Recent News

President Barack Obama has been chided for failing to keep his promise to visit the South Side of Chicago, which he dubbed “his Kennebunkport,” every six to eight weeks, [Obama's Chicago visits: Mixed feelings on infrequency of trips home, By Katherine Skiba and Becky Schlikerman, Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2011] But on Friday (February 15) he returns to one of the largest concentrations of black people in the world to push for more gun control. [Obama coming to Chicago to 'talk about the gun violence', By Ellen Jean Hirst, Naomi Nix and Jennifer Delgado,Chicago Tribune, February 11, 2013]

Obama will use the gun violence in Chicago, in particular the murder of 15-year-old Chicago public school “honor student” Hadiya Pendleton, whose majorette squad had participated in Obama’s inauguration festivities a few days earlier, as a symbol for restricting firearms all over America. Pendleton was gunned down not far from the Chicago residence of America’s First Family. Her four-hour funeral was attended by the First Lady herself. [Hadiya Pendleton funeral: Joyous memories, bitter facts about gun violence, By Dahleen Glanton and Bridget Doyle, Chicago Tribune, February 9, 2013] and Obama invited Cleopatra Pendleton, Hadiya’s mother, to Tuesday’s State of the Union address.

But the violence in Chicago and the “random” shooting of Pendleton—just one of the 51 homicide victims and 185+ gunshot victims in the city of Chicago in 2013 as of February 14—are a fatally flawed symbol of the need to force the American people to surrender the Second Amendment and their right to bear arms.

No—rather, the South Side of Chicago and the condition of the almost entirely black community there instead symbolizes why the Second Amendment must be protected at all costs.

Recall that Chicago was one of the first major cities to eliminate its citizens’ right to purchase handguns—in 1982, its city council passed what amounted to the strictest gun control laws in America. This coincided with Chicago’s black population overtaking the white population for the first time in the city’s history. Chicago was more than 85 percent white in the 1950s, but massive migration of blacks from the South and white flight from the city reshaped the demographics of Chicagoland.

It is the black population’s propensity to commit robberies, assaults, and murder using guns—even though they are illegal in Chicago—that threatens to destabilize the city, scaring away tourists, driving away capital investment, aborting gentrification. (There’s a riveting account of this mayhem in Sudhir Venkatesh’s 2008 book Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets).

This is a city where

• 94 percent of the gunmen who shot and wounded someone in 2012 got away without criminal charges [Most Shooters In Chicago Don't Face Charges, By Mark Konkol, DNAinfo January 24, 2013]. (The number was 91.5 percent in 2011).
• the embattled Chicago Police Department will no longer respond to pesky 9-1-1 calls that merely report “criminal damage to property, vehicle thefts, garage burglaries, or other crimes in which the suspect is no longer on the scene, and the victim isn’t in immediate danger” [Chicago Police Changing Response Plan For Some 911 Calls, CBS Chicago, February 4, 2013] in a bid to free up additional officers to patrol, ahem, majority black areas of the city.
• The Rev. Jesse Jackson—when he isn’t calling gun rights supporters “domestic terrorists” – is calling for the Department of Homeland Security to patrol the streets.

Incredibly, the death toll by murder in Chicago over the past decade is greater than the number of American soldiers who have died in Afghanistan

In We Are Doomed I referred to the State of the Union address as a “Stalinesque extravaganza.”

You know how it goes.    We’re shown the House chamber, where the nation’s highest civilian and military officials wait in gathering expectation.  The Sergeant at Arms announces the President’s arrival.  The great man appears at last.  In his progress through the chamber, legislators jostle and maneuver to catch his eye and receive the favor of a presidential greeting. 

On the podium at last, the President offers up preposterously grandiose assurances of protection, provision, and moral guidance from his government, these declarations of benevolent omnipotence punctuated by standing ovations and cheers from legislators of his own party, and often from the others too, after every declarative clause. 

Things haven’t improved any in the four years since I wrote that.  Every year grows stronger my yearning for a return to the modest style that prevailed through most of the Republic’s history, of the President delivering a written report to Congress on the State of the Union.  Vain hope, of course:  the politicians of this age don’t do modest.

