White Racial Consciousness and Advocacy

Edmund Connelly: Pastor Baldwin Moving to the Northwest

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Edmund Connelly: I was pleased today to read on VDARE the announcement from Pastor Chuck Baldwin revealing that he was leaving Pensacola, FL, and moving to western Montana. And he’s not going alone. In total, there will be seventeen people from his extended family, including children.

Pastor Baldwin called his announcement The Hardest Decision Of My Life—Joining The “Freedom Rush” To Montana. There are two things I noticed immediately. First, it struck me that this is an instance of the the implicit Whiteness Kevin MacDonald has discussed. Baldwin is a Christian and does not mention race in his column. Still, it is hard to escape the fact that he’s leaving a metropolitan area that is about 30% black and moving to an almost exclusively White part of the country.

More stunning to me is the fact that he’s moving to the American Northwest. I’ve become interested in the ideas and novels of Harold Covington since reading a wonderful introduction called The Birth of a Nation (See also this review By Michael O’Meara.) And Covington is interested in the Northwest.

In essence, Covington argues that in order to save the White race, racially conscious Whites must move to the Northwest, then fight for their freedom from what he calls “ZOG, the Zionist Occupation Government.” Interestingly, the borders of this envisioned “homeland” include the very area to which Pastor Baldwin and his family are moving.

There is nothing in Baldwin’s column that even hints at espousal of Covington’s Northwest plan, but it sure seems ironic that such a patriotic preacher would be following Covington’s migration call to the letter. Perhaps it’s just that both men see similar merits in moving to such a region. More darkly, perhaps they both see similar threats in remaining outside a uniformly White region.

For those interested, here is Covington’s Northwest website. Information on his four Northwest novels can be found here.

Of the four novels, the 735-page “The Brigade” is by far the best. But because it’s so long, I’d recommend starting with either “A Mighty Fortress” or “A Distant Thunder.”

Keeping up with changing technologies, Covington also gives a weekly broadcast. I think it is useful to hear his voice as he strikes me as a genuine leader.

I wish Pastor Baldwin and his family all the luck in the world. And I hope he’ll keep us apprised of life in his new land.

Kevin MacDonald: Glenn Beck: More Clueless Conservatism

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Sometimes it’s pretty obvious what’s wrong with conservatives. Glenn Beck’s Washington gathering turns out to have been a plea for a religious revival (NYTimes: “At Lincoln Memorial: A Call for Religious Rebirth“):

“Something that is beyond man is happening,” Mr. Beck told the crowd, in what was part religious revival and part history lecture. “America today begins to turn back to God. … There’s nothing we can do that will solve the problems that we have and keep the peace unless we solve it through God.”

It was a plea made to an overwhemlingly White audience by a rainbow coalition of speakers:

The speaker list was diverse, including African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans; Jews and Christians; clergymen, military veterans and sports stars, including Albert Pujols of the St. Louis Cardinals. The crowd, however, was overwhelmingly white. (LATimes: “Beck, others exhort conservatives to action at Washington rally“)

All that implicit Whiteness and no place to go. When Whites put on a rally for an overwhelmingly White constituency, they feel a need to pledge allegiance to America as not really having an ethnic identity. Hence the need for non-White speakers. The same thing happened at a Tea Party rally I attended in Southern California: the obligatory Black speaker needed to deflect charges of racism that automatically surface when the crowd is overwhelmingly White. That’s why NASCAR is assiduously courting Black drivers to perform in front of their  overwhelmingly White audiences.

The LA Times article notes that “Speaker after speaker praised the nation’s military, its Founding Fathers and Lincoln.” Red meat to the  Tea Partiers—guaranteed to bring tears to the  eye. Unfortunately, the military has been co-opted by the Israel Lobby. And the pleas to religion,  the Founding Fathers and Lincoln are just another version of the proposition nation creed: All will be well if we accept a certain set of universal ideas with no ethnic content.

