All across the nation today, 17 and 18-year-old males will be signing and faxing in their letter of intent to play college football. Tuition, books, room and board, a food stipend, and unbelievable exposure to big-time alumni connections for future job prospects accompany each scholarship.

That chance to compete for a starting spot right away; the chance to shine and win a Heisman Trophy; the chance to wear the coolest, flashest uniform and be seen on ESPN, ultimately having the opportunity to make it to the NFL. For two-to-three years prior, the best high school football players have received hundreds of letters from some of the top college football programs detailing why they should consider playing at Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, Alabama, Texas, or Oklahoma. 

They have received phone call after phone call; text after text; and in-house visits from coaches and recruiters representing these schools, not to mention the on-campus visits with all expenses paid by the school in attempts to entice these talented athletes to spend four years (at least, hypothetically) representing the university or college on the gridiron.

Big money is devoted to recruiting: in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the University of Tennessee spent an average of $1.15 million a year on recruiting from 2005 – 2008. The return on investment hasn’t exactly panned out, unless you count a high arrest rate as a some kind of off-the-field victory. And a pitiful graduation rate—well, unless you include White players—for those highly sought after, Black recruits, the majority of who have no business attending the university save for their perceived athletic superiority.

Thus far, one writer has documented the insanity surrounding the recruiting business. In Meat Market, Bruce Feldman shows us the insane lengths that the football coaches at the University of Mississippi will go in trying to secure the top high-school (or junior-college) talent in America.

Jared Taylor joins Richard to discuss the upcoming American Renaissance Conference, as well as his 25-year experience in thought criminality.

You can register for the 2012 AmRen Conference here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the years go by, news of the world throwing billions at Africans with nothing to show for it no longer shocks me. (Plus ça change… In our the egalitarian age, who knows how many trillions have been wasted attempting to equalize the races?)

What I find, in a way, more disturbing is that ostensibly intelligent grown men will still sit around a table telling one another fairy tales about why, after all that money, Haiti still looks like...Haiti.

Can someone get these poor fools some Richard Lynn!

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.”

As a resident of the Philippines, I would be lying if I did not entertain thoughts of immigration at some point in time. One of the deepest desires of Filipinos is to stop being Filipinos in the Philippines, and instead become Filipinos in [insert wealthy country of your choice]. I personally don’t like this mentality, but that is how things are. I seriously doubt most non-Whites who immigrate to Western Nations want Whites to become a minority. I doubt most of them fully understand what multiculturalism, anti-racism, or political correctness, not to mention their consequences. For the most part, what people want from immigration is the ability to earn cash and cease living in poverty.

However, the question of immigration is not just about immigration per se. It is also about identity. Immigrants to Western Countries—by implication—want to be American, European, Australian, etc... That is to say, there is an implied desire among Non-White immigrants to become “Westerners” (since, you know, they can’t be White).

I personally don’t hold this desire. I may be inclined to visit other nations, study in them, and meet people from other cultures, but looking at the bigger picture, I rather like being a Filipino, despite all the problems and issues that go along with it. There is a subtlety and depth to my particular identity that is essential to how I perceive the world, and how the world perceives me. And besides, I rather like being a darkie!

Of particular relevance to this topic is an old cinematic masterpiece called Ganito Kami Noon... Paano Kayo Ngayon (This is How We Were Then...How Are You Now?). The setting of the movie was around the end of the 19th century, when Spain’s grip over the Philippine islands was weakening, and the fury of nationalism was getting stronger with each passing day.

Among the most important elements of the movie was the theme of identity, and in this case, Filipino identity. “Filipino,” during the Spanish colonial era in the Philippines, was a term reserved exclusively for Spaniards born in the Philippines. In other words, “Filipino” was an identity which was reserved exclusively for people of a specific ethnicity.

The publication earlier this year of Jared Taylor’s White Identity was quite a milestone. In essence, it was the sequel to his Paved With Good Intentions, which was, as National Review remarked upon its publication in 1992, “the most important book to be published on the subject [of race relations] in many years.”

White Identity has already been ably reviewed in AltRight by Derek Turner, and there is no need to rehash the book's arguments. What I will do instead is reflect on what has happened the to pro-White movement in the almost two decades that separate the publication of these works—and how this history portends for the growth of a White racial identity in the United States.

