David Brock seemed a nice and gentle person on the one occasion I met him - a memorable 1995 American Spectator dinner at which Newt Gingrich attacked Robert Novak for saying the GOP wasn’t going to touch Affirmative Action, and then said anyway it couldn’t. And I later felt kind of sorry for Brock because of the beating he took from the mindless Beltway Right over what seemed to be a nuanced book on Hilary Clinton - rather like, I thought, the beating I had taken from them over my nuanced book on immigration, Alien Nation. I even made a mental note to write to him, but of course never did.

However, the work Brock has done since he changed sides and became a liberal “media watchdog“ is silly and stupid. Essentially, it consists of squealing like a stuck pig when some political correctness taboo is violated, without any regard for the rational content of the argument. The late Sam Francis was easily able to squash Brock like a bug when he started a campaign to get Sam’s column dropped by Creators Syndicate. But I have no doubt that, on a certain kind of corporate journalist this squealing works.

Brock has now attacked NBC Nightly News for interviewing Steve Sailer on movies, on the grounds that this “far-right columnist” writes for…VDARE.COM.

Reading the quotes assembled to prove VDARE.COM’s heinousness, many of them written by me, I am again struck by the utter absence of any attempt to subject them to rational criticism. Brock’s position is simply that certain subjects just must not be addressed. He wants repression, not debate. We are dealing with hysteria. Anybody got a bucket of cold water?

Steve’s reflections on his unacknowledged contribution to Brock’s career here.

I realize that no-one except me is interested in Canadian politics (this especially applies to Canadians) but I feel obliged to point out (because no-one else will) that two (more) predictions I made at the end of my 1986 book about Canada, The Patriot Game, have now come true:

“5. There may be ‘a time of troubles’ in Canadian politics, with no party able to gain a majority.

“6. …a sectional party, probably from Quebec, but possibly from the West, could hold the balance of power in the House and demand radical reform.”

With 51 seats to the Conservatives’ 124 in a 308-seat Parliament, the separatist Bloc Quebecois now holds that balance of power. Although I don’t see much awareness of it in MSM commentary, this is exactly what kept happening in the U.K. Parliament with the Irish Nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century, and is the reason that there was a Home Rule bill actually on the statute books when World War I - that world-shattering tragedy - broke out in 1914.

What this means in Canada is that Quebec has taken another step to becoming an independent nation-state. What it means more generally is that, when something is inevitable, it eventually happens.

Or, as I wrote at the end of my U.S. immigration book, Alien Nation, in 1995:

‘…immigration restriction is inevitable in America…And no political issue, once it reaches the surface, has more elemental power than immigration. It could quite easily destroy the present political-party system, as it helped to do in the years before the Civil War.”

Ken Mehlman, call your office.