Call It the 'Peter Brimelow Rule'
by Robert Stacy McCain on September 10, 2009
No conservative white Christian is allowed to discuss ethnicity and culture. Only liberals and members of ethnic minorities can do that.
You never discover the fine-print rules of American public discourse until you’re accused of violating them. Generally speaking, liberals ignore cultural discourse among conservatives. Only when you discuss potentially sensitive topics in such a way as to waive your Miranda-warning right to remain silent — “Anything you say can and will be used against you by The New York Times” — will your contributions to the discourse be wrenched out of context as proof of your malevolent intent. At some point, you’d think I might cease to be amazed by this distinctive habit of liberals, but they keep coming up with innovative new variatons on their otherwise predictable idiocy.
Over the weekend, while seeking out a certain quote about Van Jones’ resignation, I found myself at the Web site of Commentary magazine, where I noticed a symposium in which six writers — including Bill Kristol and David Gelernter — discuss Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? This struck me as an interesting subject, so after I was finished blogging about Van Jones, I wrote a blog post excerpting the symposium and adding my own thoughts. Little did I suspect that by this modest contribution to the discourse I would thereby enhance my notoriety.
It occurred to me that, liberalism being principally an urban phenomenon (remember that 2004 electoral map showing Democratic blue areas as pinpoints in a sea of Republican red?), and American Jews for the most part being residents of our nation’s larger metropolitan regions, the “town-and-country” factor might be involved in the trend that Podhoretz and the symposiasts were discussing. Ergo, I offered this modest suggestion:
If Messrs. Podhorhetz, et al., wish to promote conservatism among American Jews, let them find some way to encourage Jewish families to move to small towns in the Heartland …
Innocuous enough, unless you view the world through the prism of liberalism, wherein all conservatives are crypto-Nazis. So this comment got me linked all over the Left side of the Internet, with such creative and subtle blog-post titles as, “The Final Solution to the Liberal Problem.” Surveying the reaction, it is remarkable how I seem to be suspected of anti-Semitism by the same liberals who spent years portraying the Bush administration as a Mossad-orchestrated neocon Zionist conspiracy. One discerns that liberal arguments on such topics can be summarized in three words: “Conservatives are evil.” When it comes to proving that point, the standards of evidence are quite flexible.
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