By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday,
November 30, 2021
Welcome to the party, pal!
Cancel culture, soft censorship, the
stampeding herd of independent thinkers demanding absolute conformism in the
name of tolerance and absolute obedience in the name of diversity — none of
these is ever a problem until it happens to a progressive.
Today’s example is Andrew Solomon, who
tells his tale in the New York Times under the headline: “My
book was censored in China. Now it’s blacklisted — in Texas.”
Solomon’s book is not — you won’t be
surprised to learn — blacklisted in Texas. All that has happened is that a
state representative, Matt Krause, has asked Texas school districts about a
list of books — 850 of them — wanting to know if they have them, how many
copies, where they are, what they paid for them, etc. “Most of the books on the
list deal with race, sexual orientation, abortion or gender identity,” Solomon
writes. “Krause is one of several
candidates hoping to unseat the incumbent
Republican attorney general” — he isn’t, but he was — “and this bit of
extremist theater is a maneuver to raise his profile among the ardent Trumpists
and social conservatives likely to be G.O.P. primary voters.”
The project, Solomon argues, is a “cynical
electoral stratagem by a bigoted politician,” which sounds about right to me,
though Krause is not, in fact, a candidate for attorney general, having dropped
out of that just before Solomon’s essay was published. Krause is a candidate
for district attorney of Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth; the biggest
jackass in the race for attorney general, other than the attorney general
himself, is, at the moment, Louie Gohmert.
Solomon quotes Anne Applebaum, who
observes about Soviet-era suppression: “Actual censors were not always needed.
Instead, a form of pervasive peer pressure convinced writers, journalists and
everyone else to toe the party line; if they did not, they knew they risked
being ejected from their jobs and shunned by their friends.”
I know a little about that, having been
ejected from a job at the very magazine where Applebaum is a staff writer for
failing to toe to the party line. If Solomon would like to know something about
the experience of actually being blacklisted by, say, one of
the major American book publishers, I’d be happy to tell him what it’s like.
And I am far from alone in my experience.
I think of Amazon’s effort to suppress
books that take nonconforming views of transsexualism, the efforts of
feminists, transexual advocates, and other left-wing critics to punish figures
ranging from Camille Paglia to Harvey Mansfield to Dave Chappelle to nobodies
at Google to previously anonymous high-school kids for crimes against
progressive sensibilities, real and imagined. We have seen professors at major universities try
to deploy actual mob violence against journalists and critics, professors driven out of major universities under ridiculous
pretexts, violence directed at figures ranging from Charles Murray to College
Republicans at Berkeley, arson and fire-bombings directed at right-leaning
speakers on college campuses, etc. We have seen the New York
Times itself
acting as head cheerleader in an effort to get a college freshman kicked out of
school over offenses against etiquette committed when she was a child.
Representative Krause’s pissy little list
is pretty mild stuff by comparison.
Matt Krause is a nobody. Jeff Bezos has
real power. When Amazon bans a book, that doesn’t just take it off Amazon — it
sends a message to publishers around the world that failing to toe the party
line means that their financial futures will be put in jeopardy by one of the
world’s most powerful businesses. But when Amazon yanks a book by Ryan
Anderson, nice liberals such as Andrew Solomon generally don’t have a goddamned
word to say about it — and if they do say something, more often than not it is
to encourage the suppression of books they dislike and the marginalization of
nonconformist authors.
I’ll believe that our progressive friends
are serious about freedom of expression when they start acting like they are
serious about freedom of expression. My own experience is that they are much,
much more interested in deploying economic and social power against expression
with which they disagree — actually blacklisting books and their authors. If
Andrew Solomon is interested in actually getting with the free-speech program,
I welcome him to it.
Looking for Diversity in Texas?
Farhad Manjoo of the New York
Times has written another perplexing
column. (I have reason to write that sentence
frequently.) He wants to know why so many people are moving to Texas, and so he
teamed up with a graphics editor to do a little data analysis, the conclusion
of which is that the only good places to live in America are the suburbs of
Dallas. (More or less.) Manjoo ranks cities and suburbs according to four
criteria, two of which are reasonably obvious and two of which are . . . not
obvious. The obvious ones are economic health (as measured by unemployment and
wages) and affordability of housing, and the non-obvious ones are racial
diversity and climate risk.
You can see how that goes: The highest
wages are found in places such as San Francisco, which still does pretty well
on the diversity metric even as its African-American population vanishes. But
it is super-expensive, and, like much of California, it is vulnerable to
wildfires, rising sea levels, and other phenomena associated with climate
change. Nebraska currently has the lowest unemployment rate of any state — at
1.9 percent, the lowest rate ever recorded — but it is whiter than Copenhagen
at Christmas and it is a middling performer on income, 27th among the states.
