Again, a rather intense, sometimes caustic conversation with the great Kevin Barrett. Enjoy.
A few days afterwards, Kevin told me that he had lost a few (he didn’t say how many) subscribers over this show. I took that as a sign that we were doing something right! I mean, if you never offend anybody, then… Kevin was pretty sanguine about it too, figured that if people didn’t like what we were saying, then that’s their problem.
In the private email, Kevin referred to certain people as “racist idiots”, and I don’t really disagree particularly. However, I do not completely agree, because my sense is that this is not really the core issue at hand. After all, what is “racism” finally? That one has various preconceived ideas about different groups of people? In that sense, who is not at least a little bit “racist”? (May he without sin cast the first stone.)
The problem is not so much “racism”, but that, for certain people, there is no longer such a thing as a purely factual question! Again, consider the following question:
Is there, by any reasonable definition, a “rape epidemic” taking place in Germany or Sweden?
Surely, the honest, truthful answer to the above question is the same for everybody! A characteristic of this “post-Truth” world is that purely factual questions no longer exist. All that matters is whether a narrative is ideologically useful to you or not.
A further irksome aspect of all of this is that I myself am not an advocate of open borders. In fact, I have quite a bit of sympathy for the ethno-nationalist position. Certainly, it is hard for me to see how large-scale immigration is at all in the interests of ordinary Europeans.
Nonetheless, people on the Unz Review, where my “Muslim Rape Army” piece first appeared, almost universally argued with me as if I was an advocate of open borders! Now, to have one’s own views misrepresented like this is frustrating and infuriating, but it is not really about me. (I have to remind myself of this occasionally.)
The real problem is that, with no respect for factual truth, where are we? In the specific case of immigration, frankly, as I see it, most of the stronger arguments — the hard-headed, pragmatic ones — are on the anti-immigration side. So there should be no need to make up imaginary rape epidemics to make one’s case!
In fact, the anti-immigration people end up discrediting themselves with this stuff. That is almost certainly by design. These people are falling into a trap that has been laid for them, but there seems to be no way of explaining this to them. At least, I haven’t found a way…
Start the discussion on the Heresy Central Forum