, for instance, commissioned some of the most bizarre creations extant.)

So much for aesthetics. Stephan Kinsella, an expert of copyright law, has alerted me to the fact that the King family charged the not-for-profit foundation that lead the MLK project some three quarters of a million dollars for the rights to the Good Reverend's words.

The New York Post reports:

WASHINGTON -- The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s family has charged the foundation building a monument to the civil-rights leader on the National Mall about $800,000 to use his words and image -- and at least one scholar thinks that Dr. King would find such an arrangement offensive.

The memorial is being paid for almost entirely through a fund-raising campaign led by the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation.

"I don't think the Jefferson family, the Lincoln family [or] any other group of family ancestors has beenpaid a licensing fee for a memorial in Washington," said Cambridge University historian David Garrow, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Dr. King. ". . . [He would've been] absolutely scandalized."

Financial documents revealed that the foundation paid $761,160 in 2007 to Intellectual Properties Management Inc., an entity run by the King family. They also showed that a $71,700 "management" fee was paid to the family estate in 2003.

This kind of thing certainly makes one question America's system of patents and copyrights. (Kinsella advocates doing away with the concept of “intellectual property.”)

And the King family's actions becoming doubly dubious when one remembers that Martin Luther King plagiarized most of the writings for which he has become world renowned.

Marcus Epstein:

When Boston University founded a commission to look into it, they found that that 45 percent of the first part and 21 percent of the second part of his dissertation was stolen, but they insisted that "no thought should be given to revocation of Dr. King’s doctoral degree." In addition to his dissertation many of his major speeches, such as "I Have a Dream," were plagiarized, as were many of his books and writings. For more information on King’s plagiarism, The Martin Luther King Plagiarism Page and Theodore Pappas’ Plagiarism and the Culture War are excellent resources.

King apologists like to claim that their idol shouldn't be held accountable for plagiarism, since he was raised in a Souther Baptist milieu in which borrowing and sampling from other preachers was the norm. Whatever the case, if you want to use a text that King once pilfered, then you should expect to pay. He done stole it first, it seems.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and let's hope it bends toward the truth. Until that day, one can only conclude that the MLK legend, and its attendant industry, has reached a state of self-parody.

When you live in a place like Memphis, the local news media (which is owned by and takes its marching orders from the National news media-ABC, CBS, NBC, Scripps-Howard, Gannett, etc.) is constantly fanning the dying embers of the “Civil Rights” movement.

Why? Because the CRM was the one unqualified success of liberalism since WWll. It was the one manifestation which, at least among both mainstream conservatives and liberals, is like Caesar’s wife and is “beyond reproach.”

A case in point is the article, “United in Prayer,” taken from the Monday, August 1 edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, our daily fish wrap. The occasion for this article is to focus attention on the unveiling of the new MLK Statue on the National Mall in Washington D.C. next week.

The story features the “iconic” Clayborn Temple, formerly Second Presbyterian Church until 1949 when, as often happens in Memphis, the old neighborhood transitions from white to black and the white churches sell their facilities to black churches. Clayborn Temple is “iconic” because MLK and other “civil rights pioneers” used it as a base of operations back in the 50s and 60s.

Clayborn Temple is a stone building, and therefore the only thing that needs to be done to keep it presentable is to keep the roof repaired, but like so many other buildings in the black neighborhoods of Memphis, this didn’t happen and the AME denomination, which owns it, is now offering to sell the dilapidated hulk for $1 million plus, due to its “iconic” status, in hopes that some guilty white liberals will buy it and convert it into yet another CRM shrine.

Right on cue, the GWLs show up, this time a contingent from the now uber-liberal Second Presbyterian Church, the original owners. A gaggle of liberal “church ladies” fighting back tears of guilt and remorse despite the fact that most of them hadn’t been born when the CRM occurred, took to falling on their knees before black folks at Clayborn Temple to beg forgiveness for the imagined and unspecified “racial sins” of their forefathers and mothers.