If you are really deeply worried about climate risk, you could move to any
number of small towns in Minnesota, but nobody is doing that. In Texas, you
have lots of racial diversity — sort of — and lots of jobs and a fair bit of
cheap housing. Houston would be in the running with DFW on the Manjoo matrix if
not for its coastal location and consequent hurricane problem.
A
few thoughts.
I have spent a great deal of time talking
to a great many people about the places they live and why they live there, and
I have never once heard someone say that they moved to some particular place —
much less the suburbs of Dallas! — in pursuit of racial diversity. Some people
will say that they enjoy the diversity of where they live, but I have my doubts
that many people move for that reason.
But beyond that, I am not so sure that we
actually have a lot of “racial diversity” in Texas. What we have is a population
in which about 80 percent of the people are either Hispanic or non-Hispanic
whites, almost equally divided at about 40 percent for either group. As many
observers have noted, almost all of Texas’s recent population growth — some 95
percent of it — has been driven by “people of color,” a meaningless
non-category in which Nigerians and Bengalis are lumped in with Mexicans and
Iraqis. In reality, there are not a lot of black or Asian people moving to
Texas: In the past ten years, Texas has seen about 560,000 new black residents
and just over 600,000 new Asian residents, both figured dwarfed by the 2
million new Hispanic residents. “Hispanic” is not a very helpful category,
either, being a slop-pail into which very different peoples from very different
cultures are poured willy-nilly owing only to some proximity to the Spanish
language. For four out of five Hispanic Texans, what “Hispanic” means is “of
Mexican origin.” (“Mexican origin” can get pretty complicated, too, but that’s
beyond the scope of this column.)
What I am wondering is this: If Latino
people are pouring into Texas, the state with the second-largest Latino
population share (behind New Mexico but ahead of California), is that the
pursuit of racial diversity? From a certain point of view, it looks
more like the pursuit of homogeneity: largely Mexican and
Mexican-American people moving into Mexican-American communities in a state
with a large Mexican-American population, i.e., people moving into areas where
there are lots of other people like them. Manjoo, who is so exquisitely modish
as to insist upon the pronoun “they,” seems here to be guilty of — angels and
ministers of grace defend us! — “centering” the white point of view. Because a
guy relocating from Oaxaca is going to experience a hell of a lot more
diversity in Nebraska than he is in Dallas, where he can head over to Los
Oaxaqueños, order his sope huitlacoche, do so en español,
and go on with his day — in a largely gringo-free fashion, if he chooses.
A Mexican American moving to Dallas has
about as much to do with diversity as an Irish American moving to Boston or a
Yahoo American moving to Florida.
Similarly, while I am sure that people
sometimes move away from the scene of a trauma such as a home-destroying
wildfire or flood, I have never — not once — met someone who told me he had
chosen his new home based on “climate risk.” For comparison, about half of the
people I talk to who move to Texas from some other state cite Texas’s lack of a
state income tax as an attraction, while Californians — predictably and almost
uniformly — are all too happy to show their visiting California friends around
the 6,500-square-foot estates on ten acres that they bought, with money to
spare, after selling their homes in the Bay Area.
But if you are interested in avoiding
climate risk, stay the hell away from Dallas and environs: Texas as a whole
already has demonstrated persuasively that it is utterly unable to deal with
severe winter weather, with a power grid and a traffic system that collapse at
the first dusting of snow. With a little ice on the freeways, Dallas saw a
133-car pileup that killed six people. Not long before that, one of the city’s
nicest neighborhoods was ravaged by an EF-3 tornado. And in Dallas — a badly
misgoverned Democratic city that is a lot like every other badly misgoverned
Democratic city, right down to the crusty bums masturbating in public — a
gentle rain will put half of the city’s traffic lights out of commission. Most
of the climate-change forecasts suggest that this sort of thing is going to get
worse — and my own political forecast for Texas does not envision the response
getting much better.
Jobs? Yes. Cheap housing? Compared to Palo
Alto, sure, though not as cheap as it was a few years ago. Low climate risk?
Sure, if you don’t count tornados, heat waves, drought, blizzards, and flash
floods. Diversity? Oodles of it, if by diversity you mean that
the vast majority of the people you meet check one of two demographic boxes.
But if diversity and climate risk are at
the top of your agenda, suburban Dallas isn’t for you. You should move to
Austin. You won’t find a lot of diversity there or an unusual level of climate
security, but you will be positively walled in by a homogeneous mass of
likeminded people who profess to care about those things.
