[Bret L]

Foreword by Peter Brimelow

[Peter Brimelow is the Editor of VDARE.COM and author of Alien
Nation: Common Sense About Americas Immigration Disaster]

"On the tomb of concert impresario Johann Peter Salomon in
Westminster Abbey is the terse but entirely adequate epitaph: ʺHe
brought Haydn to England.ʺ

I suspect that my own epitaph may well be:
€œHe talked Steve Sailer into writing his first book.€�

That this brilliant if eccentric polymath had to wait for me to
suggest a book, and currently writes only for guerilla outlets like
VDARE.COM, is devastating evidence of the political correctness that
now paralyses American establishment publishing and the Mainstream
Media, including its supposedly €œconservative€� fringes. That he is
able to
write for a living at all, and that we at VDARE.COM have been able to
finance, publish and distribute Americas Half€�Blood Prince: Barack
Obamas Story Of Race And Inheritance, is a heartening reminder of the
Internet revolution and the profound cultural and political
consequences that it will bring.
(Which cant happen a moment too soon.)

I first became aware of Steve Sailers work when we were both
appearing in National Review. We were among a group of risk€�taking
writers affected by the aging William F. Buckley Jr.s abrupt decision
to
fire John OSullivan as Editor in 1998 and to place the magazine in
the
hands of conventional Republican publicists allied with
neoconservative
ideologues€”who can best be described for this purpose as once and
future liberals, briefly distracted by Cold War considerations.
This was naturally very interesting to our little group. But I think
we can also fairly argue it had much wider implications. National
Review
promptly regressed to the media norm (see above). There was no longer
any place to write about emerging issues like the science of human
differences, mass immigration and affirmative action €”which are
exactly
what Steve happens to be interested in (along with an astonishing
array
of other artistic, scientific and popular culture concerns).

And because these emerging issues were not written about, they
were not sufficiently ventilated to be available to politicians. Thus,
Steve
has repeatedly argued in VDARE.COM that simple arithmetic indicates
that, for the Republican Party, Bush strategist Karl Roves much€�
touted
€œoutreach€� to minorities could never be as successful as €œinreach€� to
its
undermobilized white base.

In February 2008, as the Republican primaries came to their
premature conclusion, Steve helpfully explained to the victorious
McCain
campaign how it could win the general election by rallying the public
in
opposition to a tangible, Willie Horton€�type symbol of Obamas real
racial views. (With some prescience, he suggested Obamas pastor, Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, who later nearly made himself into an election issue
without McCains help).

In July, he pointed out that McCain could simply
get on board the anti€�affirmative action initiatives placed on state
ballots
by the heroic African€�American conservative activist, Ward Connerly..
Steve also predicted that McCain would not take his advice, which he
did
not, with the result that Obama has been decisively ahead in the polls
for
33 straight days as I write this in late October 2008.

But it all could have been different€”if Steve had been more
widely read.

For that matter, if Steve were more widely read, we would not
now, in the fall of 2008, be facing massive reregulation and
socialization
in the financial sector. He has repeatedly demonstrated that the
current
economic slowdown is less a matter of greed or market failure, which
are
always with us, than a €œDiversity Recession€� triggered by a €œminority
mortgage meltdown€�€”the result of bipartisan pressure on the mortgage
lenders to lower standards for all in order to extend credit to
politically
favored, but financially risky, borrowers. In 2002€�2004, for example,
George W. Bush went to war against down payments, labeling them the
chief barrier to his goal of expanding minority homeownership. This
helped set off the Housing Bubble.

Of course, you will have difficulty finding this argument in the
Main Stream Media. I know€”in my day job, I have been laboring in
national financial journalism for some thirty years. In this case,
however, I
think the survival instinct of Wall Streeters, plus the perhaps
surprising
professional objectivity of academic economists (theyve long been
skeptical of the economic benefit to native€�born Americans of mass
immigration, for example) will eventually cause Steves analysis to
prevail.

