← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Hugh Lincoln
Thread ID: 18624 | Posts: 17 | Started: 2005-06-11
2005-06-11 17:35 | User Profile
with one phone call from the SPLC.
[url]http://www.manews.org/[/url]
guddam.
2005-06-11 17:58 | User Profile
Hugh Lincoln,
Thanks for the article.Anyone who comes close to being a real conservative is being removed from public. It has gotten very bad the last few years. PC is destroying everything left of the old right. Things are getting bad.
Human Events Buckles Under to 'Political Correctness' Forced Out: The Price of Speaking Freely in Multicultural America By Kevin Lamb
ry to imagine the following: For nearly three years as managing editor of a conservative newsweekly, you've established a solid track record as a capable and loyal staffer. Over the course of your employment, you've worked closely and well with your colleagues, and you and your family have mingled with theirs at company picnics, Thanksgiving luncheons and Christmas parties. Moreover, you share what you believe is your employer's overall conservative outlook: a commitment to family values, lower taxes, limited government, strong national defense, and America's civic traditions.
One morning at the office, you receive a strange telephone message from a staffer of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) - a wealthy, left-wing group opposed to everything conservatives stand for - inquiring about your work with two of your firm's publications and a third periodical you edit entirely on your own free time. Later that day, the SPLC staffer also calls your boss and other office colleagues, asking intrusive questions about you and accusing you of being an editor for a "white supremacist" publication in your free time.
Just before the end of the work day, your boss escorts you to a conference room where you are sternly greeted by another superior as well as the company's vice president. After a brief interrogation, focused not on your job performance or any other work-related issue, but concerned exclusively with your free-time activity, you are told you have one choice: resign or be fired. You are given only a few seconds to think it over. After deciding how you would prefer your job to be terminated, you're ordered to clean out your office immediately.
Stunned at being forced out of a highly compatible job with your "conservative" employer at the evident behest of a group that ruthlessly promotes far left-wing causes, from uncontrolled mass immigration to gay marriage, you wait until later in the evening when your two daughters are asleep before you break the news to your wife.
If this sounds like a plot from a Tom Wolfe novel, it isn't. It happened to me last January. I lost my position as managing editor of Human Events - the sixty-year-old conservative weekly publication - for things I wrote and edited in my own free time, even though my work performance wasn't in question. The real offense: editing a publication, The Occidental Quarterly (TOQ), that specializes in research and analysis on issues involving race, ethnicity, politics, and culture - topics that not long ago were routinely addressed by American conservatives - including some contributors and readers of Human Events.
'Politically Incorrect' Since its launch in the fall of 2001, The Occidental Quarterly's focus has been an unapologetic and scholarly defense of Western Civilization, including the historical and biological origin of the people who founded our own nation. A genuine political need exists for such a periodical since conservative publications over the years have increasingly abandoned any consideration of ethnic or racial differences as explanations for racial disparities. That evasion has been part of a general flight by America's conservative establishment, which has abandoned the conservative goal of preserving America's founding and sustaining European-derived population and its values in favor of an embrace of purely ideological polemics, such as Rush Limbaugh-like baiting of this week's demonic Democrat. The result has been conservative impotence before the ethnic balkanization of America and the ongoing cultural fragmentation of our society in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity," imposed by racial and "lifestyle" minorities on the Middle American majority.
The reluctance in conservative circles to probe sensitive topics out of fear of criticism from the left is the reason why it was necessary to launch a publication such as TOQ. If conventional conservative publications were unwilling to address these issues, then there was a place for a new publication that would.
Switching Careers I started my tenure at Human Events in March 2002, after a 13-year stint working for Newsweek's research library in the Washington bureau. After interviewing for the managing editor position at Human Events, I accepted the offer and looked forward to the challenges that accompany a new career.
Over the years, Human Events has been the leading pro-family publication among grassroots social conservatives with a well-known editorial view that firmly opposed the agenda of homosexual activists, such as "gay marriage."
