The Samuel Francis Letter

Harvard women upset by challenges to conventional dogmas

2005-01-25T04:50:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, January 25, 2005

The most recent installment of Politically Correct mind control comes from Harvard University itself, the world capital of Political Correctness and at least a major metropolis of mind control. It concerns no less a victim than the president of Harvard himself, Lawrence Summers, a veteran of the Clinton administration, who recently uttered some remarks about women that made the mind controllers sick at their stomachs. A tip of the hat to President Summers.

What exactly he said is not clear since there seems to be no transcript or record of it, but in general he unbosomed the heresy that maybe human beings (in this case, women) are not merely blank slates on which social engineers can scribble whatever fictions they please. As the New York Times described what he is supposed to have said (and does not deny saying):

"Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes." He was discussing the general reason why there are so many more male scientists than female ones, and one such reason was possible biologically based sex differences.

On the scale of Political Incorrectness, this is not much more than a misdemeanor. But it's Harvard, you see, and up there they're just not used to hearing opinions they don't like. To date, Mr. Summers has had to apologize at least three times.

"I felt I was going to be sick," trembled one female scientist in the audience, M.I.T. biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who listened to part of the speech. As the Washington Post noted, "she walked out in what she described as a physical sense of disgust."

"My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow," she panted to the Post. "I was extremely upset." Dr. Hopkins' breath is perhaps not the only thing about her that's shallow.

But she wasn't the only one, and for the last week or so, Mr. Summers has enjoyed all the vitriol that modern totalitarianism can pour upon him. To be sure, he has had his defenders, including several women scientists, who have suggested that there really may be the kind of innate biological differences between the sexes that he postulated. But, as in tyranny's more prosperous days under Stalin and Mao Tse tung, truth is no defense. Even after his third apology, one Thought Patroller, the female head of the Harvard chemistry department, sniffed that it just didn't go far enough. Of course it never does. "The problem is that you can't take it back," she sighed.

What is remarkable about the hate fest directed at Mr. Summers is not that he was necessarily right (though there's strong evidence that innate differences between the sexes account for differing mathematical aptitudes as well as many other differences) nor even that a distinguished academic official has to grovel in multiple apologies for his innocuous comments. What is remarkable is why those who objected to what he said did so at all.

They got sick at their stomachs because they can't stand the idea that "innate" or "biologically" grounded differences account for anything. What Mr. Summers said contradicted the blank slate model of humanity that has been enthroned in academic dogma for nearly a century. And one reason denying that human beings are blank slates is such a dreadful sin and makes some people physically sick is that it ultimately threatens their careers, their whole world-view, and indeed their power.

The blank slate ideology, increasingly discarded by scientists, asserts that there are no constants in human nature, that in fact there is no such thing as human nature at all, and it implies that whoever or whatever controls the "environment" -- the social or cultural environment in which a child grows up -- controls the man (or woman) that eventually emerges. It's an idea that underlies both communism and much of modern liberalism.

What Mr. Summers' remarks imply is that you can't reconstruct human beings, that there's something natural -- meaning genes -- in human nature that survives even totalitarian manipulation and social engineering.

So far from making people sick at their stomachs, the possibility that human beings possess a nature beyond the capacity of political power to twist as it wants ought to make us rejoice. But if that's true, then the ideologies rooted in the blank slate dogma are in serious trouble, and so are those whose careers are based on such ideologies. That very thought is enough to make some people sick, and it's also enough, if you challenge the dogma, to cause a few problems for your own career -- even when you're the president of Harvard.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

What conservatives can expect from Mr. Bush's second term

2005-01-21T13:57:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, January 21, 2005

"Expect President Bush to sound like Woodrow Wilson," advised neo-conservative political analyst Michael Barone in the Wall Street Journal this week. Mr. Barone's advice was no criticism, since he fairly gushed with toasty sounds about the similarities between Wilson's beliefs and Mr. Bush's "vision of an America spreading freedom and democracy to new corners of the world." And in fact Mr. Barone was correct. Wilson is exactly who Mr. Bush sounded like in his speech yesterday.

Woodrow Wilson of course was the president who not only launched America into World War I to "make the world safe for democracy" but also helped forge the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, which helped spawn the chaos that led to Nazism in Germany and World War II. Among Wilson's other dubious accomplishments were the creation of the Federal Reserve System, a massive expansion of federal regulations, the federal income tax and the rise of what he called "presidential government" to "get around" the "obstructions" of "congressional government." Why anyone purporting to represent conservatism of any kind would invoke Wilson as a positive icon is beyond comprehension.

Wilson also resembles Mr. Bush in that he campaigned in the 1916 election on the slogan, "He kept us out of war." Then, a few months later, he helped bring us into war. Like Wilson, Mr. Bush is rapidly acquiring a reputation for violating the commitments of his last presidential campaign. That, perhaps, is his most notable contribution to American political history so far.

While not exactly a violation of a campaign promise, Mr. Bush's renewed enthusiasm for amnesty for illegal aliens can fairly count as a betrayal. Though he proposed the amnesty early last year, before the campaign really started, he dropped it after a less than rousing response from Congress. He may have mentioned it once or twice during the campaign, but he has never described it as the amnesty it actually is.

Only after the election did Secretary of State Colin Powell, while on a visit to Mexico, say the plan would be revived. "In light of the campaign and other things that were going on, we weren't able to engage the Congress on it," Mr. Powell said. "But now that the election is behind us and the president is looking to his second term, the president intends to engage Congress on it."

In other words, we couldn't tell voters what we were going to do because we would have lost. Now that we don't have to pay attention to them any more, we can speak plainly. Ever since the election Mr. Bush has repeatedly promised to push his plan through Congress.

Plain Speaking Event Number Two is the proposed constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage. Personally, I am not in favor of it and have written against it in the past, but many conservatives, especially those who supported the president, are, and one major reason they did support him is because he said he was in favor of it too. Now he's not.

Interviewed in the Washington Post last week, Mr. Bush said he is advised by Republican senators that the amendment can't possibly pass. Actually, it didn't pass last year when it came up in Congress, but the religious right and its allies want to push it again. As the Washington Post noted this week, social conservatives are already grousing about the president's apparent lack of interest in pushing it. "Clearly there is concern," said a spokesman for the Family Research Council.

Add to concern about the amendment the president's appointment of an "abortion rights supporter," Kenneth Mehlman, as head of the Republican National Committee, and Mr. Bush may start having problems with a large part of his political base.

Plain Speaking Event Number Three, assuming we don't count the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as attorney general and his positions on abortion and immigration, is Mr. Gonzales' most recent statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he "he will support reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons, which Congress allowed to expire in September." Since voting blocs like gun owners were at least as vital to Mr. Bush's re-election as the religious right and since the expiration occurred because the president didn't oppose it, this too can fairly be counted as a betrayal of the president's conservative base.

Is it surprising that Mr. Bush, even before he was inaugurated for a second term, started betraying the conservative positions he took during the campaign and the conservative image he and his handlers so carefully cultivated? No, it's not. Some of us knew, even before he became president at all, that he is a phony-con. Those who elected and re-elected him have yet to learn that, but in the next few years, they will --again -- have ample opportunity to do so.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Two tales of two murders

2005-01-18T07:58:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Like the fog in Carl Sandburg's insipid poem, Martin Luther King Day this year seems to have crept up on the nation on little cat feet. We have heard few of the usual neo-conservative slobberings over how they wish they could have marched with King in Selma, nor even many of the usual lamentations of King's now-decrepit comrades that nobody sufficiently appreciates their accomplishments.

Those noises may yet come, but the real reason we have not heard them so far may be that the festivities arrived a bit early this year, in the arrest of 79-year-old former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi.

The murders of course were notorious at the time and are immortalized by Hollywood in the 1988 anti-white film "Mississippi Burning," which manages to smear every white man and woman in the state (and by implication everywhere else) by virtually stating that whites are by nature genocidal.

It's therefore not too surprising that the media reaction to Mr. Killen's arrest has been one of almost universal gloating. To bust a 79-year-old white Southerner for racial murders is almost as much fun as deporting 80-year-old concentration camp guards to communist countries to stand trial for war crimes, and that amusement has worn thin in recent years. Concentration camp guards have the habit of dying natural deaths eventually, but there's an endless supply of white Southerners to put on trial closer to home.

But Mr. Killen wasn't the only unusual suspect to win the interest of the national press last week. The New York Times, after a large story about his arrest and the murders and a long interview with the surviving relatives of the victims, also found space to tell us all about another killer of the same era -- one who long ago was tried and convicted and today even acknowledges his guilt. For some reason, he doesn't elicit quite the same reaction from the Times as Mr. Killen.

The case is that of Wilbert Rideau, who as a 19-year-old black man in 1961 robbed a bank in Lake Charles, Louisiana, kidnapped three white bank employees, and shot all of them near a bayou at the edge of town. Two survived to tell the tale; the third, a woman, survived only briefly. Rideau polished her off by stabbing her in the heart and slitting her throat.

Like its report about Mr. Killen, the Times story about the Rideau case is full of woe -- but not that of Rideau's white victims. Its sympathies are all for the killer himself.

"All-white, all-male juries" convicted Rideau of murder and sentenced him to death, and they did so three times. Appeals courts threw out the verdicts on the grounds of "misconduct by the government." We never hear too much about what that means, because the Times reporter, Adam Lipchak, is too busy singing about Rideau's achievements ever since.

Prosecutors in Louisiana "are trying once again to obtain a conviction that will stick," he writes, and that may be hard, in part because Rideau has been so "transformed." (As it turned out it was too hard. A mixed race jury this week found him guilty of mere manslaughter, allowing him to go free after serving more than the maximum sentence for that crime.) "He has, from prison, become an acclaimed journalist and documentary filmmaker," but, well, it's Louisiana, you see, and we know what that means.

"The community's rage lives on in this racially divided oil and gambling town near the Texas border," and no doubt it's all those white people, the kind Mississippi Burning warned us about, who keep nice fellows like Rideau in prison. "It's ferocious, the way we hold on to this episode," grumbled the Rev. J. L. Franklin, a black pastor who is monitoring the case.

Right, you'd think after 43 years, people would forget a white person being kidnapped, driven to the edge of town, shot and having her throat cut. But it's those white folks, so full of hate and ignorance, just like over in Mississippi, where they're probably mad about the prosecution of Mr. Killen after only 41 years.

"Little evidence endures" in the Rideau case, Mr. Lipchak informs us, which only adds to the problems of yet another trial. It's not very clear how much evidence endures in the Killen case either, but that wasn't quite the point the Times wanted to make, was it?

The Times' transparent double standard, its lip-smacking glee over the arrest of the white man in Mississippi and its weepy apologies for the black killer in Louisiana, tell us what the real point is. What Mr. Killen is supposed to have done was not only murder but also an act of political and racial resistance, and that sort of thing has to be stomped on, regardless of how little evidence remains after 41 years. As for a forgotten white woman in Louisiana who had her throat cut -- who cares?

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Weak reasons for immigration control

2005-01-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, January 14, 2005

"No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration," gasps neo-conservative David Frum in National Review's Dec. 31 cover story. Mr. Frum, the original "patriotic conservative" who tried to smear the entire anti-war right as "unpatriotic" back in 2003, has now defected from the ranks of the Open Border lobby, at least in a way. Should those who were never part of that lobby welcome him? Not especially. He still doesn't quite get what the real problem with mass immigration is -- in part because he's not that much of a patriot himself.

