Denizen DiversityLet me start by saying that I love diversity. Shocking, you think? Has the Queen of Political Incorrectness gone mad and moved to the left, you ask? Has multiculturalism become my latest clamor as I join the egalitarian movement of my former adversaries? Not quite, so read on. As a denizen of LewRockwell.com, I must admit that I am part of the most diverse group of right-wing anarchocapitalists ever assembled. Here at LR.com, we have no hiring quotas, no affirmative action, no union, and no SAT exams culturally biased toward Euros. We don’t have OSHA regulations hanging ‘round, and we have no promotions to raise up women and minorities to the management level. Not only are none of us allowed to manage at this place, but heck, we don’t even get paid, and sometimes we even get our free articles turned down! Nor does Lew buy up huge blocks of newspaper advertising space telling people he’s an equal opportunity employer. He’s not. Opportunity here is unequal, as it should be, because it is divvied out to those that excel the most and work the hardest. He advertises his own nitpicking ways as being "unapologetically idiosyncratic." (You can read about that here.) Let’s see Burger King or Denny’s hire with that slogan! Somehow, in spite of all this rampant discrimination and blatant abuse of human rights at the dictatorial LR.com, we have managed to create a breadbasket of diversity in terms of gender, race, religion, and whatever else the State tries to force upon businesses. We are all different dudes (and gals) of such immense proportions, I hardly know where to start. The Wall Street Journal, in a recent article, referred to us LR.com people as "denizens" because several of us were trashing Lincoln right around his birthday, and the WSJ don’t like its martyrs getting dung thrown on ‘em. But to show we’re really diverse, we’ve whacked FDR, Clinton, Churchill, Madison, Hamilton, and others who are blindly touted as heroes. First, let me mention that the head honcho, Lew, is a white Euro male, born in Boston, living in the Dixie heartland, and bald as a baboon’s behind. Then I’ll introduce our publisher, Burt Blumert, who’s Jewish and lives on the left coast. He hates termites and Bed & Breakfasts, so the animal rights and hotel rights people might not like him too much. We have John Morgan, who’s a doctor, and because of that is probably richer than all of us put together, so already we’re setting the stage for a sort of fiscal diversity. What about that that Rob Moody guy from Atlanta, who is single and can’t find dates because women are either too stupid or too pinko? He is another Southerner who writes about crazy things like affirmative action for Office Depot laser writer toner cartridges, so he’s obviously concerned with equal treatment for all species and objects. I’ll bet he buys his toner cartridges from minority manufacturers for virtuous reasons, and not just so he can win some brownie points from all the Stalinists at work. A new writer to our site is Brad Edmonds, and he’s some kind of an Alabama banker with a fancy degree in yes, music, so he can probably write you a symphony at the same time he forecloses on your house. How about Michael Pierce? He’s not from Rhodesia, but he fought with the Rhodesian freedom fighters because he’s such a diverse guy, and you can tell he’s a Southerner because he’s so polite and says "m’am" all the time. Then there’s this Scott Wilkerson fella, another guy in Dixie (Oops, I hope we aren’t tipping the tables of diversity below the Mason-Dixon line.) He writes with fancy words and won’t put his picture up so he can remain an enigma to all of his female admirers. Bob Murphy is a hardcore anarchist who lives in Crown Heights and walks next to minority peoples on the sidewalk and uses words like "homey," "gangsta,", "curmudgeon," and "non sequitur." How many people can claim that diverse a vocabulary? Jeffrey Tucker writes for us once in a while and he’s from another country altogether – Texas; so as the bumper sticker says, "don’t mess with him." Tom DiLorenzo is an Italian-American college professor who is an Austrian economist and Head Lincoln-Basher here at LR.com, and Dave Dieteman is a philosophy-major and PhD-to-be who works as a lawyer and attends Catholic university. And Ryan McMacken, I think, is just a plain old white-guy grad student (except he s half-Hispanic). Ralph Raico is another Italian-American professor and an historian of liberty, bald as a cueball, and a translator of Mises. Jef Allen is a reformed Yankee, Myles Kantor is a Jewish law student, James Ostrowski is a non-Jewish lawyer, and geez, we sure do have a diverse group of lawyers here. Steven Yates is a non-Jewish, non-lawyer (thank goodness!) who lives in the South, teaches philosophy, and wrote a book telling us what’s wrong with affirmative action. Michael Gilson de Lemos has that great multicultural name, plus he is Spanish and speaks Latin. Humberto Fontova is a Cuban Cajun who likes to hunt and eat alligators. What about a little female diversity in here, you say? To finish up with a bang, we have Ilana Mercer, who has just recently been writing for LR.com. Ilana is Jewish, born in Israel, raised in South Africa, speaks Hebrew, lives in socialist Canada, and is on her way to living in the little-less-socialist United States of America. How can one get more diverse than that? But wait, another female, Patty Neill, is an Irish Midwesterner from the East, writes like she’s a Southerner (she says "reckon" and "y’all" a lot), is housewife to a farmer, and specializes in English literature on her own time. Heck, when she lived in New York state, she even lived next to a black guy. How about that Jeremy Sapienza, and the diversity he brings to the table? He’s a gay guy who looks Hispanic, but it turns out he’s really Italian, but he gets special loans from the banks because he lives in Florida and he looks Hispanic. So we even got a guy who’s a model for affirmative action here at LewRockwell.com! And then there’s Jonah Goldberg, of the National Review, whom we made an "honorary member" of our group for a couple of weeks, anyway. He’s a neoconservative, and we took turns bashing him and his mag, and then he bashed us, and pretty soon a search for the words "Jonah Goldberg" on LewRockwell.com turned up 6,721 matches on any given day. Now I just spent some time with some of these people at a very important Scholar’s Conference, and even at the bar they tend to bare their diverse roots. Some drink cosmopolitans, some beer, others hard liquor, and others stick to diet coke or a wimpy glass of water with lemon.
All in all, we’re an adequately multicultural assemblage of anarchocapitalists, I’d say. Diversity, yeah!! April 10, 2001 Karen De Coster is a politically incorrect CPA, and an MA student in economics at Walsh College in Michigan. Copyright © 2001 Karen De Coster |
Now
I can’t forget me, since I’m a Flemish/French Canadian/German-American
female with blonde hair who studies Austrian economics and can count
to twenty in German. Plus I can say "guten abend," "wie
geht es ihnen?", and stuff like that. Add to that, my beautician
is gay, my nail salon gal is Vietnamese, and my dad can swear in
Flemish.