You’re absolutely correct. I was merely making a comment about the broader discussion. If you hope to have a fruitful discussion, then I was suggesting avoiding that angle.

You would have no worry of that from me. I simply don’t do such things. I should also point out that this isn’t “evidences for why Pastor Wilson is racist.” As I was explicit from the beginning and meant honestly, it is evidences for how Pastor Wilson has been culpable in some people coming to think he is racist. Pastor Wilson’s claim was that his exegesis of Philemon gets him called a racist. My response is that that’s not an accurate or honest claim, but that it is clearly his controversial statements on race that has drawn people’s ire. I… Read more »

You are free to believe that. You are also free to dialogue. I have always engaged, I explain my own views honestly and completely, I respond directly to questions and I don’t shut any honest debate partners down. If you have a specific and helpful critique of something I’ve actually said, feel free to share.

Jonathan,

I give up. Attempting to have a back and forth with Mr. Wilson’s followers is akin to walking in fun house of mirrors, minus the fun. They seem to be incapable of staying on point or making a cogent argument. It’s a good thing for Mr. Wilson that they are not his official apologists.

Good luck and God bless you.

Yup. Apparently the way to prove that Pastor Wilson is in the right on this subject is to ignore everything being said in order to bring up a completely unrelated discussion from a month ago. By doing some they claim they will be able to prove….my propensity to change the topic.

How does one not see the irony.

I tend to assume there is a silent lurking contingent of fair-minded people who benefit from the information.

I have received emails in the past expressing affinity for my statements when said person did not reply in the thread. Actually, I’ve sent such emails too.

OKR,

Probably. But it’s like a train wreck and I just can’t help looking.

Link us then. I’ll be waiting.

What you read as shrieking, others read as a point by point response to Mr. Wilson’s apparent confusion regarding black and white folks reticence to embrace him and his avowed beliefs on racial issues.

Notice how he still hasn’t linked any evidence to his claim that he has responded to these points before. His entire contribution to this thread has been three insults and then a quixotic comment where he points out that some Black people supported George Wallace after he repented of his racism.

Okay, fine. Here’s one by way of example. Jonathan said “When you say that slavery was “so pleasant an experience for the majority” or “a life of plenty and simple pleasures”, and then disparage all that Black people did before and since, people have a right to be upset.” First, these are decontexualized quotes that ignore what Wilson has actually said about slavery, many times: that it was evil practiced by a culture that should have known better. Second, Wilson has not disparaged all that Black people did before and since. That is simply false, or at best a wild… Read more »

OKR,

It’s not becoming of you to disparage Jonathan simply because he has constructed an argument in this thread when you haven’t. Potshots are cheap shots.

Could you cite, in context, what Mr. Wilson has actually written about slavery that refutes Jonathan’s assertions? It would make your’s more credible. Do you deny that Mr. Wilson has defended, in writing, southern chattel slavery? I’m sure there are such people (I’ve met them) and they are both black and white. Do you deny that? So why single out black folk as the ones who play the perpetual victim? Do you deny that chattel slavery, the rise of the KKK in the post civil war south, thousands of lynchings, segregation, and black voter suppression through Jim Crow laws had… Read more »

See, this is what I mean. Among many ludicrous assertions, Jonathan objected to a claim that affirmative action, by providing an incentive for victimhood, encourages people to who are not real victims to fake it. But the fact is obvious, effectively beyond discussion. Jonathan’s objection is absurd. You asked for examples of problems with his list, and I point this out. You respond with a list of non-sequiturs. “Has Wilson defended southern chattel slavery in writing?” “Are there not white people whom Wilson could have attacked as well?” I am not going to answer your further challenges, because I already… Read more »

Among many ludicrous assertions, Jonathan objected to a claim that affirmative action, by providing an incentive for victimhood, encourages people to who are not real victims to fake it.

That doesn’t make any sense. That’s neither what Pastor Wilson said, nor what I objected to, nor how affirmative action works at all.