Mr. Frum's article pants that the Republican Party will actually be harmed by the mass immigration it has refused to control for the last two decades and that it's high time the GOP did something about it. Indeed, that seems to be the major thrust of his case against immigration -- it's bad for the Republicans.

That there are other reasons for being for tighter immigration control or even for a complete moratorium he only obliquely suggests. There are some national security problems with letting millions of aliens ramble across your borders, and there are some economic problems with permitting "entry by an ever-expanding number of low-skilled workers, threatening the livelihoods of low-skilled Americans."

But nowhere does our Patriot mention the major problem immigration causes -- the creation of a massive subculture of unassimilated Third World aliens inside the country. For Mr. Frum, the immigration problem is mainly political, and partisan politics at that. "GOP You Are Warned," the article's title rumbles.

Of course Mr. Frum is right about that, but it's interesting that this is hardly the first time National Review has issued such a warning. Back in 1997, Peter Brimelow, the magazine's senior editor, and Ed Rubenstein wrote an article warning the Republicans of the same thing -- but for rather different reasons.

The Brimelow-Rubenstein article argued that immigration would hurt Republicans because immigrants would vote for the Democrats (and they do). Mr. Frum is arguing that Republican failure to deal with the immigration crisis could alienate the party's base (and it will).

"There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders," he writes. "Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP." But what he misses is just why the "party rank-and-file" is so upset about immigration.

It's upset for precisely the cultural and national reasons I noted and which Mr. Frum rather manages to miss. National security and economics are significant parts of the case against immigration, but mainly Americans don't like their nation being colonized by an alien, Third World mass that speaks a different language, imports different values and is often loyal to a different country.

The problem, as Mr., Frum sees it, is that sooner or later the Democrats will seize the immigration issue if Republicans don't deal with it -- as I argued also in a recent column, quoting none other than Hillary Clinton's dim views of illegal immigration. Mr. Frum quotes the same remarks, but if Hillary can't walk off with the GOP base, he suggests, there may well be other Democrats who could use the immigration issue to do just that.

He thinks the way the party should deal with the issue is to "develop and practice a new way of speaking about immigration, one that makes clear that enforcement of the immigration laws is not anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican: It is anti-bad employer," because employers hire illegals at the expense of Americans and legal immigrants.

Of course, the Open Borders people have an easy and perfectly logical answer to that: Legalize it all. If the only problem with illegal immigration is that it's illegal, if you're not willing to say mass immigration by itself is a problem, then why should we have any laws against it at all? The famous Wall Street Journal position -- "there shall be open borders" -- is the logical conclusion.

Mr. Frum's only response to this, apparently, would be that there's the security problem, but that's flaccid enough. His real problem is that he -- like most of the rest of the neo-conservatives -- will not affirm the reality and significance of the nation, the national identity. Security, economy and party interests are all well and good, but the fundamental issue in the immigration debate is who we are and what sort of nation we want to be. Mr. Frum, like a lot of his neo-con buddies, for all their ballyhoo about "patriotism," doesn't seem to offer a very clear answer.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Will immigration control get serious?

2005-01-11T07:00:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Despite what the Republican leadership would like us to think, all is not harmony and light between the Republicans in Congress and the Republican in the White House. Emerging unpleasantness on the issues of Social Security and looming Supreme Court appointments are part of the problem, but a split on immigration reform looms larger still.

Last week the Washington Post detailed how "President Bush's plan to liberalize the nation's immigration laws to allow millions of undocumented workers [libspeak for "illegal aliens"] the opportunity for legal status appears to be on a collision course with newly aroused sentiment among House Republicans pushing for a crackdown on illegal immigration."

This is hardly news, since the collision actually already occurred last year, when congressional (including Republican) reception of the president's amnesty plan for illegals was so tepid we heard nothing more about it until after the election. What's new now is that the ill-conceived plan is back and, as the Post notes, the course is set for another collision.

Indeed, last year there was yet another collision over the issue when many House Republicans wanted immigration control measures in the intelligence reform bill the White House was badgering them to pass. Eventually, the bill did pass, but minus the immigration stuff, because the president swore he'd support separate legislation for it this year.

The reason for all these collisions of course is that the immigration issue, after decades of slumber, is now beginning to rouse itself, and even politicians have to notice that, sooner or later. That makes many observers think Congress or the White House or both together will soon start "cracking down" on immigration. Maybe, but don't bet your green card on it.

Most of the specific measures the so-called "immigration control" members of Congress are talking about are in fact little more than eyewash -- not bad in themselves but far from being enough to stop the massive invasion of the United States by aliens of profoundly different national and cultural identities. They may, however, be enough to convince voters that their congressmen are doing something to stop it, and that's what the congressmen will be interested in accomplishing.

Thus, the Post mentions several specific measures the immigration control guys want to pass -- completion of a fence along the Mexican border to keep illegal aliens out; a law to set up tougher state standards for driver's licenses for illegal aliens; and making it harder for immigrants to claim asylum. The plain truth is that most of this stuff is low-cal salad dressing.

There is every reason to have more effective border security, and in various places along the border, fences are fine -- if they are watched by competent border guards, if they are maintained, and if those who try to cross them are sent back. The point is that building fences won't solve the immigration problem unless the nation -- meaning in this context the Congress and the White House -- has the will to solve it.

The same is true of driver's licenses (illegal immigrants shouldn't be getting licenses period, and no state should be granting them). The very fact that we are now solemnly talking about "tougher standards" for licenses for illegals makes it clear we are not serious about the problem.

The danger is not only that congressmen will demand these and similar measures as their contributions to stopping the immigration invasion and will then exploit such measures to delude voters into thinking something serious has been done, but also that the same legislators will then support Mr. Bush's amnesty package as the price of the "reforms" they've so valiantly hammered through Congress.

The net intended effect of such measures would be to put the immigration issue back to sleep. But that's not the effect they may actually have.

The immigration issue is awakening for the simple reason that Americans in areas far removed from the Mexican border are now for the first time beginning to see their local communities transformed by the realities of mass immigration from the Third World -- crime, disease, poverty, overcrowding, welfare, the wreckage of schools, and the obvious cultural disintegration that uncontrolled immigration brings.

Congress and the White House can collude to serve up whatever eyewash they can concoct to make voters now clearly alerted to and worried about immigration forget and ignore what's happening. But my bet is that the invasion has now gone too far and the awareness of it is now too deep for that tactic to work. Sooner or later those in Congress and the White House are going to have to confront the immigration crisis seriously -- which means a moratorium and probably troops on the border -- or else find themselves facing political opponents in future elections who will be serious.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Globalization now eats the hands that fed it

2005-01-07T20:02:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, January 7, 2005

If it's a tsunami you're afraid of, what happened in the Indian Ocean last month is probably not what you should be worrying about. The tsunami Americans need to fear is the man-made wave of globalization that has helped gut the American work force by exporting its jobs overseas in part through the cute little trick known as "offshoring." We know the threat is big because last month even Business Week started paying attention to it.

In its Dec. 6 issue Business Week sported a sizeable article titled "Shaking up trade theory" by Adam Bernstein. The article is newsworthy because, for probably the first time ever, an establishment business magazine raised some serious questions about the free trade dogmas that underlie globalization and much of the economic theory and policy of the last several decades. For a pillar of the business establishment like Business Week to do so is a bit like Scientific American raising questions about the law of gravity.

What worries a good many of the economists cited in the article is that the basic assumption of free trade theory -- the doctrine of comparative advantage, as it's called -- doesn't add up. Under the doctrine, "most economists have concluded that countries gain more than they lose when they trade with each other and specialize in what they do best. Today, however, advances in telecommunications such as broadband and the Internet have led to a new type of trade that doesn't fit neatly into the theory. Now that brainpower can zip around the world at low cost, a global labor market for skilled workers seems to be emerging for the first time -- and has the potential to upset traditional notions of national specialization."

The article cites no less an icon of the economic high priesthood than Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson, who recently raised his own questions about the benefits of free trade in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Mr. Samuelson's questions had some negative answers. As Business Week summarizes his argument:

"The fact that programming, engineering, and other high-skilled jobs are jumping to places such as China and India seems to conflict head-on with the 200-year-old doctrine of comparative advantage. With these countries now graduating more college students than the U.S. every year, economists are increasingly uncertain about just where the U.S. has an advantage anymore -- or whether the standard framework for understanding globalization still applies in the face of so-called white-collar offshoring."

Not all economists agree, and the article offers a nutshell of the debate that's beginning to ripple through the academic and business communities. But what's news is that there's a debate at all. For nearly two centuries the doctrine of comparative advantage, formulated by economic theorist David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century, has held much the same status as the Virgin Birth. Now even the high priests are starting to doubt.

One reason they're doubting is that while it's long been known that free trade scuttled blue-collar workers out of their jobs, nowadays it's starting to carve into white-collar workers. That means -- eventually -- the kind of people who write about trade policy -- like Mr. Bernstein and his friends.

"Until now," Mr. Bernstein writes, "the pain of globalization has been borne by less than a quarter of the workforce, mostly lower-skilled workers, whose wage cuts outweighed the cheaper-priced goods globalization brings." But someone else is sharing the pain -- namely, the very class that thought free trade was such a hot bargain.

Mr. Bernstein cites a study from Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass., as offering "the most detailed projections so far" of how bad the white collar hit might be. The Forrester study sees "the pace of U.S. job flows abroad averaging 300,000 a year through 2015, probably a conservative estimate. "Already, some 14 million white-collar jobs involve work that can be shipped electronically and thus in theory could be moved offshore," yet another study has found. "White-collar workers have a right to be scared," says Harvard University's labor economist Lawrence F. Katz. So did blue collar workers, but nobody cared much about them.

It's hardly surprising that nobody paid much attention to the real costs of free trade and globalization until they started eating the very people who promoted them and gained from them. That sort of thing is common enough throughout history. It remains to be seen if the wreckage of the white collar class -- the business, political and intellectual elite of the country -- turns out to be quite as devastating as some of the pessimists are predicting. If it weren't for the problem that the wreck of those elites would probably wreck the country along with them, we just might all be better off if the devastation turned out to be real.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Will administration cover up a major Israeli spy scandal?

2005-01-04T23:59:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, January 4, 2005

Last summer a flurry of press reports disclosed the FBI's investigation of a man named Larry Franklin who works in the Defense Department under neo-conservative policy chief Douglas Feith. The supposed reason for the investigation was espionage for Israel. The neo-con buddies of Mr. Feith and Israel sounded off about the anti-Semitism that was obviously driving the witchhunt, and the reports soon faded from the press.

Now they're back, at least partly, but the focus of the probe no longer seems to be Mr. Franklin. The focus is AIPAC -- the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the principal arm of what is generally (but not too loudly) called the "Israeli lobby." On Dec. 1, the FBI raided the Washington offices of AIPAC and subpoenaed four of its top officials.

This time almost no one paid any attention except the Jewish Times and the Forward, which have carried some very good accounts of what's going on. What is going on is important for several reasons, in addition to the usual interest in spy stories. Not the least of what's interesting is that Israel and its friends are supposed to be allies of the United States, not spies on it.

Defenders of Israel will say (as they said back when Jonathan Pollard was nabbed for espionage for Israel in the 1980s) that friendly countries spy on their friends all the time. Well, maybe they do, but I've never heard of it in recent decades. I have never heard that the United States spied on Great Britain or France or Germany since the end of World War II or those countries on us, nor has there ever been any espionage case in this or other countries involving Americans spying on them or their spying on us. With the Pollard case, you can't say that about Israel.