But it won’t. The people attending are overwhelmingly White because Whites are angry and deeply anxious about their future in America as other groups expand their power and as Whites are increasingly victimized as Whites, in everything from affirmative action to violent crime. But they can’t explicitly state that this is a war against them. So they end up pledging allegiance to the very things that are dispossessing them–and calling it conservative. The worst part is that it gives his gullible audience hope that there are easy, painless solutions. We can do it if we just BELIEVE.

They can’t break with the ruling ideology. Until they do, they will just keep on losing and getting more and more desperate. And that, in a nutshell, is the argument for the A3P.

The A3P replies to the New York Daily News and Huffington Post

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Kevin MacDonald: The New York Daily News has reached a new low in journalistic propaganda with its article “New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform” (July 13, 2010). The article purports to be a description of the candidacy of Ryan J. Murdough for the state senate in New Hampshire. The accompanying photo pictures a man with a swastika tattooed on his head giving a Nazi salute despite the fact that there is no connection at all between the photo and anyone in the American Third Position.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Daily News caption: A New Hampshire man (not pictured) is hoping to use racism and the support of a hate group to get elected as a Republican to the State House.

Similarly, a Huffington Post article on Murdough’s candidacy features a photo of a flag with a Swastika along with Nazi-style salutes–again, completely unrelated to anyone connected with the A3P (“New Hampshire State House Candidate Running On White Supremacist Platform”; July 13, 2010).

Uncaptioned photo from the Huffington Post article

The Daily News article refers to the A3P as a “hate group,” and Mr. Murdough is characterized as “racist.” Like many other Americans, Mr. Murdough is concerned about the very rapid demographic changes engulfing the country. His comments reflect absolutely normal and legitimate concerns about the future of his people and his culture.

We reject labels such as “white supremacist” or “racist” that are routinely bestowed on assertions of White identity and interests as a means of muzzling their expression. In the vast majority of countries around the world, it is perfectly normal and legitimate for people to resist the invasion of other peoples. No one would suppose that, say, South Korea has a moral obligation to admit millions of non-Koreans so that native Koreans become a minority. Nor is there any moral imperative that they give up the primacy of Korean culture. No one would suppose that Koreans are being evil or “racist” for opposing the entry of millions of people unlike themselves–people who will be allowed to vote and compete for political power and other resources.

Our main concern is that this upheaval unleashed by massive non-White immigration opposes the legitimate interests of the European-descended peoples of the U.S. It’s not about hatred. It’s about seeing real conflicts of interest among different ethnic groups. Quite simply, massive non-White immigration is not in the interests of the vast majority of White Americans.

Murdough’s letter to the Concord Monitor expresses concern about the costs of diversity. Throughout the world, ethnically diverse societies are marked by ethnic conflict. No one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. Our vision of the future of America is that it is well on the road to becoming a cauldron of competing ethnic groups, with chronic divisions over issues like affirmative action, redistribution of wealth and the establishment of public goods like health care — any issue that may be seen as benefiting one ethnic group more than another.

Finally, the Daily News article grossly distorts the views of the directors of the A3P. We do not endorse “Nazi ideals” or simplistic, biologically reductionist theories of Judaism and Jewish influence. Questions related to the influence of various ethnic groups and conflicts of interest between different ethnic groups can be scientifically investigated. It is perfectly legitimate for any ethnic group, including White Americans, to identify the forces that oppose their interests and to act on that basis.

A major aspect of ethnic activism for all other ethnic groups is to call attention to their perceived opponents. For example, the Los Angeles Times reports today that Latinos of all political parties oppose the Arizona immigration law and see White racism as the source of the opposition to legalizing millions of Latinos. Similarly, it makes sense for A3P to articulate the forces we see arrayed against us.

There can be little doubt that one of the main forces arrayed against White people identifying as Whites and acting on their interests is the non-White coalition of ethnic groups  centered in the Democratic Party, and this includes the organized Jewish community as well as other non-White minority groups, such as Latinos. We understand that Latinos have an interest in getting as many of their people into the U.S. as possible. However, Latino interests in immigration conflict with the interests of White Americans. We have a legitimate interest in preserving our culture and our political power.