You said “You mock the ongoing racism that Black people face, claiming that there are Black people who, “play the perpetual victim even though they have never experienced anything worse than a two-day delay in their most recent affirmative action promotion.”’ Here you say it is wrong and insulting to imagine 1) a black person 2) pretending that he is a victim when he is not, 3) and has been led to do so by the existence of programs and an ideology that caters and nurtures that idea. That’s how I summarized your claim. I don’t want to misquote you.… Read more »

Pastor Wilson’s actual claim was: 1. Said person has never been victimized by racism in their entire experience 2. Said person is not just claiming victimhood this one time, but does it perpetually, even though they never experienced it 3. Suggests that this isn’t any isolated incident but a common thing that describes a number of Black people In terms of your c point, I didn’t interpret that from Pastor Wilson’s writing. I take him mentioning Affirmative Action just to mock the Black person in question as they were actually advantaged rather than being discriminated against. I didn’t see where… Read more »

Jonathan, your restatement doesn’t seem very far from mine. You are strawmanning a little bit by stating things absolute terms – never ever ever been victimized, perpetually, et cetera. But if you leave aside hyperbole, it seems eminently reasonable to concede that since “gaming the system” is a thing people are naturally inclined to do, and since the current discourse around racism offers tremendous rewards to black people on the basis of their self-diagnosed victimhood, we should naturally expect some non-trivial quantity of black people to exaggerate their experience of racism, or attribute misfortune (or their own bad behavior) to… Read more »

I agree that there is a ton of leeway in the term “perpetually”. I was considering that earlier and there is obviously no way of coming to agreement on what it should mean. I don’t know any Black person who I feel lives that way, but it could be taken to mean a lot of different things. However, there is far less leeway in Pastor Wilson’s other accusation. He is clearly stating that the Black people he is referring to have never faced any sort of real discrimination in their lives. He is clearly saying that they have no right… Read more »

Jonathan, you said that “the surface meaning of his statement was that many Black people have never faced any real discrimination and yet act like perpetual victims anyway. That is clearly what he is saying in a straightforward manner, and that is what I took issue with.” More or less, yes. I would say “act like victims disproportionate to their actual sufferings”, because who among us has not suffered unfairness or hardship? The point is that racialized categories reward a certain category of victimhood. And without quibbling about numbers, I am saying that his statement is clearly true. One can… Read more »

I’ve only read a few of Coates’s essays here and there, but I struggle to imagine how you can possibly call him a “perpetual victim”. He speaks positively about his upbringing. I’ve seen him say great things about the college he attended and the opportunities he’s gotten in his career. I haven’t read any of his books, but you seem to be saying that even in his memoir he doesn’t “exaggerate his experiences of racism” or “fake it”, as you claimed Black people would do in this system. I don’t know a ton about him (I haven’t read any of… Read more »

You think TNC got a Genius Award and was asked to write Black Panther simply based on talent?

Coates likely got a MacArthur Grant because the year before he wrote literally the most widely read and widely discussed article in The Atlantic’s 160-year history. You can’t fake readership. When The Case for Reparations was published, more people read it that day than had ever read anything on The Atlantic. You can disagree with him but you can’t deny that it was objective a public sensation. And the bar for a MacArthur Grant isn’t amazingly high – the other writers who got them in the last five years were Donald Antrim, Annie Baker, Maggie Nelson, Laruren Redniss, Ben Lerner,… Read more »

The amount of straining farinata was already doing in order to cast aspersions on a successful Black man’s accomplishments defied credulity, but OKR, what is your agenda here? You didn’t have any problem with farinata’s unproven and mean-spirited claims about Coates. But I make an accurate statement about the readership of an article and you go into attack mode. This is especially obnoxious because people invariably complain whenever I write a long, detailed comment with strong supporting evidence. You yourself suggested that it’s a waste of time. Yet if I save time and write a concise comment assuming that public… Read more »

These guys exhibit little interest in pursuing the truth if it doesn’t line up with their already arrived at positions. Read a 15,000 word article about race in America, especially a black man’s? Not going to happen.