As for AIPAC, the original interest in the case was that Mr. Franklin was supposed to have met with AIPAC officials and an Israeli intelligence agent and handed over classified documents. What that might mean is that Mr. Franklin was not acting for himself but for his boss, Mr. Feith, or Mr. Feith's boss, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, both of whom are known to be very pro-Israeli. And what that might mean is that the whole neo-conservative cadre in the Pentagon is and has been all along an Israeli espionage operation.

So far nobody has suggested that openly, and AIPAC itself insists it's innocent. After the Dec. 1 raid, it released a public statement that read in part, "Neither AIPAC nor any member of our staff has broken any law. We are fully cooperating with the governmental authorities. We believe any court of law or grand jury will conclude that AIPAC employees have always acted legally, properly and appropriately."
That's swell, but AIPAC can't possibly say such a thing truthfully. How can its leaders know that no "member of our staff" has broken the law? The very issuance of a statement impossible to substantiate is suspicious.

More recently, the Forward reported that Mr. Franklin may have been acting as a provocateur for the FBI in a sting operation, that the target was never (or is no longer) Mr. Franklin but AIPAC itself -- as an unregistered agent of a foreign power," namely Israel.

AIPAC, it's hardly a secret, zealously and faithfully defends Israel, but it does so ostensibly as the representative of American supporters of Israel, not as the agent of Israel itself. If in fact it is taking orders from the Israeli government, it has a problem. To act as an agent of a foreign power without registering as such with the government just happens to be a very serious federal felony in this country. Many foreign agents avoid such legal problems by registering. AIPAC doesn't.

As the Forward commented last week, "registering as a foreign agent would require AIPAC to provide significantly more detailed information about its aims and activities to the government -- thereby robbing the group of a key weapon, the ability to operate behind the scenes."

But, also according to the Forward account, Mr. Franklin, as part of the FBI's sting operation, "was involved in initiating contact with some neoconservative defense experts, several of them Jewish, who supported Ahmad Chalabi, president of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi had deep ties to Bush administration officials."

There's a grand jury investigation of AIPAC going on right now, yet despite what has been a long-term investigation by the federal government, President Bush addressed an AIPAC meeting last May, and Condoleeza Rice addressed an AIPAC affiliate in Florida in October. That might suggest there's no fire behind the FBI's smoke.
Then again, it might also mean this administration is simply determined to smother the fire before its flames burn up some of its key officials.

Where multiculturalism leads

2004-12-31T19:59:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, December 31, 2004

In Europe, if not in the United States, some people are beginning to grasp that just maybe they made a mistake when they decided to welcome millions of immigrants over the last several decades. The most recent European to get it is former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who has been making noises about the damage he and his colleagues have inflicted on their own societies.

Interviewed in a Hamburg newspaper last month, Mr. Schmidt confessed, "The concept of multiculturalism is difficult to make fit with a democratic society" and that importing thousands of Turkish "gastarbeiter, or foreign guest workers, into Germany over the last several decades was a bit of a boo-boo.

As the London Daily Telegraph reported the story, Mr. Schmidt, Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, "said that the problems resulting from the influx of mostly Turkish Gastarbeiter, or guest workers, had been neglected in Germany and the rest of Europe. They could be overcome only by authoritarian governments, he added, naming Singapore as an example."

He's hardly the first to see this, although admittedly, at the age of 85, he's just a wee bit behind the curve. As long ago as 1990, I wrote, in an article in Chronicles magazine, "The late Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the dominions of the Habsburgs and the Romanoffs, among others, all presided over a kind of rainbow coalition of nations and peoples, who for the most part managed to live happily because their secret compulsions to spill each other's blood was restrained by the overwhelming power of the despots and dynasties who ruled them.

"Political freedom relies on a shared political culture as much as on the oppositions and balances that social differentiation creates, and when the common culture disintegrates under the impact of mass migrations, only institutionalized force can hold the regime together."

That's a bit of a mouthful, but I gather it's what Mr. Schmidt was driving at. To have freedom on a stable political basis, you have to have a homogeneous culture and society, composed of people who share the same values and beliefs. If they don't share them, you can hold them together only by force.

That lesson is becoming clear in Europe, where the brutal murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh last month by an Islamic fanatic shows what happens when you destroy homogeneity by importing fragments of alien and hostile cultures. Much the same lesson ought to be clear in this country, not only from the 9/11 atrocities themselves but from the recent slaughter of six white deer hunters in Wisconsin by a disgruntled Asian immigrant.

"Society cannot exist," wrote the great eighteenth century conservative Edmund Burke, "unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without." Restraints come from within when a population shares cultural and moral values; when they don't, external force has to provide the restraints.

Only a week or so after the murder of Mr. Van Gogh in Holland, the neighboring country of Belgium outlawed its main opposition party, the Vlaamsblok, for being a "racist organization." The Vlaamsblok, which two opinion polls found was the most popular political party in Flanders the month before, was notable mainly for its strong opposition to immigration. That's what made it "racist" and that's why it had to go.

This month Great Britain simply arrested two of its leading opponents of immigration, Nick Griffin of the British National Party and the party's founder John Tyndall, on charges of "inciting racial hatred." Each, it seems, had made (in private meetings secretly taped by undercover informants) derogatory (or perhaps merely critical) remarks about Islam. The arrests are transparent efforts by the British overclass to muzzle rising political challengers, but they're also part of the drift toward authoritarianism that mass immigration provokes.

We see the drift in this country, with the Patriot Act and its spawn at airports and in random searches of law-abiding citizens -- all because our own overclass will not enforce standing laws against illegal immigration and does nothing to halt the transformation of American society by millions of aliens. Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding.

This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as "anarcho-tyranny" -- we refuse to control real criminals (that's the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that's the tyranny).

What is now becoming obvious in Europe, even to decrepit socialists like Helmut Schmidt, ought to be no less obvious to our own decrepit rulers here. It's already obvious to those they rule. All they need is a leader with the guts and brains to say it out loud.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Hillary discovers - immigration

2004-12-28T19:58:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, December 28, 2004

It's beginning to dawn, even on American politicians, that you cannot have something like 34 million immigrants in the country and not expect immigration to become a major political issue. The latest politician in whose brain this insight has blossomed is the junior senator from New York and very possibly the next president of the United States: Mrs. William J. Clinton, popularly known as "Hillary."

The Washington Times reports that "Hillary goes conservative on immigration," which means, in case you're the kind of conservative who thinks mass immigration is a good thing, that she is opposed to immigration. Or at least that is what the noises she is making about the issue would suggest.

Mrs. Clinton, widely suspected of being the next Democratic presidential nominee in a year when the incumbent Republican leaves office, has a pretty good chance of being the next president, and it's interesting she's making the noises on immigration she is. In 2002, Mrs. Clinton won the New York Senate race with some 85 percent of the state's Hispanic vote. That by itself would suggest that Hispanics are a major constituency for her, at least in the state and probably nationally, and that she really doesn't want to alienate them by being against more immigration.

Then again, maybe Mrs. Clinton is just a little smarter than a good many of the Republicans who adhere to the Open Borders lobby propaganda lines that (a) all Hispanics are necessarily for immigration and (b) being against immigration or some of it will lose you the Hispanic vote. In short, Mrs. Clinton, unlike some Republicans, might actually have looked at this year's election returns.

Maybe so, but even if she's thinking about making immigration control a major part of her future political strategy, she seems to have a ways to go before she figures out how to do it. Consider, for example, some of what she's been saying, as the Times reports it.

Almost everything Mrs. Clinton has said about the issue centers on illegal immigration. That's fine as far as it goes, but most experts and political leaders who are serious about the issue understand that illegal immigration is only part of the problem. The even more massive legal immigration causes the same problems as the illegal kind.

In a recent interview on WABC radio, the Times reports Mrs. Clinton as saying, "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants." Yes, but you see, no knowledgeable person who's really against illegal immigration would say he's "against illegal immigrants." It's immigration, not the immigrants, that's objectionable. Being "anti-immigrant" is in fact a canard the Open Borders lobby uses to claim that supporters of immigration control just dislike the immigrants themselves.

In the same interview, she also said, "Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we're going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let's have a system that keeps track of them."

Yes, well, that's more or less what President Bush claims he's proposing in his "guest worker" program that is really an amnesty for illegals. The problem with the kind of guest worker or "entry and exit" programs they're proposing is that they're all entry and no exit. Once the immigrants come in, no one will be able to make them go back.

Mrs. Clinton may or may not be serious about her new noises against immigration. Personally I hope she is and that she learns more about it and thinks it through a bit more than she seems to have done. But what's really significant about her immigration control posturing is that it's happening at all.

"She's not a dumb woman," a spokesman for immigration control champion Tom Tancredo told the Times. "She's got a great liberal base, and she realizes there's no better way to draw in more conservative voters. She has really come out to the forefront on that."

After years of trying to explain to the leadership of the Republican Party that mass immigration is not only a danger to our national security and identity, conservatives may now be on the eve of finding that the person who has really paid attention is someone whom most conservatives loathe. In fact, that outcome was probably inevitable.

As libertarians and neo-cons badgered the Republicans into ignoring the immigration issue totally, it was probably only a matter of time before someone not at all a conservative perceived what the immigration issue could gain him (or her). If Mrs. Clinton lights her path toward the White House with the issue of immigration control in a serious way, the Open Borders Republicans may find they merely dug their own political graves.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Tyranny comes for Christmas, with liberal blessings

2004-12-24T19:57:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, December 24, 2004

The Christmas wars just won't stop, even though Christmas is over, at least for a year and maybe forever, if the anti-Christmas warriors have their way. While the warriors have been waging their crusade to make everyone from school kids to presidents say "the holidays" instead of "Christmas," their allies in the media have been pretending the whole war is just a conservative fantasy.

Thus, liberal columnist E.J. Dionne can't quite grasp why Christians get so upset about people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." "Politicians who speak of 'the holidays' instead of 'Christmas' now face angry Christian protests," he asserts. Well, not really. Most Christians and conservatives simply snicker at that kind of emptiness. What they get upset about is being forbidden to say "Merry Christmas" themselves or call a Christmas tree a Christmas tree, as actually and repeatedly happens.