The fact that the great majority of White Americans feel they cannot identify as Whites or discuss their conflicts of interest with other ethnic groups is a completely unnatural state of affairs — the result of a prolonged assault on the legitimacy of these concepts by politically and ethnically motivated elites that have dominated public discourse on issues of race and ethnicity since before World War II and especially since the 1960s. Our purpose is to change that, and Mr. Murdough’s candidacy is a big step in that direction.

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Hormonal regulation of ingroup altruism

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A recent paper by Carsten K. W. De Dreu and colleagues in Science shows that the hormone oxytocin makes people more inclined to help their ingroup (“The Neuropeptide oxytocin regulates parochial altruism in intergroup conflict among humans”; Science, June 11, 2010; not available online without subscription). The paper is important for several issues related to group conflict. It begins with the simple statement that more than 210 million people were killed by state action in the 20th century, typically because they were seen in ingroup/outgroup terms. It also cites Darwin’s famous statement that “groups with a greater number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other … would spread and be victorious over other tribes” — a classic argument for group selection. They also cite several studies showing that oxytocin is linked to trust: people with high levels of trust have more oxytocin receptors in their brain, and receiving oxytocin makes people more empathic and generous.

The contribution of De Dreu et al. is to show that all this niceness is reserved for the ingroup — what they call “ingroup love.” Oxytocin increased people’s willingness to contribute to a common fund even though they would lose money in the process. However, it didn’t make them more likely to contribute to a fund where the they would benefit their ingroup at the expense of an outgroup. Oxytocin therefore promotes “ingroup love,” not “outgroup hate.” A second experiment showed that this effect occurred even for people who were not personally inclined toward altruism.

The third experiment is particularly important. Here the game was rigged to distinguish the motives of greed (large upside to non-cooperation if the other person cooperates compared to the downside if they do not cooperate) and fear (large downside to cooperation if the other person doesn’t reciprocate compared to the upside if they do reciprocate).

The greed motive is exploitative: it represents the desire to take advantage of a trusting outgroup; the fear motive is defensive: it represents the desire to protect the ingroup against possible exploitation by a non-cooperating outgroup. Oxytocin activated the fear motive: Under the influence of the drug people were more inclined to not cooperate with the outgroup, especially in the fear condition. In other words, they were defending their ingroup. Oxytocin did not affect greed.

So what does this all mean? First, realize that the ingroups and outgroups in the study are not genetically based, say, on ethnic differences. It would be interesting to see if the ingroup defensive effects of oxytocin would be increased if the ingroup and outgroup were racially homogeneous but of different races. We would also expect that there would be less altruistic donating to the ingroup in the first two experiments if the ingroups were ethnically diverse.

But because ethnicity was not manipulated and groups were randomly constructed, it means that the research is relevant to understanding the biological basis of social identity theory.  Social identity research shows that even randomly composed ingroups show ingroup biases — what De Dreu et al. term “ingroup love.” The ingroup and outgroup are like two ethnically-based football teams with different colored uniforms rather than two groups that differ on the basis of ethnicity. I have argued on the basis of several pieces of evidence that social identity mechanisms are an evolutionary adaptation for between-group conflict, and these results certainly provide further support for that.

The results don’t really provide any reason for optimism for White advocacy. We already know that whatever psychological mechanisms we have for loving our racial ingroup are failing miserably throughout the Western world. One reason is that Whites do not identify with other Whites as an ingroup, so they don’t show ingroup love specifically toward Whites. In the experiments, it’s quite clear who the ingroup is, but at least for the last several decades few Whites seem to consider their race as an ingroup. Whereas the experimenters made it very clear who the ingroup was, in the real world we are constantly be told by the media that Whites are not a legitimate ingroup. Once again, “it’s the culture, stupid.”

The result is that Whites do not feel empathy for other Whites who have been victimzed — as noted in a previous blog on empathy research (“Whites lack of empathy for other Whites“). Discussions of the consequences of public policy never mention negative effects on Whites, only the negative effects on other groups. For example, the effects of amnesty are discussed only in terms of what’s good for the illegals as an oppressed, deserving group — not on the long term political and cultural viability of Whites. When public policy results might have positive consequences specifically for Whites, there is enormous anxiety among the chattering class. (This happened not long ago when people realized that tweaking the University of California admission standards to help Latinos and Blacks would likely inadvertently help Whites at the expense of Asians. Asian activists were not happy.) Whites have come to see themselves as an illegitimate ingroup.

