A respondent to my comments about the leftist mindset of the GOP and movement conservative journalists stated an opinion that I’ve heard numerous times before. This view seems to me counterintuitive as well as undemonstrated: Republican strategists, and cooperative journalists, are flattering minorities and running down the ancestors of Southern Whites in order to appeal to White Republicans or swing voters. Wise “conservatives” (and here my respondent cites the GOP stratregist David Frum) understand that Whites would desert the GOP in droves unless their party continues to make an effort to be PC. Many Republicans and certainly swing voters would not vote for a party that was not marching in lockstep with the media in expressing horror over America’s evil racist, sexist, and homophobic past. Therefore the GOP is forced to act in such a way that while it is not likely to gain black support, it can hold on to its base by appearing as concerned as the Democrats about designated minorities.

The problem with this interpretation (aside from the fact that my respondent erroneously believes Karl Rove has deviated from it) is that there is no proof known to me that its proponent is correct. The vast majority of registered Republicans, according to all polls I’ve seen, think of themselves as being more right wing than the party they identify with. They ascribe the failure of their party to represent their views more fully to a justified fear of the media.

Although I think this reason is no more than an excuse to justify a bad electoral habit and misplaced loyalty, it suggests that GOP voters are not as far to the left as David Frum and Ross Douthat might hope. Steve Sailer has documented in his columns the progressive rejection of GOP candidates by White Christian males, who no longer bother to vote (see Sailer’s many VDARE columns on the subject). Presumably many of these abstentionists are expressing unhappiness with the Rove-Frum strategy being pursued by the Republican National Committee and those associated with that institute of funded wisdom. In my own once heavily Republican Lancaster County, the Republican turnout in 2008 was as depressed as the minority Democratic vote was elevated. Many of my Republican neighbors told me they wouldn’t “vote for that RINO McCain.” (The two-party monopoly in Pennsylvania managed to keep Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin off the ballot.)

If my respondent were correct, then McCain and the GOP should have done much better than they did. On immigration, affirmative action, denouncing Confederate symbols and paying homage to MLK, one could not have found a more accommodating standard bearer than Arizona’s senior senator. Even in defeat, he was congratulating the American people for having “transcended our country’s shameful racist past” by electing Obama. Clearly the Rove strategy didn’t work in this case. In fact it didn’t work any better than the GOP strategy of reaching out to Jews by allying with the Israeli Right. While the Republican Jewish vote was as high as 32 percent in 1980, it fell to 18 percent in 2008. By the way, only a fool would believe that the current 33 percent of Jewish support for the GOP, as indicated by a Pew Poll last week, will hold. That increased support is entirely centered on one issue, namely Obama’s failure to do enough for Israel.

Moreover, I can’t imagine that people would reject the GOP because it hasn’t apologized for slavery often enough or because its Southern candidates aren’t insulting the Confederacy with sufficient indignation. Perhaps Southern Whites, who form an indispensable pillar of the party, would stop voting for the party of Lincoln (and the fictitious party of MLK) if the GOP stopped insulting their ancestors’ memories.

In all the years I’ve been hearing that the bogus American Right sucks up to leftist constituencies in order to preserve and expand their voting base, I haven’t encountered even a sliver of evidence for the effectiveness of this course. What I’m not saying is that a GOP candidate running from a very leftist state does not have to sound different from a candidate running in Oklahoma or Utah. The argument I’m disputing is that the national party organization and the “conservative movement” have to mimic the rhetoric of the NAACP or NOW on our evil bigoted past. These groups seem addicted to throwing dirt on the very constituencies they need to stay in business.

But there is a very plausible reason for this. The establishment Right moves left because that is the direction in which one has to go in order to gain social acceptability in the NY-DC-LA social circuit. On the other hand, one can survive professionally outside of this social network, as witnessed by Michael Savage and his very popular radio program. Although Savage rants like a neocon against “Islamofascism” and calls for further wars against this new form of Hitlerism, he is unflinchingly right wing on everything else. He denounces victimology and delights in calling attention to the high rates of violence in the disintegrated “black community” and among illegal immigrants Although is hard to think of anyone who has departed more flagrantly from the GOP’s reaching-out strategy, Mike has no trouble raking in bucks and attracting listeners.

