By Steve Sailer
05/12/2016
From the annals of the Sapir-Whorf effect …
Libertarian writer Cathy Young, a sort of Ayn Rand Lite, is getting some mileage in the Daily Beast out of accusing Ann Coulter of anti-Semitism due to guilt by association:
Ann Coulter’s Anti-Semitism Runs Deeper Than You KnowThe Trump cheerleader shares his habit of promoting ethnic nationalists and their ugly ideas.
Amusingly, Cathy preceded this with a blogpost last month about how horrible it is that anybody could suspect that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, author of Rolling Stone’s notorious “A Rape on Campus,” is a wee bit anti-Gentilic (not that Cathy could imagine such a word):
… Luke Ford’s blogpost, which speculates on whether or not I’m a “neocon,” contains a tidbit that led me to another interesting discovery. As an aside, Ford takes a jab at me for having written two Reason.com columns on the University of Virginia/Rolling Stone rape hoax “without mentioning Steve [Sailer] or Richard Bradley”: “Hard to say if she is just lazy or ignores the work of writers she doesn’t like.” Actually, both of those columns were reprints from RealClearPolitics.com; earlier, I had written two other RCP columns on the subject which did mention Bradley, a blogger and former magazine editor, and credit him for being first to raise questions about the credibility of the alleged fraternity gang rape victim, Jackie.I’m not really sure why I should have credited Steve Sailer, who posted about the case on his Unz Review blog and then wrote about it for Taki Magazine but added nothing original. (In the magazine piece, Sailer claims that his November 29 blogpost drew attention to Bradley’s post, which had languished unnoticed since November 24. Reason‘s Robby Soave wrote about it on December 1. I don’t know if he was tipped off to Bradley’s post by Sailer or one of Sailer’s readers, but I can say that Robby and I were among several journalists privately discussing the problems with the Rolling Stone story by November 25.)
However! Ford’s mention of Sailer’s commentary on the UVA story reminded me of something I had forgotten: the Sailer acolytes in Bradley’s blog comments who tried to argue that Rolling Stone author Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s piece about rape culture at UVA, centered around Jackie’s story, had something to do with Erdely being Jewish. Apparently, she had some kind of Jewish agenda to destroy UVA because it’s too white, Christian, pretty and conservative, or something. (When another commenter pointed out that many of the journalists who helped debunk the hoax were also Jewish, the conspiracy nuts were undeterred: Of course the Jews will do that when their mischief is caught out!)
Okay, so these are just random commenters. But a December 3, 2014 post at VDARE by one of their prolific bloggers, Eugene Gant, highlighting Sailer’s Taki Magazine article, referred to Erdely as “militantly Jewish” (linking to an article about a Jewish day camp that briefly referenced Erdely as one of the parents) and “a hit thing for the Christophobic left” (because she had previously written a story, also of dubious veracity, about a boy’s sexual abuse by priests). The Occidental Observer ran a longer piece depicting the rape-hoax story as “ethnic warfare” born from Erdely’s “anti-White animus” (in the Alt-Right taxonomy, Jews are, of course, not “white”) and noting that some of her staunchest defenders were “Jewish female journalists.” Oh, and Luke Ford did a blogpost that referred to Erdely as an “proud Jew and anti-white fabulist” (with a headline calling her a “left-wing Jew with a history of Christian-bashing).
As for Sailer? Well, he didn’t exactly peddle this slimy nuttery himself, but he sure did pander to it. Check out this April 7, 2015 Sailer blogpost at VDARE titled “Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Kristallnacht on Campus.” Its actual subject is the theme of broken glass in Erdely’s story (such as the glass table shattering during Jackie’s alleged rape) and actual broken glass at the fraternity named in the rape allegations, which was attacked by vandals throwing bottles and bricks through the windows in December 2014, shortly after the story’s publication.
If it weren’t for the obsession with Erdely’s Jewishness in certain quarters, I would have assumed that “Kristallnacht” was just a fancy metaphor. But was it actually a not-so-subtle reversal of an infamous attack on Jews in which a “militant Jew” becomes the perpetrator inflicting a Kristallnacht on gentiles? You decide.
Okay!
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.