But one of the major concerns shared by some of the Human Events staff is a perceived need to placate one of the executives at Eagle Publishing, the parent company of Human Events, who has demonstrated support for gay causes. At times the editors walk on eggshells trying to balance the demands of Human Events' professed conservative social values with the executive's gay-friendly politics. In fact it is something of a running joke around Eagle's corridors that the HE editors' balancing act has all the makings of a new TV reality series: "The Apprentice meets Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
The executive is listed as a donor to the Whitman-Walker Clinic, a "community-based health organization ... established by and for the gay and lesbian community." According to Federal Election Commission records, he also contributed $500 in June 2003 to the reelection campaign of Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, who has refused to answer questions about his alleged gay lifestyle. Foley also received a $500 contribution in June 2003 from the Log Cabin Republicans Political Action Committee, a gay Republican organization, and has received contributions from the Human Rights Campaign PAC, the leading gay organization that endorses candidates who support "gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality."
Occasionally the editors would butt heads with the executive over gay-related issues. He was beside himself after the editors decided to defend Sen. Rick Santorum, R-PA, in a front page piece that supported the senator's stated opposition to the recklessly promiscuous homosexual lifestyle. The executive confronted the paper's editor in his office in what was described by one witness as a tense and heated exchange.
In the company's bi-monthly "recognition day," essentially a navel-gazing exercise to recognize new employees and showcase the company's "talented" staffers, the executive more than once referred to Human Events as an "ultra-conservative" publication - most likely, in part, because of its opposition to homosexuality.
Getting Traction As managing editor I had some discretion on the selection and assignment of freelance material. It was my responsibility to secure copy for the "American Scene" page, a feature often devoted to book or movie reviews, so I often selected authors for various assignments, soliciting reviewers for their expertise on subjects suitable to our readership.
I approached Marian Coombs, a well-established freelance author and regular contributor to Chronicles and The American Conservative, to write a review of Gods and Generals in early 2003. I knew she was a solid conservative and reliable author who could produce quality copy and deliver what the HE editors expected for our readership. We published scores of her movie and book reviews spanning a range of general interest topics with a conservative appeal. When I first mentioned to editor Terry Jeffrey that Marian had agreed to write freelance pieces, he was thrilled at the prospect of publishing her in Human Events.
Likewise, I thought we had found a great contributor in Wayne Lutton, the editor of The Social Contract, a former Intercollegiate Studies Institute Weaver Fellow, authority on a range of historical subjects, a recognized expert on immigration issues, and contributor to Middle American News. He had a knack for providing a fresh perspective on otherwise dry topics and proved to be a fountain of interesting information. The same was true for Washington Times reporter Stacy McCain.
But their work at Human Events has suddenly disappeared from view. Their articles - which spanned a variety of topics, from reviews of Harry Potter movies to reviews of conservative books - were never found to be objectionable in tone or content by any editors at Human Events. Their body of work, along with my own, was immediately removed from the Human Events website - the direct result of a single phone call in January from SPLC staffer Heidi Beirich.
A Surreal Ending If grassroots conservative readers of Human Events knew - as they should know - that their flagship publication caved in so quickly to a single phone call from the SPLC, a radical leftist group whose allied website at tolerance.org contains a friendly interview with former underground radical Bill Ayers of the violent "Weatherman" faction of Students for a Democratic Society (and who remains an unrepentant advocate of terrorism), then those readers might also begin to glimpse why "conservatives" so often lose political battles with the left. The unfortunate truth is that the two groups share certain philosophical premises.
For one might think that the editors of Human Events would have sneered at the SPLC's effort to purge one of its employees. Instead, they agreed with the SPLC's aims, revealing that establishment conservatives have become just as intolerant of discussions of racial differences as the anti-American radicals of the far left. Under the guise of diversity and multiculturalism, the two sides have created an atmosphere of intolerance and retribution against anyone who even appears to challenge their ideological orthodoxies. But there is at least one significant difference between the left and today's conservatives: the lefties act manfully, while the conservatives tremble and duck for cover at the slightest deviation from the new multicultural orthodoxy.
