At last weekend's tenth-anniversary conference of the H.L. Mencken Club in Baltimore, I participated in a panel event with Keith Preston and Paul Gottfried. We each spoke for about half an hour. The title of the panel: "The Alternative Right."

When, a few days before heading to Baltimore, I sat down to prepare my remarks, I realized I had no idea what to say, nor even much of a clue about what the Alt Right is. It was too late to ask Paul to change the conference schedule, though, so I took it as a challenge to transmute my ignorance into something that would keep a critical audience's attention for thirty minutes. (A surprising proportion of Mencken Club attendees are credentialed academics.)

It didn't go too badly. The Z Man, at any rate, who does not please easily, says that I "did a good job presenting the broad strokes." Thanks, pal.

As always I prepared more than I delivered, so there's more here than appeared in the talk.

Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. My title is "The Alt Right Perspective." I assume this means that I should tell you what the Alt Right is, and how Alt Righters see the world.

That's unfortunate because I don't actually know what the Alt Right is. Casual acquaintances—neighbors and such—sometimes ask me if I am Alt Right. I never know what to say. Am I? Pass.

Some of this is just temperamental. I'm not by nature a joiner. I don't feel strong affinity with any sports team or church. I'm not an Elk or a Shriner. I'm just not a herd animal—not well-socialized. I'm the little boy calling out that the Emperor has no clothes. (Although I've always thought that story would be more true to life if the little boy had been chased down and lynched by a howling mob of well-socialized Goodthinkers.)

The rest is Englishness. We English don't do ideology. We leave that stuff to our more erudite continental neighbors. In matters social and political, we default to compromise and muddle. The nearest thing I have to an ideological hero is George Orwell, whose ideological position could fairly be described as reactionary-Tory-patriotic-socialist.

There's some overlap between the last two paragraphs. I have utmost difficulty following any kind of ideological script. Sooner or later I always bang my shins against the boundary fences of ideological orthodoxy.

On race, for example, I get incoming fire from both sides. Goodthinkers point'n'sputter at me for my negative comments about blacks; race purists snarl at me as a race traitor because of my marriage choice.

Has my email bag familiarized me with the expression "mail-order bride"? Oh yeah. Read more >>

Earlier by Ann Coulter: Weinstein’s Pimps–The NY POST’s “Revenge Of The Ugly Girls”

The Democrats have two very different profiles. One is their public face of absolute moral purity. They're just better people than Republicans.

That's what you're buying when you walk into the Democratic store: pure virtue. They've got nothing else on the shelves. No beef jerky, no wiper fluid, no Gatorade.

The other profile is reality: In the backroom, where the employees eat lunch, the Democrats and their fat-cat donors are committing unspeakably sleazy and immoral acts.

Everyone on the left knows this. That's why, the moment Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator, his reflexive response was not to apologize. Accused of the kind of rapes you'd usually need a gang to commit, he put up a virtue shield by attacking the National Rifle Association. Read more >>

"Betrayed."

Victor Avila is a survivor. Soft-spoken but iron-willed, he dedicated his life to law enforcement and to his country. Yet, the feds are now fighting tooth and nail to bury the full truth about the 2011 ambush by Los Zetas drug cartel thugs in Mexico that left him gravely wounded and his partner, special agent Jaime Zapata, dead.

This week, two of the Mexican gangsters convicted in the horror on Highway 57 between Mexico City and Monterrey were sentenced to double life terms in prison.

"HSI Special Agents Jaime Zapata and Victor Avila were in Mexico to protect and serve our country when they were ambushed by these ruthless criminals, who will now spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell," Acting Assistant Attorney General Blanco announced on Monday.

"This case serves as a reminder, that if you harm a U.S. agent, the U.S. government will pursue you to the ends of the earth to ensure that you are brought to justice."

