The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Freedom to Hate

Posted on | June 16, 2018 | 1 Comment

Phil Donahue debated Jared Taylor on MSNBC in 2003.

Jared Taylor won a court victory Thursday in California, when Judge Harold Kahn rejected Twitter’s motion to dismiss Taylor’s lawsuit claiming the social media giant acted illegally in banning the American Renaissance publisher, along with other “white nationalist” accounts:

Taylor claims Twitter permanently suspended accounts belonging to him and hundreds of other far-right users in December based solely on their political views and affiliations.
The judge described Taylor’s case as a “classic public interest lawsuit” and said it “goes to the heart of free speech principles that long precede our constitution,” according to a transcript of the hearing.
“Now, it may be speech that you and I don’t wish to enjoy, but that’s not germane to the determination of whether it’s public interest. Public interest doesn’t have a flavor of ideology to it; public interest is whether it benefits the public,” Kahn said. . . .
Taylor is a Yale-educated, self-described “race realist” who founded an Oakton, Virginia-based, tax-exempt nonprofit called the New Century Foundation. He operates American Renaissance, an online magazine that touts a philosophy that it’s “entirely normal” for whites to want to be a majority race.
Taylor’s lawyers argue access to Twitter is “essential for meaningful participation in modern-day American democracy.”
“At all times, Mr. Taylor has expressed his views with respect and civility,” they wrote in a court filing. “At no time did Mr. Taylor or American Renaissance engage in insults, threats, or harassment, nor did they ever encourage anyone else to engage in such activity.”

Permit me to vouch for Jared Taylor’s “respect and civility,” as I have known him for 20 years. He is remarkably well-mannered, which made an impression on me the first time I met him. He is fluent in multiple languages, having grown up in Japan, where his parents were Christian missionaries, and he engaged in postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne. He speaks with a noticeable formality, which at first struck me as stilted or artificial, but which I eventually realized was simply a matter of lifelong habit. As to Taylor’s “race realist” identification, he is not a David Duke-type personality. Taylor is not a conspiracy theorist or a hate-monger, but is instead devoted to calling attention to facts about race relations in America (and elsewhere) that the liberal media ignore.

Before there was Twitter or Facebook, before there was a blogosphere, before there was Breitbart or InfoWars or any other online venue for reporting facts about immigration and crime that the liberal media wanted to suppress, there was American Renaissance (AR), a small monthly magazine that was usually just 16 to 24 pages, but wow! AR was covering the problems related to immigration in Europe 15 years ago, before most Americans imagined how bad the situation had become. Indeed, it may be said, liberals might not have been so dumbfounded by the rise of Donald Trump and the so-called “alt-right” is they had paid attention to what Jared Taylor was publishing 15 or 20 years ago.

As I’ve told Taylor more than once, I disagree with some of his opinions and ideas about policy, but his mastery of facts is beyond dispute. Liberals are so eager to suppress Taylor by smearing him as a proponent of “hate” because they cannot stand the truth. One of his legendary exploits was in 2003, when Taylor was invited onto Phil Donahue’s MSNBC program and absolutely ran circles around Donahue. It was the biggest blowout since Georgia Tech crushed Cumberland 222-0. Taylor had spent more than a decade accumulating facts, and was thoroughly prepared to rebut Donahue’s arguments. This clearly flustered the liberal host, which caused Donahue to invite Taylor back for a rematch, and again Donahue suffered an embarrassing defeat.

What are the consequences of ignoring unpleasant facts, and basing public policy on wishful thinking? If some facts are deemed “racist,” and therefore excluded from discussions about issues like immigration, welfare, crime, education, etc., what will be the result? What problems will be caused by policies based on childish make-believe?

You can disagree with Jared Taylor’s opinions about race and public policy, but it is foolish to ignore the facts to which he calls attention.

“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself . . . [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson

There is no one with whom I agree 100% about everything. There are regular commenters here whom I consider friends and allies — people who’ve hit my tip jar to keep me going — who disagree strongly with me about all kinds of subjects. I have Catholic friends, but I’m against Catholicism, and I have gay friends, but I’m against homosexuality. Believe it or not, I even have friends who are Democrats!

Long before I ever imagined my career as a journalist, my teachers taught me that journalism is about facts — who, what, when, where, why and how. It was in defense of an unpopular cause — British soldiers accused of murdering innocent civilians in Boston — that John Adams famously said: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” As I argued in the case of Tommy Robinson (“Why Freedom of Speech Matters (And Why ‘Hate Speech’ Is Protected, Too),” May 31), the dangers of suppressing free speech are certainly not limited to issues of race:

What has happened . . . is that our institutions of higher education have been taken over by soi-disant “progressives” who have taught a generation of young Americans to believe that certain facts are “hate speech.” This problem has concerned me ever since I began researching radical feminism four years ago, and discovered how far academia has gone to enshrine Third Wave feminist “gender theory” as an Official Truth which no one on campus is permitted to criticize. . . .
The suppression of disagreement and criticism as “hate speech” on university campuses has had consequences far beyond academia.

The fact that radical feminist Julie Bindel was writing more than a decade ago about the same issues that got Tommy Robinson arrested, and that Bindel is banned from British university campuses because she is a critic of “gender theory,” should make intelligent people pause to think. What results from suppressing unpopular facts as “hate speech” is that the people who make the rules (on university campuses, on Twitter or Facebook, in newspaper offices or TV news studios) thereby create a bubble of unreality, an echo chamber of ideological conformity that excludes dissent and thereby gives rise to a cult mentality.

Once you stop drinking the liberal Kool-Aid, there is a danger that you might become a “far-right” extremist, and I’ve seen a few sad cases of people who got sucked into the gravitational vortex of the lunatic fringe. What I have tried to do is to protect the right flank, so to speak, of the larger conservative movement. There is an unfortunate “urge to purge” tendency on the Right, where respectable conservative intellectuals begin to care more about their respectability than they do about actually conserving anything. William F. Buckley Jr.’s purge of the John Birch Society in the 1960s has become an inspiration for some of Buckley’s would-be heirs (looking at you, Bill Kristol) who seem to believe that a successful political coalition can be built by a process of subtraction.

Welcome to the Trump Age, my friends. Say what you will about our President, he doesn’t care about “respectability.” He’s about winning.

My friend John Hoge has the transcript of the Taylor v. Twitter hearing, and I’m sure we’ll discuss this tonight on The Other Podcast.



 

Category: Neutral Objective Journalism, Racism

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One Response to “The Freedom to Hate”

  1. Sorta Blogless Sunday Pinup » Pirate's Cove
    June 17th, 2018 @ 8:58 am

    […] The Other McCain writes about the freedom to hate […]