The reason they get upset is only in part religious and has nothing to do with intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism, or the other dark passions that secular liberals imagine are what invariably explain any expression of religious belief. The reason they get upset is that the expression of religious belief and the practice of secular customs derived from religion are being banned. The name for that is not bigotry but tyranny. And the people who defend it are called liberals.
Mr. Dionne seems to take a moderate position on tyranny. He acknowledges, "There is something defective about a religious tolerance open to every expression of religion except for the faith of those who believe most passionately," but then again, being a good liberal, you've got to think of the other side too, which is, "What in the world is 'Christian' about insisting on saying 'Merry Christmas' to a devout Jew or Hindu who might reasonably view the statement as a sign of disrespect? At the level of government: Is it really 'Christian' for a religious majority to press its advantage over religious minorities, including nonbelievers?"
The answers, of course, are no and no, and you don't have to be a liberal to give them.
I don't think I know a single Christian who would "insist" on saying "Merry Christmas" to a devout non-Christian (or even a non-devout non-Christian), and that's not at all what the Christmas controversy is about anyway. Nor can I imagine too many "devout Jews and Hindus" who would regard someone wishing them a Merry Christmas "as a sign of disrespect." If Mr. Dionne knows such people, I hope he doesn't introduce them to me.
Now, "Is it really 'Christian' for a religious majority to press its advantage over religious minorities, including nonbelievers?" I would think not, but again that's not what the controversy is about. The controversy is about whether Christians can celebrate or even observe in public their own religious holidays in a country (or even local community) that is overwhelmingly Christian and has been so throughout its history.
The larger question is that if non-Christian "religious minorities" are offended by the majority religion of the nation, why did they come here at all? Why do such minorities invite themselves into a society in which they feel alien and then insist the majority abandon its religious beliefs and national identity so the minority can feel at home?
Mr. Dionne winds up quoting Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "the chief source of man's inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to other men." He adds, "I fear that in these Christmas debates, Christians are behaving not as Christians but as a tribe: 'We will pound them if they get in the way of our customs and rituals.'"
But I have seen no evidence (and Mr. Dionne offers none) that any Christian has "pounded" anyone. It's the Christians who are being pounded for saying "Merry Christmas" or "Christmas tree," and those doing the pounding are the non-Christians, or their buddies the liberals.
As for "tribal behavior," Mr. Dionne, like liberals in general, imagines there is this creature called "man" (or nowadays "humankind") that can somehow be separated from tribe -- nation, religion, community, ethnicity, gender, history, culture. "During my life," wrote the great French conservative Joseph de Maistre, "I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on … but I must say, as for man, I have never come across him anywhere; if he exists, he is completely unknown to me."
De Maistre's point was that "tribal behavior" is what makes human beings human. Take it away from "man" or "humankind" and what you get is not "pure man" or "liberated man" but dehumanization, and from that, tyranny. That's exactly where the war against Christmas (and similar wars against other expressions of "tribalism") is heading. When it gets there, I'll bet even liberals, including Mr. Dionne, won't like it much.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Bad reasons to celebrate Christmas

2004-12-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, December 21, 2004

A tip of the hat to Charles Krauthammer, Jewish neo-conservative (not necessarily a redundancy, despite what many neo-cons claim) who last week lobbed a much-merited smack at the face of the anti-Christmas lobby. "The attempts to de-Christianize Christmas are as absurd as they are relentless," he writes, and he's perfectly correct.

Well, actually, he's not perfectly correct. Despite his defense of the most important traditional (and official) American and Christian holiday, it's not quite clear from Mr. Krauthammer's column exactly why we should keep Christmas at all. The reason it's not entirely clear: Mr. Krauthammer is a neo-conservative, and this is what's wrong with those people.

The reason the war on Christmas is absurd, in his view, is that "The United States today is the most tolerant and diverse society in history. It celebrates all faiths with an open heart and open-mindedness that, compared to even the most advanced countries in Europe, are unique." What's absurd is to claim that the observation of Christmas, as most Americans do observe it, is in some way evidence of intolerance or discrimination.

Mr. Krauthammer, as a Jew, allows as to how he actually enjoys Christmas, not for any religious reasons but because it's an inherently enjoyable and pleasant holiday. He also offers some snippy and well-placed cracks about the sudden elevation of Hanukah, "easily the least important of Judaism's seven holidays," as a kind of replacement for Christmas.

For the anti-Christmas warriors, it's OK to observe the religious holiday of one faith or several other faiths, but not the major one of the Christian faith. That's why it's accurate to say that the war on Christmas is not just a misguided crusade of secularist liberalism; it's pretty much a concerted attack on America's Christian identity.

But that's the point Mr. Krauthammer, as a neo-conservative, doesn't quite seem to get. His objection to the war on Christmas is that Christmas is essentially harmless. He has two other objections also.

One is that the anti-Christmas crusade is "ungenerous" and the other that it's "a failure to appreciate the uniqueness of the communal American religious experience. Unlike, for example, the famously tolerant Ottoman Empire or the generally tolerant Europe of today, the United States does not merely allow minority religions to exist at its sufferance. It celebrates and welcomes and honors them." His first reason is fine, but in his second, we begin to approach the issue of what's wrong with neo-conservatism.

What's wrong with neo-conservatism is that it is a form of liberalism, and as such it is incapable of saying flatly and clearly that while Americans certainly enjoy a right to practice whatever religions they wish, Christianity remains the public religion of the nation -- whether one believes in it or likes it or not. Liberals (and neo-cons) can't say that because they don't believe in public religions and (especially) that America should have one.

A "public religion" of course is not an officially established church, as the Church of England is still. Nor is it the religion to which the majority of citizens adhere, any more than a high school glee club founded fifty years ago is young because all its members are under 18. What is true of individual members is not necessarily true of the group.

A public religion is the religion with which a country publicly identifies, and we know it identifies with it because we know it has become vital to its identity as a nation. It is precisely because Christianity is vital to our national identity that there is a war against it, and that's the reason also there is now a nationwide resistance to that war by Americans who wish to conserve our national identity.

Thus, the major national holiday is and always has been the major Christian holiday, and throughout American history presidents and public leaders of all parties and persuasions have acknowledged the Christian identity of the country, without any supposition of controversy. Only recently has an American president (namely, President Bush) gone around babbling "Happy Holidays," as he did in a press conference in Italy with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi last week, and even "Happy Hanukah."

That's because Mr. Bush is a neo-conservative too, and the refusal or inability of neo-conservatism to affirm that America does not just "celebrate and welcome and honor" "minority religions" but is publicly and historically identified with a particular religion central to its institutions and values, its culture and identity, has begun to catch up with him.
The more it does, and the more public leaders absorb neo-conservatism, the less effective their war against the war on Christmas and the larger war on America will be. And that's why, as sensible as Mr. Krauthammer's column in many respects is, we need more than neo-conservatism to conserve our nation.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Phony 'media watchdog' demands I be muzzled

2004-12-17T20:41:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, December 17, 2004

"Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person?" asked journalist Christopher Hitchens about David Brock, another "journalist" (sort of) who confessed to having penned what he later admitted was a mendacious account of Anita Hill on behalf of the "Republican sleaze machine" (for which he was well paid with royalties and fame). Well, lots of people, to judge from the reactions to Mr. Brock's latest wallow in self-righteousness, this time directed at me.

Having defected from the right because of his pangs of conscience over his earlier fakeries, Mr. Brock has now set himself up as a "media watchdog" who pronounces, to anyone willing to pay attention, on the sins of real journalists (mainly those on the political right, where Mr. Brock and his fans like to purport all sin is located).

Last week he published an open letter to the president of my syndicate demanding an explanation as to why they carry my column, with a transparent invitation to drop it. The particular column he didn't like was one of Nov. 26th about the now-infamous ABC Monday Night Football ad starring black football star Terrell Owens and white sexpot Nicolette Sheridan.

What bothered Mr. Brock was that I denounced the ad as subverting not only "morals and good taste" but also "white racial and cultural identity" through its deliberate glorification of interracial sex. I argued it was deliberate because I can see no other reason why a black man and a white woman were selected for this particular spot and this particular role. Why not a black man and a black woman or a white man and a white woman?

"We strongly condemn the clear bigotry of this column," Mr. Brock pontificated, the "bigotry" presumably being my dim view of interracial marriage. Well, I'm sorry, but I do take a dim view of it, for the simple reason that I would like my race -- whites -- to survive. I see nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, I'd like to know why Mr. Brock thinks there is something wrong with it. Nor am I the only one to think so.

In recent years, any number of prominent Jewish spokesmen have expressed their own concerns about Jewish intermarriage with non-Jews. One in particular is Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Great Britain, who writes,
(http://www.whymarryjewish.com/chief_rabbi.html), "The Jewish people, having survived for thousands of years in the most adverse circumstances, including the Holocaust, is today threatened by intermarriage and assimilation. Jewish communities throughout the diaspora are experiencing demographic decline. Why has this happened, and can anything be done to reverse the trend?"

Nor is the Chief Rabbi alone. A few years ago, neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, then President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and now on the National Security Council staff, wrote a book, Faith or Fear, in which he described rising rates of Jewish intermarriage to non-Jews as a "demographic disaster."

I'm not Jewish, but these gentlemen are right, and they have every reason to worry about what Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz calls "the vanishing American Jew" through intermarriage with non-Jews. White gentiles today are not mainly threatened by intermarriage with non-whites but by their own infertility, but any group facing demographic decline (as whites worldwide do) and wants to survive as a group has every reason to oppose intermarriage, and most do. Why can't I?

As I noted in the column, "Blacks are permitted to notice race," and so are most other minority groups. But "whites aren't." That's why, and if whites do notice race, they get denounced for "bigotry" and the people who publish them are invited not to do so, with subtle little hints that if they don't stop publishing them, they will be punished themselves.

But my views are not really in question; I'm pretty plain about them. Nor is my right to express those views, at least among normal people. My syndicate happens to be just a little more professional in its view of journalism and a good deal more committed to free expression than Mr. Brock's oily little bigotries would allow it to be.

What does worry me is that anyone takes frauds like David Brock seriously at all, but to judge from the hate mail I've received and similar demands for me to be muzzled, apparently many do.

Having milked the right for what he could get out of it with his own phony journalism, Mr. Brock now struts around squeezing the herds on the left by posturing as a paragon of virtue and integrity and instructing real journalists as to who should and should not be published at all. We now know the answer to Mr. Hitchens' question about who is such a sap as to take him seriously. There are enough of them creeping around out there to cause normal people to worry.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

War on Christmas is a war on the West

2004-12-14T21:12:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, December 14, 2004

December is not even half over, and already the war on Christmas has started. Out in the Red State of Colorado, where traditional culture supposedly thrives, the city of Denver has waded into a little cultural gunplay that is attracting national attention. But Denver is not the only battlefield. Increasingly it looks like Christmas may be pitched in the same trashcan as the Confederate Flag.

In Denver, local merchants have for years sponsored a pallid festival called the "Parade of Lights," which sported Santa Claus but no Christian images. The "mood," as the New York Times described it last week, "was bouncy, commercial and determinedly secular." The Parade "shunned politics and anything remotely smacking of controversy, including openly religious Christmas themes that might offend." (Well, not entirely.)

It's interesting there's someone in Denver who thinks that "openly religious themes" in a Christmas event "might offend." It's even more interesting to consider that someone in Denver actually would be offended by such themes. But perhaps most interesting of all is that nowhere in the entire New York Times story, despite several references to "the controversy," is a single person or group identified who actually admits to being offended by religious imagery.

The people who were offended were local Christian groups fed up with the absolute refusal of local businessmen to mention religion at all. This year the Faith Bible Chapel sought permission to run a float in the Parade of Lights that carried explicit religious themes with a choir singing hymns and carols. Permission denied. Too controversial, you see. Can you imagine what would happen if a somebody in a Christmas parade actually started singing "Silent Night"? The horror, the horror.

Michael Krikorian, a spokesman for the Downtown Denver Partnership, which sponsors the parade, says they don't allow "direct religious themes," and that includes "Merry Christmas" signs and singing or playing traditional Christmas hymns. "We want to avoid that specific religious message out of respect for other religions in the region," Mr. Krikorian smirks. "It could be construed as disrespectful to other people who enjoy a parade each year."

But the horror of being misconstrued apparently extends only to Christian themes. The Parade of Lights, as the Rocky Mountain News reported, "includes the Two Spirit Society, which honors gay and lesbian American Indians as holy people; a German folk dance group; and performers of the Lion Dance, a Chinese New Year tradition 'meant to chase away evil spirits and welcome good luck and good fortune for the year.'" Sounds sort of like a "specific religious message," no?