This incident illustrates how far leftward the publishing culture across the political spectrum has drifted over the years. The irony of the SPLC's witch hunts for "white supremacists" is that the imposition of "tolerance" contributes to greater "intolerance." Nothing is more essential to the posterity of a "free society" than the free and unhindered exchange of ideas and opinions. And nothing jeopardizes these first amendment rights more than the anti-American activities of the SPLC, except perhaps the cowardice of those who surrender without resistance.
Conservatives once defended the importance of conserving America's heritage and cultural traditions, but the rise of "political correctness" has foreshadowed an important point that William McDougall, the pioneering social psychologist, once argued decades ago: "The essential expressions of conservatism are respect for the ancestors, pride in their achievement, and reverence for the traditions which they have handed down; all of which means what is now fashionable to call 'race prejudice' and 'national prejudice,' but may more justly be described as preference for, and belief in the merits of, a man's own tribe, race, or nation, with its peculiar customs and institutions - its ethos, in short. If such preferences, rooted in traditional sentiments, are swept away from a people, its component individuals become cosmopolitans; and a cosmopolitan is a man for whom all such preferences have become mere prejudices, a man in whom the traditional sentiments of his forefathers no longer flourish, a man who floats upon the current of life, the sport of his passions, though he may deceive himself with the fiction that he is guided in all things by reason alone."
Unfortunately the cultural drift of today's political atmosphere is far worse than McDougall could have ever envisioned.
Kevin Lamb is the editor of The Occidental Quarterly.
2005-06-12 03:43 | User Profile
As an ex-Conservative now Nationalist I try to tell my Conservative friends stories like these, but they have little or no effect.The small number of Paleo-Cons notwithstanding, Conservatives at this point in time are reflexive homo butt-boys for Zionism. They are worse than Shabbez Goyim because they actually refuse to think about it, it just causes them too much conitive dissonnance and mental stress.
2005-06-12 19:48 | User Profile
[QUOTE=CornCod]As an ex-Conservative now Nationalist I try to tell my Conservative friends stories like these, but they have little or no effect[/QUOTE]
Yes, they respond by saying, "Well, racism is immoral!" Astounding how whites, especially conservative ones, have become convinced that it's "racist" to defend white interests.
2005-06-12 20:11 | User Profile
To use Jack Kemp's term for himself they are "Martin Luther King Conservatives". (sic) Hannity is a perfect example as anyone who has listen to his program can attest to.
2005-06-12 20:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Hugh Lincoln]Yes, they respond by saying, "Well, racism is immoral!" Astounding how whites, especially conservative ones, have become convinced that it's "racist" to defend white interests.[/QUOTE]Not really that astounding. It's been the reigning cultural orthodoxy since the end of WWII. Unthinking conservatives (by nature the vast majority of conservatives) accept their cultural conditioning quite readily and uncritically, even when it is wildly at odds with their own interests.
Conservatives defend the status quo or sometimes the barely status quo ante - "the way things are and should always be" as defined by unthinking support of whatever assumptions "everyone naturally assumes to be true" - either today's unchallenged assumptions, or at best the day before yesterday's.
That's all conservativism ever has been, and once you try to avoid the pitfall of cultural drift, by trying to ground "conservatism" on something more solid, you've started to create an ideology and not abide by an actual "conservatism" (which is not a bad thing, but it presents certain problems).
Conservatives have been culturally indoctrinated with the dogma of "racism is bad, only whites are really racists or only whites should worry about racism" for so long, that they now think it's conservative orthodoxy, rather than a historically recent "innovation". The best they can do is try to criticize liberals and non-whites for being "inconsistent" and not "truly colorblind" but that's a suckers game and shows they've already accepted the basic premises of the "racism" swindle.
