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



This is one of those weeks where the inside pages of the newspapers (for those of you who remember newspapers) grab one's attention better than the big headlines. The story that the comment threads are talking about: the four young blacks in Chicago who kidnapped and tortured a retarded young white guy.

The blacks are in custody; their mugshots have been broadcast to the media. You don't have to look very long at those pictures to know where we are here: on the left-hand side of the Bell Curve.

Intelligence-wise, in fact, we're on the left-hand side of the black Bell Curve—IQs in the high seventies or low eighties.

It's worth making the effort of imagination to see how the world seems to people like that. Read more >>

Jobs data released Friday for the last full month of the Obama Administration saw immigrant displacement of American workers at its fifth-highest level in absolute terms—leaving intact this 96-month-long powerful if paradoxical trend (blacks are particular victims).

Employers added 156,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate Read more >>

Peter Brimelow writes: Tonight is Twelfth Night,when Christmas decorations are traditionally taken down (although there’s a dispute as to whether it should really be January 6th, Epiphany). We celebrate by posting Tom Piatak’s annual report for VDARE.com on the War On Christmas.

 See also: Announcing VDARE.com ‘s 2016 War Against Christmas Competition! —And Reminding President Trump That This War Can Be Stopped By Federal Legislation

The Main Stream Media consensus on the War on Christmas has long been a denial that there is such a thing—coupled with an insistence that, even if there might be, no one could possibly consider it an important issue.  2016 did not cooperate with this narrative, since the year saw discussion of the War on Christmas at the highest level in politics, from one end of Europe to another, and everywhere Donald Trump, who regularly promised to bring back “Merry Christmas” as the standard public holiday greeting, held one of his campaign rallies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the War on Christmas in a speech describing the assault on traditional forms of identity throughout the West:

We see that many Euro-Atlantic states have taken the way where they deny or reject their own roots, including their Christian roots which form the basis of Western civilization…. The people in many European states are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are indeed frightened to speak about them. Christian holidays and celebrations are abolished or "neutrally" renamed, as if one were ashamed of those Christian holidays. With this method one hides away the deeper moral value of those celebrations….

Read more >>

"As we begin 2017, the most urgent threat to liberal democracy is not autocracy," writes William Galston of The Wall Street Journal, "it is illiberal democracy."

Galston's diagnosis is not wrong, and his alarm is not misplaced.

Yet why does America's great export, liberal democracy, which appeared to be the future of the West if not of mankind at the Cold War's end, now appear to be a church with a shrinking congregation?

Why is liberal democracy losing its appeal?

A front-page story about France's presidential election, in the same day's Journal, suggests an answer.

In the final round next May, the French election is likely to come down to a choice of Marine Le Pen or Francois Fillon.

Le Pen is the "let France be France" candidate of the National Front. Fillon is a traditionalist Catholic from northwest France, home to the martyred resistance of the Revolution—the legendary Vendee.

Fillon won practicing and nonpracticing Catholics alike by a landslide, and took 3 in 5 votes of those professing other faiths. Read more >>