Richard Spencer

October 30, 2008

When I first heard about it, I thought it was too good to be true. But yesterday, I was overjoyed to learn that Steve Sailer’s book on Obama, bearing the hilarious Harry Potter-spoof title America’s Half Blood Prince, will be published in November by VDARE. And, best of all, the entire volume is available for gratis downloading here:

AMERICA?S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE:
BARACK OBAMA?S STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE
By Steve Sailer
Foreword by Peter Brimelow

Peter Brimelow begins his forward to the volume thusly: ?On the tomb of concert impresario Johann Peter Salomon in Westminster Abbey is the terse but entirely adequate epitaph: ?He brought Haydn to England.”? I suspect that my own epitaph may well be: ?He talked Steve Sailer into writing his first book.?? Peter is being overly modest, for sure, but he has a point. If Sailer ever wrote a book on the intersection of economics, race, genetics, and culture, he might struggle to find a publisher at first; however, his volume would sooner or later be outselling Freekenomics in airports. James Joyce?s Ulysses is that novel that everyone in the smartset claims to have read, but truly no one ever has. Sailer?s volume would become that book that everyone would actually read, but then, when pressed, would deny knowledge of its very existence so as to maintain the semblance of anti-racist toleration.

The epigraph to America?s Half-Blood Prince is lifted from Obama’s own oeuvre: 

I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them. Which perhaps indicates a second, more intimate theme to this book?namely, how I, or anybody in public office, can avoid the pitfalls of fame, the hunger to please, the fear of loss, and thereby retain that kernel of truth, that singular voice within each of us that reminds us of our deepest commitments.

Much like Churchill said of Russia, Barack Obama is a riddle wrapped up in audacity inside disingenuousness.