My predictions for 2011 were all fulfilled: over the past year there was indeed more debt, more taxes, higher taxes, more inflation, more immigration, more liberalism, more legislation, more surveillance, and more bureaucracies. Turbulent as it was, 2011 consisted of more of the same, and it was turbulent precisely for that reason. My predictions for 2012 are as follows:

More Debt

Efforts to solve the financial crisis—now entering its fifth year—will be made, but they will consist of finding ways to kick the can down the road, hold on to credit ratings, levitate the markets, resuscitate consumption, and prevent civil unrest, rather than on actually eliminating the problem. It seems that the only politically viable option is covertly to devalue the debt. The news services will keep the middle class on the edge of their seats dramatising the never-ending Euro crisis, which may provide some jolts.

More and Higher Taxes

Although debt reduction through currency devaluation will remain the preferred method of crisis containment this year, the political establishment is acutely aware of the need to pacify the populace. The White middle class has proven timid and, following the Tea Party experience in the United States, members of the establishment are satisfied that their most profitable constituency (the White middle class is the establishment’s open wallet) can be successfully neutralised by simply calling them racists. The establishment, however, worries about the lumpen proletariat. The Tottenham riots in London in August this year, albeit triggered by a police incident, offered a preview of the civil unrest that an economic shock could bring: the rioters did not demand equality or rights, they wanted iPhones and plasma television. So, more and higher taxes will be levied on the middle class (‘the rich’ in political parlance) in order to fund pacifying handouts for coloured immigrants and their descendants (‘the poor’). Some of the increases in the fiscal burden will be hidden, but some of them will be open, and will be justified in terms of the need for ‘the rich’ to do their bit for society. The system’s contrived pseudomorality will seek to bring tax avoidance further into convergence with tax evasion.

More Wasteful and Counter-Productive Government Measures

See above. In general: good spending will be cut, bad spending will increase. With the shutting down of the space shuttle programme and assorted NASA cutbacks, Americans in 2011 saw Obama end the space age in the United States.

More Money Printing

The money printing will continue, and efforts to conceal its true extent will also continue. Because banks have so far hoarded much of the money that has been printed since the crisis began, the true consequences of the money printing have yet to be felt. Consumer depression will also contain demand and therefore price increases, although the latter only partially. I suspect that parts of this containment will start to fail in 2012, even if consumption and consumer confidence is low. However, even if there is higher inflation, we are years away from the hyperinflationary apocalypse dreamt of by some. We will not see price tags printed on electric paper exponentially revising prices upwards in real time as we make your way to the till.

More Colonisation

Despite the millions of unemployed, ‘immigration’ policy will continue to focus on pacifying voters through deceptions. In the United Kingdom, wholly unsurprisingly, the same Conservative Party that promised drastically to cut ‘immigration’ has governed over a record increase over the past year. Instead of the tens of thousands annually that the promised, the Conservatives have governed over a quarter of a million settler colonists arriving in Britain. Of course, new measures were designed to work like sieves. The modern Conservatives will carry on being more Labour than Labour, the same way that Democrats and Republicans in the United States will carry on increasing their redshift values.

More Scams

A desperate consumer culture co-existing with an economic crisis means only one thing: glory for the Golden Age of the Scam. The ever-diminishing opportunities for legitimate wealth creation mean an ever growing necessity for illegitimate wealth redistribution. Corporations will focus more than ever on a model of planned obsolescence, slave labour, and government handouts. More small and medium entrepreneurs will drop out of the economy and get on the government teat. Cheap consumer products will break on the same day we buy them, forcing us to buy more expensive versions next, which will break after a week. True quality will still only be found in obsolete technology and goods, found in museums, eBay, attics, and antique shops.

More Obamanation

Obama is likely to win a second term, albeit by a narrow margin. The Anglo-American media will back him. All-White Republican candidates will pull their punches, any one of them afraid of being the one who ends the Afro-American dream. Should Obama lose, Afro-Americans will be enraged. If by a narrow margin, as I think likely in this scenario, accusations of racist electoral fraud may well surface. Obama’s post presidential career, whether it begins in 2013 or in 2017, will see him rise to the status of a secular saint. The Left’s historical revisionists will labour to recast him as an American Nelson Mandela, victim of racism, bad luck, and an insuperable legacy of mismanagement by his blue-eyed predecessors. Some way will be found to enumerate allegedly great or visionary achievements that were derided or underreported at the time.

