By Kevin D. Williamson
Saturday, April 11, 2026
If you ever have spent much time around newspapers, then
you will have heard—and learned to be unscandalized by—the phrase “a good
murder.” It is not that reporters want there to be more horrifying, dramatic
crimes or that even the most cynical and hard-bitten among them do not feel for
the victims of criminal violence. But … these are really good stories, as
stories. War correspondents do not love war any more than oncologists love
cancer, but an interesting case is an interesting case, and the opportunity to
exercise one’s talents—perhaps even in a war that contributes to the general
good—is welcome.
And, from that point of view: What a tragedy Ibram X.
Kendi is! Our present situation calls urgently for a writer and public
intellectual of the sort Kendi should be and seems to aspire to be. If ever
there were something like “a good murder” for scholars of racism and
authoritarianism, we are right in the middle of the crime scene. The president
of the United States is a genuine authoritarian and undeniably an exemplar of
the phenomenon professor Kendi writes about in his latest book, Chain of
Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, in which he argues that
different versions of what we have come to call “replacement theory” enable not
only figures such as Donald Trump but also autocrats from Europe to South
America.
Prof. Kendi, as many readers will already know, has long
worked from a crude intellectual model—crude to the point of being almost
silly—that every word, thought, deed, and policy can be characterized simply
either as racist or antiracist, a totalist approach in which
there is no neutrality or safe harbor, no matter how far removed the subject at
hand may be from race and racism per se: That which is not positively
antiracist is racist. The world is more complex than that, of course—racism
is more complex than that, for that matter.
Prof. Kendi cannot quite decide whether to exempt
individuals from his binary scheme: “No one is a racist,” he writes in
his latest. (That was not the impression I got from the last Williamson family
reunion in Oklahoma.) That is, he argues, because racist is not a “fixed
identity” and “it does not clearly define a person.” Which would be a defensible
view if he had not, in the same paragraph, explained how to define a person
as a racist: “I define racist as someone who is expressing an idea of
racial hierarchy or supporting an inequitable or unjust policy with their
actions or inaction.” “A racist” is either a “someone” or not. One would expect
a scholar for whom racism is a theory of everything to have reached a
consistent and definite view about that. (Prof. Kendi expands on this, but does
not improve it, in a later chapter titled “Definitions.”) Surely it is the case
that racism does not exclusively define a person—even the most monomaniacal
racist is many other things in addition to that—but then racism need not
exclusively define racially relevant policies or ideas, either. For example,
Prof. Kendi defines certain college-admissions policies as racist based
on the fact that they confer a relative advantage on a disproportionately white
population (such as “legacies” and children of donors). But there also have
been—and are—admissions policies in which race is an explicit factor and, at
times, an explicit bar. For example, there was a long period of time during
which an African American who could enroll at Hillsdale could not enroll at
Harvard, which simply did not admit black students, women, and others who were
categorically excluded. Making admissions easier for certain Ivy League student
athletes in 2026 might very well advantage a subpopulation of white men
relative to black men and women and might even be judged as racist or sexist on
those grounds, but such a policy is nonetheless distinct—both practically and
morally—from policies that simply exclude black applicants or women, or that
impose restrictive quotas, as the Ivy League schools long did to keep down the
number of Jews on their campuses. Prof. Kendi’s formulation does not really
make adequate room for this.
And here I am reminded of one of my own complaints: Elite
policy conversation is dominated by elite interests, which is why we are
talking about elite university admissions practices in a book to which these
are at most tangentially related. But Prof. Kendi puts these in the book for a
reason—he believes that the campaign against racial preferences for nonwhite
college applicants are a link in that “chain of ideas” he is writing about:
Putinists and well-meaning if naive advocates of “colorblind” policies are,
from that point of view, all cogs in the same machine.
