The National Review headline says “Plagiarism in Elizabeth Warren’s 2006 book.” The body refers to Warren publishing the book “in 2006″ and Black’s book coming out in 2005. That’s true! Except that in 2006 the paperback of Warren’s book was published. The hardcover came out in March of 2005. Black’s book seems to have come out, if Amazon is correct, October 14 2005. (Or, according to Barnes and Noble, July 2005?) Months after Warren’s book. Unless there was an earlier published hardcover version that I can’t find on Amazon, it seems like Black most likely plagiarized Warren.

UPDATE: Damn, that didn’t take long. Rich Lowry has acknowledged the mistake and says the post will be updated. It was so fun, while it lasted, this fake story.
UPDATE 2: And here’s the correction. They say they took down the initial story.

On the back of my review copy of “The Tyranny of Clichés,” Goldberg’s latest, it still claims that the author “has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.” That, of course, was revealed yesterday to be utter bullshit. He is a two-time entrant for Pulitzer consideration — to enter requires solely an application and a $50 fee — and while Goldberg claims not to have added that line to his bio, it appears everywhere he writes, and it’s hard to believe he hadn’t noticed it until this week. That said, I can’t imagine a person dumb enough to actually believe that Jonah Goldberg had been seriously considered for a Pulitzer. (Well, OK, I can imagine one person dumb enough.)

If Pulitzers were handed out, like editorships at conservative publications, based on nepotism, Goldberg might’ve had better luck.

His mother Lucianne Goldberg’s history is sordid enough. In 1972, she was paid by a friend of Richard Nixon to spy on the McGovern campaign and the reporters covering it, posing as a member of the press. She became an anti-women’s liberation activist and campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment. Eventually she became a literary agent (and ghostwriter) specializing in gutter-scraping attack jobs, starting with unauthorized celebrity biographies and branching out, when Bill Clinton was elected, into conspiratorial books accusing him and Hillary of various crimes. The “Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons” story? That’s one of hers. (As was the best-selling book on the O.J. Simpson case by racist ex-LAPD detective and convicted perjurer Mark Furhman, who became a right-wing folk hero despite the fact that he was responsible more than anyone for the case against Simpson falling apart.)

She lucked out when she fell upon Linda Tripp, a White House secretary with a deep disdain for the Clintons and a penchant for gabbing with the press. Goldberg was introduced to Tripp in 1993, and Goldberg pushed Tripp to help out with a tell-all expose of the Clinton White House (focusing on conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Vince Foster) for years. The problem was, Tripp’s problems with the Clinton White House were largely based on matters of style — George Stephanopoulos’ dirty hair and Bill Clinton’s flirting — that is, until Tripp befriended Monica Lewinsky after both had been sent to work at the Pentagon. Goldberg convinced Tripp to secretly record her conversations with Lewinsky, promising her a major publishing payday. She then convinced Tripp to go to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who’d eventually break the Lewinsky story.

Jonah was there for much of this. His apartment was the scene of meetings between Lucianne and Linda Tripp that would define the rest of the Clinton era. He was privy to the contents of the (illegally recorded) Lewinsky tapes. In 1998, he published a Talk of the Town piece in (Tina Brown’s) New Yorker, in which he played the wry observer of the chaos his mother has wrought. By the end of 1998, young Jonah Goldberg had an enviable contributing editor gig at the National Review, the most prominent conservative magazine in the country. Before Lewinsky, Jonah Goldberg had been writing and producing public television documentaries on gargoyles.

As reprehensible as his mother’s career was, at least Lucianne was fun — I’ll take a chain-smoking, bomb-throwing provocateur over a po-faced pseudo-intellectual any day. Not that Jonah Goldberg was always a would-be scholar. The founding editor of National Review Online, his original job was to be the fusty magazine’s cool young person (though he was already nearly 30 when he was hired) who was conversant with the popular culture. His attempts to be breezy came off (and still come off) as glib and self-amused. His columns were essentially banal conservative dogma with a generous heaping of Simpsons references. Roy Edroso collected some choice early Goldbergisms in his 2008 review of the right-wing blogosphere’s leading lights:

Themes and style were evident from his earliest NRO “Goldberg File” contributions. Prefaced a post on Bill Clinton’s Kosovo intervention with a quote from The Princess Bride (which remains one of his cultural touchstones, along with Animal House, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica) and took a breezy attitude toward matters of life and death (“We should kill Milosevic . . . Stalin moved populations like I play Risk on my computer”). Later, welcomed “the opportunity to wax Swiftian and offer my modest proposal for saving the rainforest,” resulting in a wan P.J. O’Rourke rip-off proposing to “sell the rainforest to Disney” (which “is becoming an incredibly liberal company anyway”).