Today the American media, politicians of all stripes, and public educators will invariably fall into rapturous tones describing the black leader whose birthday is being celebrated, namely, Martin Luther King (1929-1968). King’s birthday is the only national holiday devoted to an individual American whose public observance has been commanded by Congress, and in 1983, this honor was accorded, with more or less bipartisan support. The same tribute is no longer extended to the founder of our country George Washington, or to our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, who is still widely honored for ending black slavery. Washington and Lincoln both now share a generic President’s Day that is wedged in between their two birthdays in February. The gallant Southern leader Robert E. Lee, whose birthday coincides with King’s and who after 1983 was to be co-celebrated in Southern states along with the black civil rights leader, has now fallen upon exceedingly hard times. Lee has become a non-person or even worse, someone identified with Southern slavery, although there is nothing to suggest that this Christian gentleman favored that institution or that he led the Confederate forces in Virginia for any reason other than the one he gave upon turning down an invitation to command the Union army—to protect his ancestral state against invasion.

There is a very clear relation to be drawn between these two recent developments, as my longtime friend Sam Francis delighted in pointing out. The replacement of Lee and Washington, who were related through Washington’s wife Martha, by King as the center of a public cult signaled a true “iconic revolution” in our country. Nor was this revolution in consciousness likely to end with the congressional enshrinement of King or with the public acknowledgement of his birthday. Every January, there takes place an orgy of guilt-tripping and pseudo-Christian penance, one that seems to become shriller and more robotized with the passing of time. There is also in the U.S. a relation between the downplaying of Christmas, which is being reduced here no less than in Britain to a “holiday season,” and King’s birthday in mid-January, which is followed by Black History Month, formerly know as Febuary. What the new liturgical season highlights is King’s martyrdom in 1968, when he was assassinated while leading a garbage employees’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, and the need for national atonement for our country’s long embedded white racism. This penance, which is a post-Christian form of Lent, goes on through Black History Month and is then resumed for another putative victim group during Women’s Month. Although the establishment Right (that is, GOP operatives and neoconservative journalists) and the Left disagree on how this sacral calendar is to be observed, they all see eye-to-eye on its contents.

The dispute here resembles nothing so much as the councils of the early Church that were devoted to clarifying the nature of Christ. Instead of the strife released over whether the concept of homoousia or that of homoiousia properly described the nexus between the first two members of the Trinity, we now have a more timely question: Did Martin Luther King, by his suffering and death, release our country from further atonement for racism or must this atonement become even more frenzied because of how his “unfinished mission for racial justice” ended?

Although the Heritage Foundation proclaimed King to be a “Christian theologian” as well as a “great conservative thinker,” the reality is exactly the opposite: this now beatified figure was a self-proclaimed social radical, who provided the god figure of a post-Christian religion, albeit one that is parasitic on Christian narratives. He is living proof of the continuity between Christian images and a now victorious leftist ideology.

Lest I be accused of being unfair to my subject, let me stress that he was not really responsible for this glorification. As far as I know, King could never have imagined how he would be used after his death, any more than Karl Marx could have imagined that his ideas would be cited to justify Soviet tyranny. He might even have had the decency to blush if he had heard our “conservative” presidential candidate John McCain apologizing last spring in Memphis for having not supported the King public holiday soon enough. McCain characterized this failure as “the single biggest mistake in my political life.”

Listening to Elena Kagan as she was speaking before the Senate Judicial Committee, I was struck by how perfectly she fits her time and place. An overweight Jewish lesbian, whose career seems to have been put on fast track by her political supporters both inside and outside the media and someone who if she held diametrically opposed views, would not even be considered for a grounds crew post at Harvard, she is the quintessential symbol of Obama’s America. Her praise for her mentor Thurgood Marshall, whose “glory” it was to have acknowledged “special rights for the disadvantaged and despised,” does not in any way represent Christian or bourgeois morality. It is a ridiculous parody of what Nietzsche described as the behavior of the “Last Man,” the type of decadent who combines slave morality with philistine tastelessness. Kagan not only looks the part of this Last Man. She is the real article, no less than her fellow-law professors in the Ivy League and their imitators in the Bush League, who spend their time and energy instructing judges and state administrators on the practices and intricacies of victimology.

The major objection that has been raised to her nomination by respectable conservatives (unlike the readers of this website), typified by the Young America’s Foundation and Heritage, is that the nominee opposed ROTC at Harvard.  Kagan, who is a gay activist when she is not wearing other prescribed victmological hats, defends her stand on the grounds that the military at the time was not doing enough to integrate self-described gays into the armed forces.

