When John Leo announced his retirement a last year, I noted that while he wrote a book called Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police, , he was at least a couple of steps further ahead of David Brock’s thought police than we are here at VDARE.com.

But he’s just written a column that might have been ripped from the headlines–VDARE.com headlines, that is.[Sins of Omission | Newspapers clam up about race, religion, and politics.City Journal, February 28, 2007]

He writes

This squeamishness brought the expected hoots of derision. The blogger Confederate Yankee ran the mock headline RACELESS FEMALE RAPED BY RACELESS MALE AT A PARTY HOSTED BY A RACELESS FRATERNITY IN THE SAME CITY WHERE RICH WHITE BOYS RAPED A POOR BLACK STRIPPER. Later, the News & Observer posted a police sketch of the alleged rapist, clearly indicating a dark-skinned male, next to its original online story, thus implying that it hadn’t really suppressed racial information.

Sometimes news stories omit important religious and political identifications, too. In Nashville last week, readers of the Tennessean were probably able to deduce the religious affiliation of a cabbie who tried to run over two Christian students after a heated discussion of religion. His name: Ibrahim Sheikh Ahmed. The paper reported: “Metro police spokeswoman Kris Mumford said one of the students is Catholic and the other is Lutheran. Mumford said that Ahmed’s religion was not known.” Maybe so, but many readers probably wondered: if the driver had been a conservative Christian trying to run down a Muslim, wouldn’t the newsroom have summoned the energy to find out, and to confront Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the evils of Islamophobia?

Leo mentions a third area of silence, which is that you will very rarely hear anyone referred to as a Communist, no matter how Communist they are.

I read in Liberty Magazine years ago, (not online, I’m working from memory) that if you ever hear a reference to the murder of JFK by a “Communist gunman” then it will mean that the Communist Party is no longer under a sort of “verbal protective custody” in the American media.

But that’s by the way–the taboo on reporting by race is more important, and I wish that Leo had written this for USA TODAY, instead of City Journal.

But even so, it’s an encouraging sign of a return to realism.

Matt Welch makes the case in Reason Magazine’s cover story that a McCain presidency would intrude further into American lives, especially on the issue of free speech, and “prosecute the nation’s post-9/11 wars with a militaristic zeal this country hasn’t seen in generations.”
[Be Afraid of President McCain | The frightening mind of an authoritarian maverick Reason Magazine - March 2007 Print Edition]

There is one area where McCain isn’t interested in increasing the power of the Federal Government, and that’s in the area of immigration enforcement, and one place he isn’t interested in projecting US military might, and that’s the US Border.

On the border, McCain has said, according to Vanity Fair

Then he added, unable to help himself, “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.”

Juan Mann emailed me the actual text of the proposed STRIVE act–Gutierrez-Flake bill. It’s 697 pages in PDF. Formally, it’s H.R. 1645, the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy (STRIVE) Act — introduced in the House of Representatives on March 22, 2007 by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) and at the moment, it’s exclusively available on VDARE.com. Juan writes that it’s “vital that as many people on “our side” read this disaster as possible!” So click here to download, but note that it’s not only 697 pages, but 1.86 MB.