Goldberg soon created the National Review’s multi-contributor blog The Corner, which will be his greatest legacy: Now an entire generation knows the National Review not as the leading intellectual light of the conservative movement, but as the place where random right-wing hacks alternate arguments about the grossness of Mexicans and gays with brief thoughts on Star Wars and personal tales of harrowing run-ins with liberal stereotypes.

Goldberg is always careful never to actually stake out a controversial position on anything. He’ll never buck the movement, but he sees himself as above the right-wing populists. His position on any number of issues is impossible to discern. On gay marriage: “I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both).” Jonah defended waterboarding while also claiming to find it a “tough question” and complaining that supporters of waterboarding were unfairly tarred as “pro-torture.” Everything he writes for publication is littered with “to be sure” ass-covering and declarations that he’s not actually seriously arguing what it seems very much like he’s arguing. (The Supreme Court’s Fred Phelps ruling was deplorable but also probably correct but maybe not. Julian Assange should be assassinated not that I’m saying for real that he should be assassinated.) He’s too cowardly and insecure to allow himself to be pinned down on most divisive political issues, much preferring to devote pixels and ink to making fun of mythical sandal-wearing Prius-driving (formerly Volvo-driving) liberals who supposedly think things he finds silly. Or Barbra Streisand, a recurring figure in his oeuvre.

Goldberg’s also a master at avoiding serious challenges to his half-formed opinions. In 2009, TBogg documented more than 40 instances of Goldberg evading arguments or declining to elaborate on points he’d made by invoking some rapidly approaching deadline. (Sample: “This has been discussed endlessly in the Corner and elsewhere. I’m on a deadline so I’m not going to wade too deeply into it.”) Other popular excuses in the Goldberg list of reasons he’s unable to respond to criticism have included working on his books, taking his children to and/or from school and/or the doctor, and being late for something.

Goldberg does this because he seldom seems to possess much more than a cursory knowledge of the issues and subjects he writes about on his blog and in his columns. Indeed, he often seems to have purposefully not learned about a given matter before deciding to write about it. Another collection of Goldbergisms: A series of posts he begins by cheerfully admitting that he “hasn’t been following” whatever debate he is about to weigh in on. (“I haven’t followed the case since its second or third week. … I assume the verdict is correct.” “To be honest, I haven’t followed the New Jersey folderol too closely.” “I haven’t been following the Rand Paul debate too closely.”)

In one of my favorite Goldberg passages of all time, he wrote: “I was trying to make a general point which everyone understands but also ended up communicating an even more general falsehood. Like saying violence never solves anything, people understand what I mean even when in reality what I’m saying isn’t true.” Not sure how anyone could argue with that.

From a 2010 column on the supposed “Ground Zero Mosque”:

Here’s a thought: The 70% of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.

Calling that “a thought” is pretty generous. The “Islamic Niketown” line is never explained, presumably because Goldberg found it to be a self-evidently funny joke. (I beg someone to tell me what it means. Failing that, I beg someone to find me the editor who allowed it to remain in the column.) Other self-evidently funny things to Goldberg include Asians and Pacific Islanders with HIV/AIDS and poor conditions in public housing and a lack of affordable housing … for people with AIDS.

As he’s aged, and begun wearing his fancy “best-selling author” smoking jacket around the house, Goldberg has supplemented his “Battlestar Galactica” references with references to philosophers and scholars — Burke, Hume, etc. — in order to appear serious. The effect is similar to that of a chimp wearing a top hat and monocle. His need to be taken seriously is forever doomed by his addiction to lazy generalities. That tension was apparent in the reception that greeted his first book, and his reaction to that reception.