Still waiting on Mr. Wilson’s response.

Let’s remember that the main statement that is being defended in this conversation is the claim that there are Black people who, “play the perpetual victim even though they have never experienced anything worse than a two-day delay in their most recent affirmative action promotion.”’ Then you complain that my writing is what is full of hyperbole. Those issues run up and down this conversation. I complain about a statement of Wilson’s, and someone says, “no, that statement is totally accurate, just with some hyperbole.” I make an accurate claim in response to said statement, and now it’s, “I’m not… Read more »

You say you’re surprised that Coates affected my thinking. Yet I already demonstrated to you that David Brooks, a widely read conservative author who has obviously put a ton of thought into these issues already, himself had his position dramatically changed due to Coates’s writing. In fact, Coates’s writing shifted the entire discussion of the issue, as several of the articles I cited pointed out. Why don’t any of those citations affect how you view the power of what he wrote? So far as your ongoing critique of me goes, do you believe that you yourself have demonstrated willingness to… Read more »

I believe there is no likelihood of worthwhile discussion of the issues at hand when there is a failure to recognize the possibility of one’s own bias or incorrect beliefs. But the supposed “bias or incorrect belief” was that Ta-Nahisi Coates wrote an incredibly popular, influential article in 2014 that attracted him an enormous deal of attention. So much so that it was the most-read online article ever for The Atlantic, which quite obviously would make it the most read article overall considering that the magazine’s online circulation is orders of magnitude higher than its print circulation. None of that… Read more »

David Brooks is generally referred to as a conservative, as even your link where he self-claims moderate says. And the same wikipedia article you quoted says that David Brooks has worked for the National Review, the Hoover Institute, the Wall Street Journal, and as the editor of a book called The New Conservative Writing. He’s been known as a conservative his entire career, albeit certainly a moderate one. The quote where you refer to him being a liberal before “coming to his senses” refers to when he was a TEENAGER, he then went on to work for Buckley (on Buckley’s… Read more »

I doubt it has gained any traction (I don’t really follow closely) for the obvious reason that working towards solutions for the more impoverished subset of Americans is virtually never a legislative priority for either party in this country. Both parties tend to serve the interests of their most well-heeled contingents, and will only work on “justice issues for the poor” or whatever you wish to call them when their wealthier supporters also demand it. Coates essay has been part of a movement that has pulled the idea from something not even imaginable on the table, something with not even… Read more »

Agreed, but I don’t see any way in the current political climate that they won’t be replaced with more swamp creatures. Under current campaign finance law and lobbying rules, it’s just gonna be a revolving door. There are a few relatively “noble” members of each party who manage to squeak out an election in the right district or state, but that’s not the norm.

One more reason that I believe all the real solutions are going to come down to a an individual/community/church level, not via the federal or state governments.

First, these are decontexualized quotes that ignore what Wilson has actually said about slavery, many times: that it was evil practiced by a culture that should have known better. farinata, I was not attempting to write out everything that Pastor Wilson has said about all these different subjects. I was focusing on the specifically problematic things that he had said. Those statements he made were false and it was irresponsible for him to make them regardless of what other things he also happens to have said. Second, Wilson has not disparaged all that Black people did before and since. He… Read more »

So you’re going to stand behind your claim that affirmative action does not encourage victimhood over ever-more-trifling offenses? That it does not incentivize Black people to regard themselves as victims instead of taking responsibility for their own lives and circumstances? That, these incentives being obviously present in the system, no Black folks take advantage of them? Sauce for the goose – if you point out I don’t know anybody’s motives, I counter that neither do you. But people are, in the main, sinful, and prone to take advantage where they can can. I find altogether baffling your insistence that this… Read more »

