Friedman actually failed as a scientific economist but succeeded as a moral philosopher. His greatest scholarly accomplishment -- his monetarist theory of how to regulate money and credit -- was intellectually flawed at its core and collapsed when the Federal Reserve tried to follow it. The central bank wisely discarded Friedman's money-supply approach before it did more damage. It is now a forgotten relic at the Fed.

Friedman's broader argument--that a society should be governed by self-regulating markets instead of big government--did better but also did not lead to the utopia he promoted. His "free market" faith has produced instead the very thing Friedman regularly denounced: a bastardized system of interest-group politics that serves favored sectors of citizens at the expense of many others. Enterprise and markets were indeed set "free" of government regulation, but big government did not go away (it grew bigger). Only now government acts mainly as patron and protector for the largest, most powerful interests--the same ones that demanded their liberation. Instead of serving the broad general welfare, government enables capital and corporations to feed off the taxpayers' money and convert public assets into private profit centers, shielded from the wrath of any citizens trying to object. If that is what Friedman really had in mind, he should have said so.

His most profound damage, however, was as a moral philosopher. He championed an ethic of unrelenting, unapologetic self-interest that effectively pushed aside human sympathy. In fact, humans' responsibility to one another has been delegitimized--portrayed as an obstacle to the hardheaded analysis that maximizes returns. Friedman explained: "So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not."

Pay no attention to the collateral consequences. Your only obligation is to the bottom line. Friedman's message was highly appealing--he promised people a path to freedom--but it triumphed, ultimately, because it served the powerful forces of capital over labor, economic wealth over social concerns. Government was indeed failing on many fronts, especially inflation, and liberalism had no answer. Friedman's answer was alluringly simple. Get rid of government.

People everywhere now understand what Friedman's kind of "freedom" means. America has been brutally coarsened by his success at popularizing this dictum--millions of innocents injured, mutual trust gravely weakened, society demoralized by the hardening terms of life. Most people know in their gut this is wrong but see no easy way to resist it. Friedman's utopia is also drenched in personal corruption. The proliferating scandals in business, finance and government flow directly from his teaching people to go for it and disregard moral qualms. When you tell people in power that their highest purpose in life is to maximize their own returns, there is no limit to how much "good" they will do for the rest of us. I don't recall hearing Friedman express any discomfort. Perhaps he regarded looting and stealing as natural features of capitalism that market forces would eventually correct.

This is what the memorials left out: the cruel quality of Friedman's obliviousness. Art Hilgart, a retired industrial economist, recalls hearing Friedman lecture in 1991 and recommend the destruction of Medicare, welfare, the postal system, Social Security and public education. The audience was dumbfounded.

Finally, a brave young woman asked what this would mean for poverty. "There is no poverty in America," Friedman instructed. A clear voice arose from the back of hall: "Bullshit!". The audience cheered wildly.

One of the religious right's firmest convictions is that America was established by God for a special destiny in the history of humankind. We are a uniquely blessed nation -- first among the Elect in power and strength -- because the Puritans alone had the good sense to consecrate this land to the Protestant God from the very first year, a consecration symbolized every year when we renew it at Thanksgiving.

Our glory, they believe, will endure only as long as we continue to maintain our devotion to God -- which is, they insist, why it's so very important that we get over this wall-of-separation thing and openly submit to Biblical law. If we don't accept God's special choosing, he may withdraw it (as he did with the Israelites), and America will be doomed. In fundamentalist homes, Thanksgiving is a celebration of that compact, an affirmation of America's singular destiny as a Chosen Nation.

Poputonian gives a brief rundown of the history of Thanksgiving in North America that got me thinking some about this. Thanksgiving has become a fraught and complicated issue at our house since we moved to Canada, which celebrates the same holiday on the second Monday in October. Some years, we've had two Thanksgivings. Other years, we've had none. (Today, the kids are in school and going to their dad's, and Mr. R is taking a final exam, so I'm on my own, and birdless.) It's never been my favorite holiday to begin with, so our haphazard observance patterns have reflected that as well. But the struggle to make new meaning out of the holiday has also given me a much wider view than most Americans have of where our own Thanksgiving fits into the grand scheme of history.