The thesis of his years-in-the-making (it was delayed repeatedly for mysterious reasons — presumably he just had a lot of deadlines) book “Liberal Fascism” was that the Nazis had “Socialism” in their name so Democrats are the real Nazis because Hitler was a vegetarian. (“Hitler claimed to be a dedicated vegetarian” is an actual piece of supporting evidence used in the book.) Actual historians and experts in 20th century fascism were less than impressed. (Another line: “The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism.”)

The problem is Goldberg is not smart or hardworking enough to pen a genuine piece of scholarship, or even popular history, and he is too pretentious to admit to having written an Ann Coulter-style, red meat-for-morons polemic. Having penned a book arguing a premise that every learned person in the world knows is completely false, Goldberg became incensed when it was reviewed poorly or not at all in various outlets of the “liberal media” (and the less liberal media). No one took his lengthy exercise in name-calling seriously! No one understood that even though the premise of his book is that modern Democrats are the same as Nazis, he wasn’t really actually calling Democrats Nazis! Everyone who hated his book actually didn’t read his book except for the people who did read it and hated it but those people have personal vendettas against Jonah Goldberg!

The full title of the new one is “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.” (Yes, the title “The Tyranny of ___” is itself a cliché. It’s by no means the only one Goldberg employs in the book.)

I just opened “The Tyranny of Clichés” to a random page. It is the start of Chapter 9, “Slippery Slope,” and it begins with quotations from Hume, Lincoln and T.S. Eliot. Then we’re treated to the prose of Mr. Jonah Goldberg, who is here to share his presentation on “slippery slopes.” It reads very much like a high school student’s essay assignment:

Ultimately slippery slope arguments are a mixed bag. They are useful as a way to reinforce good dogma, but they are also used to reinforce bad dogma. Similarly they can scare us away from bad policies and good policies alike. There are good slippery slope arguments and bad ones for good ends and bad ends.

What insight! What a masterful grasp of nuance! Let’s try one of our own: Airplanes can be used for good things and bad things. Some airplanes carry medicine or ice cream, but other airplanes carry bombs or bad people. But an airplane with bombs might be good because the bombs are for using on bad guys, and on the other airplane maybe the ice cream has melted.

Throughout the book, Goldberg brings his disposable Bic-sharp wit to bear on the most deserving straw men he can imagine. From the chapter on “Let Them Eat Cake”:

The notion that today’s rich are the most likely to say ‘let them eat cake!’ is a form of cultural propaganda. To be sure, there are many wealthy and politically conservative individuals who are out of touch with the hardships of poverty. But the most obvious inheritors of the cocooned arrogance and self-indulgence we associate with members of the monarchical courts of Europe are to be found not in boardrooms, but among the most celebrated liberals of American life: Hollywood celebrities.

The celebrities whose excesses Goldberg goes on to document — those he deems “among the most celebrated liberals of American life” — are Jennifer Lopez, Mariah Carey, John Travolta, (Republican) Sylvester Stallone, Kim Basinger and Sean Penn. Ah yes, the modern American aristocracy.

The book is, plainly, another dumb piece of assembly line conservative argument, gussied up with extensive footnotes. It will not impress any academics or intellectuals and it will not get the blood of true believers boiling with indignation. (It will likely sell well, thanks to bulk orders and conservative book clubs.) The phony Pulitzer bragging, that bit of slightly sad résumé-enhancement, is Goldberg all over: Desperate to impress, but utterly unconvincing.

Gus from Little Green Footballs found documents showing O’Sullivan was on the board of the “Lexington Research Institute Limited,” aka the VDARE Foundation, from 2006-2010. During that time, VDARE helped found nativist site “Alternative Right” with a $35,000 grant. Alternative Right is edited by Richard B. Spencer, yet another racist/racialist white nationalist.

O’Sullivan was demoted from editorship by National Review ouster-in-chief William F. Buckley during a 1997 purge of Peter Brimelow, a virulent anti-immigration writer (and English immigrant) O’Sullivan championed who went on to found VDARE. VDARE has published a wide variety of extremist white nationalists, like Jared Taylor and Sam Francis.

O’Sullivan is still on the masthead at the National Review, and he was published defending Derbyshire at length at NRO a few days ago.

O’Sullivan says Derbyshire’s “satire” of “anti-white racism” sadly went a bit too far:

It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag.

Yes, “anti-white racism” is obviously a huge and growing threat in our corporate executive suites, as any glance at the Fortune 500 will demonstrate.

