Noam Scheiber in The New Republic has written an article that sounds like just about every other establishment liberal piece of the last few decades. Smart people with money are fooling dumb whites without money into advocating against their own interests. Instead, the dumb whites should listen to the other smart white people, those whose jobs and power depend on an activist and interventionist state.

Scheiber here is specifically writing about the recent criticism of the Fed.  The smart rich people are represented by the Pauls (Ron and Rand), while the dumb poor people have Sarah Palin.

What exactly does the former Alaskan governor get wrong?

There was, for example, her discussion of quantitative easing as though it were sorcery. “And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We’re printing it out of thin air,” she complained. True-ish.

“True-ish” is liberal for “true.”

Then there’s my favorite passage of the speech, which displayed Palin’s solicitude for European policymaking sensibilities. “The German finance minister called the Fed’s proposals ‘clueless,’” she said. “When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it’s time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist.” But the starchy Germans always worry about inflation, even when it’s not remotely a threat. (In the same way, my Jewish mother always worries that I’m starving, but I don’t take that as a reason to gorge myself.) If, on the other hand, Zimbabwe started lecturing us on out-of-control inflation, that might get my attention.

In other words, it’s irrational to complain until Zimbabwe is criticizing your monetary policy.  Why does anybody even bother trying to keep up with the brilliant Mr. Scheiber?

In this way, Palin is a near-perfect symbol of a certain type of Tea Partier—the people who’ve had enough of the government’s arrogant scheming, even if their worldview falls a bit short of cohering. When The New York Times surveyed Tea Party supporters earlier this year, it conducted follow-up interviews to gauge respondents’ thoughts on Medicare and Social Security. Most resisted cuts to either program. “That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” a woman named Jodine White told the paper. “I don’t know what to say. … I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” Like Palin, White’s opposition to government isn’t logical; it’s visceral.

Look, there’s no doubt that many Tea Partiers hold views that are silly and maybe even damaging to themselves in the long run.  But I’m not holding my breath waiting for The Weekly Standard or Wall Street Journal to go and interview the least intelligent members of the Democratic base probing for logical inconsistencies in their statements.  Any movement or ideology that’s going to gain wide support in a democratic society is going to have a lot of followers who are of sub-standard IQ.  Luckily for liberals, making fun of their stupids is hate speech. 

Not only do liberals often accuse lower class whites of failing to understand the issues of the day, but their errors are said to work against their own interests.  Since blacks and Hispanics do actually benefit from redistributionist policies, Scheiber may argue that it doesn’t matter if many of those who vote for his side are stupid because they make the right choices, even if for the wrong reasons.  This seems sensible enough, though one must notice that this is a philosophy which sees amorality as the trait of the ideal citizen.  If you’re old, take your Social Security and Medicare and don’t worry about the debt to future generations because that’s what’s in your interests.  If you don’t have health insurance you should support other people having to buy it for you without any further philosophical or ethical considerations.  Only when poor whites reach this advanced stage of moral development will the Left find them acceptable.

As the Palins are the dupes, the Pauls are the villains.

But more than anything else, the Pauls represent the interest of the affluent and educated. After all, the people most worried about the debasement of the currency are the people who, well, have a lot of currency. On the other hand, the working class, who typically have more in the way of debt than assets, actually benefit from inflation, since it eats away at the value of their mortgages and credit card bills. Likewise, when the Pauls rail against Social Security and Medicare, they’re being perfectly true to their class, since the two programs downwardly redistribute income. It’s part of the reason Ron Paul’s presidential campaign took off on college campuses and online, two places where the affluent and educated congregate. (By contrast, unpublished data from this recent Washington Post poll shows that college grads are much more likely than non-college grads to have an unfavorable view of Palin and to believe she’s unqualified to be president.) One of Ron Paul’s most indispensable online activists was an early Google employee who sold his stock at the peak of the market.

While it’s true that many in the working class with high time preference and moderate to low intelligence and earning power would be hurt by the abolition of say, Social Security and Medicare, I find it hard to believe that those conscientious enough to join a movement worried about what government debt means for future generations will be among those who lack the foresight to save for retirement.  True, inflation eats away at debt, but it also eats away at savings.  There is an aspect of rich/smart vs. poor/stupid to the debates about who benefits from different kinds of monetary policy and the extent of government spending, but these issues also pit the responsible and thrifty against the wasteful and capricious.

