Above, the 2016 Conference.

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that history does not move in a straight line. For those of us who care about the fate of the West, there have been startling twists and turns—triumphs, defeats, and near misses.

There have been enough triumphs to show that there is a real chance of success, but there have been enough defeats and close calls to show that the fight for the West will be long and hard fought. These are some of the themes that we will take up at the next American Renaissance conference, which will be held near Nashville, Tennessee, from April 27 to 29.

Here is one of the twists that shows the nature of our struggle and how persistence will win in the end. In 2000—18 years ago—what lefties love to call an “extremist party” shared power in a European government for the first time since the end of the Second World War. The Austrian Freedom Party, under the leadership of Jörg Haider, got the second-largest vote count—27 percent—and joined a coalition with the center-right Austrian People’s Party.

There was Europe-wide hysteria. The other 14 members of the European Union froze all bilateral ties with Austria. Nicole Fontaine, president of the European parliament, raged about “the insulting, xenophobic and racist statements of Jörg Haider.” Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michelsaid it would be “immoral” to take a vacation in Austria, and schools across Europe canceled ski trips. Michel even hinted that Austria could be expelled from the EU: “Europe can very well do without Austria,” he said. “We don't need it.” Israel and the United States withdrew their ambassadors. When Freedom Party members were sworn in to cabinet positions, demonstrators nearly paralyzed Vienna. Read more >>

If Turkey is not bluffing, U.S. troops in Manbij, Syria, could be under fire by week's end, and NATO engulfed in the worst crisis in its history.

Turkish President Erdogan said Friday his troops will cleanse Manbij of Kurdish fighters, alongside whom U.S. troops are embedded.

Erdogan's foreign minister demanded Read more >>

We will finally find out if the memes are real. In President Trump’s magisterial August 31, 2016 campaign speech on immigration in Arizona, he vowed he would “immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive Amnesties.” Today, President Trump says he is offering Democrats a “wonderful deal” on DACA, including a pathway to citizenship. The Donald Trump of the campaign would undoubtedly have called it Amnesty. But could there be a more complicated agenda?

I have offered DACA a wonderful deal, including a doubling in the number of recipients & a twelve year pathway to citizenship, for two reasons: (1) Because the Republicans want to fix a long time terrible problem. (2) To show that Democrats do not want to solve DACA, only use it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 28, 2018

Read more >>

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the American Left believes its own propaganda. That’s a major reason the # SchumerShutdown was routed—it tuned out, despite Main Stream Media mewling and pervasive pollaganda, that Americans really didn’t want their government paralyzed in order to Amnesty a bunch of undocumented Democrats. But the most dramatic recent example: the extraordinary success of Michael Wolff’s book Fire And Fury, purportedly an expose of the Trump White House after it trustingly (and inexplicably) granted him access. With blatant calculation, Wolff tells the Left, and America’s entire Ruling Class, exactly what it wants to hear about Trump—that he’s a moron, buffoon, ignoramus, etc. An accident! Go back to sleep!

(Similarly, my old friend David Frum has ensured that he and his social-climbing wife will continue to be invited to Georgetown dinner parties, despite being nominal Republicans, by dismissing, in his just-released Trumpocracy, Trump’s 2016 triumph as an “Electoral College fluke.”) Still, although Wolff’s slick novelistic style deliberately makes it hard to say where fact ends and fiction begins, I do think his account of Trump’s reaction to the scandalous Democrat repression of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally “rings true” (as the saying goes). And it’s one reason I continue to be (guardedly) hopeful that Trump’s latest DACA dalliance could end well.

But first, a couple of caveats. Read more >>

Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, available exclusively on VDARE.com

As regular listeners know, I have a newspaper delivered every morning to read over my breakfast oatmeal. It's nothing heavy, just the New York Post, which nicely straddles the borderline between too-good-to-check tabloid idiocy and the honking self-important ponderosity of the broadsheet press.

I don't read more than about ten percent of my morning newspaper. I have zero interest in sports or celebrities. I glance at the business section for old times' sake but rarely read a complete article (though John Crudele sometimes says sensible things about the nation's finances).

The latest story of municipal corruption or malfeasance generally takes up two or three pages, but when you've read one of those stories, you've read 'em all. The perp is some useless incompetent, almost invariably black, given a nice plum job in the New York City bureaucracy in return for supporting the mayor, or just as an Affirmative-Action gesture.

The current flap about the head of the public-housing authority lying under oath is perfectly typical. You could write a computer program to generate these corruption stories. Perhaps the Post does that; I don't know or care.

So there isn't much in my morning newspaper I actually want to read. That's fine; breakfast doesn't take long and I have things to do. They did get my prolonged attention on Thursday this week, though.

The front-page story was about the sentencing of Larry Nassar, the sports-medicine specialist at Michigan State University who'd been found guilty of molesting young female athletes, including Olympic competitors. [VDARE.com Note: People named Nassar are Arab-American, although not usually Muslim. Not one Main Stream Media stories mention this when discussing this case.] Read more >>