On a Positive Note, However . . .

There will be positive developments on the fringes. Marxists will of course benefit from the continuing crisis because it is easy for them to point to banksters and Big Business as exploiters of the labour force. Yet, in this they share common ground with dissenters on the alternative Right, who are also likely benefit from the disturbances of 2012. Opportunities will continue to grow outside of the mainstream, and traditionalist dissenters will continue shifting away from quantitative gloom-and-doom analyses in favour of a more positive, subjective approach; away from simple forensics in favour of aggressive deconstruction and the active pursuit of new and original solutions, new ways of thinking, speaking, and operating.

In Sum

…more of the same, with some jolts, shocks, and possibly even a few changes along the way in the economic sphere that, although apparently dramatic, will not be fundamental, together with exciting opportunities on the fringes and beyond. The place to be will be on the outside.

Conservatives, whether Catholic or not, tend to have a sympathy for the Catholic Church for two basic reasons. First, left-wingers despise the Church because of its public stance on abortion. If liberals hate the Church that much, conservatives reason, it can’t be all that bad. Second, the Catholic Church seemingly takes generally conservative positions on some “social issues” such as “gay marriage” and euthanasia.

But what I can assert for certain, as a lifelong devout conservative Catholic, and what both Catholics and non-Catholics have got to understand, is that the Catholic Church is obsessed with three things.

It is extremely paranoid about its public image, which is why it protected pedophile priests for decades instead of doing the only morally correct thing—turn those child predators in to the authorities. The official Church is also obsessed with money, which is why it sells out on virtually every issue, the better to attract liberal donors. The third obsession is actually related to the first two. The Catholic Church is maniacally obsessed with sucking up to the politically correct liberal establishment. Church leaders undoubtedly stay awake at night strategizing as to how they can further endear themselves to the politically correct Zeitgeist and left-wing opinion leaders. It is an absolute mystery why liberals hate the Church—for liberals are the Church’s master!

Indeed, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, from the Pope down to individual parish priests, when it addresses areas outside the realm of Catholic doctrine and veers into economic and political issues, tends to wander into left field. Far left field.

Jonathan Bowden joins Richard to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche—one of the most reviled, admired, and misunderstood philosophers of our time.

The conventional left/right model of the political spectrum holds Fascism and Marxism to be polar opposites of one another. Marxism is regarded as an ideology of the extreme Left while Fascism supposedly represents an outlook that is about as far to the Right as one can go. A title recently translated into English by Portugal’s Finis Mundi Press, Eric Norling’s Revolutionary Fascism, does much to call the perception of Fascism, conceived of as it was by Mussolini and his cohorts, as an ideology of the extreme Right into question.

This work was originally published in 2001 and author Norling, a historian and lawyer, is a native Swede who now resides in Spain. Norling observes that throughout the entirety of his early life, from childhood until World War One, Mussolini was every bit as much as man of the Left as contemporaries such as Eugene V. Debs. He was what would later come to be known as a “red diaper baby” (meaning the child of revolutionary socialist parents). As a young man, Mussolini himself was a Marxist, fervently anticlerical, went to Switzerland to evade compulsory military service, and was arrested and imprisoned for inciting militant strikes. Eventually, he became a leader in Italy’s Socialist Party and he was imprisoned once again in 1911 for his antiwar activities related to Italy’s invasion of Libya. Mussolini was so prominent a socialist at this point in his career that he won the praise of Lenin who considered him to be the rightful head of a future Italian socialist state.