The main difference between Taylor's two books is that while Paved focused almost exclusively on Black-White relations, Identity has separate chapters for Hispanic and Asian racial consciousness, in addition to ones on Blacks and Whites. Multiracial America is here, and while Asians and Hispanics will not be forming a rainbow coalition with Blacks, they are also not going to integrate like the Italians, Irish,and Jews of last century either. Indeed, with the reality of affirmative action, changing demographics and the racial spoils system, it is of no benefit for non-Whites to integrate into the existing White society. (One important point in Identity is that Asians, once the “model minority,” are increasingly shunning assimilation for an identity of their own.)

Reading Identity, it is hard to avoid the feeling that things look bleak for White Americans. Taylor sums up the situation as follows:

The demographic forces we have set in motion have created conditions that are inherently unstable and potentially violent. All other groups are growing in number and have a vivid racial identity. Only whites have no racial identity, are constantly on the defensive, and constantly in retreat. They have a choice: regain a sense of identity and the resolve to maintain their numbers, their traditions and their way of life – or face oblivion.

The fate of the two books tells a negative tale of the last two decades. Paved was published by a respected, mainstream publisher (Carroll & Graf) and sold roughly 45,000 copies. It was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Washington Times and many other mainstream publications. White Identity was self published after getting numerous rejections from mainstream publishers. As Taylor notes, “this book is unfit for commercial publication in the United States.” It was reviewed in no mainstream publications.

Every couple of years or so, a “respectable,” Establishmentarian, Center-Left commentator will touch on the subject of racial differences in intelligence. William Saletan was the last. Andrew Sullivan is the latest. 

In the abstract, the fact that Beltway journalists would be interested in the subject of race and IQ should not at all be surprising. The evidence for racially defined and, more or less, intractable differences in General Intelligence (g) is mountainous. And race has tremendous predictive power when it comes to individuals and societies. (A report on an inexplicable achievement gap between Blacks and Asians might shock and dismay New York Times readers; among American Renaissance subscribers, it elicits a yawn.) The impact of racial differences in intelligence on international economies—and international investment—has yet to be fully explored.

Nevertheless, the reality of race undermines the civic religion of most Western societies—as well as almost every piece of socially uplifting legislation from the past 50 years—and thus has become the ultimate taboo.

And hesitant expeditions into the unspeakable by writers like Sullivan and Saletan usually evoke a quick, predictable response:

• The offender’s colleagues express outrage, and he is symbolically rapped across the wrist with a ruler;
• The offender’s critics eventually suggest ostracism as the only solution;
• The heretic relents, recants, and begs for forgiveness.

There’s no need for state intervention; journalists police themselves effectively.

But perhaps Sullivan will break the trend… In the mid-’90s, when Sullivan was Editor of The New Republic (and a neocon/neoliberal or sorts), he published an entire issue dedicated to sober commentary on Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve. Indeed, this issue—along with a non-hysterical review in the New York Times Book Review—marked the last moment in which racial differences in intelligence were discussed forthrightly in mainstream sources—before the door was slammed and bolted shut.

While little of what Sullivan writes will be surprising to readers in the AltRight sphere, he does make one important point that will touch fair-minded liberals: “The study of intelligence has been strangled by pc egalitarianism.” (Just ask Bruce Lahn, hardly a "White Nationalist" but simply a scholar searching for truth.)

Moreover, it came as no surprise to me that race realism is breaking out among liberals, who can no longer abide the cognitive dissonance between PC and their expressed support of the scientific method and empirical research—and not among conservatives and paleos. The “conservative movement” has fully embraced a kind of “Americanist Creationism,” in which everyone who believes in “equality” can be an American, and all earthly residents outside America's borders must be integrated into our One True Way. The paleos, it seems, have decided to take a pass on the central, most unavoidable geopolitical question of our time. This choice hasn’t granted them credibility...it's simply made them unthreatening. (Note that Charles Murray’s update on The Bell Curve, “The Inequality Taboo,” appeared in the neocon Commentary, not Chronicles.)