Donald Trump’s racism, like almost everything else about
Trump, is at times vague and inconclusive: If Trump’s racial views are not
quite what most English-speaking people over the course of the past century
have meant by racism, it is because racism is a degenerate form of
loyalty, and Trump is immune to loyalty of any kind. But, again, what most
people mean by the word racism is not quite what Prof. Kendi means, and
while his boutique version of racism is not often all that useful and very
often the opposite of useful, it is well-fitted to the job of analyzing Donald
Trump, whose illiterate and obsessive “good genes” talk is based on a primitive
view of a genetic hierarchy that operates not only between races but within and
across them. Trump’s views reflect an older but not unfamiliar view of racial
hierarchy, one that has informed ancient debates about which Europeans counted as
“white” (Slavs? Sicilians?) and even which Asians might be granted effectively
white status (some high-caste Hindus had been allowed to naturalize under a
1906 U.S. law restricting the privilege to “free whites” because they
represented the “highest type” of Hindu, as one court put it, until a 1923 decision put a stop to that). Trump’s racism is to
some extent idiosyncratic, but he is surrounded by racists of a much more frank
and ordinary sort, and the broader right-wing nationalist-populist movement
contains a whole constellation of race cranks, neo-Nazis, and sundry kooks
whose views on race would make Jesse Helms look like Jesse Jackson. In Trump
and the Trump movement, Prof. Kendi has a target that is—to our national
disgrace and the horror of every self-respecting American—almost tailor-made
for his attention.
Unfortunately, his book is lazy and sloppy. Prof. Kendi
is a bad writer, even for an academic. The predictable solecisms are well
represented (e.g., he doesn’t seem to know what enormity means, but,
then, neither do most professional writers), and there is an element of
contempt for the reader in his slovenliness on the page—he supposedly is a man
with a theory, and he treats his readers as though they were too dumb to see
the difference between theory and rhetoric.
Let me share with you a minor, annoying example of the
careless way Prof. Kendi goes about his literary business. Dipping into
Brazilian politics, he writes:
Jair Bolsonaro
recalled the time he saved a drowning Black soldier. “If I was racist, what
would I have done on seeing a black fall into the water? I’d have folded my
arms.” Bolsonaro thus indirectly defined racist as a hate-filled person who
would never do anything humane for “a black.”
The sneering quotes around “a black” are meant to tell
you what you need to know about Bolsonaro’s racial attitudes, of course—he is
the kind of out-of-touch bigot who, like your Fox News-watching uncle, talks
about “a black” or “the blacks.” But, of course, Bolsonaro never said: “If I
was racist, what would I have done on seeing a black fall into the water? I’d
have folded my arms.” According to the press account,what he said was:
Por coincidência,
é negro…. Se eu fosse racista: o
negão caiu dentro da água e eu ia fazer o quê? Eu ia cruzar os braços. Entrei
lá. Na segunda vez que mergulhei, consegui trazer o negão do fundo da lagoa.
Bolsonaro does not speak English.
I do not speak Portuguese, but I am informed by my
cursory reading that the word negão is a complicated one, at times
affectionate and at times offensive, much like the infamous American racial
epithet it calls to mind, but, at the same time, negão is not as
charged as that word. To use a translated quotation in the way Prof. Kendi
does, infusing it with imagined nuance imported from American English, is
intellectual malpractice.
In a similar way, Prof. Kendi is overly fond of the word likely.
E.g., a certain racist “likely chanted ‘You will not replace us’ at a rally,”
“one passage that likely stuck with Adolf Hitler,” “one likely early influence
on [Jean-Marie] Le Pen was René Binet,” Marine Le Pen voters “likely enjoyed” Charlie
Hebdo cartoons, a father “likely heard his son ridicule Muslims in the way
Nazis had ridiculed Jews,” Hitler “likely opposed Winston Churchill’s ‘United
States of Europe,’” both “the Muslim travel ban and the Women’s March were
likely on [terrorist Alexandre] Bissonnette’s mind when he read a conspiracy
theory online on January 29.”
Some of the book’s likelihoods are knowable—an
enterprising scholar could run down at least some of them. But Prof. Kendi
prefers to fill in the details in whatever way fits his thesis.
More likelihood:
El Mercurio, “which had Chile’s highest paid
circulation, had likely remained the favored outlet for Chile’s neo-Nazi and
Nazi community in the twenty-first century” and “would likely have been the
favorite paper of former Nazis.” There’s not much evidence for that, and 21st-century
neo-Nazis tend to congregate mainly online rather than passing newspapers from
hand to hand. El Mercurio has been accused of being blasé in its
writing about Nazi historical figures, but that is a different question.
Prof. Kendi also seems to believe that it is likely that
Nazi exiles profoundly shaped the political life of South America:
Some likely
disassociated from their Nazi ideology in public. Maybe some unlearned their
Nazi ideology, refusing to pass it on to their children. Others no doubt
planted Nazi ideology within the minds of their children and grandchildren.