When World War One began in 1914, Mussolini initially held to the Italian Socialist Party’s antiwar position, but in the ensuing months switched to a pro-war position which earned him an expulsion from the party. He then enlisted in the Italian army and was wounded in combat. The reasons for Mussolini’s shift to a pro-war position are essential to understanding the true origins and nature of fascism and its place within the context of twentieth century political and intellectual history. Mussolini came to see the war as an anti-imperialist struggle against the Hapsburg dynasty of Austria-Hungary. Further, he regarded the war as an anti-monarchist struggle against conservative forces such as the Hapsburgs, the Ottoman Turks, and the Hohenzollern’s of Germany and attacked these regimes as reactionary enemies who had repressed socialism. Mussolini also prophetically believed that Russia’s participation in the war would weaken that nation to the point where it was susceptible to socialist revolution (which is precisely what happened). In other words, Mussolini regarded the war as an opportunity to advance leftist revolutionary struggles in Italy and elsewhere.

When the Italian Fascist movement was founded in 1919, most of its leaders and theoreticians were, like Mussolini himself, former Marxists and other radical leftists such as proponents of the revolutionary syndicalist doctrines of Georges Sorel. The official programs issued by the Fascists, translations of which are included in Norling’s book, reflected a standard mixture of republican and socialist ideas that would have been common to any European leftist group of the era. If indeed the evidence is overwhelming that Fascism has its roots on the far Left, then from where does Fascism’s reputation as a rightist ideology originate?

The answer appears to be a combination of three primary factors: Marxist propaganda that has regrettably found its way into the mainstream historiography, the revision of leftist revolutionary doctrine itself by Fascist leaders, and the inevitable compromises and accommodations made by Fascism upon the achievement of actual state power. Regarding the first these, David Ramsay Steele described the standard Marxist interpretation of Fascism in an important article on Fascism’s history:

In the 1930s, the perception of "fascism" in the English-speaking world morphed from an exotic, even chic, Italian novelty into an all-purpose symbol of evil. Under the influence of leftist writers, a view of fascism was disseminated which has remained dominant among intellectuals until today. It goes as follows:

Fascism is capitalism with the mask off. It's a tool of Big Business, which rules through democracy until it feels mortally threatened, then unleashes fascism. Mussolini and Hitler were put into power by Big Business, because Big Business was challenged by the revolutionary working class. We naturally have to explain, then, how fascism can be a mass movement, and one that is neither led nor organized by Big Business. The explanation is that Fascism does it by fiendishly clever use of ritual and symbol. Fascism as an intellectual doctrine is empty of serious content, or alternatively, its content is an incoherent hodge-podge. Fascism's appeal is a matter of emotions rather than ideas. It relies on hymn-singing, flag-waving, and other mummery, which are nothing more than irrational devices employed by the Fascist leaders who have been paid by Big Business to manipulate the masses.

This perception continues to be the standard leftist “analysis” of Fascism even in present times, and goes a long way towards explaining why, for instance, American political movements or figures that have absolutely nothing to do with historic Fascism, such as the Tea Party or the neocon mouthpieces of FOX News or “conservative” talk radio, continue to be recipients of the “fascist” label by atavistic liberals and leftists.

The reality of Fascism’s origins was quite different. Its creators were an assortment of leftist intellectuals and political figures whose common reference point was their realization that Marxism was a failed ideology. As Steele observed:

Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries.

The Crisis of Marxism occurred in the 1890s. Marxist intellectuals could claim to speak for mass socialist movements across continental Europe, yet it became clear in those years that Marxism had survived into a world which Marx had believed could not possibly exist. The workers were becoming richer, the working class was fragmented into sections with different interests, technological advance was accelerating rather than meeting a roadblock, the "rate of profit" was not falling, the number of wealthy investors ("magnates of capital") was not falling but increasing, industrial concentration was not increasing, and in all countries the workers were putting their country above their class.

The early Fascists were former Marxists who had come to doubt the revolutionary potential of class struggle, but had simultaneously come to regard revolutionary nationalism as showing considerable promise. As Mussolini remarked in a speech on December 5, 1914:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!...Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other. The class struggle is a vain formula, with effect and consequence wherever one finds a people that has not integrated itself into its proper linguistic and racial confines—where the national problem has not been definitely resolved. In such circumstances the class movement finds itself impaired by an inauspicious historic climate.