Now that this orthodoxy of "white racism" has been culturally ingrained for so long, white nationalist conservatives are always going to be fighting against the ingrained instincts of the vast majority of their fellow whites. For that reason, conservative thinking and conservative tactics (ie, mistakenly thinking that white nationalism or anything else pro-white is somehow a "wing" of the conservative movement) is going to go nowhere. Such tactics are like trying to swim or climb uphill against the tide, if I may horribly mix metaphors.
If whites are going to have a future at all, it will be as a "white wing" and not as part of a larger "right wing", if you will pardon me again for my abuse of the language.
2005-06-12 20:37 | User Profile
White is right and fvck everyone else. I feel more affinity and brotherhood to any white in the world than colored American citizens. Once once white countries become multi-kultied and divershat, the notion of patriotism and borders becomes moot. It's like living in a communal apartment in the Soviet Union: everyone hates one another and dreams about small but his own place.
2005-06-12 20:45 | User Profile
[QUOTE=madrussian]White is right and fvck everyone else. I feel more affinity and brotherhood to any white in the world than colored American citizens. Once once white countries become multi-kultied and divershat, the notion of patriotism and borders becomes moot. It's like living in a communal apartment in the Soviet Union: everyone hates one another and dreams about small but his own place.[/QUOTE] Yes, but another point to remember is that as this happens, "left" and "right", "liberal" and "conservative" become increasingly meaningless abstractions. Whites who mistake these things for reality will always be playing a kind of parlor game, the rules of which are unknown to them, against opponents whom they refuse to recognize as opponents.
2005-06-12 20:53 | User Profile
One can think of a society as a hierarchical entity: there are first principles, and there are secondary and tertiary. Projection onto liberal and conservative plane, whatever meaning one puts in those terms, should follow a much more basic principle of blood. Blood is what unites people. It's always been that way, and any society with an ideology that contradicts that is doomed. History confirms it.
2005-06-12 21:08 | User Profile
In addition to these terms becoming meaningless all too often one finds that people who are supposedly on your "side", i.e., Left or Right are actually your enemies. Neocons come to mind immediately.
2005-06-12 21:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]In addition to these terms becoming meaningless all too often one finds that people who are supposedly on your "side", i.e., Left or Right are actually your enemies. Neocons come to mind immediately.[/QUOTE]Exactly. Once ethnicity and race come back out in the open as real topics of public discussion, the Inner Party's power to play both sides against the middle is severely reduced.
2005-06-12 22:23 | User Profile
Mr. Lamb wrote: [QUOTE]For one might think that the editors of Human Events would have sneered at the SPLC's effort to purge one of its employees. Instead, they agreed with the SPLC's aims, revealing that establishment conservatives have become just as intolerant of discussions of racial differences as the anti-American radicals of the far left. Under the guise of diversity and multiculturalism, the two sides have created an atmosphere of intolerance and retribution against anyone who even appears to challenge their ideological orthodoxies. [I][B]But there is at least one significant difference between the left and today's conservatives: the lefties act manfully, while the conservatives tremble and duck for cover at the slightest deviation from the new multicultural orthodoxy[/B][/I].[/QUOTE]I once asked Sam Francis why conservatives who professed to hate communism almost to a man ducked the war in Vietnam. He did not give a clear answer and looked at the floor. Courage has long disappeared as a virtue for affluent Americans.
