Barbara O’Brien has some good comments on David Brooks at her Mahablog; a link she posts leads to me to this, from an article published in the right-wing religious journal First Things:

Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish -- in no more than a generation or two -- a demographic revolution. Such a course is quite radical, admittedly, and contrary to the spirit of the age, but that is rather the point, after all. It would mean often forgoing certain material advantages, and forfeiting a great deal of our leisure; it would often prove difficult to sustain a two-career family or to be certain of a lavish retirement. But if it is a war we want, we should not recoil from sacrifice.

In the end, however, no matter how much we would like to win back the culture around us, we can hope for no “victory” at all -- no matter what practical measures we take -- if we are not resolved first and foremost to extirpate the habits and presuppositions of secular modernity from within ourselves.

Gee -- this is exactly what Brooks’s "natalists" believe -- except that this is really, really political, and Brooks assures us the "natalists" aren't political at all! Curious, no?

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Also, Atrios points to this post at Tapped, in which Garance Franke-Ruta notes the racism, sexism, heterosexism, and junk science in much of the work of Steve Sailer, a source for Brooks’s column.

Well worth noting -- though I do want to point out that Sailer isn’t a classic bigot so much as a neo-bigot. He doesn’t think whites are superior to blacks in everything, for example, or even in everything worth valuing. What he does believe is that genetics explains pretty much everything -- and that virtually all stereotypes are accurate (and borne out by tests).

Sailer on Tiger Woods:

Although golf doesn't require aerobic endurance, it does demand an unusual mixture of power and delicacy. Further, pro golfers need so much control over their emotions that few fulfill their potenial before their thirties…

And thus it's time to confront the question that's been whispered about ever since this Mozart-like prodigy first appeared on television as a three year old playing golf with Bob Hope: Are multiracial people like Tiger genetically better than the rest of us? Until recent decades, that query was unthinkable: "miscegenation" was assumed to be the royal road to racial ruin. But, now we have enough scientific evidence to answer with a resounding "Maybe." …

Tiger Woods seems to combine the muscularity and masculine charisma of an African-American superstar with the self-discipline and focus of the finest Asian-American athlete.

Sailer’s obsessed with IQ. Here he is defending Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of black quarterback Donovan McNabb:

...blacks tend to enjoy advantages in "real time" responsiveness -- hence black strengths in running with footballs and basketballs and in jazz, rap, dance, trash talking, preaching, and oratory....

Quarterbacks and cornerbacks, however, require radically different skills. It's simply wrong to expect equal proportions of each race at both positions.

Why? ...

The unspeakable: average racial IQ differences....

The average NFL player has an IQ of 98. That’s very good for a group that's majority black, because the average black American scores around 85 and the average white around 100....

And here he is responding to a suggestion by Norman Podhoretz that America should “impose a new political culture” across a large number of states in the Arab/Muslim world and a response by Paul Craig Roberts that the alternative is “inviting the 5 million Jews in Israel to settle in the U.S.”:

Roberts (and Podhoretz) should worry about the effect on American attitudes of a sudden influx highly-talented Ashkenazis. The median Jewish IQ appears to be higher than of the non-Jewish white population. This shifts the whole Jewish IQ Bell Curve to the right – with dramatic results on the right, high IQ, tail. By a very rough calculation, after such a population transfer, Israeli Ashkenazis would constitute one out of every five people in America with stratospheric IQs (160 or higher).

… if native-born journalists started losing their jobs to hard-working, brash, English-speaking Israelis, centuries of tragic history suggest this Olympian complacency might soon give way to anti-Semitism.

Go to Sailer's Web site for even more from Brooks's "expert."