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Zmirak and the racialists: an analysis
On January 18 John Zmirak at Taki’s Top Drawer indulged himself in an embarrassing display of flattery toward Peter Brimelow, while simultaneously expressing blanket contempt for “racialists,” including Jared Taylor. I pointed out that Brimelow is himself at least a moderate racialist, which makes Zmirak appear to be at least moderately incoherent. What I didn’t point out is that Brimelow publishes Jared Taylor at Vdare. Indeed, at the Vdare site right now there is a prominently displayed notice for Jared Taylor’s upcoming American Renaissance conference, and an article by Jared Taylor, which was posted on January 21, inviting people to the conference. So how does John Zmirak come off praising Peter Brimelow to the skies while condemning racialists as despicable lowlifes, even as Brimelow is promoting a racialist conference? The answer seems to be that Zmirak has bifurcated right-wingers into two classes. There are those he perceives as his “betters,” such as Brimelow, whose proximity and favors he seeks and toward whom he behaves like a hand-kissing courtier; and there are those he perceives as his inferiors, the “racialists,” toward him he feels total moral disgust and whom he banishes from his world. But since these two groups interact and overlap in all kinds of ways, the bifurcation is dishonest. What then is the solution? It is to systematize a thought process that common sense performs all the time, and make rational distinctions among three classes of things: that which is good and right, that which is less than right but still tolerable, and that which is wrong and intolerable, and then apply the tri-partite analysis to the class of racialist persons and ideas under consideration. (In order to simplify this thought experiment, let us say that Brimelow’s racialism consists only in the fact that he hosts racialists at his website, not that he takes racialist positions himself.) So, if Jared Taylor is an intolerably bad racialist, as Zmirak claims, then, given the fact that Brimelow publishes and promotes Taylor, Zmirak should stop treating Brimelow as simply good and right and worthy of praise; he should instead treat him as less than right but still tolerable, because, while Brimelow doesn’t do the intolerable works of Taylor, he publishes and promotes him, and therefore cannot be considered simply good and right. Alternatively, if Taylor is not intolerably bad but rather less than right but still tolerable, then Zmirak should remove his condemnation of racialists or at least distinguish between the tolerable racialism of Taylor and the intolerable racialism of other racialists; he must stop doing what he does now, which is to treat all racialists as bad and intolerable while hypocritically singling out one racialist for high praise. Finally, if Zmirak thinks that my premise is wrong and that Brimelow himself is not a racialist of any kind and that his promotion and publishing of Taylor does not taint him morally in any way, and that therefore there is nothing contradictory about lauding Brimelow while despising Taylor, then Zmirak ought to make that case, which he hasn’t done. Thus applying commonsensical moral reasoning, Zmirak could arrive at one of the following defensible positions: (1) drop his uncritical congratulations of Brimelow; (2) drop (or add nuance to) his sweeping criticism of racialists; or (3) demonstrate that Brimelow himself is not a racialist, which would enable Zmirak to continue both the uncritical congratulations and the sweeping criticisms. What is indefensible is Zmirak’s current position, in which he engages in the gross contradiction of damning all racialists as a class while giving extravagant plaudits to one racialist in particular.
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