FrumForum's latest attack on me and AlternativeRight, "Richard Spencer's Nordic Supermen," is notable in that its author, Alex Knepper, has moved beyond the ho-hum "guilt by association" accusations we've come to expect from such people. Earlier he had attempted "guilt by dramatization" and now has tried the exceedingly difficult "guilt by the recounting of an anecdote that reminds the author of the person he's trying to smear." Bold! Knepper's article makes SPLC tactics seem tame and boring in comparison.

The young Alex speaks of his fascination with the esoteric and the fringe, and tells a tale about how he attended a Nordic Pride festival (where, we're not told) and met some Odinists. These rough-and-tumble folks, who wore Thor's Hammers, discussed kith, kin, and bloodlines, and talked about rearing warriors, clearly offended Alex's delicate sensibilities. Alex hints that they're anti-Semitic, but the portrait he paints doesn't lead me to believe that these people have done anything wrong. Our world is full of groups that desire a sense of roots and "Us-ness" -- for proof, Alex might try to join the National Council of La Raza.

I don't have any problem with Pagans, but these people are supposed to be my Nordic Supermen? Really? For nowhere in the article does Alex claim that, say, I was there, that I'm a member of their group, that I even know any of these people, etc. etc. etc.

For further evidence (as if it were needed) of my Nordic supremacy, Alex cites the title of an AltRight article ... by Robert Weissberg, the good-natured, Manhattan-dwelling cosmopolitan who, I'm afraid, is about as far from "Odinic" as you can get.

Richard Spencer is right when he says that he couldn't think of any significant issue that the Alternative Right and the established conservative movement would hold in common. What he might have added is that he couldn't think of any significant issue over which the conservative movement and the GOP would disagree; or any major issue on which the Alternative Right and the GOP would agree. There is equal truth in all of these statements.

The conservative movement and the GOP have virtually merged, a situation that is underscored by the likelihood that the designated successor to Edwin Feulner as head of the Heritage Foundation will be the wife of Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Beltway conservative foundations work for Republican administrations almost exclusively, and they do so when the GOP is in power or else when it is trying to take over the presidency and/or Congress.

While I've always understood but disagreed with the internal logic of liberalism, I've always assumed that neocons were either ethnic activists (The Weekly Standard) or fools (John McCain). So even though he was a major candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, I never suspected that Mitt Romney was one. Too handsome, too smart, too genteel, too much of a gentile. Because of this, Romney's campaign policy book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, especially the first four chapters dealing with foreign policy, ended up being a let down for me.

The neoconservative (by now I think we would just call it "conservative" if it didn't sound like an admission of defeat) has a somewhat plausible explanation of world history. From the beginning of time until 1945, nations were always fighting one another. For the neocons, the pre-1945 world is the pre-1960s Dark Age of the Left. Since the end of World War II, the world has been lucky that the only superpower in the world is by far the most moral. Because America has been willing to take responsibility for the defense of all other freedom-loving nation, we're lucky enough to have been living in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. Just how much better than the rest of the world does Romney think America is? After pointing out that the U.S. could easily crush her enemies and seize their resources, he writes, "So deep is restraint and goodness etched in our collective character that the abuse of power is never even on the table or in the back of our minds."

The U.S. must support liberal democracies everywhere and always. While the Muslim extremist divides the world into dar al Islam (House of Islam) and dar al harb (House of War), for the neocons there's dar al democracies and dar al tyranny. The main enemies are radical Islam, Russia, and China. Romney wants the U.S. to be stronger than China in East Asia and stronger than Russia in Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. He recommends fast tracking the ex-Soviet satellites into NATO without spelling out that that could potentially mean nuclear war and render all his domestic policy irrelevant.

Romney thinks that the American empire, with its "military forces in about 150 countries around the world" according to the Brookings Institute, simply isn't doing enough abroad. "Besides assistant secretaries and State department bureaucrats," he asks, "who in the United States is charged with thinking about Lebanon every day?" Why, if someone wanted to build a school or clinic in that country, the former Massachusetts governor complains, he would have to get approval from Congress! Such a state of affairs is unacceptable.

As a matter of fact, the American government should appoint a sort of governor for each part of the globe.