Nevertheless, denied permission to chase away the evil spirits of their choice, "hundreds" of Denver area Christians showed up on the sidewalks anyway and sang "carols about mangers, shepherds and holy spirits, handed out hot chocolate and spoke of their faith." There you go. The witchcraft trials can be expected to start any day now.

In fact, nothing much happened, except the businessspersons now say they are going to have to "re-evaluate" the event.
"This was always just supposed to be a cutesy parade, for the kids," says Jim Basey, president of the Downtown Denver Partnership. "The purpose was to get bodies downtown." No offensiveness for Mr. Basey.

Denver is not the only city to enjoy a little Christmas cultural warfare. The Washington Times reports that the mayor of Somerville, Mass. has issued a public apology for "mistakenly" calling the local "holiday party" a "Christmas party," while "School districts in Florida and New Jersey have banned Christmas carols altogether, and an 'all-inclusive' holiday song program at a Chicago-area elementary school included Jewish and Jamaican songs, but no Christmas carols." In Washington, a school banned a play of "A Christmas Carol" because of Tiny Tim's prayer, and neighboring libraries banned Christmas trees. The website Vdare.com sponsors an annual scrutiny of the "war against Christmas." It has lots more examples.

Christmas, to be fair, is not an exclusively religious holiday, though Christians are entirely right to insist on preserving that meaning among others. It's a celebration that has been around so long it has acquired non-religious meanings as well, but meanings that go well beyond Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman. It's a festival that comes from the heart of the traditional West, which is why music, literature, films and common social customs center around it so much.

At least some of the people who want to abolish it are not intentionally anti-Western. They're people who have simply disengaged themselves from their own civilization and are entirely indifferent as to whether it survives or not.
Being strangers in their own land, they no longer have a clue as to what Christmas and its symbols mean, and it's not only Christmas that's "just supposed to be a cutesy parade." It's everything else their civilization has created.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

'War on Terror" clearly not winnable

2004-12-10T15:29:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, December 10, 2004

So who says Islamic fanatics don't celebrate Christmas? This week our friends in Al Qaeda sent Americans a little present in the form of a massive murderous attack on the U.S. consulate in Jidda that, after three hours of vicious gun play, left nine people dead. Happy Holidays.

Readers should excuse my cynicism about the brutal attack, but a certain amount of cynicism is perhaps in order when you consider that after two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and months of not very successful counter-insurgency warfare in the latter country, Al Qaeda remains entirely capable of launching the very kind of onslaught it just did. What does that tell us?

What it told President Bush is that "the terrorists are still on the move," a sentiment which for once is unexceptionable. "They're interested in affecting the will of free countries" [Presumably he means Saudi Arabia.] They want us to leave Saudi Arabia [That also is true, and why shouldn't they?] They want us to leave Iraq [right again, though it might be noted that only since the U.S. invasion of Iraq has Al Qaeda played any role in that country.] They want us to grow timid and weary in the face of their willingness to kill randomly and kill innocent people. [Yes, that's more or less the terrorist strategy]. And that's why these elections in Iraq are very important. [Hello?]"

Well, what the attack in Jidda tells Mr. Bush is one thing, but what it should tell us (and him) is that the great war on terror has been pretty much of a flop. We should have known that from the Madrid bombing last spring, and we should certainly have known that from the protracted unpleasantness in Iraq itself, where the guerrilla insurgency (or, if you prefer, terrorism) continues to flourish, despite months of American casualties and combat. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, fresh from a cheery review of the smashing success of the "war against terrorism" in Iraq, now pronounces that we can probably pull U.S. troops out of Iraq in four years.

That's after the troop increase the Pentagon has just called for, and it will depend on "the progress that Iraq's civilian government and security forces made by then," as the New York Times reports. So there's no guarantee whatsoever that we will be able to withdraw in four years at all.

Meanwhile, the president of Pakistan informed Mr. Bush last week that his government has not the foggiest idea as to where the fabled Osama bin Laden might be. A few weeks ago, U.S. authorities were claiming they had the terrorist mastermind in their gunsights, but President Musharraf has a different tale. "He is alive," he affirmed, "but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis."

It's not all his fault, he also says, because the United States just doesn't have enough troops in Afghanistan to ferret Osama out of his den and because it's hard to tell who is and who isn't really part of Al Qaeda and because of all sorts of other reasons, most of which add up to one nightmarish conclusion: The "war on terror" to which Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld have committed this country is not really winnable at all.

It is not winnable because it is not a war in the conventional sense that Western nations have historically fought wars. Western wars, from the Middle Ages on, have consisted of fairly brief periods of conflict between discrete forces. After a bit, one side or the other is exhausted or defeated, and the war is over. That is not how gentlemen like Osama bin Laden and his friends fight "wars."

War for them is a way of life, which is why you don't hear much from them for long periods of time, when they suddenly blow up a couple of skyscrapers or hit a consulate or slaughter several dozen civilians. War -- "jihad" -- is not a deviation from the normal course of affairs for them. It is the normal course of affairs.

And it's also a process that makes no distinction between civilian and combatant, which is why we call it "terrorist." Hence, it's impossible to protect against. If you protect the skyscrapers, they hit the commuter trains. If you cover the commuter trains, they hit the shopping malls.

Finally, it is a war we, the West and the United States, don't have to fight at all, or at least one we didn't have to fight before Mr. Bush and his advisers had the brilliant idea of dragging us into it. It ought to be obvious to everyone today that we will not and cannot win it. The question now should be, how do we get out of it?

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

The truth comes out about Bush's Hispanic support

2004-12-07T09:37:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Only a few days after the national election, President Bush appointed his campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, the new head of the Republican National Committee. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Mehlman offered the world his own analysis of the voting patterns in the 2004 election and what they tell us as to why his boss won.

As The Washington Post reported, Mr. Mehlman argued that Mr. Bush won largely by "broadening his appeal among key swing constituencies, including Roman Catholics, Latinos and suburban women." Predictably, he maintained that "the single most important number that has come out of the election" is the 44 percent Hispanic support the president supposedly won this year.

"Future Republican majorities will depend in part on the party's ability to expand its support among Hispanic voters, and 2004 may have been a significant step in that direction if GOP candidates can build on it," the Post reported him as telling the national meeting of Republican governors in New Orleans last month.

What Mr. Mehlman told them has already hardened in the party's mental arteries as the gospel about the election and how to win in the future: Pander to Hispanic and other "minorities" and take the white mainstream core of the Republican Party base for granted. And to judge from the president's immediate resurrection of his congressional amnesty plan for illegal aliens and his new Hispanic cabinet appointments, that seems to be the strategy his policies will reflect as well.

It is crucial to the future of the Republican Party to flush these misconceptions about why and how he won out of the party arteries as soon as possible, because we now know they are wrong and if they become the basis for political strategy and even policies, they will lead to Republican ruin.

The 44 percent Hispanic support for Mr. Bush has been dubious from the first day it was reported, but we now know it's not correct. The figure came originally from exit polls reported by the Associated Press and other news services and was a national average based on similar exit polls in each state. The state in which Mr. Bush supposedly won Hispanic support most heavily was his own, Texas, where the AP reported he won a whopping and unprecedented 59 percent of Hispanics.

That, if nothing else, is what's wrong. The Associated Press last week issued a press release acknowledging it isn't so. Mr. Bush won only 49 percent of the Hispanic vote in Texas.

In its Nov. 3 exit polls reports, the AP release states, "The Associated Press overstated President Bush's support among Texas Hispanics. Under a post-election adjustment by exit poll providers Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International, 49 percent of Hispanics in the state voted for Bush, not a majority. The revised result does not differ to a statistically significant degree from Bush's 43 percent support among Texas Hispanics in a 2000 exit poll."

The revised poll shows that Texas Hispanic voters "voted 50 percent for Kerry and 49 percent for Bush, not 41-59 Kerry-Bush."

And if you factor in the new 49 percent Hispanic support in Texas in place of the old 59 percent in Mr. Bush's national Hispanic exit polls, the 44 percent national figure vanishes. What you get is closer to 40 percent of the Hispanic vote on a national level -- an improvement over his 35 percent support back in 2000, but hardly the sort of seismic shift the pandermaniacs over at the RNC have been crowing over.

Moreover, if the Texas exit poll was wrong, then why should we be inclined to accept similar polls that show heavily inflated Hispanic support for Mr. Bush in this election? In Florida, for example, Mr. Bush is said to have won 56 percent of the Hispanic vote, a result almost as incredible as the Texas claim. Finally, an independent outfit, the Velasquez Institute, specializes in analyzing Hispanic voting patterns and concluded on election day that Mr. Bush won only 34 percent of the Hispanic bloc nationally -- a result a little smaller than but more consistent with his 2000 showing. There's no reason to think their analysis is flawed.

How many Hispanic votes Mr. Bush won this year is important, because as Mr. Mehlman acknowledges, it tells the party at which demographic groups it should direct its appeals and "outreach," and what issues (and policies) the party should support (or avoid) that are likely to attract (or alienate) those groups. With Hispanics, the main issue will be immigration, and unless the blood of political reality can start flowing through the party's mental arteries again, the errors now blocking those arteries will keep Mr. Bush and his party on the wrong side of the coming immigration battle.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Why have laws against immigration if nobody enforces them?

2004-12-03T21:39:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, December 3, 2004

On a recent Thanksgiving trip to Washington, relatives of mine had their car stopped near the Capitol and subjected to a "bomb search" by -- somebody or another, the local cops, the federal cops, the Homeland Security cops, the UN cops, who knows and who can tell anymore?

There was no bomb of course (not even my relatives carry them in their cars) and there is no "horror story," except for the horror to which we have all become so habituated that nobody even notices it -- that perfectly innocent, law-abiding Americans are stopped, their time consumed, and their property pawed over by government parasites who have no better way to justify their presence at the public trough. For the real horror of the week you have to go to Long Island.

There, the New York Times reports, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, after listening to a rising level of anger from voters about the impact of immigration on their community, "floated a proposal to deputize some Suffolk County police officers, giving them the power to detain people found to be in the United States illegally after being taken into custody on other charges. Right now, Suffolk police and corrections officers say, they are prohibited from asking immigrants whether they are in the country legally."

The plan went nowhere, mainly because local police unions objected to it (no reasons given), and of course the professional aliens lobby didn't much care for it either.

"But advocacy groups and residents of Suffolk and Nassau Counties say the proposal is a sign of the times. They say the issue of illegal immigration is rapidly gathering political force in Long Island's patchwork of historically white suburban hamlets, and as the complaints grow, politicians are responding with get-tough rhetoric, crackdowns and new laws."

The issue of illegal immigration is rapidly gathering political force in places like Suffolk because such places have not enjoyed all the glories of mass immigration the Open Borders Lobby has promised them for so long. The issue will come to many, many more such places as those glories fail to arrive there either.

What has come to Suffolk, the Times reports, is "a commensurate strain on public services like schools, garbage collection and sewer systems in an area where residents pay some of the highest taxes in the country" and citizens' complaints that "the influx of immigrants has brought noise violations, littering, people drinking and urinating in public and driveways crammed with cars."

Suffolk is not alone. "Communities across the nation -- from Mesa, Ariz., to Hoover, Ala., to Freehold, N.J. -- have faced similar struggles. Day laborers have been shut out and demonstrated against, and have become the targets of political campaigns"

But the emerging political issue is not what is really noteworthy in the story. What is noteworthy is the utter indifference of most of the governing authorities to the "day laborer problem" at all. Of course there is no "day laborer problem" -- the people of whom President Bush smugly remarked a few days ago, "We'd much rather have security guards running down terrorists or drug runners or drug smugglers than people coming to work." The problem is immigration and the refusal of public authority at any level in the country -- from the White House to the county cops -- to deal with it.

