09/29/2010
09/28/10 — A Reader Knows More History Than The President — We Didn’t All "Share This Land"
From: Jared Taylor [Email him]
Re: Steve Sailer’s Dinesh D’souza: The Right Enemies, But The Wrong Thesis
Many thanks to Steve Sailer for reminding readers of Dinesh D’souza’s failure to credit me for many of the ideas in D’souza’s 1995 book, The End of Racism. It is the sort of thing that would be unseemly and unconvincing for me to write, but rings very pleasantly coming from someone else.
D’souza actually went to comical lengths to cover any intellectual tracks that might lead to your servant. He simply had to cite an article I wrote for National Review (!!) about crime rates because, try as he might, he could find no one else who had ever made quite the same point. [May 16, 1994] In his citation, however, he violated his own bibliographic rules and failed to include the article’s author. He could not stand to mention my name even in a footnote.
Whence this horror? D’souza could not even admit he had cited one of my articles because he had decided to set me up in his book as Exhibit A in a gallery of "white racists". He hoped to deflect the accusations of "racism" that were bound to come his way for writing a book that suggested — three years after mine did — that white oppression might not entirely account for the unfortunate state of blacks. It’s a contemptible tactic I have seen a hundred times: Someone who has edged off the reservation points to someone who has gone rather deeper into forbidden territory and shouts "racist, racist," in the hope that the left will go baying after the real dissident, leaving the fake one unscathed.
As it happened, I saw the book before it went to press. By some feat of wizardry a friend got hold of a copy of the galleys and showed it to me. I discovered something then that I have since found to be dismally common. When people set out seriously to smear people like me or Peter Brimelow or Steve Sailer or Phil Rushton or Sam Francis or John Derbyshire (or anyone in the VDARE.com archive) they have very heavy going because what we write is so obviously true.
What to do? Just like the SPLC, D’souza made up things to attack. The whole sorry story of his lies and distortions is told here [The 'Tainted' Sources of The End of Racism | A contemptible streak of dishonesty runs through this book. by Jared Taylor, American Renaissance November 1995] in the wounded tones of a man who was young and naïve, and knew no better than to expect a fellow writer to be honest.
D’souza got his comeuppance, however. His attempt to caricature me and others was such a childish fabrication, we had only to call it to the attention of his editor, who promptly ordered the entire first print run of the book destroyed, while D’souza scrambled to make corrections. I still have my copy of the galleys, as proof of the rubbish he tried to peddle.
Steve Sailer tells us that D’souza is still up to his old tricks of filching people’s ideas without attribution. Bad habits die hard, it seems, and they go back a long way.
I bet you will never guess who, in his days as a student journalist, managed such a scandalous mix of fiction and non-fiction that he earned the nick-name Distort D'Newsa.
By Jared Taylor (email him) is editor of American Renaissance and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. (For Peter Brimelow’s review, click here.)
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.