The problem with social identity mechanisms is that because ethnicity is not relevant to defining ingroups and outgroups, these mechanisms are manipulable by the wider culture, and that is exactly what we are seeing.

The result is that the most empathic and altruistic among us fail to defend their racial ingroup. I suspect that most Whites with naturally high levels of oxytocin are expending their empathy and altruism on people quite a bit unlike themselves — adopting African babies and other such altruistic acts. And besides the gratification they get from helping others, they also get a great deal of social approval as an added bonus.

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Libertarianism under intellectual scrutiny — and a call for papers

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Rand Paul’s Senate candidacy has been a godsend to the liberals. Jonah Goldberg puts it this way:

Indeed, it’s worth noting that the only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals. And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

I’d have to agree with Goldberg that the liberals won the argument politically — hence the liberals’ glee at finding a really fat target. But it’s not at all clear that the liberals won the argument intellectually, or even morally. Goldberg himself is quite confused about what Rand Paul is saying — conveniently, as it turns out, because he comes up with a clever argument that he seems to think absolutely destroys Paul’s position:

For the record, Paul and [Barry] Goldwater were both wrong. The libertarian position is not to defend Jim Crow but to condemn it, and not just because of its unjust bigotry but because of its economic folly that served to entrench that bigotry.

Paul weeps for the lost right of white businessmen to refuse black customers (even though he rejects the practice himself). But he fails to appreciate the perverse irony that one of Jim Crow’s greatest evils was its intrusion on the property rights of whites. Jim Crow wasn’t merely some “Southern tradition” undone by heroic good government. Jim Crow laws were imposed by government. And they banned white businessmen from serving blacks.

Based on his interview with Rachel Maddow, Rand is well aware of the distinction between private discrimination and government laws that would force people to discriminate. Paul stated quite clearly that he supports the aspects of the Civil Rights bill that struck down government laws that enforced segregation, but he opposed the parts of the law that made it illegal for private individuals or companies to discriminate on the basis of race.

So Goldberg is managing to go along with the liberals in bashing Paul, without really confronting the intellectual issue of whether the rights of individuals should include the right to personal discrimination. (Incidentally, one wonders whether Israel apologist Goldberg would condemn Israeli apartheid. I assume he would rationalize or ignore all the official and unofficial ways that Israel discriminates against Palestinians in Israel and especially in  the occupied territories, doubtless citing the “Israel is our democratic ally” mantra.)

So the intellectual and moral issues remain.  I have recently become editor of the Occidental Quarterly. (Formal announcement and plea for subscriptions TOQ later, but you can subscribe now, if you want.) Greg Johnson, the previous editor, initiated a contest for the best essay on “Libertarianism and Racial Nationalism.” (The deadline is June 1, but it will be extended to July 1. $1000 to the winner!) Great topic.

Libertarianism is a strong tradition in American history — the tradition of unfettered individualism. Eric Kaufmann’s treatment emphasizes the idea that 19th-century libertarians saw their freedom-loving ideology as an aspect of their Anglo-Saxon ethnic heritage, and as an evolutionary psychologist I agree that there is an ethnic basis to libertarian tendencies.

But Kaufmann also notes that this libertarian tendency became part of the culture of Western suicide in the 20th century. One of the things I noticed in writing the chapter on the Frankfurt School for The Culture of Critique was that these very Jewish (and therefore profoundly anti-libertarian in their own commitments) former Marxists had nothing but good things to say about individualism.  “In the end, the ideology of the Frankfurt School may be described as a form of radical individualism that nevertheless despised capitalism—an individualism in which all forms of gentile collectivism are condemned as an indication of social or individual pathology.”