Well, well, what did the President have to tell us about the State of our Union?  On the topic that most concerns readers of VDARE.com, next to nothing: there was less than 2½ minutes on immigration in a one-hour speech, and this came at well past the halfway mark, when many viewers will have given up.

Opener:

“Our economy is stronger when we harness the talents and ingenuity of striving, hopeful immigrants [applause]; and right now, leaders of business, labor, law enforcement, faith communities, they all agree that the time has come to pass comprehensive immigration reform [prolonged applause].”

Mostly true.  Business leaders have no problem with private-sector labor markets being flooded to bring down wages.  “Labor” nowadays means public-sector employees, to whom immigrants are clients, i.e. bread and butter. “Faith communities,” formerly known as churches, are in the nation-wrecking van of immigration romanticism and refugee resettlement, to the disgust of many patriotic congregants.

“Law enforcement” needs some qualification, however, with one leader in that field testifying to Congress recently that his officers are disciplined for arresting illegal immigrants.

In confirmation of that testimony, there were illegal immigrants sitting right there in the House chamber as the President spoke, brought in as guests of congressmen.  Why did not the Capitol police arrest them?

So perhaps not quite all leaders agree.  And what about followers?  Oh, the heck with them! 

What exactly is comprehensive immigration reform, though?  Let the President tell us:

“Real reform means stronger border security, and we can build on the progress my administration’s already made, putting more boots on the southern border than at any time in our history . . .”

There flashed upon my inward eye at that point a stretch of southern border desert country with thousands of empty boots laid out on it in a line stretching all the to the horizon.  Perhaps that’s

Gun control seems likely to figure as much as amnesty in President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Vice President Biden will certainly get his wish (“we’re counting on all of you, the legitimate news media”) for campaigning coverage from the Main Stream Media.  And now the Administration can also count on Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recently announced his conversion to gun control [Arnold Schwarzenegger On Gun Control: 'Leave No Stone Unturned', By Natalie Rotman, Huffington Post, January 17, 2013]

It’s worth contrasting Schwarzenegger’s sickening scuttle with the contrary evolution of another movie action hero, Charlton Heston, who began as a liberal and a supporter of “Civil Rights”—when most of Hollywood was afraid of getting involved—and ended as five-term President of the National Rifle Association. Indeed, Schwarzenegger seems finally have taken to heart the early advice of his Jewish publicist Charlotte Parker:

One person she advised avoiding was the forthrightly conservative Charlton Heston, who since The Ten Commandments had brought Moses-like authority to his political conventions. While Schwarzenegger’s political ideas weren’t that different from Heston’s [my emphasis—PK], and it would have seemed natural for the two conservative stars to stand arm in arm, Parker’s protective instinct was to keep Schwarzenegger away from the National Rifle Association’s Hollywood poster child. If Heston appeared as the same event, Parker insisted, Schwarzenegger must never allow himself to be photographed with Heston, or, she warned, he would become marked as a right-wing ideologue.

Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger, (2005) by Laurence Leamer, P.164

But back when Schwarzenegger preparing to take on the role of his life, Conan the Barbarian, director John Milius told him to hang out with Hell’s Angels to research the type of character he wanted Schwarzenegger to portray. And, Schwarzenegger biographer Leamer writes:

His natural sympathies were with those living on the wild fringes of American life. He fancied that these self-conscious outlaws were the torchbearers of a kind of liberty that those in corporate/bureaucratic America had long forgotten or considered mere indulgence. He was a skeet-shooting hunting control. He had, by his count, about fifteen guns in his house, including not only shotguns and pistols but an Uzi.” (p. 133) [my emphasis—PK]

Charlton Heston’s final book, The Courage to Be Free (2000), offers remarkable insight into the very different personality of the man who played Ben Hur. He wrote about his experience during the L.A. Riots of 1992:

Police couldn't stop the riots in the wake of the Rodney King trial verdict in Los Angeles. I know. I was there. I was at home in the Los Angeles area when those riots broke out just a few miles away. And I was armed. Like everyone within a radius of fifty miles of those riots, I was concerned when I realized that the Los Angeles police Department could not, or would not, control the carnage and vandalism. 

