Like many others, I was surprised by the Department of Justice’s decision to drop charges against Black Panther members who paraded menacingly outside a polling place in Philadelphia. As the Washington Times writes, imagine Ku Klux Klansmen doing the same thing, and the antics that would ensue.

But I found a small clue that could explain prosecutors’ priorities. In the front of a “continuing legal education” publication of the Pennsylvania Bar Institute on “hate crimes” (not online), federal prosecutor Nancy Beam Winter submits a helpful cheat sheet titled “Interview Topics for Subjects/Friends of Subjects in Hate Crime Investigations”.

In two short pages, Ms. Winter packs enough politically troubling questions to bother Nat Hentoff, Camille Paglia, Ron Paul, George Orwell and probably a host of others. What are your views on racial separation? she wants to know. What do you think of affirmative action? she wants to know. Do you think blacks work less hard than whites? (Would it matter if they truly didn’t?)

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the questions are all aimed at “neo-Nazis” or “skinheads”. There were no questions for a Black Panther.

“You need to get them talking” Ms. Winter tells other would-be prosecutors, in a passage sure to gladden the hearts of criminal defense lawyers and civil libertarians everywhere. The questions themselves don’t quell concerns that “hate crimes” are 1) meant to target whites, and only whites and 2) end up criminalizing politically incorrect thought and speech instead of illegal actions.

I remember from law school that the “selective prosecution” defense is almost impossible to make out. But a federal defender in Philadelphia might make this cheat sheet Exhibit A in the next attempt.

UPDATE: Greg Cochran says he’s offered to make a Julian Simon-Paul Ehrlich-style bet with Nicholas Kristof over whether the ideas offered in Richard Nisbett’s book Intelligence and How to Get It will prove true or not. Greg would take the “Not” side.

Since a lot of people are visiting from Nicholas D. Kristof’s column in the New York Times, here’s an excerpt from my new VDARE.com column that is now posted: (more…)

They just had the EU elections, where they vote for the representatives to the transnational European government. Geert Wilders, who is the political heir to the late Pim Fortuyn, (late because he was killed by a Dutch immigration enthusiast) made some gains in Holland.

In the Independent, they headlined it Wilders strikes first blow for European extremists, June 5, 2009. They haven’t read Pim Fortuyn: Demonization Has Consequences by Steve Sailer.

The Turkish paper Hürriyet headlined it Anti-Turk Dutch party gains votes, June 5, 2009, which is one reminder that there’s not only a immigration pull, but a push. (You can see similar headlines in Mexican papers.)

The BNP gained their first EU member, (as noted  by Patrick Cleburne below) as well as winning some County Council elections, which are more important than their American equivalent. The UK has 61 million people in it, but its small physical size means that it’s organized in counties rather than states. British journalists and politicians who think that the BNP is a Bad Thing might want to read How PC Boosts Le Pen, by Theodore Dalrymple, about a similar situation in France:

By espousing the banalities of multiculturalism, the respectable politicians left those with a desire to conserve something of traditional French identity with nowhere to go but Le Pen. By declaring that realities as obvious as the high immigrant crime rate and the resulting fear that many Frenchmen feel cannot be mentioned by the polite and sophisticated, the respectable politicians and mainstream pundits have ceded all public discussion of such evident facts to the impolite and the outré, like Le Pen. The elites were the architects of his triumph.

If the two major parties , backed by the mainstream media, insist that that there’s no problem, they`re naturally going to push voters towards third parties.

The American Model of driving, which is based on cheap fuel and ample horsepower, has interesting driving safety implications compared to the Rest of the World Model of expensive fuel and stingy horsepower, which we are constantly advised to take up.

Car companies advertise horsepower as desirable because it lets you go fast, but perhaps more importantly, the American Model encourages you to slow down any time you feel it’s advisable, because you can get back up to speed quickly and cheaply.

In contrast, the Rest of the World Model of expensive fuel and small engines encourages you to conserve your velocity, because it’s time consuming and expensive in gas to get back up to speed after you slow down. So, you really don’t want to slow down until you get to where you’re going, no matter how many ladies are pushing baby carriages across the road in front of you.

Also, the American Model means there are much smaller class differences on American roads than on Rest of the World roads. The differences between high end and low end cars on American highways aren’t that salient. They can all go 75 mph and can all accelerate more or less adequately. In the RotW, however, the difference between the 0-60 in 14 seconds subcompact you rented and the BMW 7-Series bearing down on you from behind at 100 mph is not immaterial. Not at all.