Lecturing a conscript conclave of Justice Department bureaucrats, Attorney General Eric Holder last week called America a “nation of cowards” for not spending more time talking about race. Reading his speech, however, one recalls the sage counsel of Pat Moynihan to President Nixon in 1970: This whole subject might benefit from a long period of “benign neglect.” One point Holder did … [Read More]

Founded by Pat Buchanan, Washington, DC based group The American Cause held a conference at the National Press Club over the weekend called “Immigration and the Future of the Republican Party.” Speakers included Pat’s sister and American Cause president, Bay Buchanan; former Forbes magazine editor and current VDare.com editor Peter Brimelow; Fox News contributor and American Conservative contributing editor James Pinkerton … [Read More]

The Macpherson Report on the police investigation of the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence was published in London in January 1999. Ten years on, it is continuing to have major repercussions for British jurisprudence and society. Around 10.30 p.m. on 22 April 1993, 19-year-old Stephen Lawrence was standing with a friend at a bus stop in the London suburb … [Read More]

I recently read Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century by Jeffry A. Frieden.  As in many books in this genre the first age of globalization which ended in 1914 receives a great deal of treatment.  This was a period of free movement of capital, goods and labor.  Frieden observes that though there was agitation and organization against … [Read More]

In his 40 years as a libertarian gadfly, Walter Block is still best known for his 1977 book Defending the Undefendable, in which he defends pimps, drug dealers, blackmailers, corrupt cops, and loan sharks as economic heroes. Surely the economics Department at Loyola Maryland was aware of his heterodox scholarship and expected controversial remarks when they invited him to speak to … [Read More]

Some readers have taken time to complain that they’ve detected self-referential material and personal anecdotes in my autobiographical humor columns. Week after week, they slog their way through 2,000-word articles which they do not enjoy, by an author in whom they are not interested, with unpromising titles that refer to that author’s destructive household pets, painful medical examinations, and time-wasting hobbies. … [Read More]

Heather Mac Donald has a nice piece on gender inequality in math and science and the New York Times’s efforts to wish it all away: The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized … [Read More]

Justin Raimondo’s post about racial differences has generated many responses.  I will let others argue about the science of race and IQ, but I would like to make a comment about Justin’s assertion that: Murray Rothbard rightly warned us to be wary of statistics, which are, of necessity, the instrument of government social engineers, and I would venture to say that … [Read More]