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Jan. 8, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor

10:20

Let the Revolution Eat Its Own Children

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	Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
	It has never been more true that no matter how loony a leftist you are, there will always be someone even more loony than you who thinks you're a fascist.
	Let's start with this guy, Gary Garrels.
	He used to be a respected senior curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
	He raised a lot of money to buy art by women.
	People of color and LGBTQs.
	But he made the mistake of saying that he wasn't going to cut out white men entirely.
	That's all it took to make him a white supremacist, and he had to go.
	Until recently, David Shore was a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, Civis Analytics.
	His job was to help Democrats win elections.
	He tweeted about a paper that had found that in 1968, When there were violent black protests, it increased the number of people who voted Republican, while peaceful black protests helped Democrats.
	Now, don't you think that when there is looting and arson in an election year, progressives might want to think about that paper?
	Well, no.
	Instead, this one tweet was interpreted as an insult to blacks, whose righteous rage apparently justifies looting and arson.
	And David Shore was fired.
	Some liberals think that this cancel culture has gone too far.
	On July 7th, Harper's published a letter signed by more than 100 of them.
	It said that censorship from the left has created a stifling atmosphere of ideological conformity and that public shaming and ostracism have got to stop.
	But then, some of the people who signed the letter accused other people who signed the letter.
	Of being bigots.
	And took their own names off the letter.
	They started doing exactly what the letter was supposed to bring to a stop.
	Public shaming and ostracism.
	I guess they have no sense of irony.
	And then there's Barry Weiss, who just left the New York Times after three years as an editor for the op-ed page.
	She was hired to expand the range of opinions at the Times.
	That should be easy.
	But she gave up.
	As she wrote in her resignation letter, she discovered a big problem.
	Especially at this paper, that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
	When she tried to introduce new ideas, she got so much venom and hostility from co-workers that she quit.
	You can't survive at the Times or anywhere in the elite press if you don't agree with the enlightened few.
	Here's an example of something Miss Weiss wrote in the Times in 2018.
	She warned that liberals accused too many people of fascism or misogyny or of being on the alt-right.
	She wrote that if liberals use these words too often, They strip us of our sharpness, of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right.
	Well, many lefties love to call people fascists, and they don't like it when somebody says they're overdoing it.
	But think about what Miss Weiss is doing here.
	She is posing as someone who wants to be open to a variety of ideas, but she draws a very clear line.
	If somebody she thinks is a fascist or a misogynist and someone like that comes along, in her words, we must react forcefully, whatever that means.
	She wants to be the one who decides who's respectable and who's not.
	Here's a guy writing for the Russian site RT in an article called Who Are the Real Racists?
	The woke mob tries to redefine racism to hide their own bigotry.
	He's making Barry Weiss's point.
	Black Lives Matter and Woke Twitter are redefining racism to weaponize the charge against anyone they choose.
	If you disagree with the Woke Mob, it calls you a racist and destroys you.
	But then this guy adds that that kind of treatment is just fine for some people.
	Individuals like Jared Taylor or Richard Spencer are not tolerated, he says.
	The people who say that name-calling has gone too far can always tell you exactly how far it should go.
	As the brilliant cartoonist Stone Toss puts it, cancel culture is fine, so long it is crushing your conservative enemies, but it's gone way too far if it crushes a good little liberal like you.
	Here's a final example.
	Ben Shapiro says this.
	It's self-serving.
	To say you don't like the cancel culture when you're trying to open the Overton window just wide enough to escape but not wide enough to allow open conversation with others obviously within the political conversation who disagree with you.
	In other words, you're a hypocrite if you rail against cancel culture but don't care if it smashes people you don't like.
	But Mr. Shapiro is happy to smash people he doesn't like.
	Here he says: Of course, there are legitimate racists, and we should target them, we should find them, and we should hurt their careers because racism is unacceptable.
	Mr. Shapiro has a whole list of what he calls alt-right types whose careers should presumably be hurt.
	Peter Brimelow, Jim Goad, John Derbyshire, Pat Buchanan, Steve Saylor, even Donald Trump, and, of course, your servant.
	Mr. Shapiro wants to be exactly what Barry Weiss says was so stifling about the New York Times.
	He wants to be the high priest of the enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
	They're all claiming they know who's good and who's bad.
	They want to decide what you can read and what you can think.
	They disagree only on where to draw the line.
	Does anyone truly defend free speech?
	Yes. In 2014, Christopher Hitchens said we should imagine a time when all American school children are forced to undergo Holocaust awareness and sensitivity training.
	If that's the case with everybody, as it more or less is, and one person gets up and says, you know about this Holocaust, I'm not sure it even happened.
	In fact, I'm pretty certain it didn't.
	Indeed. I begin to wonder if the only thing is that the Jews brought a little bit of violence on themselves.
	That person doesn't just have a right to speak.
	That person's right to speak must be given extra protection.
	Because what he has to say must have taken him some effort to come up with.
	might be, might contain a grain of historical truth, might in any case give people to think about why do they know what they already think they know.
	Later he warns that things are not true just because everyone says they are, so you should listen to dissidents.
	The whole talk is excellent, and you can find a link to it in the description to this video.
	Watch the talk on YouTube before it gets cancelled.
	So several things are happening here, partly in response to the George Floyd business, And partly because that's just the way they are.
	Lefties are getting even more viciously intolerant.
	Revolutions often get out of hand and eat their own children.
	During the French Revolution, Robespierre sent thousands of people to the guillotine before the terror turned on him and put him under the knife.
	Joseph Stalin ran his own terror after the Russian Revolution.
	Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev and Kamenev and Bukharin Who made the revolution happen?
	They took bullets in the back of the head.
	Trotsky got a pickaxe in the back of the head.
	Stalin was the only one of these guys who died in bed.
	Nowadays, no one gets shot, just fired and humiliated.
	But the spirit of tyranny is the same, and the fear it provokes is the same.
	No one's immune, famous or not.
	When Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling said some mildly unfashionable things about transsexuals, the mob didn't care that she's a thoroughgoing leftist.
	It wanted her head.
	Fortunately for her, she's a self-employed billionaire and nobody can fire her.
	Well, I think all this is just fine.
	Let the revolution eat its children.
	I'm sorry for the victims, but I hope they learn something.
	I hope they begin to wonder if anyone should lose his job because of a political opinion.
	And I think it's great when people like Ben Shapiro and Barry Weiss claim to be all in favor of a vigorous exchange of ideas, except for ideas they don't like.
	That's pure hypocrisy.
	And there are few things people dislike more than hypocrisy.
	This is a very dark time for a country that used to believe in freedom of speech.
	But some good could come from this insane craze to cancel people, and from pompous folks who claim to oppose cancel culture but just disagree on who should be canceled.
	This political terror campaign and this hypocrisy might lead us back to something that should have been obvious from the start: that no one, not the government, not Twitter, not Facebook, Not YouTube.
	No one should have the right to decide what you should think.
	Maybe, eventually, we'll get back there.

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