So it’s not surprising that Goldberg as  a Jewish neocon presents himself as true to libertarianism — while ignoring the more difficult issue of personal discrimination.  But for us White advocates, the problem is even deeper. On the one hand, there is good reason to think that we Whites have a natural tendency to want to live free from intrusive governments and not have to march in lock step with others. That’s not to say that we can’t organize as a collective, it’s just that it’s harder for us to do.

Indeed, White advocacy is essentially a plea that Whites have collective interests and a right and an interest in organizing in order to achieve their interests in what has now become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests. Ethnic competition is always the death knell of individualism, as people organize themselves into competing groups. (That’s the real point  of the Arizona ethnic studies law: The last gasp of American individualism.) Any putative White homeland would necessarily discriminate on the basis of race, if only to secure its borders against the sort of invasion that we are now undergoing. Are Whites really so principled that that they would fail to see a moral imperative in preserving themselves, their culture, and their institutions, even if it meant that they had to discriminate on the basis of race.

It seems clear to me that libertarian individualism is indeed a culture of White suicide given the current political landscape. As Whites become a smaller and smaller percentage of the population, libertarianism will become an “okay” ideology for Whites — an officially approved harmless palliative to make them think they are intellectually honest while they sink into the sunset.

But I am open to all sorts of ideas on this topic and am definitely looking forward to reading the contributions to the special contest issue of TOQ.

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Tony Paulsen: Thoughts on the British General Election

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Tony Paulsen: Here are some thoughts on the British general election — not, you will note, an ex cathedra pronouncement! [Editor’s Note: In his current TOO article, Alex Kurtagic thinks it was all a waste of time.]

I’ll begin with the system parties, and move on to the patriotic right.

It’s strange to see a three horse race in which all three horses lose, but Lib/Lab/Con have managed this remarkable feat. Labour have lost 91 seats in our 650 seat Parliament, while the system’s much hyped faux alternative, the Liberals, lost five seats, rather than make the large gains predicted before the poll. They now hold 57 seats.

The Conservative party, standing on a manifesto of change (think about that for a Conservative party!) gained 97 seats, and now hold 306, but are twenty short of an overall majority.

One seat remains vacant, as a candidate died during the campaign. A bye-election will be held in a few weeks, when the Conservatives should take the seat, pushing them up to 307.

Outside Ulster, which has its own political dynamic, the only minor party to gain a seat was the Greens (more on them anon), while the sole Independent in Parliament lost his, despite being much praised as an honourable and competent member.

The Democratic Unionist Party holds eight Ulster seats, after losing East Belfast, one of the most staunchly Protestant and Unionist seats in Northern Ireland, to the very liberal Alliance party on a three way split in the Unionist vote, exacerbated by the scandals surrounding land deals involving DUP leader Peter Robinson and his wife. The three way split in Unionism also cost the Unionist parties South Belfast. Lady Hermon sits as an Independent Unionist for North Down, making nine Unionists in the House of Commons.

Even supposing the Tories (Conservatives) could persuade all nine Unionists to support them reliably, they would still be eleven seats short of an overall majority, so they are negotiating with the Liberals.

Personally, if I were in Tory leader David Cameron’s shoes, I would thank my lucky stars that I did not have to take office and impose an austerity budget of unprecedented severity on a populace not exactly enured to hardship. I would seek to manoeuvre the Liberals into a coalition with Labour, so that they can reap the odium that will follow.

Such however appears to be Cameron’s vanity and his unbridled desire for office at any price that he may rush in where others might fear to tread, unless, of course, his present courtship of the Liberals is a Machiavellian manoeuvre designed to drive them into the arms of Labour when he eventually fails to propose marriage!

Moving on to the performance of the patriotic right, there are basically three contenders in the field. Two are essentially civic nationalists, the United Kingdom Independence Party and the English Democrats.

The EDs, whose ostensible concern is to obtain a devolved Parliament for England, but whose real objective is the end of the Union, and independence for England, performed terribly. I need waste no more time on them.

UKIP, whose original purpose was to oppose British membership of the European union, but which has tried to rebrand itself as a more broadly based party of the populist right, opposing further immigration into England, is a much more formidable force than the hopeless EDs. It polled 917,832 votes across the country.

