There have been some later developments in the storm-in-an-academic-teacup over Williams College President Adam Falk [Email him] canceling a talk I was invited to give to the “Uncomfortable Learning” student group.

The National Association of Scholars (of which I am a member) has been on the case.  NAS is, to quote their mission statement, “a network of scholars and citizens united by our commitment to academic freedom, disinterested scholarship, and excellence in American higher education.”

Anthropologist Peter Wood, the President of NAS, has posted a long (4,400 words) account of some exchanges he’s had with President Falk, embellished with Dr. Wood’s own commentaries.

The piece defies compression, though I shall pull out some quotes below.  If you are interested in academic freedom in general, and the stifling power of the Antiracism cult in particular, I urge you to read the whole thing.

I should say that I have some slight personal acquaintance with Dr. Wood.  Some years ago I reviewed his book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept.  My review was for the most part favorable.  I only added some gentle chiding towards the end:

For all its delights, this is a flawed book, with a hole at its center. Peter Wood is an inhabitant of the Respectable Right, and so is scrupulously deferential to what William F. Buckley, Jr., the leading light of this faction, has called “the prevailing structure of taboos.” This book began, in fact, as an essay posted on

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Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination.

Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Read more >>

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this year had the feel of a city under siege. Speaker after speaker made veiled, hostile references to Donald Trump, without mentioning his name [ CPAC 2016 Facing Trump Specter , WND, March 3, 2016]. When the conflict finally broke into the open, with Trump snubbing the conference to dodge planned protests, CPAC turned into a defiant rally against the de-facto Republican frontrunner [ Donald Trump Bails On Speech At CPAC , WND, March 4, 2016]. By Saturday night, it was clear “conservatism” is no longer really a coherent political philosophy or worldview, but a tribal identifier. Trump is hated not because of his political positions or even his style, but because he does not repeat the shibboleths of the Beltway Right.

Despite CPAC’s theme—“Our Time Is Now”—the conference seemed simply an exercise in nostalgia, a kind of temporary theme park for aging Baby Boomers who want to remember the 1980s and young politicos who want to visit a Disneyesque fantasyland. Speaker after speaker simply urged politicians of the present to copy Ronald Reagan. That would be sufficient to solve every challenge of the present!

For example, Mark Levin, who clearly recognizes the problems with mass immigration and is not afraid to discuss them, nonetheless simply recited the electoral success of Reagan almost ritualistically, without mentioning changing demographics. [ Talk radio star attacks Trump without mentioning his name , by Garth Kant, WND, March 4, 2016] He also took an odd swipe at the nationalist currents surrounding the Trump campaign (without mentioning Trump), by suggesting “nationalism” and “populism” is not conservative, and indeed, is somehow foreign or “French.”



Meanwhile, the keynote speaker for a conference celebrating “intellectual conservatism” was Glenn Beck. [ The Kool Aid Cult , by Gregory Hood, Radix, February 1, 2016] Beck took the audience on a remarkable journey through whatever reality he is living in, a fantastic realm where the Industrial Revolution began in the United States as a direct result of the United States Constitution. [ Glenn Beck at CPAC: Compares Trump to Film Villain, Claims Industrial Revolution Started in America Because of Constitution , by Rebecca Mansour, Breitbart, March 6, 2016] He also compared Donald Trump to the bad guy from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

As the satirical Twitter personality “Conservative Pundit” joked about Trump and the atmosphere at CPAC, “Just sickens me to see someone take our esoteric Reagan mystery cult and try to make a winning party out of it.”

The day after the conference ended brought the gloomy Read more >>

Employers added 242,000 jobs in February and unemployment remained at 4.9%, reprising the lowest reading in eight years. These results, while not the blowout needed to quickly absorb 8.2 million unemployed (and millions more underemployed), alleviated fears of an imminent recession.

The Household Survey, which reports the nativity and ethnicity of workers and unemployed individuals, confirmed that the job market is strong. Even better, based on our estimates, February 2016 was one of those rare months when all the new jobs went to American workers:

In February 2016:

• Total Household Survey employment rose 530,000, up by 0.4%


• Native-born American employment rose by 552,000, up by 0.4%


• Foreign-born immigrant employment (both legal and illegal) fell by 22,000—down by 0.1%

The job market has been relatively strong for a few years now, but those gains have done little to assuage the economic stress and anger of the average American—emotions that fuel the candidacy of Donald Trump. One reason:

“We are seeing job growth across a range of industries, but we’re also seeing a polarization in the labor market…”

[ Jobs Report Shows Brisk U.S. Hiring in February, By Patricia Cohen, New York Times, March 4, 2016]

Tara Sinclair, chief economist for the job site Indeed, goes on to describe a bifurcated labor market: robust demand for hospitality and service workers—sectors, we must note, where immigrant workers are overrepresented—keeping the total job count up; while manufacturing, transportation and energy—sectors, she notes, dominated by blue collar white men—are losing ground.

But while American workers caught a welcome break in February, immigrant share of the total employment remains high by historical standards. Native-born workers have lost ground to their foreign-born competitors throughout the Obama years. We highlight this trend in our New VDARE.com American Worker Displacement Index (NVDAWDI) graphic:

Read more >>

[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com]

Super Trumpsday, as we call it over here in the Trumposphere, was a good day for the Donald: He won seven states to Ted Cruz's three and Marco Rubio's one, and he picked up either 237, 247, 257, or 258 delegates, depending which website you check. I don't know why professional journalists can't agree on delegate numbers, but they can't. Even at the lowest number, 237—that's from the New York Times—Trump got a further 19 percent—damn near one in five—of the delegates he needs to walk into the convention a winner. The NYT has Cruz picking up 209 delegates, Rubio 94. But the big story from Super Trumpsday: the turnout.

Here's a bar chart showing GOP voter turnout on Super Trumpsday compared with 2012. In all eleven states with GOP contests turnout was up, mostly way up. GOP voter turnout in Virginia was up two hundred and eighty-six percent. [ Here's Just How Massive Republicans' Super Tuesday Turnout Was, By Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR, March 2, 2016]



Turnout for Democrat voters can't be compared with 2012 because they were locked in to Obama, their sitting President, that year. But comparison with the 2008 results were dismal for the Dems. In their eleven states turnout Read more >>