In the summer of 2005, I spent a month in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Cuernavaca's a gorgeous little city, famous for a year-round spring climate so delicious that Montezuma built his summer palace there. In 1519, Cortez conquered the city, razed the old palace, and built his own castle on the ruins. (Diego Rivera later painted what may be his greatest mural in the castle's loggia.) A few blocks away, there's a huge adobe cathedral that's been standing there since 1533. It may well be the oldest Christian church in the western hemisphere.

To put this in perspective: The church and castle in Cuernavaca had already been standing for nearly a century when the Pilgrims had their little dinner party in 1620.

In fact, by that time, the Spaniards had pretty much conquered Mexico, and were making strong inroads into what is now the American southwest. Pop notes that Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine, Florida in 1565. Farther inland, Don Juan Onate declared the first Mexican Thanksgiving somewhere just south of El Paso in 1598 -- the same year he founded the city of Santa Fe. By 1620, when New England was just seeing its first Europeans, Santa Fe and St. Augustine were both thriving American cities of a thousand souls or more.

The party was already rolling in the Great White North as well. The first Canadian Thanksgiving was declared in 1578 by English explorer Martin Frobisher, who formally proclaimed a Feast of Thanksgiving for his party's safe arrival in Newfoundland. By 1607, the French explorers living in Acadia with Samuel de Champlain formed "The Order of Good Cheer," whose regular feasts of thanks often included their Huron and Algonquin neighbors. (Two hundred years later, following the American Revolution, these feasts also included banished Loyalist refugees, who contributed their own American foods and customs to the Canadian table.)

When you look at the full scope of North American history, the image of Thanksgiving as a holiday of U.S. exceptionalism becomes much harder to sustain. The Pilgrims were not the first European settlers, as many Americans believe. (Cortez's Spanish troops were.) They weren't even the first English settlers (several English colonies had been doing very well in Canada for decades). Plymouth was not the first European city in the New World (Cuernavaca would have a decent claim there); nor even in America (as anyone from either St. Augustine or Santa Fe will tell you). And theirs was far from the first Thanksgiving. In truth, they were latecomers to a long-standing party that had already become a New World tradition from Montreal to Mexico City.

Living in Canada has given me a bigger view of Thanksgiving. It's not a holiday celebrating American uniqueness and destiny, but rather one that connects us in history to all the people of this continent -- those who came on the boats from Spain, then France, then England to brave a world they could not imagine; those who met the boats and lost the world as they knew it; those who have come in the centuries since from every corner of the planet; and those who share the continent with America now, and are as bound to her fate as surely as we are bound to the brothers and sisters we're feasting with today.

We may celebrate it on different days; but the reasons for our gratitude are as recognizably familiar as the menu and the faces. Our strength is not in America's (or this holiday's) singularity, but rather their universality. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody.

"Officer, they stole my wallet! It's all a big misunderstanding. Like a Three's Company episode. Someone came in the wrong door!"

So explains a naked Scott Thompson to two cops outside a highway rest stop in Brain Candy, the brilliant 1996 film by Toronto comedy troupe Kids in the Hall. When Thompson is returned home, still naked and handcuffed, he explains everything to his wife.

"Honey, I think you've got a right to know what happened," says Thompson. "I went out driving, cuz you know I love driving. And suddenly I had to take the biggest pee in the world. I saw this washroom, so I stopped in. But it was full of those types, you know, queens and queers. And they tried to kiss me; and I said no, no, no!"

The scene cuts to Thompson reclining in a shrink's office. "Why would he do that?" asks the Man in Denial.

"Didn't you say you had gripped his buttocks and pulled him closer?" asks the shrink.