The fear ran so quickly and so deeply throughout the Los Angeles basin that even my liberal friends were frightened. My phone rang day and night. As TV news choppers hacked through smoke-darkened skies over L.A., I got a phone calls from firmly anti-gun friend in clear conflict. 

"Umm Chuck, you have quite a few... ah guns, don't you?"

"Yes, I do."

"Shotguns and... like that?"

"Indeed."

"Could you lend me one for a day or so? I tried to buy one but they have this 15 waiting day period..." (p.73)

One can only guess that many of those who called Heston asking for guns had been clients of Charlotte Parker.

In The Courage To Be Free, Heston did not hesitate to draw a moral about the attack on America’s founding ethnicity:

The message from the cultural warlords is everywhere, delivered with the arrogant swagger of absolute confidence. Summarized, it is this: Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle class, Protestant (or even worse evangelical) Christian, the Midwestern or southern (or even worse rural) hunter, apparently straight or admitted heterosexual gun-owning average working stiff, or even worse still male working stiff, because not only do you not count, you're a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as welcome and green as you hand them over, but your voice deserves no hearing, your opinion is not enlightened, your media access is virtually nil, and frankly mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something about your new America. 

And until you do, why don't you just sit down and shut up! (p.5-6)

Sounds like the anti-white MSM chest-thumping after Obama’s 2012 re-election.

But, just as Schwarzenegger has finally steered clear of Heston, the David Keene NRA, now very much a part of Conservatism Inc., would certainly distance itself from Heston’s frank defense of white peoples’ right to exist.

Schwarzenegger’s recent autobiography Total Recall inadvertently reveals the cost of his social climbing:

I followed the presidential campaigns that year with great interest and accepted happily when I was invited to take part in the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in August. My assignment was to add celebrity power to one of the “caucus teams” of Reagan administration officials and Bush supporters whose job it was to glad-hand the state delegations and chat them up on key issues.

I’d been to Republican conventions before, but this was the first since I’d married a Shriver. Maria and I believed that we should continue as we always had: she would go to the Democratic convention and to gatherings for all the things she believed in, and she would cover Republicans as a journalist, and I would keep going to the Republican convention. But we needed to be careful to avoid unnecessary controversy. Everything went well in New Orleans until my friend and trapshooting buddy Tony Makris, the PR guru of the National Rifle Association, mentioned that the NRA was holding a brunch in honor of Texas Senator Phil Gramm—would I like to stop by? I’d gotten to know Gramm well by then. When I showed up the next morning, other celebrities were there also, but the reporters converged on me. The Kennedys, having endured two tragic political assassinations, were very antigun, so what was I doing at an NRA reception? I hadn’t even thought about it. If I had, I would have been sensitive enough not to attend this NRA event. They also asked, as a Kennedy by marriage, was I supporting the NRA? What was my position on automatic weapons? Saturday night specials? Sniper rifles? Cop-killing bullets? I didn’t know how to respond. I belonged to the NRA because I believed in the constitutional right to bear arms, but I hadn’t though through all those issues and details. There was even a question about my very presence at the 1988 Republican National Convention: was it some kind of statement in defiance of the Kennedy family? (p. 368)

Besides his Kennedy connections, Schwarzenegger worked his way into intimacy with the Bush family dynasty—he campaigned for Bush I against Pat Buchanan in

We all have our guilty pleasures in life, the kind of indulgences that we are half-embarrassed, and half-amused, to admit to others. For my wife and me, it’s watching ABC’s The Bachelor. —the latest episode of which airs Monday, February 11 (8 pm ET!)

THE BACHELOR goes to the beach.

In case you haven’t seen it, The Bachelor (and its corollary, The Bachelorette, with the genders reversed) is a reality show where a group of women spend several weeks vying for the affections of one man. The initial 25 contestants advance to the next round if they receive a rose from The Bachelor by the end of each episode. But there are a dwindling number of roses to dispense each week, so each episode has winners and losers. Those who receive a rose are typically ecstatic and relieved, and those who do not are typically heartbroken.