But the issue that movement conservatives have pushed the most vigorously is a non-starter. Kagan can now plausibly say that her grievance has been addressed. The Obama administration, with the full blessings of The Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer, and other neocon potentates, has arranged to allow gays who are open about their proclivities to serve in the military, and so Kagan’s onetime objection would no longer apply. The other movement conservative complaint deals with her lack of experience as a working attorney or judge. But Diane Feinstein has ably countered this objection by pointing out that the Court is already top-heavy with former federal judges.

Samuel Francis defined “Anarcho-Tyranny,” which he saw regnant in most Western nations at the time of his death in 2005, as a political arrangement in which government does everything it shouldn’t with great vigor and exactitude (Tyranny) and everything it should with sloth and willed negligence (Anarchy).

Washington, DC, has more or less decided to leave well enough alone along the Mexican border, and yet will send military units to prevent mass immigration into Iraq. The European Union has declared its right to regulate the content of chocolate and imprison those accused of  “minimizing” the Jewish Holocaust, and yet if ever challenged militarily, it would be unable to exercise the most basic function of sovereignty.

And then there’s Toronto, Ontario: Canada’s financial capital, whose municipal government forbids by law owning Pit Bulls and positively encourages the homosexual lifestyle. This is a place I’ve called home for the past six months, and which this weekend hosted the “G20 Summit” of “world leaders.”

Toronto has mastered the Anarchy part of Francis’s expression. “Hog Town” was once a jewel of the Anglo-Saxon world. When I was a child, I remember hearing the city referred to as “the clean, safe New York” or “New York in the ‘50s” (that is, New York without the minorities.) Today, Toronto represents the most evolved case of state-engineered -- and historically incoherent -- multiculturalism on the planet: only 52 percent of the city is white, and it now boasts large blocs of South Asians, (more assimilated) Chinese, blacks, and Filipinos. No one knows who’ll ultimately win the demographic battle, but I have a good idea who won’t.

Canada has even had a little Tyranny, too (despite its reputation for down-to-earth goofiness.) Pierre Trudeau pioneered the promotion of “visible minorities” in the Great White North; his political following has been compared to “Obamania.” And yet when in 1970 the Front de libération du Québec began kidnapping politicians, Trudeau enacted emergency measures and began sounding like J.D. Hayworth:

Trudeau: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed, but it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of ...

Tim Ralfe (CBC): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?

Trudeau: Well, just watch me.

(The fascinating confrontation can be watched here.)

Canada has been quite welcoming to one and all from the third-world, as its quarter-century demographic transformation can attest. Whenever I re-enter the country, however, I usually begin sweating about the possibility of someone in the government reading my blogs, deeming me a threat to the nation, and ordering the border guards to hold me indefinitely in Diversity Training Gitmo. (I don’t think this is a case of overestimating my own significance; Anarcho-Tyrannies do ridiculous things like this.)

This past G20 weekend certainly had some of the “just watch me!” feel. Ontario reportedly spent upwards of 1 billion on security. And on Friday, the province revealed it had passed emergency legislation in secret that allows police to demand papers and search anyone -- for any reason -- who was within five meters of designated “security areas.”

By the end of weekend, close to 600 protestors had been arrested. Quite a sum, though as revealed in the television interviews of those released, detention life wasn’t too shabby: the camps were equipped with lawyers and counselors. Anarcho-Tyranny in action!

There was also a kind of Anarchy in the air that was more immediate than anything Francis described. I don’t exaggerate when I write that on Saturday, the city had begun to resemble the surreal, post-apocalyptic wastelands of The Omega Man or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -- commercial activity was shut down, store fronts bashed in -- bands of black-clad “anarchists” roamed the streets smashing things with hammers and putting abandoned police cars to the flame -- groups of pranksters, literally dressed like circus clowns, cackled and danced -- protesters marched under a cacophony of flags, signs, and banners -- thousands of normal Torontonians (the ones who were brave or foolish enough to leave their homes) wandering the streets befuddled. (I was one of these.)

This scene was encircled by militarized police in riot gear, equipped with Plexiglas visors and Praetorian shields. I got the sense that things wouldn’t look too different if a nuclear device had just gone off somewhere in North America or a total collapse of the economy had just ensued.

We weren’t witnessing a disaster, of course, but the culture of the contemporary state -- which loves to put on billion-dollar “Global Summits” -- and that of the contemporary Left -- which loves to protest them.