Having allowed that Derbyshire’s piece was sloppy and a bit racist, O’Sullivan goes on to defend each point anyway. Sure, Derbyshire believes that black people are innately criminal and stupid, but is that really a fireable offense? He might be right!

After half-purging O’Sullivan more than a decade ago, what possible reason is there to keep him around to embarrassingly defend his more explicitly awful colleagues? Especially while he’s working with the wackos at VDARE.

These two were not fired for suddenly revealing some hitherto unknown and successfully buried racist attitude — these were not out-of-left field outbursts, like Michael Richards’ onstage meltdown — but for beliefs they had always had and had always expressed. This is what makes it a purge — a decision that this sort of modern “racialism” is no longer considered an acceptable mainstream Conservative attitude.

That’s good! Though it took a while. The National Review’s rejection of the overt racists is actually a fairly new phenomenon. Joan Walsh recently wrote of how the magazine was a strong supporter of racial segregation in its early days, and while that support didn’t last long, prejudice against black Americans and crank “racialist” beliefs were welcome in the magazine long after the 1960s ended.

In September of 1997, the magazine published a lengthy attack on Steven Jay Gould by white supremacist psychologist J. Philippe Rushton — another “American Renaissance” conference speaker — in which he argued that “Mongoloids average about a cubic inch more [brain mass] than Caucasoids and over three cubic inches more than Negroids.” This, again, was in 1997, not 1897. In 1997 the magazine also published a lengthy attack on interracial marriage by Steve Sailer, who’s made a career out of pseudo-academic nativism. (He is, I believe, still the “film critic” at the American Conservative.) Sailer also penned the National Review’s not particularly warm obituary of Gould, in 2002.

When, in 2007, stalwart conservative Linda Chavez complained in a National Review Online piece about rampant bigotry against Hispanics by a few NR contributors, including John Derbyshire, they allowed her targets — and numerous other contributors not named in her piece but still offended by it — to respond. And most did, at great length, by accusing her of hurling the dreaded label “racism” at them unfairly, arguing that there’s nothing wrong with jokingly referring to all Mexican-Americans as “Aztecs” (Derbyshire) or attacking “Hispanic family values” by claiming that “Hispanic immigrants bring near-Third World levels of fertility to America, coupled with what were once thought to be First World levels of illegitimacy” (Heather MacDonald). Perfectly legitimate political arguments, right?

The National Review represents the most mainstream and least “fringey” element of modern conservatism, and they regularly police themselves to remain so, which is why it’s particularly notable that the nativists and white nationalists and white supremacists were welcome members of the NR-dictated establishment up until so very recently. (Of course, they didn’t even fully flush out the anti-Semitism until 1993, when Joe Sobran — still widely considered a brilliant mind with an unfortunate proclivity for Holocaust denial — was ousted from the magazine by William F. Buckley.)

There are a few more recent examples of American Renaissance conference participants popping up at the National Review: a link to a “revelatory” video chat with Paul Gottfried, a past American Renaissance speaker. Stanley Kurtz (he who regularly paints a dramatic picture of our moderate president’s “radical” ties) linking to a “deeply frightening” post on Iran written by “Path to National Suicide” author Lawrence Auster, who spoke at the very first AmRen conference and describes himself as a “racialist.” Another positive review of an Auster piece from Candace de Russy. (Auster split with the AmRen crowd due to their anti-Semitism, but he considers founder Jared Taylor a “talented and impressive person” whose “contributions to the understanding of racial realities have been indispensable …”)

Two of those links are from “Phi Beta Cons,” the National Review’s education blog, where purged Weissberg also contributed. Weissberg’s contributions to the site were predictable variations on common conservative themes: p.c. liberals were brainwashing our children, and black people are stupider than white people, because of genetics.

That latter claim is the primary argument of the modern version of the very old field of scientific racism, and it is incredibly popular among a certain variety of paleocon. It was also, as you see, perfectly acceptable at the NR until last week.

The “race and IQ” controversy is largely a lot of bullshit. IQ is partly heritable, and “race and IQ” obsessives draw from that fact the conclusion that black people are genetically inferior to whites (and, often, Asians as well). Then they crow about how liberals are “anti-science” for disputing their methodology and conclusions, because they are essentially trolling.