Fascism subsequently abandoned class struggle for a revolutionary nationalist outlook that stood for class collaboration under the leadership of a strong state that was capable of unifying the nation and accelerating industrial development. Indeed, Steele made an interesting observation concerning the similarities between Italian and Third World Marxist “national liberation” movements of the second half of the twentieth century:

The logic underlying their shifting position was that there was unfortunately going to be no working-class revolution, either in the advanced countries, or in less developed countries like Italy. Italy was on its own, and Italy's problem was low industrial output. Italy was an exploited proletarian nation, while the richer countries were bloated bourgeois nations. The nation was the myth which could unite the productive classes behind a drive to expand output. These ideas foreshadowed the Third World propaganda of the 1950s and 1960s, in which aspiring elites in economically backward countries represented their own less than scrupulously humane rule as "progressive" because it would accelerate Third World development. From Nkrumah to Castro, Third World dictators would walk in Mussolini's footsteps. Fascism was a full dress rehearsal for post-war Third Worldism.

During its twenty-three years in power, Mussolini’s regime certainly made considerable concessions to traditionally conservative interests such as the monarchy, big business, and the Catholic Church. These pragmatic accommodations borne of political necessity are among the evidences typically offered by leftists as indications of Fascism’s rightist nature. Yet there is abundant evidence that Mussolini essentially remained a socialist throughout the entirety of his political life. By 1935, thirteen years after Mussolini seized power in the March on Rome, seventy-five percent of Italian industry had either been nationalized outright or brought under intensive state control. Indeed, it was towards the end of both his life and the life of his regime that Mussolini’s economic policies were at their most leftist.

After briefly losing power for a couple of months during the summer of 1943, Mussolini returned as Italy’s head of state with German assistance and set up what came to be called the Italian Social Republic. The regime subsequently nationalized all companies employing more than a hundred workers, redistributed housing that was formerly privately owned to its worker occupants, engaged in land redistribution, and witnessed a number of prominent Marxists joining the Mussolini government, including Nicola Bombacci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party and a personal friend of Lenin. These events are described in considerable detail in Norling’s work.

It would appear that the historic bitter rivalry between Marxists and Fascists is less a conflict between the Left and the Right, and more of a conflict between erstwhile siblings on the Left. This should come as no particular surprise given the penchant of radical leftist groupings for sectarian blood feuds. Indeed, it might be plausibly argued that leftist ”anti-fascism” is rooted in jealously of a more successful relative as much as anything else. As Steele noted:

Mussolini believed that Fascism was an international movement. He expected that both decadent bourgeois democracy and dogmatic Marxism-Leninism would everywhere give way to Fascism, that the twentieth century would be a century of Fascism. Like his leftist contemporaries, he underestimated the resilience of both democracy and free-market liberalism. But in substance Mussolini's prediction was fulfilled: most of the world's people in the second half of the twentieth century were ruled by governments which were closer in practice to Fascism than they were either to liberalism or to Marxism-Leninism. The twentieth century was indeed the Fascist century.

Language is always evolving, and the direction of a language’s evolution is a function of its users. In Jamaica this meant, first, the development of a creole by West African slaves after British rule in the 17^th century; and, secondly, with the island’s population being majority Black since the 1670s, said creole’s growing into an unofficial national language.

Because it was based on a White man’s language, and Whiteness had long been associated with high social status, Jamaican patois was traditionally looked down upon as a failure to attain the White Englishman’s educational standards.

This, however, is changing (at least in Jamaica), and linguists at the University of the West Indies in Kingston have been working on a translation of the Bible into Jamaican patois. The hope of supporters is officially to legitimise the creole as an authentic language in its own right.

The results are striking. What follows is from Luke’s Gospel—or, in patois, Jiizas—di buk we Luuk rait bout im:

Original: ‘And having come in, the angel said to her, “Rejoice, highly favoured one, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women.”’

Patois: ‘De angel go to Mary and say to ‘er, me have news we going to make you well ‘appy. God really, really, bless you and him a walk with you all de time.’

The BBC report on this development includes a film where a Jamaican cleric frames this in nationalist terms. His easy switch from patois to Standard English, from illiterate to literate English, as if they were different languages, is rather odd.