Some of those children and grandchildren possibly discovered and uprooted these
Nazi ideas. Some of them carried these Nazi ideas into adulthood. Some of them
renovated Nazism into neo-Nazism—into a new great replacement theory. And some
of them have been achieving the power and influence their parents experienced
long ago in Nazi Germany. Their parents were Nazis. They are neo-Nazis. These
neo-Nazis hide in plain sight, largely undetected and unprosecuted in the
twenty-first century. Accurate definitions of neo-Nazism and racism are needed
for people to clearly see them. But neo-Nazism and racism have been misdefined
since the days of Nazi Germany.
I do not know what it could hope to mean to claim that
neo-Nazism has been “misdefined since the days of Nazi Germany,” given that
there were no neo-Nazis in “the days of Nazi Germany,” just Nazis.
(Paleo-Nazis?) The term neo-Nazi did not come into use until the 1950s,
for obvious reasons. The whole book is marred by these kinds of intellectual
fender-benders.
Those little messes are not random. Prof. Kendi practices
an ethics of moral infection—x cited y book, z cited y book,
ergo x is infected with z’s moral transgressions—and where there
is no known vector of transmission for the political cooties of his
imagination, he simply invents one. For example, about the 1973 French novel The
Camp of the Saints, he writes: “Jean-Marie Le Pen almost certainly read the
book.” That is based on … nothing obvious. Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s at times estranged daughter and successor, has recommended the novel. But
either there is documentary evidence that Jean-Marie Le Pen read the book or
there isn’t. (He does not seem to have been a great reader of literary fiction.)
That doesn’t mean that Le Pen père was not influenced by the ideas
associated with that book—Donald Trump surely has been, and I’d be very
surprised if Trump had read that novel or any other. And the politics of moral
infection is complicated—the Le Pens certainly embraced Renaud Camus’ “great
replacement” ideas, but Camus rejected Jean-Marie Le Pen, hated the fact that
the anti-immigration tendency in France had “been
embodied for a quarter of a century and more by one man, Jean-Marie Le Pen,”
and in 2002 launched a political party to provide an alternative to both the
mainstream conservatives and Le Pen. In a 2022 interview with a crackpot right-wing outlet, Camus complained that Marine Le
Pen was “almost entirely replacist.” That the man Prof. Kendi credits with
shaping the fundamental politics of Marine Le Pen does not think that Marine Le
Pen represents his view of the world should be a fact of some considerable
interest, I would think. But the views of Renaud Camus et al. are relevant only
when they buttress Prof. Kendi’s case—when they would complicate it, they are
mainly ignored.
One of the problems with a simplified politics of moral
contagion is that it makes it difficult to draw useful distinctions, in this
case the distinction between a particular kind of noxious politics rooted in a
particular conspiracy theory (that “elites” are using immigration to secure
their own interests) and a more general social and cultural conservatism that
intersects with that “replacement theory” politics on the most ordinary and
normal kind of policy questions. Unless we are to take seriously the unserious
proposition that the only two views of immigration are open borders on the one
hand and Nazism or Trumpism or Hindutva on the other—and Prof. Kendi would have
us conclude that these are all substantially identical—then we are going to
have discussions about immigration restrictions that inescapably include the
questions Who? and How many?
It is easier for Americans to think about this outside of
our own context. But if you got onto an airplane and landed in Tokyo and then
drove to Kyoto and saw nothing in the one place or the other or in between
other than fat white people eating Five Guys burgers and speaking semi-literate
American English and talking about football—surely you would feel that
something had been lost, and that that something was Japanese-ness. Japanese
conservatism about Japanese-ness is racial in that it is inexplicably tied up
with a preference for a population that is ethnically Japanese (as the Japanese
population today overwhelmingly is) as well as Japanese-speaking and
historically and ancestrally tied to Japanese culture and traditions. But if
the Japanese preference for Japanese-ness is poisonous bigotry, we need a
different set of words and concepts for certain events in Germany, South
Africa, and the United States, among others.
Cultural conservatism works out differently in different
societies: The French are much more liberal and diverse than the Japanese, but,
God bless them, they almost never apologize for being French or for preferring
French things and French ways, and they were like that long before Renaud Camus
came along.
Those who point out that the things being said today
about Latin American immigrants also were said in the 19th century
about Irish Catholic immigrants very rarely go on to point out that those who
said those waves of immigration would forever change the culture, religion, and
politics of cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were absolutely
correct. They did. Boston was arguably the nation’s least Catholic
major city in John Adams’ time (there were no Catholic churches and no publicly
celebrated Masses, and Jesuits for a time could be put to death simply for
being present in Massachusetts) whereas today its identity is very much tied up
in its modern Irish-Catholic heritage. “The Great Replacement” may be a nutty
conspiracy theory, but great replacements do happen—I don’t know how you say
“white interloper” in any of the indigenous American languages, but I am sure
the people we call Comanche have a word for it.