But this shock-jock in not likely to be invited on to FOX, except when the Europeans try to keep him out of their countries for insulting Muslims and when O’Reilly subsequently decides to showcase him as an enemy of terror.. And I doubt that Mike gets invited to those swell shindigs that the NR staff attends with their liberal buds or that like Rich Lowry, Mike the chance to engage in a love-fest with the Stalinist editor of The Nation Victor Navasky. The GOP and movement conservatives truckle to supposedly victimized minorities and target Southerners, Germans, Russians, etc. because they live and move in urban leftist circles. In the process they have absorbed the mindset of those circles they are trying to penetrate. That is the most obvious reason for their behavior. And I would not deny that my subjects believe what they say about the themes under discussion. Given the society in which they travel and the education they’ve received, those beliefs must be second nature for them.

As a final comment, I would note that The American Prospect has just published the single most dishonest article on the subject of my essay that I’ve ever run into. Frum move over, you’ve met your match! The author, Alan I. Abramowitz, warns Republican leaders to stop listening to their fanatically right wing base. For “every ten percent” a candidate moves to the right, according to Abramowitz, he loses 1 percent support. In contrast every time a Democratic candidate moves leftward, he holds his numbers and may even do better in the polls. Presumably Norman Coleman would still be the U.S. Senator from Minnesota, if he had not been so right wing and had been willing to move ten percent to the left.

Note Abramowitz never suggests what moving right or left entails. Does moving left mean supporting Obama’s health plan? Or does it refer to a willingness to support more affirmative action programs for black women in higher education? Does moving right mean being in favor of nation-building in the Middle East or supporting the privatization of social security? Abramowitz claims he is able to prove his thesis by providing cogent evidence but offers nothing of the kind.

Finally his remarks about Coleman, who was one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, are nothing less than risible. Coleman went down to defeat against his fellow-liberal Franken because he turned off the Republican base. He also faced a third-party (Reform Party) challenge from a former centrist Republican, Dean Barkley, with whom he had to divide votes. The only way Coleman could have won was by energizing the conservative Republican base, which he studiously avoided doing. Still and all, I shouldn’t be unfairly hard on Abramowitz. He presents us with an invaluable portrait of the mindset of our esteemed GOP strategists.

Under the title "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," Senator James Webb (D., Va.) says what no mainstream Republican politician would ever dare to say:

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived...

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy./The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that 'fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery...'

In 1938...[o]f the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white)...

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white...

Wow.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't quote so much while commenting so little - but, hey? what could I possibly add?

Needless to say, the PC brigades are out to get him.

I propose that we start a new Zeitgeist blog series entitled  “So, This Is How It Ends,” chronicling instances of multiculturalism so advanced that one finds oneself hoping that this latest outrage is representative of a terminal stage of Western civilization and that things couldn’t get worse.

Item 1: In an interview with Al Jazeera this past week, NASA new chief, Charles Bolden, disclosed the administration’s goals:

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator – [Barack Obama] charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering," Bolden said in the interview.

So, Bolden’s tasks are, 1) inspire the children, 2) reach out to the world, 3) improve the self-esteem of Muslims. (Space exploration doesn’t seem to have made the list this year.)

We can also be confident that the presence of Mr. Bolden will inspire the next generation of black Diversity hires.

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.

Well, Obama has gotten rid of that insubordinate general! And he can now rest assured that no prominent military man will ever make fun of him or Biden again. The president’s claim at today’s press conference that McChrystal’s ouster marked a “change in personnel, not policy” was apparently meant to be comforting … but in fact, indicated that the useless Afghan war will probably drag on for another decade.

AltRight reader “Niccolo” left the following astute -- though, I must say, potentially dangerous -- comment regarding my last piece on McChrystal:

Obama should consider himself very, very lucky that civilian rule of the US Armed Forces is sacrosanct. Had this not been the case, he could have been very easily brushed aside by such men.

The president as “Commander-in-Chief” has become one of the most beloved phrases in the American political lexicon -- a trend that culminated in John Kerry’s corny “reporting for duty” salute at the 2004 Democratic convention. Americans aren’t likely to give up on this notion any time soon. (It should be noted that the Constitution authorizes the president to be “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States,” though the language clearly indicates that the Founders never dreamt that a president would be presiding over an unending state of war in multiple parts of the globe.)

