April 17, 2026

AT THE PRESIDENTIAL LEVEL, IN 1992: When Did America Quit Electing Adults? “Here are some examples. This is Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, who’s in a panic because she never saw hail before, I guess.”

Posted at 7:05 am by Stephen Green

HOW IT’S GOING:

Related:

Plus: The Ceasefire Gave Iran Time, It Gave CENTCOM a Target Deck.

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

POOR AND UNDER THE BOOT OF A DICTATORIAL REGIME IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH LIFE:  Our Poor Relations.

Posted at 5:32 am by Sarah Hoyt

ARE SOMETIMES USEFUL, BUT YOU SHOULD DITCH THEM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE:  False Preferences.

Posted at 1:02 am by Sarah Hoyt

April 16, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Do your best work.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

In this most important sense Jean Raspail was visionary, even if he did not correctly identify the source of the greatest threat. Perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is his account, in the essay that precedes the novel, of how prominent political figures either ignored or repudiated The Camp of the Saints in public, but agreed with it in private. It proved to be a disastrous disjunction.

It’s the good Dr. Dalrymple, so read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Éric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France. The definitive account of France after de Gaulle is now available in English.

Posted at 9:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

“IT WAS ALWAYS THE WOMEN, AND ABOVE ALL THE YOUNG ONES, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy:” “Young women are trying to conserve an ideology they see as the stable bedrock of society, even if it’s actually an acidic collection of delusions that will inevitably destroy society itself. And they’re upset that young men aren’t doing what they see as their role to uphold that order as well. In short, women are natural conservatives. They’re trying to conserve progressivism because it’s the reigning social order and theological governing system of Western civilization. And they’re upset and confused as to why young men aren’t stepping up to uphold it as well.”

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll