03/20/2015
Razib Khan, latest victim of the war on "white supremacy"
See also Razib Khan Hired And Fired By The New York Times, Both On The Same Day! By John Derbyshire
Why don’t we outsource the entire Main Stream Media to the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com)? Oh, wait…
The job of the American MSM, after all, is not to expose facts and inspire debate, but to conceal facts and shut down discussion.
The latest example: the treatment of Razib Khan, a noted commentator on human biodiversity and genetics who blogs at the Unz Review and has been featured at Slate, among other publications. He was recently announced as a new monthly columnist at The New York Times, yet within a day, he was dismissed [New York Times drops Razib Khan, by Dylan Byers, Politico, March 19, 2015].
When Khan’s new position was announced, the ululations began, with the first strident squeals coming from Parasitic Class paragon Jamelle Bouie, who was evidently triggered because Khan once wrote a letter to VDARE.com. In 2000. And it was critical.
Gawker’s JK Trotter [Email] took up the wailing with a curiously hysterical post about Khan’s supposed past with “racist, far-right online publications” [New Times Op-Ed Writer Has a Colorful Past with Racist Publications, Gawker, March 18, 2015]
Other than Khan’s letter (he has never been a contributor to VDARE.com) what are his other sins? He has written for Takimag.com. Did he say anything bad there? No, but Taki Theodoracopulos makes Trotter feel blue, as does fellow Takimag contributor John Derbyshire (evidently, people are still upset about The Talk: Nonblack Version.)
Interestingly, Trotter is also sad that Takimag.com published Vice founder Gavin McInnes, especially a colorfully titled article of his on racial and sexual slurs which we will link to but won’t list here for fear of running afoul of internet filters.
Of course, McInnes’s point in this article was not that racial or sexual slurs are good, but that the use of what is essentially a curse word doesn’t reveal a person’s inner thoughts about different groups. As he put it, if “we were forced to reveal our inner feelings about visible minorities, women, and homosexuals, I think the left would be shocked to see how totally OK we are with it all.”
With his prissy reaction, Trotter is proving McInnes’s point that the Left is a group of humorless scolds.
Trotter also presents what he believes is evidence of Crimethink.
These days, that’s all it takes. Heck, I hear Khan might have gone to Starbucks and requested coffee instead of a lecture about reparations for slavery.
But the real heart of Trotter’s case, if we can call it that, is that Khan takes race seriously. Like a Victorian maiden encountering a mouse, Trotter leaps up on a chair and shrilly denounces an article Khan wrote for the apparently racist magazine Discover which calmly and objectively discusses some of the science behind human genetics [Why race as a biological construct matters, by Razib Khan, Discover, May 16, 2013].
As Trotter admits, “[Khan] never says black people are less intelligent. But his willingness to treat black intelligence as a matter of debate has not hampered his career in the slightest.”
Trotter evidently believes it should. Journalists, in his view, should stick to more respectable topics — like trying to expose which FoxNews anchor or Hollywood celebrity is gay. (My answer: all of them.) And Trotter is not unusual in this.
Mark Steyn once described multiculturalism as a “cult of ignorance” — because you don’t have to know anything about other cultures, you just have to “feel warm and fuzzy” about them. Similarly, contemporary journalism actively discourages investigation of actual facts in favor of bromides that are obviously untrue but must be unthinkingly repeated.
Just as a racist is a conservative winning an argument with a liberal, when someone calls you “ignorant” on racial matters, it is usually an indication that you have unfashionably brought facts, evidence, and objective reality into the discussion. A demand you “become educated” about race doesn’t mean actually looking into the truth of the issue, it means learning what slogans, buzzwords, and clichés are required to fit in polite society.
As Steve Sailer has noted: elite education is increasingly about
indoctrinating your child in the dominant rhetoric of the era he will live in not only makes him less likely to make a career-damaging slip up, it makes him more cunning at how to attack and destroy his white rivals whenever they make rhetorical slip-ups so he can more quickly claw his way to the top.
But this isn’t just intra-white status competition. Mr. Khan, according to his own published findings on his family history and his South Asian appearance, isn’t exactly some champion of Nordic Hyperborea [Guest post by Razib Khan: My personal genome, Genomes unzipped, October 2, 2011]. He’s obviously not a “white nationalist.” And yet he finds himself denounced, smeared as a racist, and professionally hurt because of calm analysis and the presentation of facts that are indisputably, unalterably, and objectively true.
This comes on the heels of a too-good-for parody article from Caitlin Dewey, who writes about “digital and Internet culture” at the Washington Post. Dewey gives the impression of a unpopular supporting character from Girls somehow transported into our world to unironically squeal about “Law & Order: SVU” attacking gamers for not being feminist enough [“This is the final word of Gamergate — and it’s from ‘Law & Order: SVU,’” Washington Post, February 11, 2015].
So her frenzied whine that companies like Amazon and Paypal allow websites that the Southern Poverty Law Center doesn’t like to use their services is not surpring. She mostly focuses on Counter Currents Publishing but also bashes VDARE.com as a “radical white nationalist site.” [Amazon, Paypal, and Spotify inadvertently fund white supremacists. Here’s how. Washington Post, March 17, 2015].
Why anyone should care about a glorified hedge fund that sends its employees out to yell racial slurs, celebrates the admitted terrorist Bill Ayers, calls the Family Research Council a “Hate Group” inspiring violence against it and is angry that people liked Lord of the Rings can only be the subject of speculation. Yet Dewey features extensive quotations from an almost unhinged Heidi Beirich that are unintentionally hilarious.
“These are normal, corporate businesses,” a frustrated Beirich said, “and they’re providing services to the white supremacy movement.”
You can actually hear the rising intonation. How does this unstable woman get through the day? At the risk of throwing Miss Beirich into a depressive spiral, I got a sandwich from Subway today too. Is she going to start harassing them?
Of course, as we’ve repeatedly said, VDARE.com is not a “white nationalist site.” It is a forum site that publishes liberals and conservatives, Americans and non-Americans, and contributors of all races who are concerned about the destructive effects of mass immigration. Thus one of VDARE.com’s most heavily-trafficked pieces in recent weeks was a column referring to black Democratic Congressman John Lewis as a “real American hero” whose great failing is refusing to stand up for his African-American constituents by opposing mass immigration. It was written by a proud Democrat, Donald A. Collins.
Of course, we don’t expect Dewey bothered to research any of this any more than she contacted the people she was ostensibly reporting on.
VDARE.com is also proud to publish white advocates like Jared Taylor. Why not? Why, precisely, are his views so unacceptable when defending the interests of every other group is worthy of praise? Specifically, why is discussion of European-American rights and interests worse than the celebration of openly hateful, violent, and destructive anti-white behavior that runs through the MSM? (Example from Gawker here).
The answer is not just that the MSM doesn’t want a real debate on important issues in case whites wake up and act to halt their slide into minority status — it’s that it is not capable of it. When you systematically exclude everyone who has something significant to say, you end with an entire industry of automatons trading the same clichés back and forth. Eventually, that becomes all they are capable of doing.
No wonder the MSM is suddenly so eager to shut down free speech. They’re afraid because we’re doing the job they won’t and can’t do.
James Kirkpatrick is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.