And in the end, if one takes Scheiber’s analysis at face value, there's the question of on what grounds the author can object to the wealthy, conscientious and prudent working for their own interests.

These past few weeks, my in-box has been deluged with Republican propaganda of various sorts; all of it reiterating the message that “the American people” are rising up and poised to “take back their country” from the entrenched “ruling class.” I also received quite a few emails from individuals -- country club Republicans and Red State yahoos alike -- who echoed the same line.

Judging by last night’s results, I apparently have my country back.

Not too long from now, rhetoric will be shredded by reality.

• Obamacare will not be repealed. (No major entitlement has been repealed for decades, and House Republicans couldn’t get rid of Obamacare even if they weren’t lying cowards.)

• The House Republicans will likely halt any “cap-and-trade” legislation. That’s a good thing. But it’s hard to rely on them for much else. The word “stimulus” has had the micky taken out of it, but there’s no telling what kind of Keynesian nonsense they would support if the Dow Jones dropped a couple thousand points. Let’s not forget that in 2008, the Republicans brought us “stimulus” checks in the spring and bailouts in the fall.

[To lighten the mood, here’s a amusing joke I heard at last night’s big Republican shindig at the Leadership Institute:Some people are claiming that Obama is a Keynesian. But it’s been proven that he was born in Hawaii!  Hardyharhar…]

Arianna Huffington claims that Jon Stewart is not a liberal, but simply someone who speaks truth to power.  I disagree.  If Jon Stewart told Arianna Stassinopoulos that she is an unprincipled fag hag who has slept her way up the social ladder so she can be praised for telling us the same lies everyone else in the media does, then that would be truth to power.  Nor would such language be uncalled for to describe self-appointed intellectuals who think of gay sex acts when someone references the Boston Tea Party.  The Huffington/Stewart love fest is power praising power, liberals congratulating each other on their nonexistent courage, and the ruling class uniting to mock the great unwashed who pay their salaries.

Politics is about who, not what, and increasingly rallies have become exercises in identity politics rather than mobilization for specific issues.  Most liberal commentators are interpreting the Tea Party movement as a manifestation of white racial consciousness, with Whites supposedly outraged at a Black president ruling “their” country. The fact that the rallies are overwhelmingly White (with most minorities relegated to the speaker’s duties) is taken as evidence enough that the Tea Party is composed of closet Klansmen.  As Keith Olbermann tediously speechified,

Let me ask all of you who attend these things, how many black faces do you see at these events?’ and ‘Why are you surrounded by largest crowd you will ever again see in your life that consists of nothing but people who look exactly like you?

Of course, this could be said not just of your average Tea Party rally or Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally, but Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.  Both are powerful examples of implicit Whiteness, though neither heralds any kind of burgeoning White racial consciousness.  The Tea Parties are more interested in highlighting the black Founding Fathers that racist progressives have covered up, whereas Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” is essentially an effort by SWPL’s to mock a straw man they’ve created to describe religious conservatives. After all, Keith Olbermann tells us that those primitives don’t believe in evolution but also believe in the existence of racial differences, unlike progressives who understand modern science.

In case you missed it, Comedy Central’s John Stewart and Stephen Colbert hosted their “Restore Sanity/Keep Fear Alive” rally this weekend on Washington’s National Mall. The straight man in the act was Stewart (“sanity”), an open liberal concerned about extremism; the funny man was Stephen Colbert (“fear”), who appeared “in character” as an extremist conservative. Such an arrangement is all you need to know about what Comedy Central thinks of traditional Euro-Americans.

Though before I start bashing the rally, I’d be remiss in not pointing out that Stewart and his writers have no small amount of talent and mettle. Throughout the 9/11 years (2001-2006), the tragedy and farce of “movement conservatism,” I found myself agreeing with most of the Daily Show clips I came across in which Stewart would criticize the pompous “democracy spreaders” and their beloved “Decidor.” Certainly, no one else on mainstream cable was willing to report on then-candidate Barack Obama’s kowtow to AIPAC using a New York “Jewy” voice, as Stewart did in a now legendary segment, “Indecision 5768.”

