The Atlantic, Trayvon Martin, and John Derbyshire: Fake “Discussion Thread” for Ta-Nehisi Coates is a Rigged, Affirmative Action Echo Chamber

By Nicholas Stix

Ta-Nehisi Coates is what passes for a non-academic black intellectual in this country. I say, non-academic, because the academics are more bombastic. So, he is more literate than they are. He gets book deals, real magazine money, speaking fees, the whole nine yards. (It ain’t easy bein’ green … with envy!) And the academic sinecures will come, as the night follows the day.

His Atlantic bio reads,

Ta-Nehisi Coates- Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

[Coates writes, in the first person:] Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

* * *A Quick Word on John Derbyshire
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
April 7 2012, 2:21 p.m. ET114
The Atlantic

Let's not overthink this: John Derbyshire is a racist. Declaring such does not require an act of of mind-reading, it requires an act of Derbyshire-reading:

“I am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one, and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon, the way we are going.”

I guess it's admirable that Rich Lowry is taking time away from pondering why people think he's a bigot, to denounce Derbyshire. But 'Derb' told you what he was in 2003. And National Review continued to employ him. That's who they are.
What else is there?

[N.S.: That’s it. That is The Great Ta-Nehisi’s complete “refutation” of John Derbyshire.

Apparently, virtually everyone in the world but me thinks he is a wise man and a genius, The Great Ta-Nehisi, that is.

So as to avoid cherry-picking, I copied and pasted 11 consecutive reader comments.]

simonmd341 Today 05:06 PM

• Taki's magazine is a cesspool.
• 4 people liked this.
•
Junipermo Today 04:54 PM

• "Let's not overthink this: John Derbyshire is a racist."
• Best first line ever. Powerful, succinct, and undeniably true.
•
• 4 people liked this.
•
Between Two Worlds Today 04:47 PM

• Derb doesn't speak for me.
• Thank God.
•
• 1 person liked this.
•
MatterOverMind Today 04:31 PM

• John Derbyshire,
• "We are what we are, and that's the way it's going to be," so, ".... catch a fire, so you can get burnt!"
--Bob Marley.
•
rikyrah Today 04:23 PM

• Let's not overthink this: John Derbyshire is a racist
• tell me about it.
• that's the beginning, middle and end of the story.
•
• 14 people liked this.
•
JoshuaJasper Today 04:16 PM

• OK, I'm going to sugget you close this thread, TNC. Regulars, Hordites, and such, let's just not poke the trolls here.
• Please? Because we've got a buncha stormfront types banging on the door. Let's just leave them the hell alone, OK?
•
• 11 people liked this.
•
Celia Jones Today 04:18 PMin reply to JoshuaJasper

• Don't feed the trolls!
•
• 2 people liked this.
•
Ian Today 04:24 PMin reply to Celia Jones

• On the one hand, yeah. On the other, it's a rare occasion when the trolls' comments are indistinguishable from the subject of the post.
•
• 10 people liked this.
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Craig Today 04:18 PMin reply to JoshuaJasper

• My flaggin' finger is itchy today.
•
• 2 people liked this.
•
carlos the dwarf Today 04:29 PMin reply to Craig

• I haven't been this trigger-happy since that time I went duck hunting with Dick Cheney...
•
• 8 people liked this.
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Damon Poeter Today 04:12 PM

• Derb forgot to add Point No. 16 to his little 'talk': 'Kids, don't forget to throw on a pair of adult diapers when you give this talk to your own children someday, because I've shit and pissed myself a couple times just thinking about all these big, bad imaginary black people for the past hour!'

Not only does everyone think that The Great Ta-Nehisi is Solomonic in his wisdom, but they demand that apparently non-existent hordes of those who fail to appreciate His Greatness be either banished or ignored.

The thread is fake. The censors at The Atlantic deleted virtually every comment challenging The Great Ta-Nehisi or one of his devotees.

Meanwhile,

they shamelessly trolled Derbyshire’s thread at Taki’s Mag with some of the dumbest comments you’ll ever waste your time reading. Well, like the ones they posted at The Atlantic.

I responded to a merely dishonest remark by a Ta-Nehisian named Deborah:

Deborah Today 03:44 PM

• [Derbyshire quote, form 2003] “and those things are going to be illegal pretty soon”
• Can I point out that they still aren't, nine years later? And that we're still outlawing actions taken, not thoughts thought, like always, despite paranoid fantasies?

I responded, thusly:

Since the late 1990s, whites have been periodically arrested, and even railroaded into prison, for nothing more than speech, or symbolic expression protected by the First Amendment.

Brian Swetnam
Janice Barton
Jeremiah Munson
The Mizzou Two
James Lee Wallis Jr.
Brian Wallis
Tony L. Johnson

Three responses came, in rapid fire.

Deborah wrote, in response to nicholasstix:

Pulls up google. Puts in first name. Assumes all the LinkedIn people are not the ones intended.

Swetnam had a criminal record of racially and ethnically motivated crimes. [N.S.: No; Swetnam had a record of symbolic expression, protected under the First Amendment.] After he burned three crosses on the grounds of a school, explicitly as a threat of violence against the black students at the school (that's what cross burning means), he did jail time.

A burning cross on the lawn is a death threat. You burn one on my lawn, I don't say "Ah, I love the smell of free speech!"