Jamaican patois’ literary pretensions may represent a more advanced stage in a development that has occurred in other former colonies.

In Singapore the local creole is known as Singlish. It is an accretion of words originating from English, Malay, Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese, Tamil, Bengali, Punjabi, and, to a lesser extent, various other European, Indic, and Sinitic languages, with television-derived American and Australian slang thrown in for added global spice. Singlish is disglossic, meaning it has high (acrolectic) and low (basilectic) variants. The former is most similar to Standard English, the latter appears almost like a foreign language: compare ‘This person’s Singlish is very good’ with ‘Dis guy Singrish si beh zai sia.’

In Malaysia the English-based creole is called—somewhat appropriately—Manglish. The creole shares roots with Singlish, and West-coast Manglish is nearly identical to the former.

Closer to home, in the United Kingdom there is Hinglish (Hindi + English), which is spoken both in India and in the United Kingdom. Its usage in Britain is so widespread that some years ago Collin’s published a humorous dictionary, titled The Queen’s Hinglish, How to Speak Pukka.

Hinglish is not like Jamaican patois, Haitian creole, or Singlish, but operates more like Spanglish, with borrowed words thrown into the base language and occasionally rearranged grammar. Hinglish words include: airdash (travel by air), chaddis (underpants), chai (Indian tea), crore (10 million), dacoit (thief), desi (local), dicky (boot), gora (white person), jungli (uncouth), lakh (100,000), lumpen (thug), optical (spectacles), prepone (bring forward), stepney (spare tyre) and would-be (fiancé/e).

Sensing the rage of White citizens and the existential threat it poses to the status quo, British politicians have sought to keep the chanko stew in the multicultural pressure cooker from exploding through feinted acts of appeasement—purely cosmetic, if not outright deceptive, ‘changes’ in immigration policy. In the minds of many mainstream White politicians, immigration is inevitable, necessary, and will not fundamentally affect the power balance in the country. And in the minds of some such politicians, immigration might alter the outward complexion of the country, but will not change its fundamental values or institutions—Blacks and Asians will become ‘White’ inside. Thus, any rage coming from within the indigenous White majority (‘racism’ in the PC dictionary) is a nuisance that needs to be managed and controlled until ‘education’ and exposure eliminates it in time.

Yet, based on the experience of former colonies, a fundamental alteration of the ethnic and racial composition of the citizenry in the European territories now being colonised by settlers from Asia, Africa, an the Caribbean, will bring along with it the long-term decline of Standard English and the rise of creole variants, which, may in due course obtain official legitimation. In this sense, Jamaica may be affording us a preview of Europe’s future, rather than another emblem of the island’s further divergence from Britain and convergence with West Africa.

In this scenario, the traditional upper classes in Britain would gradually change complexion, becoming progressively Asian and Muslim. Whiteness retaining its link with high status would prescribe a period of mimesis, where the new upper class would initially use a variant of Standard English as a class demarcator. In time even this Standard English will likely be seen as an obsolete vestige from a superseded past under White hegemony. It will likely be said that ‘no one speaks like that anymore’, the same way that no American politician today sounds like Woodrow Wilson in 1912, William Taft before him, or William McKinley in 1896. The same way that the BBC abandoned Queen’s English, even a creolised form of our Standard English will give way to a full creole.

This is not to say that what we call Standard English would remain static in a scenario where Europeans regain control of their destiny. The various spelling reform efforts in English predate the era of mass immigration, and scientific and technological advances, along with the social structures and behaviours that they give rise to, are constantly adding terminology to our dictionaries. New words have legitimately entered the English language from non-Indo-European sources via, for example, American, South African, and Australian English. Language is and should be constantly evolving. The question here is how ours is likely to evolve, who it is that will influence its evolution, and for what reasons.

Words lose their meaning under our rulers, as with any other tyranny. Terms like “democracy” or “human rights” do not define a system of government or self evident qualities of mankind so much as serve as shorthand for progressive hegemony. If a state passes restrictions on immigration with massive popular approval, the media will describe it as an “anti-democratic” measure that violates “human rights.” However, if a national government openly bans a legitimate political party because they do not like the opinions of those in them, this will be described as an act in defense of “democracy.” This isn't incorrect. Democracy is, at its essence, the Church of Mediocrity Militant, and the fist of the system is no more apparent than in the mundane.