But that was then -- in 2007, an “extremist” conservative was in the White House and Barack Obama was a plucky underdog -- and this is now -- Democrats run the country and grassroots conservatism has taken up the mantle of social protest. Stewart’s message has thus modulated to lampooning those who are anti-Establishment and offering the soothing counsel of take it easy, trust in your elected leaders, don’t question the system, in less subtle words, OBEY!

Commentaries published on this website, most notably by Richard Spencer and Elizabeth Wright, have underlined the problems with the Tea Party movement and its most prominent representatives. These pointed observations about Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, and Christine O’ Donnell have all been true; and if I have more or less defended some of these figures in the past, I’ve done so, while conceding most of the argument made against them. I agree in particular with Elizabeth Wright’s brief against Rand Paul’s stuttering attempt to object to the public accommodations clause in the Civil Rights Act and her withering attack on Glenn Beck’s recent “carnival of repentance” in Washington.

Elizabeth concludes that such soi-disant critics of the Left cannot bring themselves to find fault with any excess in the Civil Rights movement -- and especially not with its far leftist icon Martin Luther King. “Conservatives” are so terrified of being called “racists” or for that matter, sexists or homophobes, that they devote themselves tirelessly to showing they are just as sensitive as the next PC robot. Indeed, they often go well beyond anyone on the left in genuflecting before leftist icons. This was the purpose of the Martin Luther King-adoration rally held by Beck in Washington.

And even more outrageously, such faux conservatives accuse long-dead Democratic presidents, who were well to the right of the current conservative movement, of being more radical than they actually were. It would be no exaggeration to say that Wilson and FDR were far more reactionary than any celebrity in the Tea Party movement. One could only imagine what such antediluvian Democrats would have said if they had heard last year’s “Conservative of the Year,” chosen by Human Events, Dick Cheney, weeping all over the floor about not allowing gays to marry each other. And what would that stern Presbyterian and Southern segregationist Wilson have thought about the cult of King or the attempts by Tea Party leaders Palin and McDonnell to impose feminist codes of behavior on business and educational establishments. Wilson had to be dragged even into supporting the extension of the franchise to women.

The Tea Party sounds so often like the Left because it is for the most part a product of the Left. Its people were educated in public schools, watch mass entertainment, and have absorbed most of the leftist values of the elite class, to whose rule they object only quite selectively. From the demonstrators’ perspective, that elite isn’t patriotic enough in backing America’s crusades for human rights and in looking after the marvelous welfare state we’ve already built. The Tea Party types are understandably upset that their entitlements may be imperiled, if the current administration continues to run up deficits. This is the essence of their anti-government rant. And above all they don’t want more illegals coming into the country who may benefit from the social net and who may be receiving tax-subsidized medical care.

But this, we are assured, has nothing to do with race or culture. In fact the Tea Party claims to be acting on behalf of blacks and legally resident Latinos, in the name of Martin Luther King and all the civil rights saints of the past. It just so happens that almost all these activists are white Christians. Nonetheless, they are also people, as Elizabeth perceptively notices, who would like us to think they’re acting in the name of other ethnic groups, even if those groups don’t much like them. As four “young conservatives” explained to the viewers of the Today show last week, the Right wishes to lower taxes, specifically “to make jobs available to black Americans.” Unfortunately black Americans loathe those reaching out to them, presumably as a gesture of repentance as well as in pursuit of votes.

Those “conservatives” who want a moderate but not excessive welfare state and who act in the name of blacks, Latinos and dead leftist heroes, are fully tuned in to the conservative establishment. According to polls, these folks love FOX-news and avidly read movement conservative publications. Palin, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove, all FOX contributors, are among their favored speakers; and the Tea Party’s likely candidate for president, Sarah Palin, is now surrounded by such predictable neocon advisors as Randy Scheuermann and Bill Kristol. Even with her insipid, ungrammatical phrases about reducing the size of government, Palin already looks like an updated, feminine and feminized version of what the GOP has been running for president for decades, with neocon approval.

