Bret McAtee attempted to post some observations in the "comments" section here yesterday, but unfortunately my new system apparently ate them. He has since posted those observations at his own blog, which you can check out here.

Through all of this recent controversy, I've learned a number of positive things about the paleoconservative movement. While I certainly don't agree with everything the movement seems to believe, I think many of them would be suprised to know that I share their views on an increasingly substantial number of things (though the personal abrasiveness of some of them can make it a difficult movement to stomach). I have been heartened to see many of the paleoconservative stripe come here to unambiguously condemn the racist rantings of a few who claim the "paleo" banner.

Bret's article is a good contribution, and I think he makes some valid points--even the ones directed at me. Where I disagree with Bret is in an analogy he uses in discussing my (and others) recent characterizations of paleoconservatism:

The problem of course is that all of this is what is called the genetic fallacy or more familiarly known as guilt by association. These moderates that are on crusade against classical Conservatism are by in large fine Christian gentleman, even if their politics is at war with their Theology, but one wonders what the level of their own angst would be if others tried to tar them with the David Koresh brush. David Koresh was a Christian. These neo-con's are Christians. Therefore David Koresh and Neo-cons have a great deal in common.

I do not think this analogy holds up because one would be hard-pressed to find any links to David Koresh (or the like) on any randomly chosen Christian site. One would have to make at least several degrees of link-to-link-to-link to find anything like Koresh and his ilk. However, I found links to the racist swill at the Little Geneva site through the blogs of most of the people here who identify themselves as paleoconservative.

Please understand, I'm not attributing the views expressed at Little Geneva to the majority of paleos who visit here. Most have made it clear that they do not share those views. What I am pointing out is that I didn't have to go very far to find it in the literature that they linked to. It was only one degree of separation away.

Simply being a Christian does not put me in the same league as Koresh, the Ku Klux Klan, or Fred Phelps. On that, Bret and I are agreed. However, if one were to find on my blog all sorts of links to folks who spoke glowingly of Koresh or the Klan, I would have, at the very least, opened myself to the accusation of being sympathetic to such groups.

As I become more and more convinced that racism and anti-semitism does not lie at the heart of the paleoconservative movement, my hope for them is that they will turn their attention towards expelling the racists, who currently don't feel all that uncomfortable there, from their movement. The movement will not take any ground if racists are allowed to comfortably hold their views within it. As Mark Horne (himself a paleoconservative) said in a recent post, "don't even be seen with them."