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal likely has abiding disgust for civilians like Obama, Biden, and Holbrooke, who have been designated his superiors; however, I don’t think for a moment, he ever contemplated suspending Constitutional dictates, declaring a State of Emergency, and for the good of the nation, dismissing Obama and installing himself as a temporary dictator, as the Romans understood it. And the fact that he lacks a popular following in the country is only a secondary reason why he would never do such a thing.

Personal ambition is always a factor in matters of state; however, it’s certain that Francisco Franco recognized that accepting the legality of the general elections of 1936 would lead to the further subversion of the state, leftist attacks on the Spanish nation and Church, and eventually, Communist rule in his homeland.

We’re certainly not experiencing anything like the dire exigent in which Franco and the Spanish Right found themselves during the summer of 1936; however, if we were, our military higher-ups seem to lack, entirely, the vision one needs to take wise, decisive action.

McChrystal -- a skilled, efficient, “get ‘er done” operator and, as we’ve witnessed, a brutally honest man -- probably represents the best the armed services have to offer at the moment. (Others who have worked their way up the chain of command include the shrewd “political general,” David Petraeus, and the new breed of military diversicrats like Doug Casey, whose views -- “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength” -- seem to resemble those of the Columbia English department.)

Alas, McChrystal seems to only know how to figure out the best way to develope a counter-insurgency strategy -- which tells one nothing about why one’s fighting or what one’s fighting for.

The Seattle Times reports:

The father of a 16-year-old West Seattle boy who said he was attacked by two men who made racially charged statements wonders why there have been no arrests even though police have identified two possible suspects.

It's been nearly three weeks since 16-year-old Shane McClellan showed up at an emergency room beaten, his father said, almost beyond recognition and almost one week since the teen was called into the police precinct to identify photos of suspects.

"We just can't understand why there haven't been any arrests," said Shane's father, Tim McClellan. "It doesn't seem right. I mean, the guys had my son's blood on their hands."

Further details:

Shane McClellan said he was walking home around 2 a.m. on May 25 when two men, one black and one Filipino, asked him for a light..

They then robbed him and beat him for four hours, whipping him with his own belt while saying things like, '"How do you like it, white boy?" and "This is for enslaving our people"...

McClellan...said the two men also poured Four Loko energy beer on him, burned him with a lit cigarette and urinated on him...

OK, I know what you're thinking -- we've only got the boy's word to go on, and how likely is it that the sort of thugs he describes would be literate enough to say anything like "this is for enslaving our people," in between burning him with cigarettes and pissing on him?

But the story goes on:

The officer who took the report went to the scene of the beating [where he] found blood, discarded...Loko cans and fresh cigarette butts...

A short time later, while returning to the precinct, Blake saw a black man and a Filipino man who appeared to be trying to conceal an open can...

"When he stopped to talk to the two men, he noted they had dried blood on their hands, were drinking the same brand of energy beer and smoking the same brand of cigarettes he'd found earlier.

So, being the frightful racist that we all know that all American policemen are, he then beat them both to within an inch of their lives, knowing that his higher-ups would cover for him. Right?

Wrong: "After [the officer] talked with his supervisor, it was decided that he should get good contact information on the two but not take them into custody." (The Seattle Police are, after all, justly proud of their "long history of diversity.")

But never fear: we are assured that "the assault is being investigated as a possible hate crime." Ain't that special?

I don't suppose there's much point observing that, were the races reversed, this incident would be national news, by now, with the very reverend Jesse Jackson & the equally reverend Al Sharpton and the even more reverend New York Times falling all over each other to publicize and to condemn the limitless iniquity of the White Man, world without end, Amen. So let's just take that as read. But might one be allowed to wonder, in the context of incidents like this, whether it's such a great idea for the American educationist establishment to go on, year after year, (a) further pumping up the already weirdly high levels of self-esteem among black students and (b) instilling in those same students the historically absurd belief that slavery is a crime for which all whites, as such, owe all blacks, as such?

