Sohrab Ahmari: "Pseudo-Scholars and the Rise of the Barbarian Right"

First, this is a real problem. 

   I think we all knew it was coming--and now it's basically here. The forces of crazy are on the rise on the right. This always seemed to me to be a more-or-less inevitable consequence of the crazification of the left (which, itself, could, for all I know, be, in part (though certainly not entirely) a reaction to some previous crazy on the right).

   Carlson himself is well along a trajectory that now seems pretty familiar: start by opposing the politically correct lunacy on the postpostmodern progressive left...end up mired in the foetid* heart of the wingnut fever swamps.

   Carlson, IMO, did some solid work for awhile there. But then he started asserting that the government had UFOs and the CIA killed JFK--and he said it all with the same air of bemused certainty (or whatever that tone of his is). Making us all feel (or maybe be) stupid for having listened to him at all...

   Well, that's probably not right. He was right about a lot...until he wasn't...

   How much of that is Carlson's fault, and how much of it is the seemingly inevitable corruption an attentive and approving audience brings, I don't know.

   Jeez, I used to listen to Rachel Maddow if you can believe that. Though some say she's at the end of the oppositetrajectory. So maybe she was good at one point. I expect I was just stupid. She's just a loon. And an idiot.

  Anyway: yes, there are dark forces arising on the right. For example, I see some pretty heinous racism and sexism on some of the rightier sites (in the comments--not, so far, in the actual posts). Harris brought that shit out pretty much immediately. It really was like flipping a switch.

  And now antisemitism, of course.

  That's just all over the place now.

   Which, I guess, means it was in there all along, just hidden.

   Everybody's been alarmed about antisemitism on the left. Me too. But that's a lot harder to separate out from antizionism. The stuff on the right is more straightforward (though also, sometimes, hard to distinguish from anti-leftism).

   That's, as we'd say back home, a whole nuther thing that needs people's attention. But not right now. (Some righties like to point out that there are a lot of Jewish lefties. It does seem that way. But I'd guess, there are a lot of Jewish leftists just because there are a lot of Jewish intellectuals, and leftism is the unofficial religion-substitute of the left. There are a lot of Jewish conservative intellectuals, too. Also libertarian ones. But anyway.)

Second though: Ahmari throws out the baby with the bath water, and accuses Steve Sailer of being a racist and--somehow--a eugenicist. Well, the somehow is: by linking to an Atlantic piece. And, you know, The Atlantic...

   Sailer is not a racist. And not a eugenicist. The left likes to make fun of the right's "noticing" and "just asking questions" tropes. But often they are just noticing and asking questions. Noticing and asking questions are good things. Sailer is right about what Ahmari is criticizing him about: there are almost certainly racial IQ differences. This isn't some crackpot "scientific racism" as the left likes to call it. It is a conclusion of cognitive psychology--and a pretty well-established one. You can look it up. I suggest just going right to Charles Murray's Facing Reality. We don't have to like it, but we have to recognize it.** And this is where the leftist crazy comes in: the politically correct denial of scientific conclusions. Almost inevitably followed by the PC insistence that those conclusions be suppressed or even changed to cover up the unpleasant truth. There are also racial differences in violent crime rates. Again, a well-established (social) scientific conclusion. And neither of these differences go away if you control for things like poverty.

   So, yeah. There's cause for concern about what's happening on the right. And this Cooper guy seems like about par for that particular course. Now, we can imagine a sane person arguing that Soviet communism was worse than Nazism, and that it would have been less bad to have allied with the Nazis over the commies. The latter killed even more people than the former did. But that doesn't sound like what he's arguing--and I don't have the heart to listen to read his stuff or listen to the interview. My bad, I guess. If he really does argue that 

...the Nazi takeover of France—which resulted in the deportation of 75,000 Jews to concentration and death camps—“was infinitely preferable in virtually every way” [to] the admittedly offensive drag queen “Last Supper” staged at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July.

...well, that's just nuts.

Here's the great Victor Davis Hanson stomping on this BS.

*That British 'o' in there seems it seem a lot more fetid to me.

** I've said this before, but: we were able to avoid this issue for a long time. There was a kind of gentleman's agreement to just not talk about it in anything like public venues. But, for at least a decade, the progressive left has accepted CRT and related crackpottery/pseudoscience--including the view that "systemic" racism is the only possible explanation for the racial differences we observe (e.g. the academic achievement gap, the wealth gap, etc.). Well, that's just utter bullshit. x is the only possible explanation for y is usually bullshit in public policy debates. Not only is racism not the only possible explanation for the relevant gaps, it's not anywhere near the best explanation we have. It's an explanation advanced for political reasons by pseudoscholars in the weaker regions of academia. And by people who just can't face the facts.  And we have an actually scientific explanation available.

   So, anyway: now that the left is using the systemic-racism-is-the-only-possible-explanation line to wreak havoc on the country, the gentleman's agreement aforementioned is null and void. And we are, in fact, obligated to state the unpleasant truths in question.