The Left is variegated, of course, ranging from the suit-and-tie NGO “professionals,” who go on TV, to the unkempt, unwashed (literally), unemployable, universally ugly hangers-on, who schedule their lives around “the next protest.” Such Left People were able to turn the park just outside my apartment into a kind of Lallapalooza-cum-tent city-cum- fornication and defecation zone.

Most of the damage to private property was inflicted by another subgroup, labeled the “black bloc,” which would precipitously come out of the woodwork at opportune moments and start indulging in ultra-violence. (The phrase "black bloc" was unknown, at least to me, before this weekend, but by Saturday afternoon, it had become a dreaded household term.)

And despite the billion spent on security and the large number of arrests, the bloc didn’t have much trouble destroying Starbucks and bank storefronts, their preferred representations of, so I understand, Global Corporate Fascism.

One might presume that in the Dark Ages (Before Sensitivity Training), a cop who saw a “anarchist” dancing atop a flaming police car would grab the perpetrator by the scruff of the neck and rough him up a bit before the arrest. Again, welcome to Anarcho-Tryanny -- where the police are militarized and wussified.

Smashing up Starbucks is certainly pointless -- and fitting for the “black bloc,” whose “Fuck the System!” revolt amounts to a re-rerouted teenage rebellion against their parents. That said, the tens of thousands in damage they inflicted should be compared to the billion spent on “security” and the fact that most all shops in the financial district and Yonge Street area were closed, costing them untold amounts in lost business. Hosting, say, the Superbowl can be a bonanza (at least for hoteliers, restaurateurs, and t-shirt vendors.) The “G8 Summit” was, however, a pure loss of at least 2 billion for everyone in the region. The mayhem I describe in this essay would never have occurred if Obama, Merkel, Cameron & Co. had just decided to have a Skype teleconferece.

(And the price tag doesn’t include the actual programs enacted by the summit attendees. On Friday, at the more elite “G8” in nearby Huntsville, Canada promised 1.1 billion for “maternal health” in “developing nations.” As a good conservative, Prime Minister Stephen Harper refuses to support birth control in Africa … but he still wants to give the continent vast amounts of cash.)

Some rather hysteric Torontonians interviewed on television kept saying, “I don’t know what happened to my city”; others claimed that Toronto had “changed” utterly due to these events. (Since the coverage of the “peaceful protestors” had been universally positive, one must assume that the reaction was against the black bloc and armored police.)

But in fact, the G20 protests were entirely predictable and hadn’t changed anything. Much like the “avant-garde” art world has been engaging in the same high jinx for the past 40 years, the Baby Boom and Gen X/Y Left has been essentially rehearsing the 1968 protests in Paris and Berkeley ad nauseam for just as long.

One might call this political masturbation, or the Left’s version of Civil War re-enactments, but then leftist protest isn’t simply a subculture but an industry. (In this line, it’s fitting that the G20 protests overlapped with Toronto’s state-funded “Pride Week” (which actually lasts 10 days)).

Conservative critics could easily point out the glaring, amusing, contradictions among the Left groups. There’s the quasi-primitivist rejection of the goods of the marketplace, expressed by suburban kids chatting on cell phones and typing “status updates” -- along with their demand that these wicked capitalist goods be redistributed to the masses. There’s the pretense of “anarchism” by groups that also claim every person on earth has the “right” to housing and a “living wage.” There’s the flirtation with Muslim activists by groups staffed by lesbians, gays, and Jews. There’s the unending multiplication of contradictory new fragments and new “rights.” And so on.

But in pointing out the obvious, one misses the guiding threads that run throughout the Left, and which unite it in ways the Right could only dream of.

One of these is the embrace of the “inverted world”: that is, anything -- truly, anything -- that is anti-white, anti-European, anti-Christian (unless you’re supporting “social justice”), anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-meat-eating, anti-beauty (I’m not kidding), and anti-traditional family (unless you’re helping “working families” of labor unionists). Disputes between lesbians and Muslims will be settled after The Revolution.

(If you don’t accept the racial aspect of the Left, imagine going to the G20 and holding up a sign reading “Stop Boer Genocide Now!” Such a sentiment could be described as “leftist” in that it involves helping a small people oppressed by a hostile majority. But as we all know, sticking up for White Protestants in Toronto is dead on arrival. Indeed, it might get you arrested!)

