Earlier by Patrick J. Buchanan: Has The Backlash Arrived For Police-Bashing?

On Tuesday, Brooklyn Borough President and former police captain Eric Adams took the lead in the New York mayoral race with 32% of the Democratic primary vote, 10 points more than progressive Maya Wiley, who had the endorsement of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

How did Adams beat the elite? Said The New York Times:

Adams built "an old-school political coalition that united Black and Latino voters," and was "able to persuade working-class people, largely outside Manhattan, that he was the best candidate to make the city safe from crime."

Earlier: Charles Murray's FACING REALITY: Ruling Class Must Accept Race Differences—Or Provoke The "Disaster" Of White Identity Politics

Crossposted from Amren.com

Sometimes, a single brave man can break a taboo. Nicholas Wade’s carefully argued May 5 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists broke the ban on the lab-leak view of the origins of Covid-19. In just a few days, articles on a possible lab leak appeared in the Washington Post (twice), the New York Times (twice), and the Wall Street Journal. Suddenly, what the tech censors had banned as a “conspiracy theory” was legitimate. President Biden ordered an investigation.

For years, I have wondered how the taboo on talking about racial differences will collapse. Could one brave man break the logjam? Charles Murray gives it a try in his latest book, Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America,. I cheer the effort, and Dr. Murray has made powerful arguments, but much as I hope he succeeds, I think he will fail.

First—and least important—the book could be more persuasive. Second—and much more important—Dr. Murray is already notorious, as the SPLC puts it, for “using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue” for “the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities.” If one man could end the taboo, he would have to be famous, beloved, and untainted. Tim Cook? Anthony Fauci? Maybe there is no such person.

But aside from whether one man could turn the tide, the very purpose of Facing Reality is hopelessly wrong: Dr. Murray says the reason we have to bring the truth to light is to prevent whites from realizing they have racial interests. “If working-class and middle-class Whites adopt identity politics,” he writes, “disaster follows.” Whites must wait quietly while wise men like Dr. Murray talk everyone else out of their “identity politics” and usher in an age of racial reconciliation.

Earlier: Happy Independence Day—“Juneteenth” For The Historic American Nation!

Happy Juneteenth! I hope you all had a lovely week celebrating the nation’s newest federal holiday, which commemorates the end of slavery throughout the Confederacy.

How could you not? The media was chock-a-block with commentators telling us what a fantastic, transformative event for our nation this was. But the media ignored the best part of all!

What Juneteenth commemorates is not technically the abolition of slavery, but the notification thereof to a particular group of slaves.

Although President Lincoln officially ended slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, it wasn’t until two years later, on June 19, 1865, that the slaves of Galveston, Texas, got the news, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger rode into town and issued a series of proclamations announcing that the hideous institution had been abolished and, henceforth, slaves would be considered hired labor.

This takes Juneteenth to a whole new level. Think of all the new federal holidays we could create using Juneteenth as our template! (Anyone who’s dealt with the federal government knows that those workers well deserve another paid day off.) We just need horsemen to ride around the country, correcting the errors of those who falsely believe something bad about America.

During our VDARE.com Book Club discussion on The Bonfire of the Vanities, Steve Sailer argued that the book wasn’t the quintessential American novel. [Join the Book Club here, and listen to part of it below.]

However, it was the quintessential New York novel. Personally, I’d argue that New York, not Los Angeles or Washington, doesn’t quite define America but still represents it better than any other major city. Whatever is happening in New York is simply a reproduction on a grander scale of what’s happening around the country.

What’s most striking about The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was published in 1987, is how fresh it feels. The “Masters of the Universe” who emerged from the Conspicuous Consumption Era of the 1980s (when Donald Trump was arguably at his cultural and financial peak) have become a cultural archetype that is still with us, as seen by the continuing fascination with movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and American Psycho. The simmering racial politics that dominate the novel, including the mutually reinforcing power dynamic between huckster ethnic preachers and disingenuous media, have only intensified since the book was published. Sherman McCoy’s feeling that the Sword of Damocles of media destruction hanging over him a.k.a. doxing is something many Americans can relate to today. The only difference is that today media frenzies emerge much more quickly (and luckily, burn out that way too.)