09/28/2009
James Bowman calls Christopher Hitchens’s obituary on Irving Kristol "an uncharacteristically sour send-off", and notes that Hitchens said this:[with reference to "the image of a neoconservative as a liberal 'mugged by reality'"]
"once people got over their affected fuss about the possible innuendo in the word mugged, they reluctantly saw that Kristol had found a memorably demotic way of encapsulating the sad fashion in which utopianism can collide with brute facts about the human animal."
Let me explain that — Hitchens is saying that liberals objected to the phrase "mugged by reality", because they thought it implied changing your principles after actually being mugged, and since you would almost certainly have been mugged by blacks, that would be wrong. And Hitchens still believes that’s true. No amount of black crime, directed at you or your family, would be justification in Hitchen’s eyes for conservatism.
Anyhow, it’s difficult to say who’s being racist here. Kristol, for mentioning mugging in a metaphor? Liberals for suspecting that he meant blacks? Hitchens, for seeing the "possible innuendo"? Or is it VDARE.com, because we always get called that.
Probably all of us. We're all pretty white, and we all distrust President Obama, and that, nowadays, is racism.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.