While that wasn’t my claim, I’m fine with making it. I don’t think affirmative action has ever been that important a driver of people’s inner lives at all. What do you think affirmative action is? When do you think it started, and do you believe there’s been a dramatic change in the inner and outer lives of Black people in that quite concrete time? Also, since you think that affirmative action is such an overwhelming psychological force, when there was far, far strongly affirmative action for White people (let’s say from 1865 to 1965 at the very least), how do… Read more »

It was your claim. You said (of Wilson) “You mock the ongoing racism that Black people face, claiming that there are Black people who, “play the perpetual victim even though they have never experienced anything worse than a two-day delay in their most recent affirmative action promotion.”’ My point is that such people can be expected to exist in any system of preferences, and in fact do exist in the system of racial preferences called “affirmative action.” Your objection is groundless. But rather than retracting the claim, you now want to change the subject to white people. And frankly, I… Read more »

Like I said above, I think you’re making Wilson’s mention of affirmative action at the end of the statement carry far too much water. You’ve turned it into the driving point of the entire statement when there’s no evidence Wilson intended it as such. So far as your claims that I’m changing the subject, you made what you claimed to be a universal principle and I’m pointing out that that’s hogwash. You suggested that a tiny preference like Affirmative Action, which only affects a small minority of Black people, by basic principle would “incentivize Black people to regard themselves as… Read more »

No, he’s turned it into the driving point of his objection. His objection to what though? I was listing statements from Pastor Wilson that I find problematic. As I said directly, I felt that that statement mocked the ongoing racism that people face as Pastor Wilson was attacking Black people who he claimed had never had the slightest experience of discrimination, but only advantages. He wants to ignore my objection, and keeps trying to make the statement about something else entirely. Do you not see how he has ignored the initial objection? Recently, as an example, we were having a… Read more »

Just in that same conversation, I had simply asked to what immigration policies you were referring to, and you dumped an afternoon’s worth of work on my lap and were offended that I didn’t immediately set to disproving them to defend the position you’d imagined I’d taken. You asked which positions I was referring to, and I listed 22 of them. When you claimed that conservatives objected to nearly all of them but offered no examples whatsoever, I chose the 5 I felt most important and asked you to provide evidence supporting the claim that conservatives were against any of… Read more »

The universal principle I have in view is that people follow incentives. It’s nearly a tautology. If your social structure rewards something, you get more of it. So if you arrange the social carrots and sticks such that victimhood is valuable, you will see a lot of marginal cases deciding that yes, his really was victimized by racism that time a white lady stepped on his foot. If you disagree with that principle, I am not sure that we have anything further to discuss. I have never represented that white slaveholding – or any slaveholding – was good for anyone.… Read more »

But Affirmative Action doesn’t incentivize individuals to claim personal victimhood. It’s simply not how the program works – it is not based on one’s personal experience of victimhood. I keep repeating that and it feels like I’m talking to a brick wall. And whether or not you have that principle in view, it speaks nothing to the question of whether Black persons in American society will have experiences of discrimination or not. And I agree with what you say of slaveholding encouraging tyranny. One of many reasons why I think Pastor Wilson’s claims of the great positives of Southern slaveholding… Read more »

Briefly: “Affirmative Action doesn’t incentivize individuals to claim personal victimhood.” Yes, it clearly does. It’s an entire structure dedicated to the proposition that nothing is fair for black people. That they cannot study as well as the white kids, that they cannot prepare for tests or write or speak in an organized, coherent fashion, and that these discrepancies are the fault of white society at large, which therefore owes them (in the example with which I am most familiar) admission to college on an easier basis. Are you really trying to say that this system doesn’t encourage anyone to feel… Read more »

Once again, Affirmative Action did not even exist until Nixon, affects a relatively small number of people and is a relatively minor part of most of their lives. The actual historical experiences of slavery, segregation, discrimination, poverty, poor schools, etc. are far more consequential in affecting how Black people feel about their experience and opportunities than any program. You’re suggesting, for example, that the vast majority of Black people can be stuck in terrible schools, schools so bad that according to Pastor Wilson they should all be shut down, but that being stuck in a horrific school won’t affect how… Read more »

Actually, JP Stewart, our comments and responses have been graciously solicited by none other than the proprietor of this site. You certainly don’t have to like them, but that’s just the way it is.