Mr. Lamb was instrumental in having my article detailing American wars published, and I commiserate with him. Yet even his cohorts were somewhat reluctant to pursue the obvious conclusion. [QUOTE]Since its launch in the fall of 2001, The Occidental Quarterly's focus has been an unapologetic and scholarly defense of Western Civilization, including the historical and biological origin of the people who founded our own nation. A genuine political need exists for such a periodical since conservative publications over the years have increasingly abandoned any consideration of ethnic or racial differences as explanations for racial disparities. That evasion has been part of a general flight by America's conservative establishment, which has abandoned the conservative goal of preserving America's founding and sustaining European-derived population and its values in favor of an embrace of purely ideological polemics, such as Rush Limbaugh-like baiting of this week's demonic Democrat. The result has been conservative impotence before the ethnic balkanization of America and the ongoing cultural fragmentation of our society in the name of "multiculturalism" and "diversity," imposed by racial and "lifestyle" minorities on the Middle American majority.[/QUOTE]This country sorely needs a journal that does print articles challenging accepted truths, but yet retains a biting intellectual approach. My best wishes to Mr. Lamb.
2005-06-13 00:21 | User Profile
[QUOTE=grep14w]Not really that astounding. It's been the reigning cultural orthodoxy since the end of WWII. Unthinking conservatives (by nature the vast majority of conservatives) accept their cultural conditioning quite readily and uncritically, even when it is wildly at odds with their own interests.
Conservatives defend the status quo or sometimes the barely status quo ante - "the way things are and should always be" as defined by unthinking support of whatever assumptions "everyone naturally assumes to be true" - either today's unchallenged assumptions, or at best the day before yesterday's.
That's all conservativism ever has been, and once you try to avoid the pitfall of cultural drift, by trying to ground "conservatism" on something more solid, you've started to create an ideology and not abide by an actual "conservatism" (which is not a bad thing, but it presents certain problems).
Conservatives have been culturally indoctrinated with the dogma of "racism is bad, only whites are really racists or only whites should worry about racism" for so long, that they now think it's conservative orthodoxy, rather than a historically recent "innovation". The best they can do is try to criticize liberals and non-whites for being "inconsistent" and not "truly colorblind" but that's a suckers game and shows they've already accepted the basic premises of the "racism" swindle.
Now that this orthodoxy of "white racism" has been culturally ingrained for so long, white nationalist conservatives are always going to be fighting against the ingrained instincts of the vast majority of their fellow whites. For that reason, conservative thinking and conservative tactics (ie, mistakenly thinking that white nationalism or anything else pro-white is somehow a "wing" of the conservative movement) is going to go nowhere. Such tactics are like trying to swim or climb uphill against the tide, if I may horribly mix metaphors.
If whites are going to have a future at all, it will be as a "white wing" and not as part of a larger "right wing", if you will pardon me again for my abuse of the language.[/QUOTE]
You'll get no strong objection from me on any of this, but I continue to think there's some hope in working within conservative and Republican circles. If we can persuade folks (correctly) that the idea of racial equality is liberal nonsense, that will help. You're right that conservatives tend to obey orders and do less thinking --- so work with that.
It just takes work.
2005-06-13 02:02 | User Profile
I subscribe to the Occidental Quarterly and have so far received two issues, which I have read cover to cover and enjoyed every article.
2005-06-13 19:50 | User Profile
You'll get no strong objection from me on any of this, but I continue to think there's some hope in working within conservative and Republican circles. If we can persuade folks (correctly) that the idea of racial equality is liberal nonsense, that will help. You're right that conservatives tend to obey orders and do less thinking --- so work with that.
I agree with Hugh and grep. One of the chinks in the gentile armor exploited by the IP was our sense of "fair play" that other races lack, which allowed far more infiltration and penetration of the power structure than would otherwise have occurred. Whites retain this instinct and it's still being constantly preyed upon, witness all the hullabaloo over queer nuptials. "The poor widdle gays only want the same rights you greedy breeders have had forever, so share already!" Of course, America's gag relflex appears to have kicked in over that one, but the point is, it being the case that the sense of fair play is still operant among a majority of our people, then let's use that by hammering on the double standards that work against White people in everyday life (AA in hiring, college admissions, social programs, etc.) and that there is strong resentment of. This has been tried, yes, but with the watered-down and "conservative-safe" approach decried by grep. A no-holds-barred, unapologetic strategy may yield better results. I have had better luck in face-to-face talks with people using this tack than with yammering on about how Jews run everything, certainly.
