Vdare’s writer, Marcus Epstein, says that I have “viciously attacked Pat Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, and even National Review under the editorship of John O’Sullivan.” That will come as news to O’Sullivan, who hired me at NR and is a good friend.

A little trip down memory lane here. It is true that I wrote a cover story in 1999 harshly criticizing Buchanan’s attempted redefinition of conservatism. Another paleocon, one James Lubinskas, then wrote an essay for a racialist newsletter on NR’s decline–a decline now so pronounced that the magazine had started running attacks on “popular white conservatives” by “senior editors with Indian surnames.” Brimelow, over at Vdare, approvingly quoted this bit from what he called Lubinskas’s “magisterial review.”

My “vicious” criticism of Brimelow (which included the line “Brimelow bravely and wittily challenged the elite pro-immigration consensus”) appeared after that racist provocation.

I bring up this history because it fits a pattern in a lot of paleoconservative commentary. Paleos make highly charged attacks on their enemies on the Right and then expect to be treated like wounded puppies whenever anyone else responds in kind. Pat Buchanan has spent much of the last two decades accusing various conservatives of “treason” for supporting free trade, the war in Iraq, etc. He publishes a magazine that suggested that David Frum was an Israeli agent of influence inside the White House. Frum wrote an essay for NR calling the paleos “anti-American,” and you would think, from the paleos’ reaction–they still bring up (and distort) that essay–that harsher words had never been spoken. I don’t see any good reason to have sympathy for their complaints.