Nevertheless, these votes were thinly spread, and nowhere did it approach winning a seat under out “first past the post” system.

Last year, UKIP came second in England and Wales in the elections to the European parliament, after the Conservatives, but ahead of the ruling Labour party, an extraordinary performance. This year, most of those voters plainly went back to the Conservative party, whence they came.

It is tolerably clear that UKIP can only win really big votes in elections to a parliament of whose existence it theoretically disapproves, an unusual state of affairs to say the least.

The BNP made a huge electoral effort, contesting 339 of the 650 seats in Parliament and polling 563,743 votes.

One mystery is what possessed Nick Griffin to contest 339 seats. There was no obvious purpose in contesting more than the number needed to secure a broadcast on television and radio (in England, political parties may not buy air time. The television and radio stations, whether state or privately owned, must provide a certain amount of free air time to each party contesting more than a minimum number of seats, I believe c. 110, so it would have made sense to fight c. 120 seats to allow for errors in filling in the nomination papers: similar arrangements obtain in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on local television and radio. Obviously the number of seats involved in those countries is far smaller).

The contrast with the Green party, which enjoys roughly similar electoral support to the BNP, could not be starker. The Greens concentrated their limited resources in one or two constituencies in which they are particularly strong, and took a seat, their first ever win at this level.

The BNP leadership on the other hand was overcome by hubris in the run up to this election, and nemesis duly followed.

Nick Griffin had thought that he might win the Barking (East London) seat from the Labour incumbent, Margaret Hodge, née Oppenheimer, scion of a wealthy Jewish family that fled Germany in the 1930s.

In the event, his share of the vote fell from the 16% that the BNP polled in the 2005 election to 14%, and he trailed in third after the Conservative candidate. Hodge was triumphantly re-elected.

Griffin’s deputy, the enigmatic Simon Darby (widely known in movement circles as 5IMon because of his alleged role as an agent of our equivalent of the FBI, MI5) failed to take Stoke on Trent Central, another seat that the BNP had high hopes of actually winning. Instead, he came fourth.

In a dénouement worthy of the book of Esther, “Haman’s sons”, the twelve BNP councillors on Barking council, all lost their seats in the local elections held on the same day.

Up and down the land, BNP councillors lost their seats in the worst electoral reverse that the movement has ever suffered (in fairness, mainly because until recently it never got more than one or two stray councillors elected, so didn’t have seats to lose).

It is plain that the party’s abandonment of the once successful strategy of concentrating on sinking deep local roots in carefully selected communities that are more receptive to its message than the mass of the people at this stage in its development in favour of a massive effort at national level has failed completely.

So what are the positives? (Yes, there are some!). Well, to poll 563,743 votes in 339 of the 650 seats suggests that there are about 1,000,000 people willing to vote BNP in the United Kingdom, even under an electoral system that makes a vote for a minor party a wasted vote in most constituencies, so that most electors choose whichever of the major parties they dislike less.

Were we one day to move to a more proportional system (not unlikely, as the Liberals will demand it as the price of their participation in a coalition) it is plausible that a phalanx of nationalists would eventually enter the establishment’s sanctum sanctorum. Of course the system parties will try to rig the electoral system to exclude nationalists, but it is difficult to do that, especially in times of serious economic hardship that make radical alternatives to the existing system more appealing to the people.

On the down side, morale in BNP circles will now slump in the short term and not easily be revived. At the end of this year, the party will almost inevitably lose members (it has a “churn” rate of c. 25%, that is to say, one in four does not renew at each year end: this year it is hardly plausible that new members will join to replace those who leave).

It will be interesting to see how the party membership now views its leadership, and whether any credible challenger to Nick Griffin emerges.

The party’s strained finances are under investigation by the authorities after it failed its audit last year, while the 2009 accounts are shortly due. Quite why vast sums of money have been sent “over the water” to its strange Northern Ireland based fund-raiser, “the Rev.” Jim Dowson, a bogus evangelist straight out of Elmer Gantry, is one of the many questions that will have to be addressed in those accounts.