Some Sarah Palin-endorsed Republican women did well last night, revealing once again the importance of the Tea Parties. But one shouldn't underestimate the power of Southern black people voting for the Democrat listed alphabetically at the top of the ballot. Exhibit A -- Alvin Greene: 

An unemployed 32-year-old black Army veteran with no campaign funds, no signs, and no website shocked South Carolina on Tuesday night by winning the Democratic Senate primary to oppose Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Alvin Greene, who currently lives in his family's home, defeated Vic Rawl, a former judge and state legislator who had a $186,000 campaign warchest and had already planned his next fundraising event. Despite the odds, Greene, who has been unemployed for the past nine months, said that he wasn't surprised by his victory. "I wasn’t surprised, but not really. I mean, just a little, but not much. I knew I was on top of my campaign, and just stayed on top of everything, I just—I wasn't surprised that much, just a little. I knew that I worked hard and did," Greene said in an interview.

Greene insists that he paid the $10,400 filing fee and all other campaign expenses from his own personal funds. "It was 100 percent out of my pocket. I’m self-managed. It’s hard work, and just getting my message to supporters. I funded my campaign 100 percent out of my pocket and self-managed," said Greene, who sounded anxious and unprepared to speak to the public. But despite his lack of election funds, Greene claims to have criss-crossed the state during his campaign—though he declined to specify any of the towns or places he visited or say how much money he spent while on the road.

"It wasn’t much, I mean, just, it was—it wasn’t much. Not much, I mean, it wasn’t much," he said, when asked how much of his own money he spent in the primary. Greene frequently spoke in rapid-fire, fragmentary sentences, repeating certain phrases or interrupting himself multiple times during the same sentence while he searched for the right words. But he was emphatic about certain aspects of his candidacy, insisting that details about his campaign organization, for instance, weren't relevant. "I'm not concentrating on how I was elected—it's history. I’m the Democratic nominee—we need to get talking about America back to work, what's going on, in America."

The oddity of Greene’s candidacy has already prompted speculation from local media about whether he might be a Republican plant. But Greene denies that Republicans or anyone else had approached him about running. "No, no—no one approached me. This is my decision," he said. A 13-year military veteran, he says he had originally gotten the idea in 2008 when he was serving in Korea. "I just saw the country was in bad shape two years ago…the country was declining," he says. "I wanted to make sure we continue to go up on the right track." But when asked whether there was a specific person or circumstance that precipitated his decision to jump into politics, Greene simply replied: "nothing in particular...it's just, uh, nothing in particular." South Carolina Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler speculated that Greene won because his name appeared first on the ballot, and voters unfamiliar with both candidates chose alphabetically.

Greene has yet to speak to any Democratic officials, either. After filing to run, his campaign went dark. According to this report, he didn’t show up to the South Carolina Democratic Party convention in April and didn't file any of the required paperwork for candidates with the state or Federal Election Commission. When I spoke to him, the state’s Democrats had yet to contact him after his victory was announced.

Greene insists that he's planning to work with state and national officials to ramp up his campaign and raise money "as soon as I can." And he plans on putting his unemployment at the center of his campaign. "I’m currently one of the many unemployed in the state and this country. South Carolina has more unemployed now than at any other time," Greene says. "My campaign slogan: Let's get South Carolina back to work." He adds that he would like to see "one Korea under a democracy."

[The ninth in a series on inclusiveness. Read parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, and IX.]

 

Western societies treat liberal ideals of freedom, equality, diversity, tolerance, and inclusiveness as uniquely authoritative. Those ideals increasingly trump all other considerations and silence all criticism.

As a practical matter, they mean rule by experts, bureaucrats, and commercial interests that promise to give everyone what he wants, as much and as equally as possible. Other authorities aren't rational and neutral enough.

Under such circumstances, the function of representative institutions becomes legitimating decisions already reached in other ways. Traditional less formal institutions such as family and religion become strictly private in significance. The point of multiculturalism and similar tendencies is to keep them so by destroying the public relevance of every particular tradition.

Some evidence that racism is natural.

(Health.com) -- Humans are hardwired to feel another person's pain. But they may feel less innate empathy if the other person's skin color doesn't match their own, a new study suggests.

When people say "I feel your pain," they usually just mean that they understand what you're going through. But neuroscientists have discovered that we literally feel each other's pain (sort of).

If you see -- or even just think of -- a person who gets whacked in the foot, for instance, your nervous system responds as if you yourself had been hit in the same spot, even though you don't perceive the pain physically.

