Category Archives: Peter Brimelow

‘Take back this country from an emboldened progressive Left’

After 50 years, conservative giant pushing ‘ambitious, audacious, and aspirational agenda’

The Heritage Foundation, America’s “largest conservative research and education institution,” which has guided Republican administrations and policymakers from before Reagan to the Trump years, celebrates its 50th anniversary this week on Thursday, Feb. 16.

Led by its optimistic new president, historian Kevin Roberts, who vows that Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, will play a key role in saving America from the authoritarian left, the policy-centered organization plans a series of celebrations leading up to a gala event and “leadership summit” in April.

“It is time for an ambitious, audacious, and aspirational conservative agenda to take back this country from an emboldened progressive Left,” said Roberts, who became Heritage’s seventh president in 2021 after serving as CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

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Thinking About The King Kerfuffle: The Answer To False Charges Of “Racism” Is The (Truthful) Charge Of Treason by Peter Brimelow

But there is, in fact, language to counter to the charge of “racism.” There is a word that has the same incantatory power—and, unlike the charge of “racism,” it happens to be accurate. That word is “Treason.”

Of course Rep. Steve King was accused of “racism” when he noted recently that the much-mythologized young illegal aliens who become high school valedictorians are far outnumbered by those who enter as drug mules—for example, by professional token Hispanic columnist Ruben Navarrette here. The charge, needless to say, caused Establishment Republicans to flee in panic.

Why “of course”? Because the modern definition of “racism” is “someone who is winning an argument with a liberal”—or, too often nowadays, with a libertarian or with a cheap-labor Republican.

(And King did indeed win the argument. The simple fact is that drug mules among young illegal aliens do indeed outnumber valedictorians by a factor of quite possibly a hundred or more—especially because most of the “valedictorians” recently touted in the Main Stream Media turn out to be frauds).

But the King kerfuffle raises a more general point. Not even the accusation of witchcraft in Colonial Salem had the same irrational power as the accusation of “racism” in American politics today.

Thus currently fear of being accused of “racism” is a huge problem for opponents of the S.744, the 2013 Rubio-Schumer Amnesty/ Immigration Surge act, which has been steamrollered through the Senate and which the House is now being pressured to pass. (This is what provoked King’s comment). Many live in terror that someone in their coalition of supporters might be revealed to be “racist.” (Or accused of it by the MSM, which amounts to the same thing).

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Amnesty means more plutocrat plundering by Peter Brimelow

Logically, the Gang of Eight’s bill should not have survived the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing. That dramatically and conclusively demonstrated that the U.S. government has utterly failed at selecting, monitoring and assimilating immigrants (remember Dzokhar Tsarnaev became a U.S. citizen on Sept. 11, 2012), let alone keeping them off welfare.

Washington has (another) dirty secret: Nobody read, or is going to read, the Heritage Foundation’s report of the net fiscal impact of the Gang of Eight’s proposed illegal-immigrant amnesty.

(The report concluded the impact will be $6.3 trillion over 50 years – or, to put it another way, all by itself amnesty will bump up government spending by a percentage point or two of Gross Domestic Product every year).

It’s not the report’s fault. It’s beautifully written, logically compelling and marshals a lot of numbers with great skill. (I speak as a veteran of 40 years in financial journalism.)

And, of course, professional politicians do tend to be innumerate lawyers with ADD personalities, incapable of sitting still, congenitally committed to schmoozing rather than studying.

But the real reason the report isn’t being read: Everyone has already made up their minds.

In the case of the patriot opponents of amnesty, this is actually laudable. They have grasped the great truth enunciated by the late, great free-market economist Milton Friedman: “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

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Milton Friedman: Immigration And The Cultural Prerequisites for Capitalism by Peter Brimelow

One of the things that trouble me very much is I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for a democratic society. But I also believe there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy. So rolling back the welfare state is exceedingly difficult, there’s no question about that.


Milton Friedman

(First published as Why Liberalism Is Now Obsolete |Interview With Milton Friedman, by Peter Brimelow, Forbes Magazine, December 12, 1988).

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Has the Reagan Revolution run its course? Or has the American electorate firmly rejected liberalism?

Amidst all the static and breast-beating about a “dirty” presidential campaign, most commentators have overlooked this fundamental question, which was the gut issue in the late presidential election.

That the old game of taxing-and-spending no longer works politically was made reasonably clear by the Bush victory. So, will the so-called Reagan revolution continue? Or will the federal government resume playing a larger role in our lives? To get a longer-range perspective on what lies ahead in politics and economics, FORBES interviewed Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. From his magnificent apartment high above San Francisco’s Nob Hill, Milton Friedman offers a global and historical vision of where the U.S., indeed the world, is heading.

FORBES: Do you think the current free market cycle that is manifested almost everywhere today—including behind the Iron Curtain—will last? Or will government intervention come back into fashion?

Friedman: The free market cycle will last. The intellectual movement [for a free market] is approaching middle age, but the political movement is in its infancy.

You wrote in 1962 in Capitalism and Freedom that “…the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude and misery.” How do you feel about that now?

Still true. But I’m much more optimistic than I was in the late 1970s because of the change in the intellectual climate of opinion.

Historically, the intellectual climate tends to be subject to very long swings, which are reflected in public policy only after a lag. At first only a very small group of people are persuaded….

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