As noted, local law enforcement is not permitted to ask if an immigrant is legally in the country, but the federals don't ask at all. Ever since the Clinton administration, immigration authorities have abandoned "interior enforcement" -- if you make it a few miles over the border, you need have no fear of being busted for violating federal immigration statutes because the authorities don't even try to enforce them.

The horror is that despite the obvious harm of mass immigration on the daily life of American communities, authorities are not willing to take any even elementary steps to control or check it. Their reluctance obviously doesn't extend to snooping around law-abiding Americans who have to put up with random "bomb searches."

But the reason we have to have bomb searches at all is that the authorities for decades have refused to enforce existing immigration laws, so that we now have imported a massive potential fifth column able and willing to wage terrorism against us.

What President Bush doesn't get (among much else) is that "coming to work" can be as much an act of warfare as setting bombs and is often a rather more effective weapon with which to destroy a nation. The price of mass immigration is not only cultural disintegration but also the gradual construction of a police state that becomes the only force able to hold the country together once mass immigration has come to work.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Why immigrants kill

2004-11-29T17:29:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Just exactly how many murders will it take to convince the Open Borders lobby, whose leader now seems to be President Bush, that mass Third World immigration is not such a good idea? Up in Wisconsin, a gentleman named Chai Soua Vang, a 36-year-old Hmong immigrant, just blew away six people, apparently because they threw him out of their privately owned deer stand he had decided to take over for his own use.

Ten years ago immigration expert Roy Beck wrote a path-breaking article in the Atlantic Monthly about the Hmong immigrants in Wausau, Wisconsin, a discussion he repeated in his later book, The Case against Immigration.

"The number of Southeast Asians burgeoned, and the city's ability to welcome, nurture, accommodate, and assimilate the larger numbers shrank. Most immigrants were unable to enter the mainstream of the economy. Residents resented the social costs of caring for many more newcomers than anybody had been led to believe would arrive…. Inter-ethnic violence and other tensions proliferated in the schools and in the parks and streets of a town that formerly had been virtually free of social tensions and violence." That's only a selection, but what Mr. Beck described is the predictable result of the mass immigration of a a radically different people into a homogeneous community.

Obviously, not all or even most immigrants turn out to be spree killers, and obviously there are plenty of home-grown ones -- Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, et al. But in recent years immigrants, and especially those from non-Western and non-white parts of the world, have contributed more than their fair share to the annals of atrocity crimes.

The most obvious is the World Trade Center in 2001, but well before that Jamaican immigrant Colin Ferguson murdered six passengers on a commuter train on Long Island in 1993. Pakistani immigrant Mir Aimal Kansi murdered two people outside CIA headquarters in the same year, which was the year after aliens first tried to blow up the World Trade Center. In 1997 immigrant Ali Abu Kamal shot up the tourists at the Empire State Building, and later two more immigrants were arrested for trying to blow up the New York subway system. There are a number of other cases that made national news at the time.

Are they all just coincidences? Not exactly. The link between immigration and violence is that the aliens lack roots in the society and civilization into which they import themselves. The people they see aren't their people, and their moral and social norms aren't theirs either. Being strangers in a strange land, they feel little obligation to it or its members. For immigrants on the fringe, the resulting tensions can overflow, and it's not easy even for those not so fringe.

Thus, the Washington Post, not exactly a hotbed of nativist bigotry, offers this editorializing in its news article about the Wisconsin killings.
"Rules and etiquette on American hunting passed from generation to generation have proved unfamiliar to many Hmong, who come from Laos, where hunting is a practiced skill. The Lao mountains are among the wildest and least populated areas of the world. There are no regulations about what, where or when to hunt. Conservation officers and property owners in several states have reported conflicts with the Hmong over their hunting practices, often because they did not understand American traditions. Four years ago, Minnesota's Department of Natural Resources hired a Hmong officer to teach the community about local hunting and fishing rules."

Well, I guess maybe the Department of Natural Resources didn't do such a bang-up job, and who can blame it? Why should we need government bureaucracies to explain our traditions and values to masses of aliens who have no business coming here at all? The "conflicts with the Hmong" the Post mentions so demurely are not just about hunting, and the conflicts are not confined to the Hmong. The exact same kinds of conflicts are obvious to anyone who deals with Third Worlders on any large scale.

Will the Wisconsin mass murders of which Mr. Vang is accused lead the dominant culture to start rethinking immigration and its social consequences? Not a bit. Here's what ABC News found to worry about in the incident:
"Vang's arrest left some Hmong citizens in his hometown fearful of a backlash. About 24,000 Hmong live in St. Paul, the highest concentration of any U.S. city. And the shooting has already provoked racial tension in an area of Wisconsin where deer hunting is steeped in tradition."

That's the real problem, you see, not immigration but the racial "backlash" that may or may not come about from the white people whose friends and neighbors Mr. Vang slaughtered. Maybe the Department of Natural Resources can send in a team to teach them about racism.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Morality not the only target of Monday Night Football ad

2004-11-26T07:24:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, November 26, 2004

ABC Sports last week took careful aim at the "moral issues" that are said to have driven this month's national election and delivered a good swift kick to their dentures on national television. The main reaction from viewers and the professional "family values" lobby has been to denounce the nudity and clearly implied sex of the now-notorious ad that promoted last week's Monday Night Football game. That's all well and good, but there was more going on in the ad that no one will mention -- race.

The ad shows blonde white sexpot Nicolette Sheridan of the steamy "Desperate Housewives" series smooching up to black football star Terrell Owens in the locker room of the Philadelphia Eagles. Then the young lady drops her bath towel and jumps into Mr. Owens' not-exactly recalcitrant arms. "Aw, hell," he leers, "the team's going to have to win without me."

In the aftermath of the similar reaction to CBS's showing of the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake flap during the Super Bowl last February, there can be little doubt the ABC ad was not just a blunder. It was an intentional act of moral subversion. It was filmed the Friday before, and in the aftermath of all the jabber about "moral issues" in the election, it ought to be transparent that it was intended as an act of political-cultural subversion as well.

In the CBS incident, Miss Jackson exposed her breast on camera during a performance with Mr. Timberlake. The Federal Communications Commission fined CBS, which broadcast the Super Bowl, the piddling sum of $550,000 -- little more than lunch money, of course, for the big networks and hardly a deterrent to similar smacks at good taste in the future. But taste and morality are by no means the ad's only targets.

Like the Jackson-Timberlake performance, the Owens-Sheridan ad was interracial and brazenly so -- if only morals and taste had been the targets, the producers could easily have found white actresses who are less obviously Nordic than the golden-locked Miss Sheridan, but Nordic is what the ad's producers no doubt wanted. For that matter, if you only wanted to take a swipe at morals and taste, you could find a black woman to rip her towel off or replace Mr. Owens with a famous white athlete (there are still a few).

But that wasn't the point, was it? The point was not just to hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste but also of white racial and cultural identity. The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it.

So far only one voice has mentioned the ad's racial meaning and denounced its "insensitivity" (to blacks) -- that of black Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy. Blacks are permitted to notice race. Whites aren't.

But the ad's message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience. Nevertheless, for decades, interracial couples of different sexes have been sneaked into advertising, movies and television series, and almost certainly not because of popular demand from either race. The Owens-Sheridan match is only the most notorious to date.

In the minds of those who produced the ad, race is at least as important as the moral and aesthetic norms their ad subverts. To them, the race as well as the religion, the morality, and the culture of the host society are all equally hostile and oppressive forces that need to be discredited, debunked and destroyed. If the destruction can't happen at the polls or through the courts, they can always use the long march through the culture that control of the mass media allows.

Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself.

"We apologize," smirked the spokesman for those who sponsored the ad, Mark Mandel, the Vice President of ABC Sports. Mr. Mandel of course ultimately reports to his own boss, Michael Eisner, chief executive of the Walt Disney Company that owns ABC. And Mr. Eisner's Disney in recent years has become a battering ram against traditional American identity.

Re-electing President Bush and voting against homosexual marriage are well and good, but they won't defeat the real enemy in the moral, cultural and racial war that the likes of Mr. Mandel and Mr. Eisner are waging. If American voters really are driven by the "moral issue," they need to drive a good bit further than Mr. Bush and his "family values" allies have suggested.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Bush still misses the immigration message

2004-11-23T07:05:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Well, I guess you can't expect a guy to know what's going on inside this country just because he's the President of the United States. This week President Bush took a trip to Chile, where he more or less officially raised from the dead his defunct amnesty plan of last January. I guess he missed what's been going on about immigration politics in both the country and the Congress ever since the election.

What's been going on is that major players in Congress have made it known that they don't like the idea of amnesty that underlies the Bush immigration reform plan. The most recent sign of displeasure was the refusal of House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner to support the intelligence reform bill the administration has been peddling because the White House won't support its immigration control measures.

The main reason the bill is in trouble has to do with national security issues, but the opposition of Mr. Sensenbrenner and other lawmakers to what is a major administration and House leadership piece of legislation for reasons of immigration control ought to tell us how important the immigration issue now is. Unfortunately, it has told the president nothing.

Even before the House conservative revolt over the intelligence bill, the White House should have gotten the message on immigration, from what its own party has been trying to explain to it ever since the election, if not from the election itself.

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, who speaks for dozens of House GOP lawmakers on immigration, said bluntly when Secretary of State Colin Powell first revived the amnesty plan a couple of weeks ago that the plan was "dead on arrival." Even that was not enough to send the White House the message.

Then California Rep. Elton Gallegly, who chairs an important subcommittee on terrorism of the House International Relations Committee, urged the president not to re-introduce his immigration plan.

"It is our hope that in future discussions with the Mexican government, you will encourage Mexico to do its part to address illegal immigration rather than encourage their citizens to illegally enter the U.S." Mr. Gallegly, with at least 21 other members of Congress, wrote to Mr. Bush earlier this month.

Well, as I noted, Mr., Bush has been out of the country and I guess he didn't get the message, or messages, because when he spoke to a press conference in Chile this week after the summit conference in Santiago, he ignored every one of these warning signs that his ill-advised amnesty plan is no more popular with his own party and its leaders now than it was when he first popped it on them last January.

Mr. Bush also claimed that he had "campaigned on this issue," presumably meaning immigration, if not amnesty itself, during the election, which is simply not true. If he mentioned it at all in the campaign it seems to have escaped notice, save during the third presidential debate when the moderator brought it up.

And Mr. Bush then emitted one of the inane remarks for which he has become famous: "We'd much rather have security guards running down terrorists or drug runners or drug smugglers than people coming to work." No doubt, but to do any of the above, we have to have a lot more security on the border, which we don't.

What we -- the American people -- would much rather have is a president who betrays some faint glimmer that the border is out of control and that mass immigration represents not only a major threat to our national security and sovereignty but also a major force threatening the disintegration of our identity as a nation and civilization. Mr. Bush doesn't have a clue, or if he does, he is indifferent to it.

What he is not indifferent to, apparently, is what Mexican President Vicente Fox tells him to do. Mr. Fox has been badgering Mr. Bush for years to institute amnesty for Mexican illegals, and that's what the president's plan does. Mr. Fox has revived his efforts to get amnesty through since the election, and Mr. Bush has complied. Why Mr. Bush seems so eager to make his counterpart in Mexico happy over this issue remains unclear, especially given the obvious unhappiness of his own party and the vast majority of Americans with the plan.