Researchers in Italy are reporting that subtle racial bias can interfere with this process -- a finding with important implications for health care as well as social harmony.

And immigration policy more than anything, if we desire a society where, you know, people care about their fellow citizens.

In the study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, people of Italian and African descent watched short film clips that showed needles pricking black- and white-skinned hands. As they watched, researchers measured the participants' empathy (i.e., their nervous-system activity) by monitoring sensors attached to the same spot on their hands. They also tracked the participants' heart rates and sweat-gland activity, a common measure of emotional response.

"White observers reacted more to the pain of white than black models, and black observers reacted more to the pain of black than white models," says the lead researcher, Alessio Avenanti, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Bologna.

The researchers also showed clips of a needle pricking a hand painted bright purple. Both the Italian and African participants were more likely to empathize with this intentionally strange-looking hand than with the hand of another race, which implies that the earlier lack of empathy was due to skin color, not just difference. "This is quite important, because it suggests that humans tend to empathize by default unless prejudice is at play," says Avenanti.

That's one way to look at it. Another is that we naturally empathize with other living creatures that aren't humans who are members of other races. Or proximity leads to distrust.  But of course this is instead blamed indirectly on stereotypes, social conditioning, blah, blah, blah. The article even seems to suggest at the end that this could be used to justify affirmative action type policies for doctors, lest blacks not get treatment from people who feel their pain.

Once again, a healthy society flows with the current of human nature rather than demand we swim against it.  Achieving social harmony is difficult enough without the "blessing" of diversity.

There is a certain logic of degeneration at work when a civilization loses its bearings. The Olympic Games are a case in point. Once a religious festival of the ancient Hellenes, the Olympics were first revived during the convulsions of the French Revolution.

Along with a number of other spurious fabricated holidays, the Directory in Paris held L'Olympiade de la Republique from 1796 to 1798. In place of classical paganism, the games were animated by the new humanist faith, with athletes competing to honor the gods of liberty and reason.

The Olympics would then be permanently established a century later, this time their rationale being the rather Victorian concerns of good hygiene and international brotherhood.  Since that time the events evolved from a propaganda battleground among the militant antitheist ideologies of the 20^th century into the vapid, overblown commercial extravaganza we know today.

While the Olympics held sacred import for the Greeks of the classical era, they have been recast through modernity as a pseudo-festival, a celebration of ultimately nothing. In his work In Tune with the World, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper saw that man's rejection of God leads to a frenzy of meaninglessness in a vain attempt to escape the terror of death.

For the mad dash to meaninglessness, contemporary Britain wins the gold. In the run-up to hosting the 2012 Olympics, London has just raised the curtain on its mascots for the summer games. While they're supposed to "chime" with children, these creatures are more likely to induce a fresh round of psychological disorders in the rising generation. Forget clowns; let's all welcome the new stars of kids' most fevered nightmares.

Aside from these concerns, the new representatives of the games neatly encapsulate the U.K.'s transformation into an alien, postmodern dystopia. It's particularly noteworthy how these entities came into being- by committee. "Wenlock" and "Mandeville" (named after the respective founding-places of the British Olympics and Paralympics) are the product of 40 focus groups over the span of 18 months, a fact that presupposes additional layers of administrators and experts guiding the entire unholy enterprise. Any individual creativity or artistic inspiration was thus quashed by the processes of the managerial regime.

Photo: Suzanne Plunkett, Reuters

The mascots' creators have also ensured that the characters are liberated from even the slightest connection to English history and culture. There they stand in a schoolyard in front of a rainbow mural, each a strange metallic cylinder with the all-seeing eye of a giant squid. Perhaps they're meant to symbolize Britain's ubiquitous surveillance cameras; that would at least make matters more comprehensible. Ever-vigilant Wenlock and Mandeville monitor London's multicultural chaos, represented here by the ensemble of children who might as well have been flown in from multiple points around the globe.

There are affairs more pressing than criticizing London's choice for its 2012 Olympics mascot. After all, one can find evidence for British social disintegration in its crime explosion, the breakdown of the family, mass immigration by invitation and numerous other symptoms of advanced decadence. Then again, the two silver aliens are fitting symbols of secular, egalitarian Cool Britannia's institution of formlessness. Modern society's worship of man ultimately leads to the reign of absurdity.