[Deborah is simply lying. “A burning cross on the lawn is” not a death threat.

The blacks were engaging in actual, racially-motivated violence, not threats of same. She clearly supports some “right” of blacks to engage in racist violence, and then sophistically turns non-violent, symbolic expressions into “a threat of violence against the black students at the school.” Even within the terms of her sophistry, “threats of violence” still don’t match actual violence. She can’t even keep her lies straight.

And how is burning a cross on school property a threat of violence, but not burning the American flag?

If burning the flag is protected symbolic speech, then the proper response to someone burning a cross on school grounds is, indeed, “Ah, I love the smell of free speech!”

Ian wrote, in response to nicholasstix:

Burning crosses on school property in order to intimidate specific people (black students at that school) is not symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment. That's just the first name. Not going to trouble myself with the others.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-04-12/news/0004120218_1_bowie-conspiracy-montana

[Ian provided the link to the following article.

Man given 10-year term in Bowie cross-burning
April 12, 2000|BY A SUN STAFF WRITER

A 22-year-old man was sentenced to 10 years without parole in federal prison yesterday for his part in a cross-burning at Bowie High School in June 1997.

Lynne A. Battaglia, U.S. attorney for Maryland, said that Brian Swetnam of Bowie was convicted under federal civil rights, hate crime, and conspiracy statutes and sentenced in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt.

Swetnam pleaded guilty to the charges in February. Conviction carries a 10-year mandatory sentence.

Three other defendants -- Derek Schleicher of Bowie, Patrick Trainer of Troy, N.Y., and Robert Trainer of Montana -- have also pleaded guilty in the incident.
They have not yet been sentenced.

The conspiracy charges involved allegations that the defendants discussed various ways to avenge the assault of a white student at Bowie High School by an African-American.

[The proper response to Ian is the same as the one to Deborah.]

Deborah 04/07/2012 03:48 PMin reply to GN

• I assume the timing is to explain why anyone walking while black is asking for execution, and there's no point being upset about it.
• 19 people liked this.
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Guest 04/07/2012 04:08 PMin reply to Deborah

• Comment removed.

That “comment removed” is me! Here is what I said:

I would imagine that the timing had more to do with denying that blacks like Trayvon Martin have a license to kill non-blacks, or that whites or Asians have a duty to die, based on blacks’ whims.
 

Deborah wrote, in response to nicholasstix:

Dude, you seriously need to go look up whether it's Martin or Zimmerman that's dead. You seem really confused.

At 9:20, after reading the responses to my comments in my email, I returned to the thread at The Atlantic, only to find that it had been closed (circa 5:48 p.m.), only three-and-a-half hours after it had begun, and not only had my comments been removed, but the responses by Deborah and Ian to my list were removed, so that no one would be able to find out that white Americans were indeed being arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned, based merely on their thoughts. The censors left Deborah’s response to my second censored comment up, since that made her look good, without entailing any exchange of contrary information or opinion.

In order to deceive the public into thinking that the comments left standing represented the actual response to The Great Ta-Nehisi, The Atlantic’s censors left one cleanly dissenting view and one half-way dissenting view up, the latter of whose author sandwiched his dissent with attacks on Derbyshire and the entire history of National Review, respectively, perhaps to sidestep the censor’s itchy delete finger.

549106 Today 02:48 PM

• I'll grant that his comments are despicable and that he's an unpleasant human being, but are we protesting him economically ( keeping in mind that a boycott of a far right vanity-project isn't going to change much, since it's already not based on any kind of profit model) or are we seeking to restrict freedom of speech and opinion? Because if it's the latter, as someone with a basic respect for the constitution, I have to stand completely with his right to have his views published by like-minded people.
• But why is everyone creating such a scandal out of this, as if the national review is decent? Since when was the National Review a respectable publication? Buckley came out in favor of Jim Crow and said that whites had the right to maintain cultural and political dominance even in places where they weren't numerically superior because they were "more advanced." Why are all the people who preach moderation and bipartisanship suddenly claiming this is beyond the pale when the whole thing has been patently reactionary from the beginning?


LabanTall Today 05:32 PM

• OK, so he's got a label on him, self-pinned then hammered firmly into place by you. But I presume he writes about more than himself. Is what he writes true or insightful ?
• And btw, what's this with one politics writer calling for another to be sacked? Is this the level of debate in the Land of the Free?

[The Great Ta-Nehisi or one of his censors responded by shutting down the thread minutes later.]

The Great Ta-Nehisi responded to Mr. Sandwich with a non-response.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Today 02:51 PMin reply to 549106

• I'll grant that his comments are despicable and that he's an unpleasant human being, but are we protesting him economically ( keeping in mind that a boycott of a far right vanity-project isn't going to change much, since it's already not based on any kind of profit model) or are we seeking to restrict freedom of speech and opinion?
• Don't make vague critiques. Do you see anyone suggesting the latter? If so, address them directly. Otherwise, you're baiting a flame-war. Specify. Specify. Specify.
• 40 people liked this.

I don’t see how Mr. Sandwich was being vague. The Great Ta-Nehisi was simply being dishonest.

Since I am blocked from posting this at The Atlantic, I must ask The Great Ta-Nehisi from my perch:

Are you such a delicate, vulnerable flower, that you cannot withstand the slightest breeze of disagreement. Do you require idolatry?