Jill, It may be a painfully accurate diagnosis, but those who do it do so for rhetorical reasons. The problem with this conversation is that the Left is not trying to find truth and provide solutions. They are trying to rhetorically bully people into being quiet. I was having a discussion about this the other with a member of my church, and after critiquing a point from them, the response I got was: “Well, that is exactly what you think, because you are white and privileged.” This is a logical fallacy of the highest proportions, but what it does it… Read more »

Since that’s a quote from early in his career, though never retracted, it’d be good to bookend it with something more recent. For anyone who is unfamiliar with what Black Lives Matter is and how they compare to the Ku Klux Klan, here is a helpful introduction. (For those who care, Conor is a right-leaning libertarian and is white.) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/drawing-distinctions-antifa-the-alt-right-and-black-lives-matter/538320/ Then there is Black Lives Matter. After spending a lot of time reading and reporting about the movement, I understand its primary end to be stopping unjust killings by police officers; some of its members have broader agendas, like economic… Read more »

Since that’s a quote from early in his career, though never retracted, it’d be good to bookend it with something more recent. For anyone who is unfamiliar with what Black Lives Matter is and how they compare to the Ku Klux Klan, here is a helpful introduction. (For those who care, Conor is a right-leaning libertarian and is white.) https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/drawing-distinctions-antifa-the-alt-right-and-black-lives-matter/538320/ Then there is Black Lives Matter. After spending a lot of time reading and reporting about the movement, I understand its primary end to be stopping unjust killings by police officers; some of its members have broader agendas, like economic… Read more »

The problem with Jonathan is that his vendetta against Wilson consists of quote mining him while ignoring everything else Wilson has actually said about race, and against racial vainglory and malice. Jonathan has flatly ignored the Wilson’s accounts of their own motives and has directly accused the Wilsons of racist motives and desires, applying his own confirmation bias and guilt-by-association logic.

That is a lie, as I have already said directly in this conversation, “I believe that Pastor Wilson thinks racism is wrong.”

Earlier this year, Jonathan made a streak of accusations of alleged racial motives of Jim Wilson, and proceeded to assign guilt by association to Doug Wilson No, that is an absolute lie and almost the exact opposite of what happened. I caught you lying in that very thread, where you had to delete words out of the middle of multiple sentences to give the impression that I was saying the exact opposite thing as what the full sentences actually said. My EXPLICIT argument the entire time was that it was never, ever right to attribute a father’s actions to the… Read more »

This is the statement Katecho “quoted” of me in that thread to claim that I had called Pastor Wilson’s father a White Supremacist and assigned guilt-by-association to Pastor Wilson: Jonathan originally asserted that: “Wilson’s father was sending his children to Whites-only schools … obviously Wilson’s father can be labeled a “White Supremacist” for being actively involved in segregation, right? … never giving proper credit to his father’s own actions of willingly participating in a White Supremacist movement, right? And this is the actual series of quotes I made leading up to what Katecho deleted parts from: Similarly to what I… Read more »

Katecho, is your position that anyone who willingly participates in a white supremacist system must be a racist? Because that’s the only way your logic makes sense. But that’s not my position, nor is it Pastor Wilson’s position. In fact, the ONLY reason that conversation even happened was because I was rebuking that sort of position. Once again, the entire point I started that conversation with was: 1. Children can NOT be held responsible for the actions of their fathers. 2. You can NOT call someone a white supremacist just because they participated in Southern Segregation, just like you can… Read more »