2005-06-14 00:30 | User Profile
[QUOTE]I agree with Hugh and grep. One of the chinks in the gentile armor exploited by the IP was our sense of "fair play" that other races lack[/QUOTE]
I would submit that it is more complex than this. The extension of a sense of fair play to those outside the group might be said to be more a result than a cause of alien infiltration. It is a result of a failure of the community's immune system, which discriminates between self and non-self.
Madsciencetype's reference to "the chinks in the gentile armor" raises an important subject. How is that we find ourselves subject to manipulation from aliens? Generally speaking, our elite are the ones who open the gate to enable the entry of the manipulators.
I do not see such a phenomenon in other races, though I admit I havenââ¬â¢t looked very hard. Triandis says all elites are less group-oriented than are the masses, but still this seems to be a phenomenon peculiar to (or especially pronounced in) our race. To the extent that we have a greater problem in this regard, we must look to ourselves and see what is different about us that might create the susceptibility.
It is helpful to look to the immune system for insight. Immunology has sometimes been ââ¬Åsummarilyââ¬Â defined as the ââ¬Åscience of self/non-self discriminationââ¬Â, though a more-nuanced definition is more complete:
[url]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biology-self/[/url]
Think about that the next time you encounter a person or statute that opposes or prohibits ââ¬Ådiscriminationââ¬Â. The overt purpose is to prevent us from discriminating between self and non-self! It takes no imagination to understand what is going on once you realize that we are in fact an imperfectly integrated biological organism, if you will forgive the redundancy. That is why, ultimately, David Sloan Wilsonââ¬â¢s books (which elucidate the theoretical underpinnings for MacDonaldââ¬â¢s contemporaneous exposition of an example of a human ââ¬Ågroupââ¬Â strategy at work) are so much more important than MacDonaldââ¬â¢s.
But I have digressed considerably. Back to the elites: How are they bamboozled?
Cognitive elitism and associated status yearnings.
The same method is used by Jews and the Asians at GNXP; the intelligent outsider purports to have more in common with the elite white gentile than do his poor relations.
This can be considered the evolutionary tradeoff, the price we pay for the creativity of our race. Our creativity is a function of (or at least appears to share a common cause with) our greater variety in ability within the raceââ¬âthe famous wider standard deviation. And this greater difference between the two tails of the bell curve provides the crack into which the wedge of cognitive elitism can be driven.
2005-06-15 17:47 | User Profile
Bump.
I would submit that it is more complex than this.
Certainly it is, but I was trying to think of strategies to reach people that were relatively easy to digest, and the double standard fits the bill pretty nicely. I do like the approach of the National Policy Institute that Tex posted around here somewhere. While it may be another oversimplification, we need things that fit on a bumper sticker and while we here may find a scholarly work by the likes of MacDonald or D.S. Wilson interesting, the people we're trying to reach often have the attention span of a kindergartener, a result of sound-bite politics. We need to work with that while remaining true to the core message.
I think your immune system analogy is spot on. The elites function as the "memory" cells of the immune system and should recognize debilitating non-self infiltration and take steps to induce a healthy response. The elites today are corrupted (and I think you are correct in your analysis of why this is) and have no group loyalty or memory whatsoever. This wasn't the case for elites like Washington, Adams or even figures like Lee, who were very cognizant of their responsibility to the body politic, unlike the spoiled doofuses like W we see today, who only have responsibility to the bottom line and maybe immediate family.
One thing about social and political upheavals of the past I've noticed is that the elites are never gotten rid of, only the players change. I've reluctantly concluded that this is unavoidable, though I don't take the same dim view of the masses that Wm. Pierce did. The key is to make sure the new elites are more responsible in protecting their group.