Actually one shouldn’t expect anything else from the Tea Party. In the 1980s the conservative movement witnessed a monumental sea change, when the neoconservatives assumed full power and proceeded to kick out dissenters. This development shaped the future of the Right, and its effects are still with us. The neoconservatives not only neutralized any real Right but also managed to infantilize what they took over. An entire generation of serious conservative thinkers were bounced out and replaced by either lackeys or by those who were essentially recycled liberal Democrats. The latter had recoiled from the anti-Zionist stands of the leftwing of the Democratic Party and then were given as a consolation prize carte blanche to swallow up the conservative movement.

Afterwards the establishment Right began to move in the direction of the Left, and it did so while limiting the range of disagreement with its opponents to a few acceptable talking points. The emphasis was on Middle Eastern intervention, disciplining anti-Semitic nations, and spreading “democratic values.” Internally the neocon Herrenklasse had no real interest, except for being able to do favors for corporations that financed them and for the Religious Right, which is fervently Zionist. The notion the neocons bestowed depth on the conservative movement may be the most blatant lie ever told. What they brought was agitprop, of the kind practiced by Soviet bureaucrats, and armies of culturally illiterate adolescents to turn out their party propaganda.

In all fairness, it must be said that the master class tolerated other points of view, for example from Catholic Thomists or Evangelicals, as long as these religiously inspired positions didn’t interfere with what counted for the neocons. Those who called the shots would also occasionally demand from their dependents certain favors, in return for subsidies and publicity, e.g., stressing the compatibility of Christian theology with neocon policies. Freeloading intellectuals could only be tolerated for so long.

This hegemony had two noticeable effects on the current Right, aside from the unchanged role of the neocons as the main power-players. The rightwing activists shown on TV and those they support in elections include badly educated duds, and these are individuals who often don’t sound like anything an historian might recognize as conservative. Their yapping about human rights (supposedly there is now a human right to own a gun) and their outpouring of the politics of guilt, as noted by Elizabeth Wright, are just two of their weird characteristics. About ten years ago I gaped with astonishment when I read a commentary by Jonah Goldberg explaining that the Catholic counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre was really a far leftist. It seems that Maistre questioned the idea of universal human rights und dared to note that human beings were marked by different national and ethnic features. These quirks, according to Goldberg, belong exclusively to the left, like “liberal fascism.” When the intellectual Right can come up with such nonsense and then parley it into a fortune, it is hard to imagine any lower depths of cultural illiteracy to which it could sink.

The “conservative wars” of the 1980s, which involved mostly a mopping up operation, also led to a hard Right that is unrelated to any other American intellectual Right. Those associated with this Right wish to have nothing to do with the failed or decimated Old Right that was smashed decades ago. It has found its home among the thirty-some generation and even more, among younger conservatives who are not part of the DC neocon network. One finds among these militants an almost primitive counterrevolutionary mentality. It is one that has taken form as an impassioned reaction to the Left’s masquerading as the Right, which began with the neoconservatives’ ascendancy to total domination. Although I have my reservations about what I’m describing, it must be seen as a spirited response to a fraud as well as to something that is intellectually and aesthetically vulgar.

Clearly this youthful Right is in no way influenced by Russell Kirk or by other “cultural conservatives” of an earlier generation. Its advocates reject a Right that was co-opted by the neocons and by those who are thought to have failed to resist that fateful takeover. Nor would most of those in the “culturally conservative” camp (Jim Kalb may be the exception here) feel comfortable with the exuberant reactionaries of the rising generation. Many of them sound like neo-pagans because they are convinced that the Western religious tradition has given rise to what they condemn as “the pathology of egalitarianism.” The French New Right, Nietzsche, and Carl Schmitt have all shaped this still inchoate youthful American Right. In their case Europe has cast its shadow on the US, unlike the multicultural Left, which, as I have argued in several books, is our poisonous gift to the Europeans.

The emergence of this anti-egalitarian Right and the infantilization of movement conservatism indicate what can not be undone. The American Right has changed irreversibly because of what occurred during the Reagan years and in the ensuing decade. We shall continue to live with the consequences.

