Jonah Goldberg On "That's Racist!!"
07/06/2011
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William Houston at Youth For Western Civilization says that "It is a rare day that I agree with anything Jonah Goldberg writes". I know what he means, although I kind of liked Liberal Fascism, when it wasn't going on and on about "eugenics."

Houston is right that Jonah Goldberg is on the right side of the "That's racist" meme, and Jonah Goldberg is right to say that "[T]he people who've spent the last few decades screaming, "That's racist," not as a punch line but as a heinously unfair accusation or in an attempt to bully people, don't seem to get that the joke is on them.."[Goldberg: 'That's racist' as a punch line, LA Times, July 6, 2011] Congratulations, you're to the right of NPR!

However, I can't help but feel that Goldberg is being a tiny bit hypocritical when he says "It's also a common joke among conservatives, precisely because we're used to being called racists for the weirdest things," because we've been on the receiving end of a certain amount of "That's racist" action from Jonah Goldberg himself. See especially Ideologues Have Hijacked an Important Debate, Los Angeles Times, February 24, 2002, in which he said that

"Instead, we get Buchanan and his new book "The Death of the West," which warns hysterically that the white race is becoming an "endangered species," about to be swallowed up by the duskier Third World (defined as all nonwhites no matter how rich, educated or democratic). We get Peter Brimelow, a once-respected conservative voice who now runs the shrill anti-immigration website VDARE.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first British child born in North America. We get syndicated columnist Samuel Francis (widely considered Buchanan's personal ideologist of choice) who has argued earnestly for "imposing adequate fertility controls on nonwhites." These are not stupid men-indeed, they are extremely talented individuals-but they have become dismayingly obsessed in recent years with creating, to borrow a phrase from my colleague at the National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru, an "identity politics for white people."

Some answers we made at the time include

Peter Brimelow ("a once-respected conservative voice") on Goldberg of National Review (a once-conservative, now respected, magazine), Steve Sailer: Jonah Whales on VDARE.COM!, and Paul Gottfried:  Pope Jonah.

But really, all you need to know about Jonah Goldberg's conservatism is that nine years later, it's still appearing in the Los Angeles Times.

 

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