Steve is under the happy illusion that he is the house moderate at
VDARE.COM. (We are a forum and will publish writers of any political
persuasion who are concerned about immigration policy and the national
question.) Yet it is his writing, above all about race, that regularly
gets us
into the most trouble. For example, VDARE.COM was banned from the
Republican booster site FreeRepublic.com, and anyone posting links to
us
purged for life, after one of Steves earliest €œSailer Strategy€�
articles
pointing out that there were far more white voters available to the
Republican Party than minority voters, a matter of math.
And, remember, FreeRepublic is an allegedly €œconservative€� site.
Imagine the reaction of liberals and progressives. (Actually, you
dont
have to imagine it, their screeching is a constant in American public
life).
In polite journalism, regardless of how thoughtful and well
researched, the issues that Steve Sailer raises cannot be discussed at
all.
I sometimes think Steve himself is blissfully unaware of all this.
He often reminds me of a gangly, goofy Labrador pup, bounding happily
into the living room eager to show off the latest filthy bone hes dug
up,
utterly oblivious to the universal shock, horror, and dogicidal
glares.
And the truth is that Steve, in himself, is genuinely a moderate
and temperate personality. He has that self€�absorption not uncommon
among introverted bookish intellectuals, which can be irritating, but
otherwise he views his fellow man with amiable affability and,
generally
speaking, benevolence.

Americas Half€�Blood Prince is based on a close analysis of Barack
Obamas 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and
Inheritance. It will be immediately obvious to reasonable readers that
Steve actually quite likes Obama. In particular, Steve has real
sympathy
for the pain of the little boy longing for the father who had
abandoned
him€”and, during much of his childhood, for the mother who had
dumped him on his grandparents€”and he has given careful and
sensitive thought to what this means for Obamas allegiances and his
beliefs.

Working with Steve as an editor is a special experience. Steve does
not like editors. He thinks that answering their emails and phone
calls
encourages them, so he avoids it as much as possible. In particular,
anything that could be construed as criticism causes him to retreat
into a
hurt silence, which can extend until the next deadline appears a
crisis.
What might be called in conventional journalism an (ahem) €œassignment€�
tends to be received with a grand Olympian coolth. Although I do
intend
to claim credit for suggesting this book to Steve, I am fully aware
that he
wrote it because he wanted to. If he hadnt, he wouldnt.

An M.B.A. with extensive marketing research experience (which
explains his quantitative bent, highly unusual in journalists), Steve
turned
to writing and left Obamas Chicago to move back to his own native
California, with his noble wife and his children, after a near€�fatal
bout
with cancer, to which he makes a stoic reference in this book.

As editor of VDARE.COM, I live in the East, a continent and four time
zones away.

This could have been a problem. But, after some experimentation, we
evolved a system whereby Steve would autopilot a column in every
weekend, untouched by human, or at least editorial, input.
It all works because Steve Sailer is a species of genius. Every
Saturday morning, except when I get the terse email note €œOut of gas€”
file tomorrow,€� I am confronted with a geyser of ideas, insights, and,
not
infrequently, statistical analysis, on an astonishing and
unpredictable
range of subjects. Because Steve writes in an overnight Dionystic
creative
frenzy, it sometimes materializes that his mind has darted off in some
tangential direction and we actually have two columns, or at least a
few
additional blog posts. Editing twitch: I think I can see a couple in
the
present work. But it doesnt really matter in the context of Steves
incisiveness and courage.
In this book, Steve argues that Barack Obama has been presenting
himself since 2004 as a €œhalf€�blood prince,€� an archetypal ambiguous
figure in whom the various parts of a deeply€�divided society can
jointly
invest their contradictory hopes. Such figures spring up regularly in
conflicted polities. A classic example in my own experience: Pierre
Trudeau, the son of a French€�speaking father and English€�speaking
mother, who appeared to have pulled off the same trick in reconciling
English and French Canada in 1968. But, in such situations, someone is
going to be disappointed. In Canada, Trudeau turned out to be an
epiphenomenon of French Canadian nationalist debate.
In the U.S., Barack Obama turns out to be a man of the left who
seeks to use government to redistribute wealth to his own race, but
who
has sought white support because he has found he is perceived as not
really €œblack enough€� to be a black leader€”greatly to his distress.
The
evidence for this is Obamas own memoir, which is very honestly
subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance. Steve Sailer says: €œThis
isnt a
debate between Barack Obama and some guy named Steve. My book is,
fundamentally, a debate between Barack Obama and his own
autobiography. Im just emceeing that debate.€�

Nevertheless, Steve guesses that an Obama first term will be
cautious. He suggests that Obamas true radicalism will not emerge
until
after his re€�election in 2012.
I disagree. I think the contradictions that Steve has identified in
this book will turn any Obama Presidency into a four€�year O.J. Simpson
trial and that the consequent meltdown will compare to the Chernobyl
of
the Carter Presidency in its destructive partisan effects.
I cant wait.
But regardless of which of us is right, the fact is that Obama
candidacy has achieved one thing at least: it provoked a Steve Sailer
book.

So it cant be all bad.
Now read on. "