The world should be divided into regions, preferably the same regions as those of the military.  One individual-only one-would have responsibility to lead the promotion of democracy, freedom, stability, and free enterprise in that region...

Ever year, an independent agency would gauge progress in that region using defined metrics and then report to the nation whether and to what extent the envoy was succeeding.  The envoy would be given a budget, and he or she could call on the resources of federal agencies and departments to support the effort, using previously authorized budget dollars to compensate that department.

Romney doesn't stop to consider that maybe it hasn't been American power that's been responsible for our era of relative peace, but any one of a handful of other factors. After all, the end of WWII happened to coincide with the invention of nuclear weapons, which ruled out war between major powers. The Flynn effect has led to smarter world leaders and in our more technologically developed world wealth is based less on land and more on knowledge. Also, increased international trade has created incentives for peace and the world media works to isolate and shame aggressors. The reasons for the decline in conflict between great powers are complex and can't simply be broken down to the foreign-policy establishment in Washington. It's particularly strange to hear conservatives claim that the federal government is too incompetent to, say, set national education standards but has been responsible for a golden age of peace.

I remember talking to a Moroccan-American who taught Arabic for the U.S. Army. He was telling me that the government didn't have many speakers of the language. To learn a tongue that difficult takes a very high IQ and even then it can only be done with years of constant attention. If it's true that the U.S. lacks speakers of a major and important language like Arabic, I wondered, how many people in our government did he think spoke Serbian and knew what was going on in that country before we went in and bombed it? "Probably nobody," he replied. Would it be un-American to suspect that Bill Clinton began bombing to distract the public from his personal indiscretions? Why, it would, according to Mitt Romney, because no American would ever even consider putting his own interests before those of the dar al Democracies.

The second part of No Apology focuses on domestic policy and isn't half bad. The author explains that high health care costs are caused not by the free market, but a system that incentivizes waste. Imagine a broadband market in which a third party chooses your provider and pays them. The provider then decides what services you need and how much to charge. Eventually you're going to end up with a lot of bells and whistles and a big bill. Since the consumer pays a flat deductible with most health insurance plans, after a certain point there's no reason to shop around or ever say, "Well, I don't really need that."

A better system would pay doctors a flat fee for each patient, who themselves pick up a percentage of the cost rather than a set amount. The Republican has a basic philosophical difference with the Left, which believes that too much capitalism and greed are causing health insurance to be unaffordable. As a matter of fact, no part of the economy has seen more government meddling than health care.

Romney's chapter on education has some good ideas despite the Leftist creationism ("It is not a coincidence that student achievement scores by ethnicity mirror the rates of out-of-wedlock births."  You don't say...) The teachers' unions oppose merit pay and higher salaries for math and science teachers. They instead support reforms like smaller class room sizes, which increase the amount of work they have but have been shown not to make a difference in student performance. On immigration, we get the usual conservative formula of legal + skilled = good and illegals = bad. The Hispanicization of the country is accepted as fait acompli, however, and the need to close the achievement gap seen as vital for America's future.

There are a few reasons that Romney might not win the Republican nomination: mainly he's Mormon, a flip-flopper, and comes across as too perfect. But all that may not matter. After all, had John McCain not been around, Romney would've been the nominee in 2008. And the 2012 field looks just as bad. He doesn't have to convince voters that he's their soul mate, but just gather more votes than Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee. It's hard to see who else is going to pull it off.

By the end of his book, I wanted to like Romney again. Domestically at least, America would probably be a freer and better country if he became president. Still, my revulsion for his foreign policy would probably stop me from ever voting for him. At a time when true conservative movements are succeeding all over Europe, the last thing the West needs is Washington's definition of "human rights" militarily dominating the globe. As a matter of fact, Romney may prove so competent an executive that he prolongs the inevitable decline of the empire.

The problem with dealing honestly with race is that if you’re familiar with and talk about the science/common sense on group differences it’ll overshadow everything else you want to say. Imagine someone coming up to you and telling you he’s an environmentalist, creationist, neo-con and child molester. The last descriptive term is the only thing that you’re going to take away.  Everything else becomes irrelevant. So it is with the term “racist.” The term means little more than believing in the scientific method and rejecting the double standard which says Asian countries for Asians, African countries for Africans, Middle Eastern countries for Middle Easterners and white nations for everybody.