Eventually, it reaches the point where The Bachelor must choose the woman he wants to marry, and reject the runner up. Usually, The Bachelor proposes marriage, and the runner up walks away in tears. And it makes for great theater.

The show is ridiculous; the melodrama is intense. The women can be catty and backstabbing. They have teary meltdowns over the prospect of being rejected by someone they barely know (and the men on The Bachelorette are often just as bad). And, while some of the joys and sorrows experienced by the contestants seem genuine, much of it is way over the top, which is what makes it so entertaining.

Granted, only three of the bachelors/bachelorettes have actually gone on to tie the knot. But many of the male and female runner ups (known as "Bachelor alumni”) have dated and a few have actually gotten married. Given the decline in the institution of marriage nationally, that’s not so bad.

My wife and I started watching the show three years ago, right after our first child

Here on New York City’s Rockaway Peninsula, Ground Zero for Hurricane Sandy, my majority-Irish, overwhelmingly Catholic, white working/middle class community will hold its annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade, one of the biggest in the country, on March 2. It will showcase many of the same pipe-and-drum marching bands that will perform in the even bigger parade down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue 14 days later.

And the Stix Family will be there, as usual.

When Michael Bloomberg, whom some neighbors call “the Mayor of Manhattan,” marches up front, no one will cheer. Some of my neighbors will boo him, and some will give him a one-finger salute. I will engage in my annual ritual of turning my back on him.

The hatred is well-earned. Bloomberg started it, by waging war on us in a million different ways.

Keep in mind that Bloomberg, like the previous three white mayors—Beame, Koch, and Giuliani—owes his power very largely to white working/middle-class communities like ours.

A colleague (Steve Sailer?) wrote that in supporting Giuliani, whites were creating an implicit racial community. They did that with Beame, Koch, Giuliani too, but their beneficiaries never repaid them. (Koch clashed publicly with blacks because he refused to suck up to them and they hated him with a passion, but he hired blacks like crazy.)

Conversely, although Bloomberg apparently calculates that the white working class has no place else to go

Conservatism Inc. is falling over itself to welcome “our new Spanish-speaking overlords”—to adapt the famous scene from The Simpsons (itself adapted from the 1977 movie Empire of the Ants). The Republican Congressional leadership has chosen newly-minted Florida Senator Marco Rubio to give the response to President Obama’s February 12 State Of The Union—half in Spanish.

(It’s a pattern—Rubio gave the GOP response to the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision partly in Spanish, and spoke in Spanish, briefly, at the Republican Convention).

Does this mean the United States is turning into Mexico?

No, it’s worse—it means the United States is turning into Canada.

Canada has a lot of experience with bilingualism, all of it bad.

I’ve noted before that the ludicrous Canadian custom of making speeches in both languages—saying everything twice, once in English and once in the minority language—is coming to America.

Well, the Canadians have invented an even worse absurdity: the speaker alternates between languages, leaving large parts of the audience unsure what he’s saying.

Thus Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner blogged acidly (April 19, 2010):

John Ralston Saul's public speech entitled: "Reinventing the language of citizenship/ inventer la langue de la citoyennete" will be presented in Canada's two official languages Please note the speech will alternate between French and English with no simultaneous translation.

John Ralston Saul is a member of the globalist elite, born in Ottawa, educated in Montreal and London. He writes books in English, but his website offers visitors the choice of English, French, or Spanish.

Gardner asked

I can understand why the lecture might be given in French. Or in English. Or in either with translation. But both with no translation? Do that and you will ensure that more than nine out of ten people in the city [VDARE.com note: Vancouver, B. C.] in which you are giving the lecture will be unable to understand what you are saying. So what is this except a symbolic gesture of... Of what, exactly? Bilingual idealism? Contempt for the unilingual?