"I was concerned he would fall," says Thomspon. "I mean, his pants were down around his goddamn ankles."

I held a special screening of Brain Candy the other week in honor of Ted Haggard, the Colorado mega-church pastor and evangelical leader whose initial "Who put this c**k in my mouth?" half-admission to enjoying the company of a gay prostitute and purchasing methamphetamine was cut straight from a Kids in the Hall skit. Before admitting to "sexual immorality" and quickly disappearing with his wife to an unmapped island in the south Pacific, Haggard claimed that he was innocently referred to a masseuse by a Denver hotel, and that while, yes, he bought meth from the masseuse, who, it turned out, also happened to be a gay prostitute, he threw the devilish drug away before trying it.

Never mind buying speed only to toss it: Crank, for the ultimate relaxing massage!

No, I don't believe Haggard threw the meth away, unless you define "throw away" as "suck up your nose while greasing your abs."

A lot of people have pointed to the dialogue in Haggard's spastic cameo in the documentary Jesus Camp, in which Pastor Ted condemns homosexuality and tells a 12 year-old kid he's "very cute." But look beyond the words and the film depicts a man high on more than John 3:16. He stalks the stage wearing a Janet Jackson headset and a grin so big it looks like it's about to rip his face into quadrants. His teeth often appear clamped; his eyes bulging wide. He can't, or at least doesn't, shut up. He's on so many cylinders he even heckles the Jesus Camp crew during his sermon. "If you use any of this footage, I'll sue you!" he jests, cracking himself up. Later, after the Sunday service, he's still going strong. "It's a great life!" he tells the filmmakers for no good reason. Dynamite, even. The man is clearly at an impressive cruising altitude; lunch is now being served with a choice of chicken or pasta.

Haggard's own boundless energy dominated profiles of his New Life Church. A cover story in Christianity Today repeatedly describes Haggard as "ebullient" and "charismatic," and quotes a colleague who marveled: "Th[e] stuff just flows out of Ted." Indeed words do just "flow out" of some people. Especially when they're jacked up on speed.

The creation story of Haggard's New Life Church reads like notes from a speed-fueled start-up project. In the early days Haggard sat around his garage maniacally building podiums out of buckets and stages out of assorted junkyard effluvia. He also ran around Colorado Springs recruiting, talking to anyone who would listen. When Haggard wasn't smiling, playing with buckets and random shit in his garage, or talking way too fast to uninterested bystanders -- that is, when he was coming down -- he heard the speed voices, saw the speed demons. A May 2005 Harper's profile describes how "evil forces" would call Haggard late at night and threaten to kill him. Anyone who has ever collapsed after a four-day meth binge understands you don't have to be a Believer to know those evil forces are real.

The Harper's story also offers this litany of classic tweaker behavior, including an actual phone book activity:

[Haggard] assigned everyone in the [early] church names from the phone book they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches -- in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market. His congregation "prayer-walked" nearly every street of the city.

If Haggard was indeed a speed freak, and I think he was, it was an understandable drug of choice. Every weekend, in front of thousands of swaying, chanting cultists, he had to entertain for hours. It must have been draining. Living within a short drive of a city known for its fine cut glass, why wouldn't Haggard, a hard-working father of five, chip away at the stuff to keep the energy level up? And if his wife wasn't up to it, why shouldn't he find someone to help take advantage of all those nerve clusters, placed there by Haggard's Lord Father, designed after His Own Perfect Image?

The reason, of course, is Jesus-drenched, hip-hop hooray hypocrisy, the currency that fuels the increasingly hi-tech economy of the Religious Right in America. Haggard isn't allowed his harmless pleasures because he spent so much of his life trying to deny them to other people who were actually honest with themselves and the world. Haggard was well known for liking rock and roll in his Church; if only he'd accepted sex and drugs, he could have led his evangelical flock in a healthy new direction -- less hate, more hot tub. But nobody likes a hypocrite, especially Mike Jones, the former hooker who deserves a decent book deal and who better not have accepted a pay-off to destroy all those hours of James Dobson choke-ball footage.

