I confess I haven't read Ann Coulter's new book.  I further confess I don't intend to: too many books backed up here.  In any case, while I'll allow that Ms. Coulter is performing a useful function at some level, her blank ignorance of science leaves her polemic suspended in mid-air without foundations.

It does seem though, from reviews and interviews I've seen, that she's arguing for some great change in the mentality of American whites having occurred at the time of the O.J. Simpson verdict.

From the book's description on Amazon.com, in words I've heard Ann use in TV interviews about the book:

It took the O. J. Simpson verdict—the race-based acquittal of a spectacularly guilty black celebrity as blacks across America erupted in cheers—to shut down the white guilt bank.

That contradicts the notion I've expressed here, and which in my experience is wellnigh universal among dissident conservatives, that there was a brief spell of openness about race in the mid-to-late 1990s—Peter Brimelow calls it an "interglacial"—since when the range of respectable opinion has become narrower than ever. (See the wee table two-thirds of the way down this piece.)

So who's right?  Ann's cheery vision of the "white guilt bank" going out of business around 1995, or me, with my nightmares of looming totalitarianism?

Has the white guilt bank really been shut down?  My own belief is that it got a handsome bailout package and is now thriving.  Opinions please to me via the e-address on my personal home page.