The Tea Party, much like country music, evangelical Christianity, and the Republican Party, fits Ellison Lodge’s description of a movement whose identity is implicitly white and yet whose rhetoric is explicitly non-racial or multiculturalist. The overwhelming majority of Tea Party participants (I’d say 90-95 percent) are white people. The Tea Party leadership, however, has bent over backwards to put colorful African-American entertainers and advocates of free-markets up on stage at every rally, each new one more embarrassing than the last.

Keith Olbermann is thus on to something when he asks,  “How many black faces do you see at these events?” The answer is, of course, that American blacks are about as interested in cutting welfare programs and returning to a laissez-faire republic as they are in taking up polo.

When Olberman attacked the Tea Party for its alleged “racism” this past spring, its leadership fought back with what I’ve called “PC Judo -- they essentially affirmed politically correct values and taboos and tried to turn them against their left-wing critics.  As Lodge recounted, the Dallas Tea Party made a video that featured every non-white Tea Partier they could find and then pointed reprovingly to MSNBC’s mono-racial collection of prime-time hosts. Olbermann’s and MSNBC’s hypocrisy is real, but the implication of the counter-attack is that all-white movements are inherently suspect or illegitimate.

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

Conservatives frequently like to depict themselves as hard-nosed realists, and liberals as living in a world of wishful thinking. This is often true. Sometimes, though, it’s conservatives who mistake fantasy for reality.

I’ve previously praised Rick Barber for his badassness and revolutionary rhetoric, but I’m afraid he might have jumped the shark with his latest commercial, in which he asks Abe Lincoln how one should call it when government taxes people to pay for other people’s healthcare. “Slavery!” is Honest Abe’s answer.

In one way, it’s good for Tea Partiers to think like this -- and they might be inspired to roll back much, much more than Obamacare. However, in this video (which I found while writing my last blog), Keith Olbermann and David Weigel rightly point out that Lincoln is one of the worst “Founders” to associate with such sentiments: he instituted the first income tax, not to mention a military draft (Objectors were shot!). Not all American history before Jimmy Carter was Morning in America.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Two articles of interest to the Alternative Right. While Richard is trying to craft an intellectual movement of the disparate pieces of the disposessed Right, we should give some thoughts as to how the political sausage is made. While intellectualizing is important, the real strength of the movement is how  people live it internally. This Policy Review article on the Tea Party phenomenon points this out nicely. The Tea Party movement is the closest thing to a break in the neoconservative hegemony we have. It has virtually no intellectuals of note, no real new ideas; it is an attitude and a warning to the ruling elite. Intellectuals (I prefer to refer to them as "technocratic elites") think they're leading movements. The point I take away from this article: they may be running things, but they're not leading any movements. Furthermore, the article points out a dimension of how the present elite's social control works: social aspiration. If you're a middle class schlub in an office job who wants to think of himself as better than your fellows, how do you do it? Well, the same way the middle class has always done it -- by apeing the folkways of the social class immediately above them, in this case, the class consisting of technocratic professionals who run the place.

A governing elite that has a monopoly over the allocation of prestige has immense power over a culture. It can decide what ideas, thinkers, and movements merit attention, while it can also determine what ideas, thinkers, and movements should be dismissed with scorn and contempt — assuming that the elite even condescends to notice their existence. Needless to say, such a setup will lead to a high degree of intellectual cronyism, in which members of the “in” group mutually endorse and reinforce each others’ prestige; but like crony capitalism, this is standard operating procedure of all elites and should come as no surprise. Relying on the natural human desire to gravitate towards prestige, the intellectual elite has no need to resort to the ham-fisted methods of Orwell’s Big Brother.

What sparked the Tea Party revolt is mounting dissatisfaction at living in a society in which a small group has increasingly solidified its monopoly over the manufacture and distribution of opinion, deciding which ideas and policies should be looked upon favorably and which political candidates will be sympathetically reported. Even more, the Tea Party rebels bitterly resent the rigid censorship exercised by this elite over the limits of acceptable public discourse. Those who have the power to rule an opinion “out of order” do not need to take the trouble to refute it, or even examine it. They can simply make it go away.

It is the Tea Partiers’ indifference to the whole idea of intellectual respectability that renders them immune to the prestige pressure that molds and shapes the ideas and opinions of those who do care about being intellectually respectable. To put it another way, the Tea Partiers can escape the otherwise all-pervasive influence of our cultural elite because they are the people who Gramsci called marginalized outsiders.