I have never declared that the Confederate flag is “inherently and exclusively racist”, that doesn’t even make sense to describe a physical object that way. The Confederate flag celebrates an objectively racist event, the choice of a subset of US states to withdraw from the union in an attempt to permanently preserve slavery. However, someone can choose to fly the Confederate flag, or support the Confederate flag or the Confederate cause, for any number of reasons. This has always been my consistent position. People should recognize both that people fly the Confederate flag for many reasons, often ones that are… Read more »

False. , Jonathan holds that waving a Confederate flag celebrates an inescapably racist event False. The Confederate flag was literally created in honor of a racist event. Yet many people who fly the flag do not themselves have racist reasons for flying it. Can you really not parse the difference? If Jonathan actually believed that people can fly a Confederate flag for many reasons, including reasons that are not a celebration of racism, then why doesn’t he stop berating Wilson about the flag and go educate those other people who are being falsely instructed that they should be triggered by… Read more »

The Old South was more than just slavery, but people aren’t flying those other flags of the Old South. They are specifically flying the battle flag that was created when the South seceded in order to indefinitely preserve slavery and white supremacy, a flag that did not exist before secession and that was generally not flown after secession except in war memorials and veteran’s events. Wider use of the Confederate Battle Flag in general society began as a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. The third iteration of the KKK that began in the 1940s began using the Confederate Battle… Read more »

I’m beginning to wonder if you actually have difficulty parsing sentences correctly, and thus your repeated misinterpretations of my positions are not intentional but simply unavoidable. Let’s go back to my original argument, the very first thing I said. Someone refused to read a Ta-Nahisi Coates essay because they declared his father was once in the Black Panthers, therefore he is a Black Supremacist. I said that you can’t declare someone a Black Supremacist just because they’re in the Black Panthers, just like you can’t declare someone a White Supremacist just because they willingly participated in Southern Segregation. Then I… Read more »

Did you just try to equate voluntary association and defense of an organization with ascribing a father’s sins to the son? This conversation is a waste of time. Literally everything else you said in those paragraphs, including your absolutely false claims that I ascribed “racist motives” and “racist motivations”, was clearly rebuked above. And you still haven’t apologized for your original attack, where you tried to trick people into thinking that my position was literally the opposite of my stated position by deleting parts of multiple sentences rather than giving the full quote. I already posted that one at the… Read more »

Don’t you just love it when someone calls you out for making assertions then in the next several paragraphs they do the same? You really shouldn’t waste your time on these folks. Vendetta indeed! Exhibit A Katecho is the mistress of the fun house of mirrors. Shoulder-to-shoulder racial community in the old south? Great Auntie’s nostalgia aside, that’s nothing but a bunch of claptrap. If that’s what passes as American history in her homeschool curriculum, then it’s no wonder she has no idea what she’s talking about. It was the rare exceptions that proved the rule. Many of those exceptions… Read more »

He even said, “Jonathan has flatly ignored the Wilson’s accounts of their own motives”….and then repeated that slander about me while flatly ignoring not just my accounts of my own motives but the plain meaning of the original words. I don’t get it. It’s not an argument that could hold weight with anyone unless they hated me so much that they were totally blind to what I actually said. Even in the original thread when I was arguing with multiple other people, Katecho’s claims about me weren’t getting any traction. Why is he doing it here? Who does he think… Read more »

Oh, she’s a he? My bad.

What a self-deceptive claim. You repeatedly accuse me of numerous sins and demand my repentance, and then cast yourself as a “defender” and I’m the evil “accuser”. Do you not see your own attacks on me, attacks where repeatedly bring up months-old threads and make false claims, as obvious accusations? And in fact, who started the accusations? “Let’s bring it down to the present. How many blacks voted for Obama, defender of the current genocide being perpetrated against black children as we speak? How many woke faculty members at Southern voted for Barack “Partial Birth” Obama? Has anybody even asked?… Read more »

Agreed. It would be impossible for a Black person to support either major party without extending a great deal of forgiveness. Sadly, many feel they are stuck with whichever party has done the least to overtly attract people who hate them recently.

I think you forgot where you were posting. In Douglas Wilson’s worldview, the Confederate Democrats were the heroes who demonstrated true Christian morality, and the Republicans under Lincoln were tyrants and Republican abolitionists were the enemies of God. Pastor Wilson declares himself “unreconstructed” as a direct rebuke of the original Republican agenda. It appears you must agree with me in denouncing Pastor Wilson’s position? And with the George Wallace you denounce, 96% of White Alabama voters were backing his Democratic campaign in 1964. That’s when the Greatest Generation was voting, well within living memory. If Democrats were really as bad… Read more »

One wonders why quite a number of folks appear to have only a sketchy understanding of American history. I thought this was the classical education homeschooled crowd. But maybe therein lies the problem. Isn’t Rushdoony their patron saint of history. That would explain a lot.

A poor understanding of history isn’t the greatest problem, as that can always be corrected easily. The deliberate warping of history to fit one’s agenda is a much more serious issue.

I have no doubt that FP is well-aware that racism has existed in both parties, and that the party operating as most attractive to white racists has shifted in living memory. I am only confused about whether he considers himself a Christian, and if so, with what intention he posts the things he does here.

I’m pretty sure Doug isn’t a Democrat. But he supports the Democrats of the 1800s and much of the 1900s and says it is they who had a better relationship with Black people. While you claim the party of racism has never changed. So clearly you are at significant odds there. What little racism there is in the Republican party does not hold a candle to the racism of the Democrat party. Trying to argue otherwise is a denial of facts. The party most attractive to any racist, white or otherwise, has never changed. That’s so incredibly at odds with… Read more »

And to bring it back full circle in an aesthetically pleasing way… In Birmingham they love the Gov’nor, boo-boo-boo Now we all did what we could do That is of course Lynyrd Skynyrd speaking with disdain about segregationist George Wallace….in 1973….just months after those same racist White Birmingham residents (by your own accusation) had just voted overwhelmingly to reelect Richard Nixon. In Alabama, Wallace supporters and Nixon supporters were the exact same people at the exact same moment in time. There goes any prayer you had of even pretending you that believe the white racists who voted for Democrats in… Read more »

We’ve been over this. Wallace was a Democrat. If you’d bother to delve further into your own quotes, you’d discover that the main point Atwater was making is that race is no longer a major issue in Southern elections. By the time 1968 rolled around, there were other, more pressing issues such as the Vietnam war and the related anti-war movement. Except that Wallace also won landslides in Alabama in 1968 and 1970 while running explicitly anti-Black ads, which I’ve already quoted. Of course, in your simple mind, racists will always be racist, are only white, and will never change.… Read more »

At this point I’m wondering if you’re a parody account. Claiming that the actual RNC chairman at the time is a “has-been”, claiming that’s you don’t know who another prominent RNC chairman or Bush’s campaign chair are and therefore they don’t matter, and dismissing the things Phillips said about Republican strategy at the very moment he was leading that strategy just because 20 years later he went for the other party? And your list…you consider things like approving a Rosa Parks day or having a couple member states in a congressional caucus or having a judge support an integration decision… Read more »

So your argument is now that the frontmen of Republican strategy in 1969, 1970, 1981, 2005, and 2010 are not relevant because either you haven’t heard of them, or because they started helping Democrats 20 years later, or because they’re a “has-been”. (I am still perplexed how the actual RNC chairman can be a has-been while he is in office as such, just one year from his initial election, but you never did argue honestly.) And I’m supposedly biased for agreeing with what Nixon’s head strategist, Bush’s campaign chair, and multiple in-office Republican National Committee chairmen explicitly confirmed publicly. As… Read more »

I think you’re beginning to win him over!