Whether the party can put its financial affairs in order remains to be seen, and will be a crucial factor in determining whether the BNP continues under its present leadership, or drops its pilot (who won’t go willingly).

Tony Paulsen is a pen name.

Kevin MacDonald: Mexican stories

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Kevin MacDonald: Lately I have been inundated with stories about Mexicans. Up in Morgan Hill (near San Jose), four White students had the temerity to wear American flags  on Cinco de Mayo, resulting in Mexicans swearing at them in Spanish. The John and Ken radio show, a major LA-area talk show with  a huge audience and very negative attitudes on illegal aliens, interviewed a woman who recounted being physically threatened by a crowd of Mexican students swearing at her in Spanish . She closed her comments by saying that she thinks that it may all end with a race war.

I suspect that the response of the White students indicates an emerging racial/ethnic consciousness. Overtly, it was about American flags versus Mexican flags, but the racial difference was obvious.

Today’s LA Times recounts the story of a Mexican family that crossed the border a century ago. What’s amazing is that after a century they seem completely unassimilated to the US. They have large families with “dozens of relatives” living in adjacent houses, and they still speak Spanish as their first language. A Mexican gunman with a long record of arrests murdered three family members, including the mother of his child. The family is depicted as working class. In other words, no assimilation and no upward mobility in 100 years.

Today’s LA Times also has an article on Ricardo Dominguez, a Mexican American just granted tenure at UC-San Diego. Dominguez is a performance artist who, in the words of this tenure-granting letter, is a “defining figure in the migration of performance art from physical space to virtual space.” His performances in virtual space are political gestures aimed at shutting down websites of people who are not on board with his leftist-ethnocentric, pro-immigration agenda.

His latest claim to fame is using $10,000 in public funds to develop a cell phone that tells illegals where there’s water while entertaining them with poetry as they cross the desert (“May the wind always be at your back”). His course is described as “Trans( )infinities as an (empty set) of potential aesthetic practices that move between, through, across, and beyond the post of the post-contemporary by transfixing on the loan words” — whatever that means. But it’s good enough for tenure at the University of California. And of course, his moment of fame has received a great deal of encouragement from his numerous colleagues on the academic nutcase left: Dominquez describes the praise he has received as  “a kind of glorious moment in the performance. … It’s the humanity that has gathered around … Electronic Disturbance Theatre.”

Another LA Times story from today describes 14 Mexican-looking people (I realize this is profiling) who were arrested after tying up traffic for hours while lying down in front of the city jail as a protest against the Arizona immigration law. They joined their hands  together inside plastic piping to make it harder to arrest them. The sign in the print edition had a clenched brown fist and a what looks like a reference to Arizona’s “racist laws.”

Finally, there was the article in the NY Times by Zev Chafets on Julian Castro, the “The Post-Hispanic Hispanic Politician.”  Castro’s mother is a former La Raza activist, and it’s pretty obvious she still identifies as a Mexican and is not too fond of Anglos:

To Rosie, the Alamo is a symbol of bad times. “They used to take us there when we were schoolchildren,” she told me. “They told us how glorious that battle was. When I grew up I learned that the ‘heroes’ of the Alamo were a bunch of drunks and crooks and slaveholding imperialists who conquered land that didn’t belong to them. But as a little girl I got the message — we were losers. I can truly say that I hate that place and everything it stands for.”

Despite this, the whole point of the article is to assure readers that there is no danger of Mexicans being an unassimilated minority:

In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States. “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.” At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere. Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.

Chafets writes as if finding one Mexican politician who seems on the surface to be assimilated means we should all breathe a sigh of relief–despite Castro’s radical mother and a whole lot of very unassmilated Mexicans, even after several generations. What I see does nothing to remove Huntington’s concerns.

But it’s clear that Castro is getting a huge publicity push. Chafets quotes people eager to declare him to be the likely first Latino president. And it doesn’t hurt that his chief of staff is Robbie Greenblum — a Jewish lawyer. If nothing else, Castro has figured out how to get ahead in American politics, and Zev Chafets and the NY Times are doing all they can to play along.

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