Let’s deal with this as swiftly as possible: “IQ” measures one variety of cultural literacy — are you good at taking a specific kind of test? — not innate “intelligence.” IQ generally correlates to economic advancement, because, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in one of his least annoying pieces, it measures “modernity.” Plenty of things are “heritable” but not genetic — like taste in music. An Ireland-born person of South Asian ancestry is almost certainly more likely to enjoy Jedward than an Indian-born person of Irish ancestry, so while the Irish can be said to be more likely to have shit taste in music on that account, it is by no means determined by their genes.

The fact that IQ has been steadily increasing for as long as we’ve been measuring it — the famous Flynn effect — indicates that the test measures a characteristic determined primarily by environment. “Heritability” of IQ is higher in more prosperous classes than in lower classes. In other words, “for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.”

Race itself is socially and culturally constructed; basic visual “racial” markers are genetically dictated but any randomly selected white person may be more genetically similar to any randomly selected Asian or African person than another randomly selected white person. “The great majority of genetic variation … [is] within the so-called races, not between them,” according to Jan Sapp.

Between 5 and 7 percent of human genetic diversity is between subgroups within the classically defined races; 6 to 10 percent of the total human variation is between those groups that we think of as races in an everyday sense based on skin color. The remainder of the variation occurs at the individual level and cannot be categorized by group or subgroup.

If IQ were primarily or even marginally genetically determined, “race” would be about as useful a rubric for analyzing differences in intelligence as hair color or nose shape or any other cosmetic difference. If our society had a history of oppressing red-haired people, there would be researchers manipulating statistics to prove that gingers are simply genetically inferior, and John Derbyshire would be warning his children to avoid large gatherings of Scottish people.

What liberals find obnoxious about the conservative obsession with IQ and its heritability is that it’s a patently obvious smokescreen for racism. Charles Murray and his ilk pose as disinterested scientists, but they are political actors. The people who care deeply about the supposed innate genetic differences between “the races” also almost invariably use those supposed innate differences to justify attitudes and behaviors that are indistinguishable from “classic” American racism.

Derbyshire’s lessons to his children don’t even make sense if you suppose that intelligence is genetically determined, because the “races” are not genetically distinct enough for you to draw useful conclusions about people based solely on those visual cues. It is much more “useful” to draw inferences based on purely cultural signifiers; that group of drunk guys in New Jersey Devils apparel staggering down 35th Street toward Madison Square Garden may seem like people you should avoid, but not specifically because they are white people unknown to you.

The purge at NR is still limited to those who link their preoccupation with “the IQ question” to explicitly white supremacist or nativist politics, like Derbyshire and Weissberg. Charles Murray, who pioneered the argument but who’s always careful to stop short of open association with Stormfront types, remains a welcome presence.

Phi Beta Cons, the aforementioned higher education blog where Weissberg was published, is edited by Robert VerBruggen, who, while declaring himself “agnostic” on the issue of genetically determined race-based IQ heritability (hmm), has certainly demonstrated an interest in the subject.

VerBruggen, for example, defended DNA co-discoverer James Watson, who has revealed himself in his old age to be a racist, sexist crank.

Watson isn’t a “racist” but a “racialist”; in other words, he believes that genetic differences between the races might explain differences in ability and behavior, and that’s a travesty.

Watson had recently said (among other things) that aid to Africa was useless because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really.” He also said that “people who have to deal with black employees find” the idea that all people are created equal to be “not true.” VerBruggen allows that Watson’s comments were “unprofessional,” but apparently not “racist.” (Racialist! There’s a difference!)

Conservatives like VerBruggen seem attracted to genetic determinism, especially when it reinforces their view that society’s “winners and losers” each deserve their lot in life: When research shows that the lower classes tend to score worse on IQ tests than rich people, the conservative interpretation is not that IQ increases with, say, greater economic security and nutrition and access to healthcare and a million other environmental factors, but that rich people are rich because they are smarter. This leads to fatalism — to Murray’s sorrowful belief that there’s only so much we can do as a nation to improve the lives of our downtrodden underclass. They’re just dumb!

To be clear, I’m not calling VerBruggen a “racist,” or accusing him of anti-black bias — I just think that his repeated need to defend practitioners of racialist IQ hogwash is ill-advised, and it certainly helps explain how a white supremacist found a welcome home at the National Review without anyone (apparently) noticing.