The explicitness of that notice is rare but neither the attitude nor the practice are, at least not in Ottawa. Years ago, after moving here, I was amazed at how, in Official Ottawa—i.e. the Ottawa of the federal government—it's perfectly acceptable for public speakers to switch back and forth between languages, without translation, even to the extent of setting up a joke in one language and delivering the punchline in another. This would be admirable in an ideal world in which all Canadians could laugh along. But in this world, this is a very effective way to shutting out the overwhelming majority of Canadians who are unilingual.

Funny. But in fact creeping bilingualism is not funny at all. It’s a serious threat to unilingual members of the majority language community a.k.a. English-speakers, in both Canada and  the U.S.

Among other things, bilingualism ultimately means job preference for the minority language group—and years of language lessons for English-speakers who want those jobs.

 Thus in Canada, many federal civil service jobs are reserved for people who speak both languages, which means, de facto¸ it is dominated by French speakers.

George Jonas, a Hungarian immigrant to Canada, has described the dynamic:

If Canada was to be a bilingual country with most power concentrated in Ottawa's federal government, in the nature of things it would be Francophones [VDARE.com note: CanSpeak for French-speakers, but  really it’s a matter of blood] who would end up occupying most positions of authority in it. The inclination is always stronger for minorities to learn the language of a majority. Anglos weren't going to be bilingual in significant numbers.  Francophones would be, and so rule the land.

[Unintended Consequences, by George Jonas,

Liberals in the Main Stream Media have been up in arms over an official White House petition to

STOP WHITE GENOCIDE: Halt MASSIVE third world immigration and FORCED assimilation in White countries!

The petition states

Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians, White countries for EVERYBODY? White countries are being flooded with third world non-whites, and Whites are required by law to integrate with them so as to "assimilate," i.e. intermarry and be blended out of existence…Supporting White Genocide is not anti-racist. It's anti-white!

Followers of the Dissident Right will likely recognize this text. It frequently appears in the comment threads of race-related news articles and YouTube videos. 

But it’s news to many on the Left. They are utterly outraged that anyone would think such thoughts:

• Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed tweeted on the petition with the words: “Is this the most racist White House petition ever created?”
• Jonathan Capehart, a black Washington Post columnist, answered: “I would have to answer yes. Yes, it probably is.”

Capehart was particularly upset that some of the signers come from “unlikely places such as New York City, New Haven, Conn., Silver Spring, Md., and Berkeley, Calif.”  A petition to ‘stop white genocide’?, January 18, 2012].

They're everywhere!

Capehart even appeared on MSNBC to express his outrage that 405 people had signed the petition— “not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things” but “way too many” for such unacceptable thoughts. [Conspiracy theories a way of life for conservatives, January 18, 2013]

Host Karen Finney (who is considered, but doesn’t look, African-American, see picture RIGHT) snarked that Rush Limbaugh probably had the same thoughts. And black commentator Touré, appearing on the same show, suggested that the entire GOP base agreed.

Unlike Capehart, I cannot manage to get outraged that four hundred people (or currently, almost 950 people) are willing to sign their name on the petition.

What does concern me, however, is that over 330,000 people—more than any other cause—have signed another White House petition to “legally recognize Westboro Baptist Church as a Hate Group.” 

The Westboro Baptist Church is a fringe church led by Fred Phelps.  Phelps began his political activism as a left-wing civil rights attorney.  Among his many cases, he filed a class action lawsuit to compel forced busing, as well as forced integration of the American Legion.  [As a lawyer, Phelps was good in court, By Joe Taschler and Steve Fry, Topeka The Capital-Journal, August 3, 1994]

Fox News has referred to the Westboro Baptist Church as a “left wing,” but did it not mention any of Phelps’ civil rights activism, leading the fashionista Leftists at Gawker to mock its claim. [Fox News Refers to the Westboro Baptist Church as a ‘Left-Wing Cult’, by Neetzan Zimmerman, December 26, 2012]  Fox could have made a much stronger case had it mentioned Phelps’ past legal work—but that would involve an un-neoconservative concession that civil rights litigation is “left wing.”   

Phelps and the Church gained fame in the 1990s when he began protesting “Gay Pride” events with signs emblazoned “God Hates Fags.”  Eager for more and more attention,