It's not an illegal settlement in the Gaza Strip, it's a colonia in Texas.

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

When Christmas and New Year's both fall on a weekend, that week in between is the silliest of all silly seasons in the Western world. Unless there's a natural disaster, or some non-Western lunatic tries to start a war, nothing happens. So I’m going to write at length about the one newsy thing that did happen this week: the fuss over the U.S.A. not using its veto in the U.N. Security Council to take down a resolution critical of Israel. I don't think it's half as important as it looks.

To judge from my email bag and donation logs, I have a surprising number of readers in Israel. I say "surprising" because I hardly ever say anything about Israel or her affairs, and don't actually know much about the place.

The last time I wrote at length about Israel was,  I think, in mid-2010 at TakiMag.com, and that was only by way of putting down a marker. I had just started writing regularly for TakiMag, which runs some anti-Israel stuff, and I wanted to make my own position plain:

Any fair-minded person must be an Israel sympathizer. A hundred years ago there were Jews and Arabs living in that part of the Ottoman Empire. After the Ottoman collapse, both peoples had a right to set up their own ethnostates. It has been the furiously intransigent Arab denial of this fact, not anything Israelis have done, that has been the root cause of all subsequent troubles.

Aside from being a well-wisher of Israel in sentiment, though, I agree with Steve Sailer that we pay much more attention to the place that our national interest justifies, for reasons to do with the over-representation of Jewish Americans in the Main Stream Media and the wealthy-donor classes. Read more >>

Many on the Dissident Right mock cuckservatives for engaging in “DR3” or DemsRRealRacists i.e. incapable of defending their values on their merits, they conceed the Left’s moral premises, but accuse them of being the “real racists”, homophobes, sexists etc. Since Trump’s election, the Left is engaging 3R-PC RightwingersRRealPC—they claim it’s now the Right that wants “safe spaces.” Guess what? It’s bunk

Before discussing these alleged Rightist “safe spaces,” let’s look at a few examples of the prevailing Leftist version.

• When libertarian-feminist Wendy McElroy gave a speech at Brown University critical of the concept of “rape culture,” Katherine Byron, a college senior and member of the “Sexual Assault Task Force,” set up a self-described safe space

…intended to give people who might find comments ‘troubling’ or ‘triggering,’ a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma.

[ In College and Hiding From Scary Ideas , by Judith Shulevitz, New York Times, March 21, 2016]

But at least this Brown brainlessness was limited to a dozen or so students. Some Leftists try to turn the entire campuses into “safe spaces,” where no dissenting views are allowed:

• In a high-profile incident at Yale, then-Silliman College Master Erika Christakis questioned whether the University needs to give out guidelines on culturally inappropriate Halloween costumes. While dutifully qualifying that "I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation," she wondered whether the administration should not consider " consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.” [ Dressing Yourselves, October 30, 2015]

In the ensuing outrage, a minority student asserted that it was the Master's "job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman... it is not about creating an intellectual space!" [ The New Intolerance of Student Activism , by Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, November 9, 2016]. Christakis was pressured to resign.

And her successors at Yale ceased calling the heads of residential colleges “masters” because it has a “painful and unwelcome connotation that can be difficult or impossible for some students and residential college staff to ignore” [ Decisions on Residential College Names and “Master” Title , Yale University Office of the President, April 27, 2016]. Read more >>

Donald Trump has a new best friend.

"President-elect Trump, thank you for your warm friendship and your clear-cut support of Israel," gushed Bibi Netanyahu, after he berated John Kerry in a fashion that would once have resulted in a rupture of diplomatic relations.

Netanyahu accused Kerry of "colluding" in and Read more >>

@AnnCoulter Jan. 1 (one year ago)

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Highlights: The Obamas hire a moving company; the class-action lawsuit, Donors v Jeb; and of course ... President-elect Trump!

@AnnCoulter Jan. 12

... even to GOP response to Obama's SOTU is a paean to immigrants. And GOP can't figure out why Trump is sweeping the country.

@AnnCoulter Jan. 12

Trump should deport Nikki Haley.

@AnnCoulter Jan. 15

Bush campaign lands the coveted Lindsey Graham endorsement, bringing an additional 0.0% support to the juggernaut that is Jeb!

@AnnCoulter Jan. 26

Recall: Rubio was not asked about his single legislative accomplishment -- amnesty bill -- until the SIXTH debate.

@AnnCoulter Jan. 30

Sweaty little liar Rubio sucks up to Iowans with Jesus talk, but he tried to replace them with 30 million Mexicans.

@AnnCoulter Jan. 30

Rubio's immigration bill issued 33 MILLION green cards in 10 yrs -- or 271 new immigrants for every 1 GOP caucus-goer in Iowa.

@AnnCoulter Feb. 1

Trump is the leading GOP vote-getter tonight, among natural-born-American candidates.

Read more >>

 If there is one promise Donald Trump will never be able to back away from and survive politically, it is The Wall. The Great Wall of Trump has taken on a kind of existential importance, both as a tangible symbol of Trump’s ability to Read more >>

Thomas Sowell is retiring from column writing at 86--his farewell column is here. See earlier A Man Alone (1987) and Human Capital—A Chat With Thomas Sowell (1998) by Peter Brimelow


I first read Thomas Sowell in college--no thanks to my college.

At the majority of America's institutions of "higher learning," reading Thomas Sowell was a subversive act in the early 1990s when I was a student. It remains so today. Why? Because the prolific libertarian economist's vast body of work is a clarion rejection of all the liberal intelligentsia hold dear.

Among the left's most corrosive ideas is the concept of perpetual and permanent racial victimhood, which social engineers pretend to rectify through federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized preferential policies. Sowell's groundbreaking academic analyses of these programs in the U.S. and around the world exposed how elites profit mightily at the expense of the alleged beneficiaries of government-coerced affirmative action.

The grand rhetoric of diversity masks the true intent and actual impact of current racially discriminatory "solutions" to past racial discrimination: solidifying the power of the few over the many. As Sowell put it succinctly in one of the first pieces of his I came across in the journal " The Public Interest"[PDF]

"Live people are being sacrificed because of what dead people did."

In that essay and much more deeply in his book, "Preferential Policies: An International Perspective," published that year, Sowell explored the "mismatch" effect in the ivory tower. While prestigious schools such as the University of California, Berkeley congratulated themselves for manufacturing "wonderfully diverse" student bodies ostensibly to make up for the legacy of American slavery, (which Sowell pointed out was in no way unique to either the American South or blacks), he reported that more than 70 percent of bla Read more >>