But whatever his reasons, the president has been given fair warning by his own party, as well as by various results in this month's election. He still doesn't get the message. Americans who want to stop the amnesty he is planning to force on the country need to forget the man they just re-elected and make sure their own congressmen and senators know what to do about the disastrous measure he is sending them.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

What the election really tells us about immigration reform

2004-11-19T07:30:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, November 19, 2004

The Bush administration has read the political tea leaves that this year's election left at the bottom of the electoral cup and concluded that amnesty for illegal aliens is the message they send. Since that was the message the administration wanted to see, it's not surprising that's the message it gets. But its tea-leaf readers need to look again to understand the election's real message on immigration politics.

The administration apparently has embraced the increasingly dubious exit polls that show President Bush winning 44 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally, an increase of some 9 percent for him since 2000. Mr. Bush pandered to Hispanics shamelessly and concocted a "temporary workers visas program" that is tantamount to amnesty for illegal aliens; therefore, he won Hispanic votes.

Therefore again, he and his courtiers reason, the way to lock Hispanics into the Republican column is to keep on pandering, and that is why, no sooner was the election over, the administration announced it would revive the amnesty plan.

As political analyst Steve Sailer has argued on Vdare.com, there are strong reasons to doubt that Mr. Bush really did win 44 percent of the Hispanic vote nationally, and as I have argued myself, even if he did win that much, there is absolutely no reason to think it was because of what the president said or did about immigration or amnesty. But there's no reason either to rehearse those arguments again. What's important is to look at the election returns as they do relate to immigration and related issues.

In Arizona, Proposition 200 passed overwhelmingly with 56 percent of the vote. Prop 200, denounced by the Open Borders lobby, condemned by both Arizona's senators (Republican), its governor (Democrat), its congressional delegation (mostly Republican but two Democrats), and its Chamber of Commerce (any party it can buy), requires proof of eligibility to receive state benefits or to vote.

The real purpose of Prop 200, of course, was to stop illegal aliens, who lack such proof, from getting welfare and from voting. What sounds like an oatmealish and meaningless ritual in fact contained a powerful message against illegal immigration: You (illegals) are not part of our nation and are not entitled to receive the benefits and privileges Americans are entitled to receive. Go home. Prop 200 won the support of 47 percent of the state's Hispanic citizens.

What that exit poll tells us is that pandering to Hispanics on immigration and related issues is not necessarily the way to win their support. Every opinion poll on immigration for the last generation or so has shown that Hispanics oppose mass immigration almost as strongly as non-Hispanics do. Why shouldn't they? As the Third World ships sink, why should those who make it to the lifeboats welcome everybody else on board?

As for political figures closely associated with restricting immigration, nobody can beat Colorado's Rep. Tom Tancredo, who has made immigration reform and restriction his signature issue. So hostile was the Bush White House to Mr. Tancredo that Karl Rove reportedly told him he was not welcome there. This month Mr. Tancredo won re-election by a whopping 60 percent or more -- against a heavily funded Democratic opponent. Mr. Bush, it might be noted, won Colorado by a not-so-whopping 52 percent of the vote. It's not Mr. Tancredo who shouldn't be welcome in the White House. It's Mr. Bush who shouldn't be welcome in Mr. Tancredo's district.

What these two sets of exit polls from Arizona and Colorado tell us is not what the tea leaves Mr. Bush is reading say. What these returns tell us is that supporting restrictions on mass immigration not only is not political suicide but in fact is a road to political resurrection.

That's the same message California sent ten years ago in passing Proposition 187, a measure similar in concept to Prop 200, which passed with some 60 percent of the vote, won House seats for five Republican congressmen, and pulled Republican Gov. Pete Wilson from his political grave. Nothing has changed since then, including the bottomless capacity of pro-immigration forces to delude themselves and many political leaders that supporting immigration control is politically harmful.

However many Hispanic votes Mr. Bush won this year, he would be well advised not to see in them a message that pro-immigration politics and pro-amnesty proposals are what American voters, including Hispanics, want. The clear message from this year's election, in so far as immigration and closely related matters were issues anywhere, is that they don't want that. What they want is for their government to protect their borders and their nation from the immigration invasion it is experiencing. Regardless of what the polls really tell us, there's no reason the government cannot and should not deliver that.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Neo-conservatives reject 'moral issue' as driving election

2004-11-16T07:32:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, November 16, 2004

It didn't take the neo-conservatives long to figure out the real truth about the election and explain to us, hanging breathless, what we should think about it. David Brooks in the New York Times was perhaps the first to unveil it to the rest of us out here in the boonies.

The truth, you see, is that "it is certainly wrong" that the "moral issue" was the driving force in the election. That delusion comes from a "poorly worded question" in the exit polls. "When asked about the issue that most influenced their vote," Mr. Brooks writes, "voters were given the option of saying 'moral values.' But that phrase can mean anything -- or nothing. Who doesn't vote on moral values? If you ask an inept question, you get a misleading result."

And if you want a misleading result before you ask the question, you get neo-con propaganda. Neo-conservatives don't like the "moral issue" or the white Christian evangelicals who take that issue seriously enough to vote on it. What the neo-conservatives care about is foreign policy, especially how all those white Christian cattle in the backwaters can be rounded up to fight the Middle East wars the neo-cons are slobbering to wage -- "World War IV," as neo-con guru Norman Podhoretz likes to call it.

Mr. Brooks, despite occasional reservations about the Iraq boondoggle, is on board for that agenda too, and much of his column sought to explain how the election was really "a broad victory for [President] Bush" and that a national consensus behind the "war on terror" was what led to his victory.

Yet, as I have noted before, only 51 percent of the voters supported Mr. Bush at all, and while he did win the election, there was nothing "broad" about it. The broad victory was not that of Mr. Bush and his foreign policy but of the moral issue -- the massive and simultaneous success of 11 state ballot measures that rejected same-sex marriage. There's no "misleading question" involved here. It was straight-forward and so simple even neo-cons could grasp it, which they do, which is why they are so eager to explain it away before the rest of the country starts talking about matters they don't want to talk about.

The neo-conservatives of course are not the only people who don't want to talk about such matters -- namely, the moral direction of the nation and its culture. The Republican establishment doesn't want to talk about it either, which is why, as the Washington Post reported last week, evangelicals had to drag the GOP kicking and screaming to support the marriage amendments at all.

In Michigan, state Sen. Alan Cropsey, sponsor of a bill to ban homosexual marriage, told the Post "the Republican Party was not helpful at all. It's not like they were the instigators. They were the Johnny-come-latelies, if anything." Several other activists say the same.

So far from Republicans or the White House using the ballot measures to crank out the evangelical vote, the evangelicals themselves -- and in some areas Roman Catholic groups -- created the movement. Evangelical leader Charles Colson says, "The White House guys were kind of resisting it [the marriage issue] on the grounds that 'We haven't decided what position we want to take on that.'"

What the election returns really tell us, then, has little to do with President Bush (who a week before the election defended "rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that's what a state chooses to do," and explicitly renounced the GOP platform on same-sex marriage on ABC's Good Morning America), let alone his foreign policy. What they tell us is that the Republican Party including its top leader still doesn't get it and that it still prefers to take its signals from neo-conservatives like Mr. Brooks and the cultural and ideological ghetto they represent.

The White House and the GOP didn't want to support the grassroots movement against same-sex marriage because the people who staff those institutions are more comfortable with the people who write the Washington Post and the New York Times than with the Middle Americans whose votes they desperately want and need. It's not easy to argue that a party able to win the White House and both houses of Congress is the Stupid Party, but stupidity is largely a matter of being unable to learn, and what this election tells us more than anything else is that, at least up until Election Day, the Republican Party had learned nothing.

Nor has Mr. Brooks. He and his neo-con allies now have four more years to plot how to derail the Middle American Revolution toward which this election clearly points. If Mr. Bush is not stupid, he'll derail the neo-cons from the White House now.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Bush betrays conservatives already

2004-11-12T07:33:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, November 12, 2004

Barely a week has passed since 84 percent of the nation's self-described conservatives cast their ballots for George W. Bush, and already the president and his administration have delivered at least two good, strong, swift kicks in the teeth to the voters who elected him. Speaking in Mexico this week Secretary of State Colin Powell acknowledged that the administration will revive its amnesty plan for illegal aliens, and in Washington Hispanic White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was named as the next attorney general.

Mr. Gonzales, considered a liberal on social issues, will be the main official to pick the next Supreme Court justices, including the chief justice. Since one of the major reasons why conservatives voted for Mr. Bush at all was that he would supposedly select more conservative justices than John Kerry, Mr. Gonzales' appointment is a nice wallop to the conservative face.

It's also an obvious pander to Hispanics, since the White House has now bought into the claim that the president won some 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in the election due to his warm and toasty amnesty plan. The plan, unveiled last January as a "temporary workers visa program," was so obviously an amnesty that the president had to drop it for the rest of the election year. Now it's back, and the election is over.

Mr. Powell explicitly acknowledged the political machinations behind the amnesty. "In light of the campaign and other things that were going on, we weren't able to engage the Congress on it," he said. "But now that the election is behind us and the president is looking to his second term, the president intends to engage Congress on it."

How about engaging with the masses of Americans who oppose amnesty and who Mr. Bush in the White House in the first place? Well, they've served their purpose and can now be ignored, just as the American ruling class has ignored public opinion on immigration control for decades. Why should this president be any different?

The Washington Times reports that while Mr. Powell was plotting amnesty in Mexico, the president himself was plotting it with Arizona's Sen. John McCain. "The president met privately in the Oval Office with Sen. John McCain to discuss jump-starting a stalled White House initiative that would grant legal status to millions of immigrants who broke the law to enter the United States," the Times reported.

Mr. McCain, it may be recalled, is fresh from the slap in the puss his own state delivered to him and his congressional colleagues for opposing Arizona's Proposition 200, a ballot measure that effectively denies welfare to illegal aliens and prevents them from fraudulent voting. Mr. McCain, his colleague Sen. John Kyl and every member of the Arizona congressional delegation opposed Prop 200, as did the local Chamber of Commerce, the governor of the state, and of course the Open Borders lobby. Prop 200 passed by a massive 60 percent anyway -- and with 47 percent Hispanic support.

It's not surprising the Busy White House is oblivious to the vote on Prop 200. Mr. Bush's secret agenda since almost the day he entered office has been to enact an amnesty. He nearly did so in September 2001, when certain other business intervened. He resurrected it early this year, and it went comatose. Now he's trying to pull it from the grave.

The leader of immigration control forces in Congress, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, who was re-elected by a similarly whopping 60 percent in his district (as opposed to President Bush's slim 52 percent in Colorado), says the resurrected amnesty plan remains "dead on arrival." It may well be, but then again, the situation is somewhat different now.

Congressmen now don't have to worry about what their constituents think for a whole two years, and if they pass amnesty, as they have before, they can hope voters will forget about it. Moreover, with the 44 percent Hispanic Republican myth, many congressmen will simply be afraid to alienate Hispanics. That's why the 47 percent who supported Prop 200 is important.

Contrary to another myth of the Open Borders lobby, voting for immigration control does not mean political suicide, or even serious political risk. As the votes for the Arizona measure and for Mr. Tancredo show, the reality is that immigration control wins elections.