It's hard to think of anything more mundane or typical of modernity than Rihanna. At 23, she already boasts several Grammy's, almost a dozen top 100 hit songs, and most importantly, a role in the upcoming cinematic masterpiece Battleship (based on the board game). Rihanna also earned the coveted status of “victim” and “survivor” after her boyfriend at the time, Chris Brown, savagely beat her (after, it is rumored, she gave him herpes), and the resulting pictures were posted online. After a quick break, Brown was rewarded by earning millions singing songs about how many girls still want to sleep with him—after all, it's not like he said a racial slur. In his latest collaboration with the blue-eyed Cuban rapper “Pitbull,” Brown croons about how everyone in the Dominican Republic wants to immigrate to America.

Meanwhile, Rihanna doubled down on her image of promiscuity and vulgarity, flauntingly spending thousands of dollars at a sex shop in Paris, turning her concerts into barely concealed strip shows, and ensuring that your prepubescent daughter is singing songs about S&M, unless you live in an electronics-free cave. I should pause to note that she has also been officially named an “ambassador for tourism” for Barbados and is a “great source of national pride,” and so she is. While it's doubtful she's part of a one-world brainwashing scheme, Rihanna's vaguely mixed appearance (she was bullied for being “white” in Barbados) and auto-tuned, lowest common denominator, pop-urban schtick make her the perfect frontperson for global prolefeed. 

Alas, even in the brave new age, there is the eternal enemy waiting to be stamped out. Rihanna was ignominiously chased out of a field in Ireland by a Democratic Unionist Party alderman named Alan Graham after she took her clothes off in his fields. For his trouble, he was besieged by hate mail accusing him of religious bigotry. Rihanna also had a troubled encounter in Portugal recently, where she supposedly encountered a racist hotel guest who said that black women dress like sluts. (Why would he think that?) She responded by tweeting to her 11 million followers about “cunts,” made a thinly veiled reference to penis size, and admitted she screamed at him. Proudly, she proclaimed, “My nigga came out.”

This past summer, Cameron Diaz starred in the somewhat fun but undeniably fluffy not-quite black comedy Bad Teacher. The most inspired aspect of that movie wasn't the rather pedestrian plot or the by now thoroughly tired raunchy tastelessness of the tone and content (we've had about a thousand too many third-rate Something About Mary-style uninspired cinematic gross-out cringe-fests in the last decade or so). Instead, what stayed with the viewer was the character played by Diaz herself: an utterly unadmirable, shallow, narcissistic, bad-tempered anti-heroine-- someone we're given every reason to hate, but with whom we end up sympathizing in spite of ourselves, since her endlessly deplorable actions end up seeming rather pitiful, instead of vicious; and because the total lack of sentimental pretense that accompanies her absolute absence of scruples lends her an odd but undeniable charm.

Diaz's character is reincarnated in only slightly different form in Young Adult, a much deeper, much darker comedy-drama from Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman—the writer/director team which brought the sleeper hit Juno to the screen in 2007. Here, the thoroughly Americanized Afrikaner Charlize Theron plays the lead, author and divorcee Mavis Gary. Mavis, a once-beautiful blonde now approaching middle age, is a woman who still puts on the haughty airs of a duchess, yet who lives like an unreconstructed slob. Every night she passes out drunk in her semi-fancy Minneapolis high-rise apartment; she wakes up, hung over, sometimes next to last night's date, sometimes alone, always surrounded by filth she never bothers to clean up. She spends most of her day watching crap daytime TV, eating junk food, and occasionally attempting to write a new "young adult" book for a Gossip Girl-like franchise, which has her employed as a ghost writer.