If conservatives seriously want to understand why the “cudgel of racism” is still wielded against them, they may want to try to picture how actual black people interpret their fascination with “proofs” (or even just “interesting arguments”) that blacks are genetically inferior.

Although founder William F. Buckley is widely credited with driving John Birch Society extremists out of the conservative movement, he made his own contributions to the ugly coarsening of American politics on the issue of race. He and his magazine defended segregation and white supremacy in the South (though he later apologized), while in the North, he played a leading role in making the issue of rising crime both racial and political – with arguments and tactics still being used in the Trayvon Martin case today.

I just finished “The Cause,” Eric Alterman and Kevin Mattson’s history of modern American liberalism, and I was particularly fascinated by their account of the lasting impact the 1965 New York mayor’s race had not only on the city but on liberalism. Buckley ran against liberal Republican John Lindsay and Democrat Abe Beame, and of course lost. But for a while the elite conservative Buckley became a hero to some working-class New York Democrats, for his ability to channel their anger about the city’s rising crime rate, often in racial terms. He mocked liberals for pointing to racism and poverty to explain crime, arguing that those social forces didn’t “make Negro crime any less criminal.” He declared flatly:  ”I believe that young thugs are young thugs, irrespective of race, color or creed.” Before there were Reagan Democrats, there were Buckley Democrats.

Lindsay won the election, but Buckley won the debate about crime. After the newly elected mayor appointed a civilian complaint review board to examine rising reports of police brutality, New York cops fought back with a ballot measure to repeal it. Buckley and conservatives backed the measure, while the liberal establishment fought it ferociously. The measure passed thanks to a once unthinkable alliance of outer-borough Jews and “white ethnics,” mainly Catholics – two pillars of the so-called New Deal coalition that kept Democrats in the White House for 36 years, with a short break for Dwight Eisenhower. National politics has never been the same.

The sense that liberals, black and white, care more about criminals than crime persisted beyond the 1960s. I grew up in New York back then and I remember genuine fear about rising rates of crime and arson in the city. With uncles who were cops and firefighters, I was familiar with the sense of resentment that their jobs were getting more dangerous, but Lindsay was making them out to be the bad guys. Of course it was never true that liberals didn’t care about crime. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. counted crime among the scourges to be fought in the black community, and in our day Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama have done the same. Yet once Republicans made the issue political, you were “soft on crime” if you insisted on acknowledging that poverty and oppression play any role in it at all.

Derbyshire stated crudely what Buckley channeled with more finesse – and it helps explain the right wing’s need to demonize Trayvon Martin. In the 1960s, the right fought civil rights liberalism by blaming black people for their own troubles, by defining African-American men in particular as scary and dangerous, and by attacking liberals for refusing to “admit” it.  According to this playbook, Trayvon Martin had to be made into a “young thug,” and George Zimmerman had to be rescued from the attacks of liberals and turned into a man who was just using common sense, defending himself and his community from a known danger.

Rich Lowry himself, though he has now distanced himself and his magazine from “Derb’s” crude racism, continued Buckley’s tradition last week, with a tendentious column accusing black leaders of “politicizing” Martin’s death while “ignoring” the problem of black teens murdered by other black teens. (This has become a big fake issue on the right.) Lowry ignores years of hard work to combat “black on black crime” by national and local black leaders. The murders Lowry writes about indeed deserve more attention and more outrage than they inspire, but it’s preposterous to claim black leaders haven’t demanded society pay attention. They have, and sadly, they will again; it’s the larger society that refuses to listen.

And in the end, the fact that some black teens are murdered by black teens has no bearing on the Trayvon Martin case. Black leaders and journalists took up the cause because local authorities were ignoring it; without their “rabble-rousing,” we would never have known what really happened. An unarmed black teenager was shot dead and his killer went free.  Local police conducted a subpar investigation that nonetheless convinced the lead investigator that Zimmerman should be charged with manslaughter, but he wasn’t.

Meanwhile, the right-wing outrage machine is more concerned that Zimmerman may be being wrongly accused of racism than that a boy died largely because he’s black. William F. Buckley’s magazine played a key role in building that outrage machine, and it continues to keep it going, whether or not John Derbyshire works there anymore.