Five others received lesser sentences of 35, 34, 30, 28 and 12 years for murder and attempted murder, which Avila on Tuesday called a "complete and utter disappointment." As he described in his victim impact statement, "I was shot in three places and had shrapnel and glass imbedded in my body in too many places to count. Not only did I have to undergo multiple surgeries to remove the bullets and shrapnel and stitch together my shredded muscles and skin, but I also had to learn to walk again." Read more >>

Papa John’s, a sponsor of the National Football League, has just been reduced to begging “Nazis” not to eat its pizza after it criticized the league’s inability to squash protests of the National Anthem [ Papa Johns Tells Nazis ‘Don’t Buy Our Pizza’ After Chain Is Claimed As Official Pie Of Alt-Right , by Harriet Sinclair, Newsweek, November 5, 2017]. Of course this isn’t doing it any good at all and it’s still being criticized by Leftist reporters on Twitter. This is a symptom if the larger problem facing the NFL, and America: race is making it impossible for a disintegrating country to participate in institutions that were once embraced by all.

Sunday’s ratings show the NFL is truly struggling. Since the “take a knee” protests became more prominent, viewership is down five percent from the first half of the 2016 season, and down almost 20 percent from the same period in 2015 [ NFL Anthem Protests Continue To Smack League’s Broadcasters And Sponsors , by Mike Ozanian, Forbes, November 3, 2017]. Sunday Night Football just hit a new season low [ TV Ratings: ‘Sunday Night Football’ Hits Season Low , by Joe Otterson, November 6, 2017]. Read more >>

Just like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was as much a political disaster as a natural one. And the disturbing aftermath of the catastrophe shows it is time to rethink our relationship with Puerto Rico—preferably by giving them independence.

Working with Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosello, President Trump has already changed FEMA’s regulations in order to provide aid to island more quickly than is typical. FEMA will also provide 90 percent of the costs for rebuilding infrastructure, instead of the usual 75 percent [ Exclusive: Trump boosts disaster aid for Puerto Rico rebuild , by Roberta Rampton, Reuters, November 2, 2017]. Nonetheless, the excitable mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, is accusing the president of perpetuating “genocide” against the island’s people [ San Juan mayor accuses Trump of “genocide” after hurricane , by Stephen Dinan, Washington Times, October 12, 2017].

Even as America is funneling huge amounts of money towards Puerto Rico, commentators are openly urging Puerto Ricans (who are U.S. citizens) to move to the mainland and wage demographic warfare against the president.

Consider Hispanic Republican (!)  Ana Navarro, who describes herself as “Nicaraguan by birth. American by choice”—her choice, not ours. Read more >>

A major goal of this Asia trip, said National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, is to rally allies to achieve the "complete, verifiable and permanent denuclearization of the Korean peninsula."

Yet Kim Jong Un has said he will never give up his nuclear weapons. He believes the survival of Read more >>

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

So President Trump's chief of staff, former Marine Corps General John Kelly, praised Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Fox News: "Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. He was a man who gave up his country to fight for his state."

Those are accurate statements, so far as I know. They wouldn't have been very controversial prior to this summer's spasm of hysteria over historical statues. They were not very controversial when President Eisenhower had a portrait of General Lee in his White House office. As Ike pointed out when someone grumbled about this, the constitutionality of secession was an open question in 1861.

Lee was not a fan of secession. Once it was a fait accompli, though, he had to choose his loyalty, state or nation. As General Kelly said, he chose his state, and acted with unfailing courage and dignity in defense of that cause.

And defense it was: As Southerners tell you, the Confederates didn't want to take over the U.S.A; they wanted to get out of it.

And as historian Gene Dattel points out in his new book Reckoning with Race, if toleration of slavery is the touchstone, we had better get busy renaming Washington Square, Madison Avenue, Yale University, the innumerable places and institutions named after Ben Franklin, and so on.

Even some neocons came to the defense of Generals Kelly and Lee — Ralph Peters in the New York Post, for example:

Now we're re-fighting our Civil War with neo-Stalinist, fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of the dead. We rush to tear down statues of men we refuse to understand. We rob one group of citizens of their heritage to please another …

Lest I sound like a Southern sympathizer, let me state that my sentiments are pure Yankee. I lost an ancestor who wore blue and recently visited his grave in the National Cemetery in Beaufort, SC.

Kelly Is Right About Robert E. Lee, October 31, 2017

As Colonel Peters implies, we are seeing a deliberate revival of sectionalism, a wilful re-opening of wounds we thought were long healed. Read more >>