With that in mind, take a look at Frum Forum’s Tim Mak’s new article on Alternative Right.  See if you can find anything in there that would be out of place in a report put out by the SPLC.

It's certainly no fun to work so hard building a beautiful website and assembling a top-shelf group of contributors and then be ignored. So I'm glad that AltRight has ruffled enough feathers for the neocons and anti-racist Left (two groups that curiously seem to agree on quite a bit!) to take note. Peter Brimelow and I, and a couple of others, have already given interviews to a representative of FrumForum.com, and I doubt this was merely a fact-finding mission. Expect an article on us in David Frum's website in the near future. Yes, it's likely that this will be a hit piece, and the interviewer often tried to talk me into an Aren't-You-All-Just-A-Bunch-Of-Evil-Racists? corner. But I generally liked the guy, so I'll remain optimistic that the portrayal of us is fair.

Peter Brimelow discusses this issue on the VDARE blog:

I gave two phone interviews today, one to American Prospect’s Jessica Weisberg, who seems to be working on another version of the John-Tanton-is-the root-of all-evil meme, and FrumForum’s Tim Mak about Richard Spencer’s Alternative Right. (AltRight seems to be upsetting the political hegemonists. Here’s another attack, ludicrously blaming AltRight on me.)

Long experience has taught me to have no particular hope of accuracy or even elementary fairness in articles resulting from this sort of interview. But it struck me that they both ended on the same note. Ms. Weisberg asked me what were Tanton’s “real”motives. (Answer: he’s really interested in TREES, dammit! MORE PEOPLE MEAN FEWER TREES! How much clearer can he make it?) Mak asked me, rather nervously, didn’t I think that covering human biodiversity would lead to accusations of racism. (Answer:everything leads to accusations of racism–deal with it.)

Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":

"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."

Perhaps you've been following the latest diversity madness at the University of California San Diego (49 percent Asian, 27 percent white, 2 percent black).  Last month a fraternity had a "Compton Cookout" to celebrate Black History Month.  That week, a student on the campus TV station called those protesting the party "ungrateful n-----s" and the next day "the Black Student Union issued a list of demands, including mandatory diversity sensitivity classes, increased African American enrollment in students and faculty and the creation of space in central campus considered 'safe for African-American students.'" Then last week, a noose was conveniently found in the library.  Black students stormed the chancellor's office before it was revealed that the perpetrator of the crime wasn't white.  In the latest news , "a white pillowcase crudely fashioned into a Ku Klux Klan- style hood" was found on a statue last Monday.  The AP also reports "This week, officials at UC Santa Cruz found an image of a noose scribbled on the inside of a bathroom door."

Imagine you're a UCSD student.  You lock yourself in the bathroom stall one morning and suddenly recall reading an AP report that said that at your school a drawing of a noose was found on the bathroom wall.  Knowing that if you cover the wall with swastikas it'll be a national story and nobody will ever find out, how do you resist?

Meanwhile, two students from the University of Missouri have been arrested and charged with "second degree tampering" for leaving cotton balls outside a black culture center.  Think about it for a minute...

Making his point (allegedly) with shoelaces, cotton balls, pillow cases and drawings on bathroom walls.  After the centuries of colonization and slavery, my how far the white oppressor has fallen.

Inclusiveness is radically inconsistent with free thought and speech. The problem is quite fundamental. To question the principle of equal inclusion is to put some people's standing in question and ipso facto to exclude them from full equality with those whose standing is not in question. A regime of inclusiveness must therefore suppress questioning of its principles if it is to exist at all.

More generally, every system needs standards and restrictions, and doing away with some makes others more important. For that reason, expanding some aspects of diversity means limiting others. In particular, making ethnic and sexual diversity a supreme value means limiting permissible opinion quite radically. If it is unshakable dogma that group differences never cause problems, and they obviously cause problems, there are going to be severe limits on thought and discussion so the problems can't come up.

A couple of people have asked about my comment “high IQ people are by and large easier to brainwash.”  Is it really true?  I think so, and will explain why.

Let’s take feminism, which along with Marxism and racial egalitarianism is one of the “big three” evils that have cursed the modern world.  How might a smart person be easier to brainwash in a women’s studies course?  We can look at some feminist material to see.