Yet Mavis is roused from her listless day-to-day torpor when she learns that her teenage sweetheart Buddy Slade, now happily married, has just given birth to a baby daughter. Convincing herself that Buddy can't really be happy in that "hick town" she left behind, she returns to Mercury, Minnesota, with the mission to wrest him away from the family life in which she's convinced he must feel stifled and imprisoned. Once there, Mavis meets and forms an unlikely friendship with Matt Freehauf (Patton Oswalt), a former "theater fag" whose locker was next to Mavis's when they attended high school together, but whose existence was barely ever noted by her during those four years. Matt, it turns out, was brutally attacked by a group of jocks during his senior year and suffered disfiguring, lifelong injuries from that assault. (Once she sees the cane he carries, Mavis remembers Matt as "that hate-crime guy"; Matt laconically replies that once the media found out that he wasn't actually gay, but rather "just a fat dork who got his ass kicked," they ceased to care about his case.)

After downing a few drinks, Mavis opens up to Matt about her real reasons for being back in town. Matt is appalled, but also somewhat amused, by Mavis's announced scheme to seduce her ex-beau away from his wife and daughter. He sees, just as we do, that in addition to being morally untenable, Mavis's despicable ambitions don't even have the virtue of being inspired by authentic love. Instead, it is for entirely ego-driven reasons that Mavis seeks to destroy a blissful and intact family; she wants to feel desirable and successful again. She is painfully aware that her body is aging and her sex appeal won't linger too much longer; once her attractiveness to the opposite sex is gone, she fears she'll be alone for good.

The brand of historiography promoted by the Mises Institute is at its best when it is revisionist, and fearless of social and political taboos. It is at its very worst when it is Manichaean: The Black Hats vs. the White Hats; The Good Guys (a term these historians actually like to use) vs. The Baddies; the Party of Liberty vs. the tyrannical Statists etc. etc. etc.

I might agree with Thomas DiLorenzo on some crucial issues, including the Federal Reserve and the Cult of Lincoln, but history-writing should not be a kind of extended op-ed, in which readers silently cheer on the Good Guys, hiss at the Baddies, judging both by the degree to which they adhere to a 2012 Anarcho-Capitalist Platform.

All this was brought to mind as I was reading what DiLorenzo surely considers to be devastating take-downs of his National Review opponents in the Beltway, regarding the Ron Paul newsletters saga.

The official National Review line has, for a while, been that Ron Paul is borderline unmentionable, mostly due to his foreign-policy positions.  If there is a strong need to go after him, the NRchiks haven't hesitated to bring up that at one point in time, Paul's newsletters promoted unfashionable views on race, as well as conspiracy theories of various degrees of crankiness—despite the fact that such views are out of tune with Paul’s more recent public statements on racial matters and the civil rights movement. 

DiLorenzo’s response is to dig up some money quotes from NR’s past and insinuate that the “neocons” are racist bigots. That is, he does EXACTLY what he accuses NR of doing. (In the process, he proves that NR was once a pretty interesting magazine!)

What's next, an Emma West biopic starring Queen Latifah?  

Ron Paul has a real chance of winning next week’s Iowa caucuses. And not surprisingly “the Smearbund” (as Murray Rothbard termed it) has returned—along with discussion of those newsletters, which have haunted the Congressman for 15 years.

The GOP establishment will tolerate Paul so long as he remains a folksy and charming long-shot. (He’s even useful in that he keeps Constitution-thumping die-hards within the Republican fold.) But the second it looks like the man might actually win, the gloves come off.

To be sure, most of the smears of Paul’s brand of Old-Right libertarianism are unfair and ungrounded; and they usually amount to a variation on theme—“You don’t want to invade [Insert Middle Eastern Country], ergo you endorse [Insert cruel dictator]! Such logic is invariably accompanied by allusions to Hitler, “the lessons of Munich,” yadayadayada. (This past week Dorothy Rabinowitz shrieked that Paul is a “propagandist for our enemies.”)

That being said, the claim that Paul’s newsletters from the ‘90s are “racist” (at least as that word is commonly defined) is, in fact, quite fair.

One can defend most of what is written on libertarian, non-racial grounds, as Justin Raimondo did in his powerful 2008 piece from Takimag. But the fact remains that the newsletters were “racist” in the sense that race is real—it has a remarkable analytic and predictive capacity—and the newsletter authors (whoever they might be) were willing to “go there.”