For years, Andrew Sullivan has been a reliable barometer of the social mood of America’s college-educated masses: that is to say, he’s flipped from being a neoliberal in the ‘90s...to a war-happy neocon after 9/11...to an anti-war “realist” around 2006...to an Obamaniac in 2008...etc. etc. etc.

Let’s hope that this time, he takes a principled stand.

“Heartiste” (who’s still “Roissy” to me) demonstrates, through the ramblings of blogger Amanda Marcotte, that HBD and Feminism are implacable enemies.

Most everything he writes there is true...but the science of human nature demolishes more than just bitchy feminism.

In America, and much of the Western world, right-thinking people think about Evolution thusly: 

• If you’re liberal, then Darwin was absolutely correct. Only backward, religious people think otherwise. That said, around 60,000 years ago, Evolution pulled the emergency break: no significant human development has occurred since then; all apparent racial differences are either “skin deep” or social constructs. Only backward, racist, religious people think otherwise.

• If you’re a conservative, Darwin was dead wrong. To believe his Theory is to deny that there is a moral thrust to the universe—and thus to undermine the basis of Democracy, Equality, and Apple Pie. Plus, Darwin is racist.  

It’s difficult to judge which side is wronger in this dispute…

In the conservatives' defense, Darwin is “racist,” in the sense that the procedure of Evolution explains not only the differences between Africans and Europeans but those between Yorkshire Terriers and Pit Bulls.

What’s significant is that the positions of both the acceptable Left and Right are radically egalitarian, each in its own way.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that there’s no inherent reason why a sincere religious believer could not affirm that God (or the Gods) made the races distinct and separate—or that He (or They) delineated the fates of each individual. The godfather of scientific racism, Arthur de Gobineau, an ancien-regime Catholic, actually rejected Darwin, exclaiming, “We are not descended from the ape, but we are headed in that direction!”

Whatever the case, the American Creed, of both Left and Right,  is that You Can Be All That You Can Be, and anyone and everyone can be an American.  HBD is pure heresy.

I hesitate to write a preface to this article, as it stands on its own. It should also be clear that AltRight has no “party line” and, indeed, is at its best when it acts a forum for ideas to be tested. That said, I am not persuaded by Johnson Miller's conclusion that a scientific understanding of race should have no place—or, at most, a greatly reduced one—within traditionalist circles. I even quibble with a few of his factual assertions. That said, this piece makes an important point, and, furthermore, I recognize that there is a real divide within the non-aligned Right between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” “Archeo-Futurism,” a future-oriented movement within tradition, associated mostly with Guillaume Faye, is a project I support; however, I won't deny that there is a tension, and sometimes antagonism, between its two components. ~Richard Spencer

Human Biological Diversity (HBD), as a concept, is inimical to the radical traditionalism identified as the core orientation of Alternative Right. The use of HBD does stand as a challenge to the egalitarianism of Liberalism and, more generally, of modernity. However, the abstraction, materialism, and quantification upon which HBD is predicated are in fact more characteristic of Liberalism than of anything called traditionalism. We should not give ourselves over to the scientists’ materialist conceptions of man. We need, instead, an organic conception of man that recognizes the transcendent.

It was in the development of eugenics that we gained a clear crystallization of the “nature versus nurture” conflict, as well as the idea of races as statistical populations that is so important for HBD. And it was the Left that gave us eugenics. It was driven by a Progressive desire for an increasingly powerful state that could intervene to manage populations perceived as troublesome in order to promote the improvement of society. Eugenists believed in the perfectibility of man. But, instead of perfecting individuals through education and the creation of free societies, as was the desire of eighteenth-century proponents of the Enlightenment, eugenists sought to rationally manipulate the very materials of inheritance to produce long-term improvements in populations.

Granted, there were great variations in the methods and goals of eugenists, but, most relevant for HBD, was the development of statistical methods to map out human difference. But what concept of the nature of man is embedded in this? To them, man was fundamentally mechanical. He was defined by the material nature of his inheritance. Why did some people and not others commit crimes? Not because they were immoral, enmeshed in sin, or because of any other spiritual or moral quality. They committed crimes because of their biological inheritance. They couldn’t help it. This view of man absolves us of any responsibility, as well as of any free will or spiritual quality. It’s no wonder that eugenics came from the Left and not the Right.