It's hard not to suspect that such footage exists, that the penthouse of the evangelical skyscraper is one big gay bathhouse, with a wrinkled Dobson getting serviced by three leather bears in the center pool. But Dobson no doubt has a serious four-stage security moat around him at his compound in Colorado Springs. My bet for the next gay evangelical scandal is handsome D.C.-based Tony Perkins, the Guy Smiley nitwit running the Dobson spin-off Family Research Council. It's possible Perkins even enjoyed the occasional double massage with his good friend Pastor Ted in Denver, while the two plotted how best to roll back the latest New England state court decision.

In his election-week Family Research Council note to members, Perkins blew a note of mock-disgust at Haggard's dark and repulsive behavior. (The italics are in the Perkins original, quoting from Pastor Ted's letter of apology. But Perkins didn't use quotes, choosing the more menacing italics instead.)

Who put that dark and repulsive cock in your mouth, Tony?

It's true Haggard wasn't as despicable as Perkins, or his neighbor and former spiritual mentor Dobson. Although a proud Republican and a self-professed leader of the Religious Right, Haggard was a relative moderate in that world. He understood that the environment is in serious trouble and that the Bible offers grounds for "Creation Care"; he claimed to admire the social gospel traditions of the black church; he even lauded Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Supreme Court decriminalized sodomy in the Lone Stud State. Haggard's hypocrisy had some bounds, after all.

I just have doubts the same can be said for his meth habit.

Alexander Zaitchik co-founded Freezerbox in 1998. He is currently based in Washington, D.C.

Readers of VDARE.COM need little introduction to the SPLC or Ms. Beirich. Since 1971, the SPLC has built up an unsavory reputation, attracting criticism even from the Left for dubious fund-raising tactics, reckless allegations (anyone who opposes open borders is a racist) massive exaggerations (the Ku Klux Klan is on the verge of taking over the entire U.S.) and, by those who actually read its materials, for wholesale misrepresentation. Essentially a gang of political terrorists, well described by Peter Brimelow as a "shakedown scam that preys on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich", the SPLC is nevertheless accorded almost religious reverence by many in the media, academia, and government. Case in point: the (otherwise quite fair) student newspaper article on my case was headlined Civil rights group investigates professor [by MaryJane O'Brien, Daily 49er, November 13 2006]. [For the Capitol Research Center's new expose of the SPLC, click here]

The SPLC is paying me attention because it wants to suppress my academic work. I am interested in sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and group behavior. Some years ago I began to study the Jews. This resulted in three scholarly books and a monograph considering Judaism from a modern evolutionary perspective:

A People that Shall Dwell Alone:Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994)

Separation and Its Discontents:Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (1998)

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (1998)

Understanding Jewish Influence: Study in Ethnic Activism (2004)

I have also published a number of related articles (scroll down).

In this body of work I have developed the argument that Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies. The objective has been control of economic resources and political power. One example: overwhelming Jewish support for non-traditional immigration, which has the effect of weakening America's historic white majority. Such behavior would be viewed as perfectly normal from a sociobiological standpoint.

Of course, I could be wrong. Demonstrating this would require logical argument and reinterpretation of the extensive factual evidence I have assembled. I have yet to see any critic of my work able to show that I was wrong about the theory or in my handling of the evidence. But in principle it might be possible.

However, my critics, exemplified by the SPLC, have generally been unwilling to attempt this. Instead, their line has been that the subject is taboo and discussing it should be forbidden. Needless to say, this is not the intellectual tradition out of which the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution came.

My experience provides a case study of these tactics. Beirich, along with another SPLC operative Mark Potok, recently wrote an article listing me as one of the "13 worst people in America" and "The scariest academic". In a country with around 300,000,000 people and 45,000 academics, the SPLC places me in some pretty rarified company.

