Free Republic

Most scientists will tell you that race has no biological basis—it is, in academic-speak, a “social construct.” But a new book by distinguished journalist Nicholas Wade challenges that assumption, concluding that race is real and human social behaviour is subject to natural selection just like everything else. As the New York Review of Books put it, in its coverage of Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, there is now a “statistical sense” in which races are real. Scientists can tell, based on genetic variance, which continent a DNA sample comes from. That might not sound revolutionary to...

Genuine conservatives would have restrained, as best they could, Democratic proposals to cure what ails us, for genuine conservatives are of course genuinely wary of too much change, too fast. But they would not have made a political game of uniform obstructionism; they would not have toyed with, of all things, unemployment benefits; and they most decidedly would not be advocating trillions in extended tax cuts while in the grips of such looming debt.

The most intriguing item in the debut number of the American Conservative, the new biweekly magazine co-edited by Patrick Buchanan and "Taki," is an advertisement on Page 25 for something called the America First Party. "We salute Pat Buchanan and The American Conservative!" the ad declares in blue type alongside iconography borrowed from "liberty" movements of decades past: a calligraphy-ed and parchment-y "We the People" superimposed over the Statue of Liberty, itself superimposed over the Stars and Stripes. "Our party members were honored to 'ride to the sound of the guns' with you in battles past," the ad avows, evidently...