The other thread that runs through the contempo Left is that all its groups seek to be recognized -- and, most importantly, funded -- by the federal governments they condemn as “fascist.” As I was passing through the foul-smelling, hippie-like gathering that had cropped up in a nearby park, I watched as a nerdy white girl took the mike and started complaining about how “the government doesn’t respect us.” Ontario apparently only gave her project -- for lesbians or labor unions or Palestinians or who knows what -- five grand in funding. (If only AlternativeRight.com were so abused by the authorities!)

The Anarcho-Tyranny state, in turn, adores these groups, as all of their “problems” can be solved by new federal initiatives. Every “radical critique of bourgeois society” is in practice an excuse to expand a bureaucracy. The state will never oppose the Left -- and never stop importing the Left’s favored third-world populations -- until this arrangement ends.

For a long time in Western history, a state would establish sovereignty by appealing to theology and natural order (e.g. “the divine rights of kings”), or, with the birth of liberalism, the need to secure liberty. (Carl Schmitt: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”)

The postwar world not only witnessed the triumph of the said “radical critique of bourgeois society” -- what Kevin MacDonald has identified, in its active, subversive form, as the “culture of critique” and Paul Gottfried, in its passive, decadent form, as the “politics of (white) guilt” -- but its institutionalization in education, big business, and, most of all, government.

The critique is the establishment. The culture it engenders eventuates in scenes like the one we saw in Toronto this weekend.

In electronic conversations Tom Piatak, Grant Havers, and I attempted to figure out why Jonah Goldberg posted his recent idiocy, proclaiming the Civil Rights Act to be a bulwark of economic freedom and scolding Rand Paul as an ally of Southern bigots. One not necessarily wrong but insufficient reason for this rambling diatribe is that Jonah is an incoherent suck-up, like Ross Douthat and David Frum, someone who fawns on the liberal establishment when he's not posing as its critic. Significantly, Douthat and Goldberg both began their tirades against Rand Paul by saying reasonable things: in one case that Ron and Rand Paul may have been influenced by paleoconservative associations; and in Goldberg's case, that Rand Paul was expressing reservations about the scope of the Civil Rights Act once held by perfectly respectable statesmen. The two columns then lurch off into vitriolic attacks on Rand Paul, linking him to racism, anti-Semitism and other obscene practices. Needless to say, the allegations are never proved, and the minicon attack dogs rely on broad accusations, which obviously play well with the (predominantly Jewish) liberal media.

But without denying that the gratuitous attacks are intended to accommodate the media establishment, it seems to me that there is more at stake here. I can't imagine that anyone but engaged leftists and civil rights lobbyists would care much about Paul's critical thoughts from a distance of many decades about the Civil Rights Act, given the fact that, as Goldberg admits, the act is not likely to be revoked. Paul's objection, moreover, was painfully qualified, as Goldberg explains in the first half of his column.            

Tom Fleming has written a excellent article on the Rand Paul controversy, and since he brings up many valid points that haven't yet been mentioned at AltRight, I'll reproduce it here.

(Über-moderate, Sam's Club socialist, and beloved conservative commentator for the New York Times Ross Douthat has warned Times subscribers about reading "extremist," "ideological" material such as this, and thus I must advise that thoughtful, sensitive souls proceed with caution.)

The title to this piece is a joke, of course, and I am glad that Rand Paul won the Kentucky Republican primary. I would have voted for him if I lived in the Blue Grass state. Paul's victory is also indicative of the power of the Tea Party movement, which originated with his father's 2008 presidential campaign but has taken on a life of its own. 

This said, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that Rand secured victory, in part, by earning the endorsement of Sarah Palin, as well as that of RedState.com's terror warrior Eric Erickson. Maybe those two know something we don't? In his major TV spots, Rand promised not to close Gitmo, stated (albeit vaguely) that "fighting back" was the proper response to 9/11, and flashed a lot of images of Military-Industrial-Complex fighter planes soaring through the sky. Though I thought this kind of stuff was on the wane, the GWOT, "standing tall against Islam," and even Christian Zionism still remain integral parts of the identity politics of Red-State Christian white people. If he wins the general, Rand won't be riding into Washington on a wave of antiwar sentiment, and it's likely that many of his voters would feel surprised, if not betrayed, if there's a major Senate debate on attacking Iran, and Rand comes out staunchly against.