The Beirich & Potok article is a compendium of ethical lapses. It refers to me as having a Master's degree, although I have held a Ph.D since 1981 and have been a fully tenured faculty member at Cal State Long Beach for 15 years. The implication: I am not a fully qualified and recognized scholar. An academic who acknowledges not having read my work is quoted, while positive comments by academics who have reviewed my research in scholarly publications are ignored. It presents gross oversimplifications of my work-summarizing an entire book in one sentence and leaving out important qualifications (e.g., although the organized Jewish community was the major force in pushing through the 1965 immigration law and in the establishment of multicultural America, I stipulate that many Jews were not involved in these efforts).

Further, Beirich & Potok lift quotations out of context. Most outrageously, they claim that I "suggest[s] that colleges restrict Jewish admission and Jews be heavily taxed 'to counter the Jewish advantage in the possession of wealth.'" In fact, the passage in question discusses the possible consequences of a hypothetical ethnic spoils system in which individuals are assigned access to resources based on their percentage in the population. Obviously, if such a system were in place, it would discriminate against Jews. Merely explaining the real-world consequences of such a system is not the equivalent of advocating it.

Personally, I am appalled that there are major organizations and movements in this country that advocate ethnicity-based access to resources such as university admissions. Behavioral science research clearly documents that different ethnic groups have different average talents, abilities, wealth, etc. These differences can only lead to increasing levels of ethnic tension and competition in multicultural America. An ethnicity-based spoils system would be the end of the country as originally founded. It would lead to a hyper-Orwellian future in which each ethnic group jealously monitors the others to make sure it is getting its "fair" share.

I'm reminded of an earlier hatchet job by Beirich. She made a phone call to Human Events Editor-in-Chief Tom Winter complaining that Kevin Lamb, Human Events managing editor, was also the editor of The Occidental Quarterly-a publication that the SPLC calls "racist" and "white supremacist." (The fact that I have published articles in The Occidental Quarterly is a major part of the SPLC's problem with me.) Lamb was gone within the hour.

More recently, Beirich succeeded with another phone call in frightening the supposedly-conservative Leadership Institute into a last-minute refusal of its premises to the Robert A. Taft Club, which planned to hold a debate-a debate-between American Renaissance's Jared Taylor, National Review's John Derbyshire and black conservative Kevin Martin.

The Taft Club is basically just a group of Washington-area kids. But no band of heretics is too small for the SPLC Inquisition.

Ms. Beirich asked to interview me during her stay in Long Beach. Given her record, I was confident she would be acting in bad faith. But I offered to be interviewed by her-if she would answer my concerns regarding her previous writing about me and make them public to the CSULB community. She has not responded to this offer.

Kevin Lamb was an "at will" employee and really had no defense against the assault of Beirich and the SPLC. But the fact is that even academics with tenure are terrified of being called racists, anti-Semites or any other pejorative concocted by the left.

This is ironic. Unlike politicians, who must curry favor with the public in order to be reelected, and unlike media figures, who have no job protection, tenured academics should be free from any such fears. Part of the job-and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the first place-is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions.

That image of academia, however, simply and sadly has no basis in reality. Consider, for example, an article appearing almost two months after the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's famous essay on the Israel Lobby and appropriately titled " A hot paper muzzles Harvard." [by Eve Fairbanks, The Los Angeles Times, May 14 2006]:

"Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle - and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction."

It's not that professors don't want to sound off on public policy issues. When there is an opportunity to spout righteous leftism, professors leap to the front of the line. A good example: the Duke University rape allegation case. Despite considerable evidence that the charges are spurious, three academic departments, 13 programs, and 88 professors at Duke paid for an ad in the campus newspaper in which they assumed the guilt of the men, and stated that "what happened to this young woman" resulted from "racism and sexism".

