In 2019, two books demanding more censorship have each devoted a chapter to portraying me as a historic villain.
In the first, Angela Saini’s Superior: The Return of Race Science, I was cast as a bad guy along with Sir Francis Galton, James D. Watson, David Reich, Morrissey, and Albert Einstein, which, I must say, is pretty cool company.
Sadly, in New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz’s new Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation, the chapter about me (“The Sailer Strategy”) is folded in amidst interminable profiles of right-wing nutrition supplement hucksters like that Ape Brain guy, which I found less edifying than being included on Saini’s list of evil great white men.
Both authors are convinced that I helped hijack something big, although they disagree about whether it was science or politics. (I’ve been busy, apparently.)
Marantz has a noticeably higher IQ than Saini, but his book is vastly longer. Its 380 pages are printed in a tiny typeface with an even teenier font used for the many footnotes. It should have come with a magnifying glass.
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Another irritation: Antisocial has no index, presumably to encourage people who might be mentioned in the book to buy it rather than to just look up the bits about themselves while standing in the bookstore.
And while Saini’s book climaxes wonderfully when she blunders into a humiliating interview with superstar geneticist Reich, who, hilariously, demolishes her book’s thesis that Race Does Not Exist, Marantz mostly hangs out endlessly with callow rightist micro-celebrities whose earnest attempts at arguing the issues with him he sidesteps.
But Marantz’s Ctrl-Left thesis is much the same as Saini’s: Something must be done about all the bad people, like me, who have been “hijacking the American conversation” with our control of the media.
(By the way, have you noticed lately that anything referencing “the conversation” is almost inevitably lame? “The conversation” is an embarrassing schoolmarmish term that has come to mean Shut Up and Listen to Me Talk. I wonder who cajoled Marantz into this embarrassing subtitle.)
In The New York Times recently, Marantz proclaimed, “Free Speech Is Killing Us.”
And in his book, Marantz worries: How can underdog media outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and National Review stand up to the might of the Sailersphere?
Sailer and other far-right heretics, many of whom Buckley had banished to the fringes of the movement years earlier, now reconvened online. They built their own publications (The American Conservative, Taki’s Magazine, VDARE), and promoted them using new tools such as WordPress and Twitter and Reddit. These were more powerful distribution mechanisms than fifty-year-old print magazines….
For example, Marantz has persuaded himself that my extremely obscure political philosophy of “citizenism” represents the kind of hideous idea that naturally flourishes like a weed on the internet with no WFB around to shut me down:
William F. Buckley, the last singular arbiter of conservative opinion, died in 2008…. He had no comparable successor, no conservative panjandrum who could dictate which ideas deserved to flourish and which did not…. Many decisions about the spread of information were now made algorithmically. The algorithms were not designed to gauge whether an idea was true or false, prosocial or antisocial; they were designed to measure whether a meme was causing a spike of activating emotion in a large number of people. And Sailer’s citizenism—more colloquially known as intellectualized white nationalism—was just such a meme.
Where to begin?
