For 12 straight hours, and now again today, rapper Taleb Kweli — who’s evidently a big deal, though I hadn’t heard of him — went on the attack against me, and against some of my followers.
It was bizarre.
On my entrepreneurship email list I wrote about some business lessons I drew from this.
It began when someone linked to my lecture on Hitler’s views of economics, in order to demonstrate to Talib that Hitler wasn’t really a free-market guy.
Instead of evaluating my claims, Talib went around looking for evidence that I was a bad person.
He then replied, speaking about me:
“He is a vile racist.”
Huh? Evidently Talib based this claim on an article by — of all people — Max Boot, who as I recall did not actually accuse me of racism. Boot is a pretty awful neocon, though, and in any case I
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smashed his article in a reply that appeared in The American Conservative.
Then Talib said:
“He is not respected in his field.”
So I linked him to reviews of my book The Church Confronts Modernity (published by Columbia University Press), which was praised by all the major journals: Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Journal of the Historical Society, Catholic Historical Review, Choice (review publication for academic libraries), and numerous others.
Yes, I know it doesn’t matter whether a rapper attacking me knows any of that, but sometimes you just say things anyway.
Now for a few snippets. (If you have images disabled, you won’t see them.) Hard to reproduce many of Talib’s, since his language is so foul, but it’s all there on Twitter, and you can at least get the idea.
Talib later accused sixteenth-century whites of having “invented” racism.
Most of the discussion was “you’re a racist, that’s racism, racism is everywhere, white people should shut up and learn when black people talk about racism.”
This wasn’t exactly my debate with Michael Malice on Alexander Hamilton, inother words.
At one point Talib posted a screenshot — not of any of my books, of course, which he’s never read — of Boot’s article in which the latter criticized my view that the states had the power to nullify unconstitutional federal laws. Boot never brought up Thomas Jefferson or the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, in which that power is clearly promoted and defended, so I mentioned them to Talib on Twitter.
No response.
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There was no way “you’re a racist” made any sense at all in that situation, so (as with every one of my arguments from history) it was ignored.
I did offer a very nice Liberty Classroom discount (coupon code TALIB, of course) to my Twitter followers for two hours (expired now, unfortunately), so there’s another business lesson here: never, ever let an opportunity like this go to waste.
The guy was pretty nasty most of the time, throwing career-destroying smears around not only at me, but at the many scores of people who were all trying to minimize his embarrassment, including some of his own fans.
I shouldn’t have gone as long as I did (I kept jumping in here and there, but he was at his computer for a solid 12 hours in a row), but it was such a bizarre situation that I couldn’t help myself.
Unfortunately, this is how all too much debate takes place out there these days.