Immigration was barely mentioned during the presidential campaign, and if Mr. Bush had really wanted to revive his defunct amnesty plan, he should have talked about it a good deal more than he did. He didn't -- because he knew bringing it up would be his own political suicide. Now that he's avoided that fate, he thinks he can sneak amnesty through. Conservatives who were fooled once need to let their congressmen know they won't be fooled again.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

What the exit polls tell us about immigration - maybe

2004-11-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, November 9, 2004

If last week's election returns tell President Bush anything about immigration policy, it is that he ought to continue and even expand the "guest workers" program he unveiled last January. What was essentially an amnesty for illegal aliens, a reward for lawbreakers and an open invitation to the world to immigrate to this country seems to have benefited him. That at least is the conclusion to which some - mainly the Open Borders lobby and politicians eager to believe it - are leaping. And on its face it's not unreasonable.

In 2000, Mr. Bush won some 35 percent of Hispanics, while his opponent Al Gore won 65 percent. Mr. Bush's share was an improvement over what GOP nominee Bob Dole won in 1996 (21 percent), but still not very good, especially compared to Mr. Gore's landslide Hispanic support. The Open Borders lobby claims the GOP's poor performance with Hispanics is due to its support for immigration control. That's dubious, but it makes good propaganda.

This year, after Mr. Bush's amnesty proposal in January, some exit polls show Mr. Bush walked off with significant increases in Hispanic support. Nationally he's supposed to have won 44 percent to Sen. John Kerry's 53 percent - a majority, but not the landslide his predecessor took or what Democrats usually win. Mr. Bush, if these polls are accurate, won more Hispanic votes than any other Republican contender in history.

It looks like pandering pays, and maybe it does, but before you swallow the propaganda, look at the exit polls more closely.

There are good reasons for believing the exit poll data are deeply flawed, but even if we grant that they're accurate, they don't necessarily mean what the Open Borders boys say. Let's assume they're accurate for the sake of the discussion.

Most of the U.S. Hispanic population is centered in four states - New York, California, Texas, and Florida. If you average the Hispanic vote that Mr. Bush won in those states in 2000, you get his national average among Hispanics of that year, 35 percent. If you average what exit polls say he won this year in them, you get his national average among Hispanics last week - about 44 percent.

Mr. Bush increased his support among Hispanics in all four of these states, but in two - Florida and Texas - he did especially well. In the former, he increased his Hispanic support by 7 percent, to a sizeable 56 percent majority, and in his own state of Texas, he won a whopping 59 percent, 16 percent more than in 2000.

But in New York and California, the increases were not so large - only 6 and 4 percent respectively - to 24 percent and 32 percent in each state, well below his national support levels in 2000.

And these returns suggest a different explanation for why Mr. Bush did as well as he did among Hispanics. It wasn't amnesty. It was him.

Mr. Bush won Hispanics in Texas because he's from Texas and has always run well with that community. He won some 39 percent of the state's Hispanics in 1998 as governor and 42 percent in 2000 as a presidential candidate.

In Florida, Mr. Bush did well among Hispanics for a couple of reasons. Florida Hispanics are still largely Cubans, and they traditionally support Republicans. Mr. Bush's brother is Florida's governor and has a Hispanic wife and son who campaigned for him (which helped the president among Hispanics elsewhere too). And finally Mr. Bush is the incumbent president and a wartime president, which counts for something. It probably helped him even among his least supportive voting bloc, black voters, who supported him only slightly more than in 2000.

As for amnesty and all the pandering in which Mr. Bush wallowed to gain Hispanics, it may have helped him in California and New York but not very much. If his amnesty and immigration policies explained his Hispanic gains, the increases would have shown up more evenly in all four states - not just those in which he has a personal connection.

Finally, the Open Borders propagandists who love this year's exit polls so much don't seem to be quoting another one, from Arizona: Immigration control ballot measure Prop 200 won with some 60 percent of the vote - and 47 percent Hispanic support. And what that tells us for certain is that it's false that immigration control alienates Hispanics.

It's not unusual for the Open Borders lobby to be wrong in its facts, and now they're equally wrong in its interpretation of the facts (If they are facts). Despite the silence on immigration in this year's campaign, there's every reason to think the issue is about to take wing. Mr. Bush and his party ought to get on board now.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

Electing nobody

2004-11-05T07:34:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Friday, November 5, 2004

When a drunken man tries to walk a tightrope, it is never possible to predict whether he will make it across or fall. Nothing you can reasonably foresee happening can possibly affect the outcome of his walk, and whatever happens depends entirely on accident. So it was with the great presidential election of 2004, now quickly and thankfully receding into the ocean of bad memories.

On the morning of the election, the pro-Kerry Washington Post carried the headline "Election Day Dawns with Unpredictability," while the pro-Bush Washington Times announced "Bush, Kerry battle down to wire." Neither paper nor all their experts could predict whether the men they favored would make it across the tightrope. Nor could anyone else.

Long before the election took place, every conceivable voting bloc had been so massaged and manipulated by those skilled in such arts that everyone knew how they would vote months before they went to the polls. Only those few who could not be so massaged and manipulated -- the "undecided vote," as it was called -- in the end determined the result.

Given the immense role that such political arts and the massive amounts of money needed to fund them now play in our politics, it is open to question whether we should continue to call our system "democracy" in any meaningful sense. But certainly it makes no sense to speak, as Vice President Cheney did the morning after the election, of the victor in such elections gaining anything like a "mandate" -- a command from the body of the people to pursue a particular course of action.

In the case of President Bush's victory, any talk of a "mandate" is simply preposterous. The president, the incumbent chief executive of a nation at war, won by a bare 51 percent, only a slight improvement over his actual loss of the popular vote four years ago.

In 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt ran for a fourth term in the middle of World War II, he won by a popular vote of 54 percent. In 1972, Richard Nixon, also an incumbent war president, won by 60 percent. Even in 1984, at the height of Ronald Reagan's Cold War, the incumbent won by nearly 59 percent. If George W. Bush's two victories in 2000 and 2004 -- 48 percent and 51 percent respectively -- represent the "emerging Republican majority," that majority is in serious trouble. By contrast with the victories of earlier wartime presidents, the thin margin Mr. Bush won Tuesday is a moral defeat.

A writer in the neo-conservative Weekly Standard recently argued that the election was a "referendum on neo-conservatism," and he may have been right. If so, then neo-conservatism lost. There was little serious discussion in the campaign of the rationale for the Iraq war or the grand strategy of exporting global democracy that are the trademarks of neo-conservative policy. What seems to have motivated voters more than any other concern was neither national security nor the economy but "moral values." There's nothing neo about that kind of conservatism. It's as old as the Old Republic itself, but few political leaders saw it coming.

Except for the unpredicted and unpredictable opacity of supporting "moral values," then, there is virtually nothing that can be said about what the voting of the presidential election of 2004 tells us about what the president should do. Nor is it even clear which "moral values" the voters believe are important.

The candidates (or more precisely their surrogates) spent most of the campaign vilifying each other's 40-year-old war records. They devoted most of the carefully staged presidential "debates" to questioning each other's judgments about the war with Iraq, but at no time did Mr. Kerry make clear what he would do in Iraq in the future or what he (or Mr. Bush) ought to have done in the past. At no time did the president acknowledge that serious blunders -- if not outright lies -- contributed to launching a war we seem unable to finish.

There was no discussion of mass immigration, probably the major public issue facing the country today, nor of trade policy and its impact on the economy and the fate of the American middle class and its civilization. Given the refusal of the candidates and the establishment media to address these and other issues, how can it possibly be claimed that any kind of "mandate" emerged from this election?

President Bush faces the next four years with neither any clear direction from the voters themselves nor any serious indication of what he and his administration really want to do. The election he just won tells us who the legal president of the United States is, but neither the president nor the people who elected him seem able to tell us anything else.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.

What Bush has done to conservatism

2004-11-02T07:35:00.000-05:00

FOR RELEASE Tuesday, November 2, 2004

What will happen to American conservatism as a result of the 2004 election? Obviously, the answer depends largely on what happens in the election, and we won't know that until tomorrow (or later). But that doesn't stop pundits from telling us anyway.

Pat Buchanan believes a "civil war" will break out inside the Republican Party over its ideological future, a war between the Bush partisans and their neo-conservative allies on the one hand and, on the other, paleo-conservatives like Mr. Buchanan, advocates of an "America First," national interest-based foreign policy, economic nationalism and traditional conservatism -- small government, constitutionalism and cultural traditionalism. The New Republic's Franklin Foer also thinks the paleos may have a future after the election.

The most recent contribution to this discussion comes from two British observers with The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, they suggest that whatever happens in the election, what President Bush has done to American conservatism is here to stay.

What Mr. Bush has done to conservatism, they argue, is to revolutionize it. He has embraced what they call "big government conservatism," reversing what both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan supported. "The massive growth in the state during this presidency (faster than under Bill Clinton, even if you exclude the spending on the war on terror)" is at heart "a deliberate strategy."

Moreover, they claim that Mr. Bush's use of the state is conservative in that in his intention was "to turn government into an agent of conservatism," using federal power to impose moral values in ways traditional conservatives rejected (not because they rejected the values but because they rejected the scale of federal power to impose them). Finally, "Mr. Bush's boldest contribution to reinventing conservatism" lies in his foreign policy, which centers on spreading democracy across the planet as a moralistic crusade.

Like a lot of foreign observers of America since Alexis de Tocqueville, these two don't get everything right, but they do spy trends many Americans tend to miss, and they are largely right about the impact of the Bush administration on the body of American conservatism. To put it another way, the impact of Mr. Bush on American conservatism has been a disaster.

It has been a disaster because every "contribution" the authors cite is not simply a modification or an adjustment but an abandonment of what traditional conservatism means and has meant. It is, in short, "neo-conservatism" -- and in a way that has nothing to do with "neo-conservative" as a codeword for "Jews."

The main neo-conservative writers -- Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and most others -- have long insisted that they don't share traditional conservative distrust of the centralized state -- a distrust that was shared by traditional Jeffersonian conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians. What the neo-cons wanted, wrote their "godfather" Irving Kristol, was "a conservative welfare state," while Mr. Podhoretz has written that from its beginnings "the neoconservatives dissociated themselves from the wholesale opposition to the welfare state which had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal." Today, thanks to the Bush administration, they have succeeded in disassociating American conservatism from American conservatism.

Mr. Bush's use of expanded state power for "moralistic" ends is consistent with neo-conservatism as well, though it mainly comes from his alliance with the religious right, a movement that has close ties to the neo-cons. But Mr. Micklethwait and Mr. Wooldridge may exaggerate the degree to which the president has actually embraced the religious right's agenda. Most I know in that movement are less than pleased with what he's done to advance it.

Most obviously, as the authors acknowledge, Mr. Bush's foreign policy is largely the creature of the neo-conservatives all by themselves. The crusade to spread democracy, especially in the Middle East, has been a neo-conservative obsession since at least the Reagan administration. Only under Mr. Bush did they have a green light to make it the central purpose of American policy abroad.

The trouble with Mr. Bush's adaptations of conservatism to fit the neo-con mold is that they are fundamentally inconsistent with what most American conservatives have always believed and believe today. Only by masking them with conventional conservative rhetoric -- and by dwelling on how awful the liberal alternatives are -- can a Republican Party dominated by neo-conservatism expect to keep grassroots conservative support and remain in office.

And maybe it can and will. As neo-conservatism entrenches itself as the dominant and defining expression of conservatism, there will be fewer and fewer Americans who even remember what real conservatism is. Maybe they can still wage a civil war to take back their party and their nation, but the result of that civil war could be as much of a disaster as the last one.

Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist.