The Vdare-Roberts disgrace continues

David B. writes:

Today, Joe Guzzardi writes of the mail Vdare has received about Paul Craig Roberts. He writes that the mail runs 60 percent in Roberts’s favor. Brimelow says that Vdare is a coalition and that he will continue to publish him. Readers who don’t like Roberts can ignore him. I have done so for years, but I read the one in May during the immigration battle when Roberts wrote that he “would accept the entire population of Mexico if I could rid America of the neoconservatives.”

As I said last week, the worst thing Vdare could do is what it’s doing, which is to encourage the Roberts fans among its readers to write in his support. When Vdare publishes letters such as Sean’s from last week opining that the nuttier-than-a-fruit-cake, hate-mongering conspiracy theorist Roberts is a “old-school” conservative and that “Roberts is a bastion of integrity and a true patriot,” all Vdare is accomplishing is to validate and publicize the Roberts-type lunacy among its readership, a lunacy which in 19 cases out of 20 is undoubtedly hanging out in the same room with anti-Semitism.

I’ve often commented on the absence of adults at National Review Online. Are there any adults in the orbit of Vdare? Samuel Francis got pretty cranky at times in his later years. But if Francis were alive today, would he tell Peter Brimelow, “Sure, Peter, you should go on publishing Roberts’s insane columns, that’s a fine thing that really helps advance the immigration restrictionist movement”? I don’t think so.

But who knows? I may be imagining a Sam Francis that didn’t exist. The bitterness that increasingly took him over (and that led me pretty much to stop reading his columns) would tend to leave a person indifferent to the kinds of concerns I’ve been voicing here.

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M. Jose writes:

On Joe Guzzardi’s piece on Roberts, I will have to agree with what I think you will say about it—Guzzardi elides over the important issue, which is that Roberts doesn’t just criticize Bush, he accuses him of planning a terrorist attack, either actively or passively (i.e. by planning to allow one to happen without interference), and has suggested that 9/11 was at least partly an inside job.

I still find VDARE useful as a source of information about immigration issues—unlike one of your readers who commented about its “uselessness” because it doesn’t lobby, I think that it serves a purpose. Even being a place where people can complain helps to build the restrictionist community and to boost morale for lobbying fights, as well as providing information that other groups can transform into lobbying.

But Paul Craig Roberts ought to go.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 03, 2007 01:53 PM | Send