It is intellectually incoherent to scoff at resistance to
population change on the one hand and to lament “settler colonialism” on the
other. No, it is not the case that Central American construction workers are
the moral equivalent of Belgians in the Congo, but the story of human
civilization is that people move around and bump into each other, and that,
where there is conflict, someone wins and someone loses. Nations rise and fall.
But if you are going to try to convince me that the Republic of Korea’s preference
for an ethnically Korean Korea is of a piece with the Final Solution, you’re
going to have to do a lot more work than the author does in this book.
Prof. Kendi undoubtedly is correct when he argues that
racial prejudice exercises a profound influence on how white people in liberal
societies think about who can be assimilated, who should be assimilated, and
who has a right even to be considered for that. (It comes up less often in
illiberal societies and in racially homogenous societies: Assimilation in
North Korea is not really a thing.) But even here, Prof. Kendi both
oversimplifies and distorts matters. He argues that Renaud Camus is wrong to
think of North Africans in southern France as alien, writing:
Despite religious
and phenotypic differences, people around the western Mediterranean Sea have
been interacting, trading, warring, migrating, and reproducing together for
centuries. They have been sharing cultures and histories since at least the
ancient Roman Empire, which encompassed what is now France and North Africa.
Together, this diversity of peoples formed Mediterranean culture. Tourists can
now dine on Mediterranean cuisine at restaurants in Southern Europe and North
Africa.
First of all, if anybody really thinks there is such a
thing as “Mediterranean cuisine,” I have a hummus stand in Tel Aviv to sell you, along with a
bulletproof vest. (Good luck!) But if “Mediterranean culture” is sort of a
thing, then so is “European culture,” and perhaps the various peoples of the
European Union are not entirely wrong to value it. Nor are they wrong to keep
in mind that one of the reasons there is such a thing as “Mediterranean
culture” in north Africa is the fact that the poor hapless Egyptians got
themselves replaced good and hard, being ruled for 1000 years by imported
Greeks and Romans. Hellenism was imposed on much of the Mediterranean at
spearpoint by the armies of Alexander the Great, and then Islam was imposed on
much of the same territory in much the same way. “European culture” was made
from the same recipe—different conquerors, same process. In its turn, Islam was
imposed on Europe from the Iberian Peninsula to the gates of Vienna, while
National Socialism was imposed on Europe from Norway to Greece and from Brest
to the suburbs of Stalingrad. Conquest is a matter of living memory in Europe.
One need not have any time for Renaud Camus or the Le Pens or the Trumps to
take as entirely reasonable that maxim that “Switzerland is for the Swiss,” as
I have heard it put from time to time.
Europe has seen a great deal of social change over the
years, and much of it has been unwelcome. If we really believe in the
self-determination of peoples, then we must also believe in the right of
political communities to decide who joins those communities and on what
terms—rather than having terms and conditions imposed on them, either by
well-meaning moralists or by the brute facts of immigrant boots on the ground.
That well-meaning liberal intellectuals can see the
question of self-determination very clearly in the matter of, say, the First
Nations in Canada but not in the case of Canada itself, much less in the case
of France or the United States, shows just how parochial and limited our
well-meaning liberal intellectuals really can be when faced with the messy
facts of real-world political decision-making. The American people, damn their
eyes, have twice chosen Trump and Trumpism, at least in part because some of them
saw the choice as between what Trump stands for and what such figures as Ibram
X. Kendi stand for, which includes a narrow, ahistorical, and at times
sanctimonious account of what it means to be a political community. Marine Le
Pen, Viktor Orbán, and the rest of that ghastly horror show did not come out of
nowhere—and they did not come out of the imaginations of a couple of French
novelists none of you had ever heard of until five minutes ago. (It is good
that French novelists do not have so much power—Michel Houellebecq is going to
be in print for a long, long time.) Prof. Kendi is part of the problem, though
not a very big part of the problem.
Americans could use someone to do what it is Prof. Kendi
seems to want to do, but doing it in a constructive way is going to require a
more open, more genuinely liberal, and more humane approach to the tangle of
human affairs than what is on offer in this book. Prof. Kendi often seems not
to have so much an idea as an enemies list, and, even though some of his
enemies deserve to be all of our enemies, that is not enough. The job at hand
will require someone who can answer T. S. Eliot’s question:
When the Stranger
says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
