John Leo is retiring, and has filed a farewell column, [Thanks for letting me be part of the conversation, August 13, 2006]although he’ll be setting up a webpage at johnleo.com, (not live yet.) He’s the author of Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police, By Vdare.com’s standard’s not that close to the line, David Brock doesn’t spend as much time denouncing him as he does denouncing us, but Leo has said some things that the New York Times wouldn’t, and he’s been a valuble resource in the media.

Here are some samples, from just the last six months:

• Free speech is loser where religious expression is concerned
  (Christians persecuted by the ACLU.)
• Officeholders favoring diversity ignore laws they don’t like
  (Affirmative action may be illegal, but it’s many politicians will openly defy the law)
• Sentiment against illegals is powerful and growing
  (“The political culture of Washington, focused on cheap labor and Latino votes, is nowhere near recognizing what is happening.”)
• Underreporting Muslim violence (“Suppressing news, whether out of multicultural deference or fear, is a perilous business. We can’t know how to react to upheavals if we aren’t told about them.”)
  

And finally this

In his 1995 book “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy,” the late Christopher Lasch argued that America’s political and cultural elites had opened up a gap between themselves and ordinary Americans. “Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse,” he wrote. They are increasingly detached from their fellow citizens and drawn to an international culture, Lasch said, or what we would today call a transnational culture.Transnationalists” don’t take immigration reform seriously

Read the whole thing; there won’t be any more John Leo columns for a while.

Joe Guzzardi will be a guest on The Stan Solomon Show at 2 P.M. EDT. Listen live here.