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Francis has shown a keen analytic bent, though he flirts too much with the segregationists. So much about the man is guaranteed to offend. Gottfried is likewise a skilled analyst of contemporary American society. His books are very much worth reading, though in his slighter articles he's gotten to be too much of a whiner and accepted without question too much of what Rockwell and Fleming dish out.

Buchanan has shot his credibility as a politician, but often makes good points and raises important questions. The GOP is eventually going to regret its embrace of the neocons and move to a more main street, less globalist, less interventionist point of view, though. But it won't happen if the alternative to globalism is perceived as being tribalism or racialism.

Fleming is far too much of an armchair emotionalist. I can't consider him any sort of serious thinker or even a good writer. So much of his writing boils down to "I don't like," and some of the things he does like, sociobiology for example, have real problems for many. I don't think he has much understanding of history beyond a good guys vs. bad guys approach.

Dittos for Rockwell who also flirts too much with anarchy. So much of what gets put up on his website can't be taken seriously. The eternal "I hate the state/government is evil" refrain is more apt to turn people off than to attract them. He comes across as very much a Johnny One-Note.

I regard this LOTS/SIP nonsense more as a damning rather than a redeeming feature. An intriguing idea about American history gets pounded into a dry, narrow, spectacularly wrong-headed orthodoxy. Secession becomes a cure all, and the Confederacy the great alibi of American history.

Liberty Magazine has much in common with the paleolibs without falling into their grosser errors. There's an interesting article in the March issue contrasting Mises with Rothbard and Rockwell and questioning what they've done with his work.

I trust you are older than me since Francis just comes across as a charlatan to me, more so than Jared Taylor who I honestly think is interested in legitimizing a debate none of us really want to have. I must concede, Francis' 'managerial liberalism' has become part of my political lexicon.

But we disagree on Fleming. I believe most out-side the beltway conservatives, and they are not many of us, who read the full spectrum, don't fully appreciate that the machinations of the DC government is a who's who of the elite in this country. Their culture, both the Rs and Ds, is repugnant, atheist and hedonistic to the core; yet they have no problem going on TV and playing the moralist.

Fleming is offering a view, albeit, in its infancy, that reminds us that 'they' are not like the rest of us. That DC, NYC, and LA may have money, but they are not representative of anything remotely 'American.' At its core, Fleming is giving a pure nationalism, stripped of the cheapness of pure ethnic identity.

Just last week, in the now infamous Francophobes column he mentioned a line about that space between New York and Los Angeles. When just the Sunday before, Ned Flanders on the Simpsons described the space between New York and Los Angeles as "you know, America."

Fleming watches the Simpsons? I doubt (Kaiser) Bill Bennett does.