When the person in charge of Republican strategy describes what that Republican strategy is, that’s not an appeal to authority, that’s witness testimony. And when four of the suspects confess to a crime, but there are a couple others involved who deny it or give excuses, which one are you likely to believe? Hmmm…. Where did you agree to that when you weren’t downplaying it? In my very first response to you bringing up racist Democrats, when I said, “Agreed. It would be impossible for a Black person to support either major party without extending a great deal of forgiveness.… Read more »

You’re clearly not gonna budge anywhere, on this, so I’ll just end with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy And I already proved to you that those Dixiecrats switched to Republican – Nixon’s three biggest wins in 1972 were in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia – three of the same states that had voted for George Wallace in 1968. He got around 90% of the White vote in each of those states, and that happens to be just after his own campaign strategist Kevin Phillips said in a PUBLISHED BOOK in 1969 and in a PUBLIC INTERVIEW in 1970 that they were now planning to use… Read more »

Now I know way more about the song than I ever cared.

I mean, it is interesting, yes, and thanks, but not every comment merits a long serious kind of response, is what I’m saying.

I mean, I could just drop a one-line insult like several of our fellow commenters prefer, but heck, it only takes seconds to read a paragraph and it’s always nice to learn something.

JohnM, instead of complaining, you should be thanking Jonathan for the history lesson you never received in school.

It wasn’t history when I was in school.

A “thanks” followed by the assertion that I should not have done what I was being thanked for is faint praise indeed.

Because if I make any assertion at all in a comment, even assuming something obvious like, “online articles read by tens of millions have a higher readership than print-only articles with a circulation of just a few hundred thousand”, without providing copious proofs of every facet of the assertion, I’ll be called out for it.

Jonathan, no, you won’t be called out for failing to present *copious* proofs (or “proofs”) of *every facet* of the assertion. Is fear that you will be the reason you do it all the time?

Certainly some people may demand evidence. Some people, as you know, will dismiss any evidence you offer, in which case piling it on won’t change anything. Sometimes people will reasonably dispute that what you present amounts to proof, in which case multiple links or quotes and lengthy argument in the same vein will not be any more convincing.

JohnM, if you look above you will see that someone tried to claim that “the” example of Black people unfairly benefiting from Affirmative Action and narratives of personal victimization is that Ta-Nahisi Coates didn’t deserve to get picked to write a Black Panther comic book series or win a MacArthur grant. I pointed out that the year before he was chosen, Ta-Nahisi Coates has become famous by writing literally the most-read article ever for The Atlantic (as reported by multiple outlets), a 15,000 word article read by millions of people that created a great deal of discussion and influence, and… Read more »

(I’ll also point out that in response I noted that The Atlantic’s online readership is orders of magnitude higher than its print circulation so it is beyond reasonable doubt that a print-only article will ever outperform the most-read online article ever. That the promotional video he cited only got 20,000 views, which couldn’t nearly explain the 4,000,000 people who read Coates’s article on the first day alone. And I posted numerous articles talking about the profound influence that Coates’s article had had, completely restarting the public discussion of reparations and changing the minds of even well-read conservative thinkers like David… Read more »

My point had nothing to do with anything you claimed about Ta-Nahisi Coates, it was a general observation about what you generally do. For my part, I’ve never heard of Ta-Nahisi Coates, and do not care one way or another. Your claims, *which you tend to state at unnecessarily great length*, often have so many facets that it is unlikely anyone will “call you out” on all of them. When someone does challenge you on all aspects of a claim it may be because they find all aspects of the claim suspect. In that case, why should they not challenge… Read more »

There is truth in there. As you can see above, I posted all those citations and it had no effect whatsoever to the person who accused me of making questionable assertions. There are a limited set of conversation partners (there used to be many more but most of them seem to have left) for whom I don’t really expect a meaningful dialogue at all. But when one of them makes a challenge, I’m always thinking of the uncommenting observers. Do they believe the challenge? Will it look like I’m untrustworthy, or that I spread false information? And so I do… Read more »

I’ve submitted them.