The whole article is worth a read.

Coming at the problem from another direction is Fred Reed. Fred is acutely aware of social class, since he comes from what Christian Landers would call, "the wrong kind of white people." You know, like the Tea Partiers.

When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in. I conclude that they suffer from Commentator’s Disease, which consists in the confluence of several disabilities, the first being high intelligence.  ...

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain. They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Fred is essentially pointing out the same thing: the loons in charge of the booby hatch we call America have very little real connection with the actual human beings who live here. While an Alternative Right should generate new ideas, and dust off some useful old ones, if we want to have some impact on the world, we need to connect with the people who live in it.

The Federal Government is taking steps to make sure Americans vote sufficiently along racial lines.

PORT CHESTER, N.Y. — Arthur Furano voted early – five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

Voters in Port Chester, 25 miles northeast of New York City, are electing village trustees for the first time since the federal government alleged in 2006 that the existing election system was unfair. The election ends Tuesday and results are expected late Tuesday.

Although the village of about 30,000 residents is nearly half Hispanic, no Latino had ever been elected to any of the six trustee seats, which until now were chosen in a conventional at-large election. Most voters were white, and white candidates always won.

Federal Judge Stephen Robinson said that violated the Voting Rights Act, and he approved a remedy suggested by village officials: a system called cumulative voting, in which residents get six votes each to apportion as they wish among the candidates. He rejected a government proposal to break the village into six districts, including one that took in heavily Hispanic areas...

Vote coordinator Martha Lopez said that if turnout is higher than in recent years, when it hovered around 25 percent, the election would be a success – regardless of whether a Hispanic was elected.

"I think we'll make it," she said. "I'm happy to report the people seem very interested."

But Randolph McLaughlin, who represented a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the goal was not merely to encourage more Hispanics to vote but "to create a system whereby the Hispanic community would be able to nominate and elect a candidate of their choice."

That could be a non-Hispanic, he acknowledged, and until exit polling is done, "it won't be known for sure whether the winners were Hispanic-preferred."

Is there nothing too petty for Holder’s Justice Department?  A little town of 30,000 needs to have its election rigged so Hispanics win?

This is a perfect example of why conservatives who approve of mass immigration from the third world aren’t thinking hard enough.  No non-racial issue could ever prompt the feds to look into the voting practices of a small village.  And on no non-racial issue would conservatives be such push overs.  

That means that if the Hispanic population is growing the only way for this not to lead to bigger government is for conservatives to stop being scared of the “racist” charge.  Since at this point this seems like the most unlikely thing in the world we will have see the state usurp more and more power.  

Those able to think for ourselves read stories like this noticing these patterns and assume that others must be coming to the same conclusions.  But your average Joe Sickpack or even movement conservatism isn't very good at putting seemingly unrelated stories about school achievement gaps, voting rights legislation, healthcare disparities, etc. together.  He needs to have things spelled out for him and right now nobody's opposing the multicultural state from a libertarian or classical liberal position, much less a racialist one.  Not Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Michelle Malkin. Not Tea Party radicals who wear wigs and carry assault rifles.  Not the Ron Paul movement (notice Rand Paul denying that his position on private discrimination is anything but hypothetical as if the state is race nuteral today).  The 99% of conservative leaning America that doesn't read Alternative Right, VDare or Steve Sailer has no idea this is going on. 

For these reasons, I don't believe that the Left has come close to maximizing the benefits it could potentially derive from racial politics.

While ads like Rick Barber’s are encouraging, it’s fascinating how people will hint at secession and revolution but not even mention in their litany of complaints against the state the Diversity Jacobinism Washington imposes on us. I predict that liberals will come to rely on racial egalitarianism more and more as an excuse for a powerful, centralized state.  Raise taxes?  White America erupts.  Add a new entitlement program?  They start showing up with guns at rallies telling you that they’re going to take their country back.  Require private businesses to discriminate against whites and all but set up a quota system for election results?  Listen to the crickets chirping! If you find one area of your enemy's defense line completely undefended-or better yet, the enemy refuses to notice when you attack him there-and resistance everywhere else is fanatical the decision of where to send the bulk of your army is a very easy one.