In that case, of course, the professors who went public with their indignation knew they were part of a like-minded community and that there would be much to gain by being on the politically-correct side.

Seen in this context, the reaction to Mearsheimer and Walt makes a lot of sense. As one professor explained: "People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card and promised that afterward everyone would be friends."

This latest experience with the SPLC has improved my understanding of the dynamics of group control of individuals.

There have been times when I have had to endure vicious charges of anti-Semitism, for instance by Jacob Laksin (Cal State's Professor of Anti-Semitism. Frontpagemag.com May 5 2006). But when discussion was confined to the impersonal world of the internet, it did not bother me. I would write a detailed reply and circulate it among the people who read me. I knew that people who support my writing would rally to my defense and say nice things about me and my reply to Laksin.

Naturally, I also knew that I would a get hate mail and maybe a couple of death threats. But that's to be expected. And it's all rather abstract, since I basically sit in solitude at my computer and read it all. It pretty much ends there. A part of me even sees some benefit in it because visits to my website are up and more people are buying my book.

But then came the SPLC and Heidi Beirich. Someone not connected to CSULB sent an email to the entire Psychology Department-except me-asking why they allowed an "anti-Semite" to teach there. The result was an uproar, with heated exchanges on the faculty email list, a departmental meeting on what to do about me and my work, and intense meetings of the departmental governing committee.

Cold shoulders, forced smiles and hostile stares became a reality. Going into my office to teach my classes and attend committee meetings became an ordeal.

I keep saying to myself: why is this so hard? At the conscious level I was perfectly confident that I could sit down with any of my colleagues and defend my ideas. I know rationally that a lot of the people giving me negative vibes are themselves members of ethnic minority groups-who like the present ethnic spoils system, such as affirmative action and ethnically-influenced foreign policy, just fine.

My theory: Ostracism and hostility from others in one's face-to-face world trigger guilt feelings. These are automatic responses resulting ultimately from the importance of fitting into a group over evolutionary time. We Westerners are relatively prone to individualism. But we certainly don't lack a sense of wanting to belong and to be accepted. Violating certain taboos carries huge emotional consequences.

This little bit of personal experience is doubtless typical of the forces of self-censorship that maintain the political order of the post-World-War-II West. It's the concern about the face-to-face consequences of being a non-conformist in the deeply sensitive areas related to race or to Jewish influence.

My research on Jewish issues is well within the academic mainstream in terms of use of sources and evidence, and it has been well reviewed in a variety of mainstream sources. It would raise no controversy except that it deals with very sensitive issues: Anti-Semitism and Jewish influence on culture and politics.

I am willing to defend the idea that my ethnic identity and ethnic interests are as legitimate as those of the numerous ethnic activists that make a living in academia. Would Mexicans or Chinese be considered moral reprobates if they didn't like the idea of their people losing political, demographic, and cultural control within their homeland? Should academics like Cornel West or Alan Dershowitz be fired or ostracized because of their obvious and deeply expressed ethnic commitments? What of the many Latino professors who marched in the recent spate of pro-immigration rallies supporting more immigration to the U.S. for the people with whom they identify?

All of these are accepted and indeed approved. However, my relatively low-key expression of ethnic identity as a white European-American concerned about the prospects of his people and culture so easily becomes whipped up into mass hysteria on campus.

This guilt trauma is the result of our evolved psychology and a long history of socialization in post-World-War-II America. It's a big part of the problem, and people like me have simply got to become better at dealing with it.

So in the end, I've come to greet Heidi's arrival in Long Beach as therapeutic-a painful but necessary challenge that must be overcome first at the psychological level if any progress is to be made on unabashed and unfettered discussion of critical issues like the Third World Invasion of America and the impending death of the West.

Hell, if Republican candidates had been ready, willing, and able to campaign on these issues, they might not have been so thoroughly "thumped" in the recent elections.

Kevin MacDonald is Professor of Psychology at California State University-Long Beach. For his website, click here.