Hollywood Reporter: Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired ‘Manhattan’

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Many “aspiring models” end up being “escorts” or have “sugar daddies” i.e. become prostitutes to wealthy men. As they age out, some of them transition to assistant positions to these men where they assume madam like roles and recruit and groom the next generation of “aspiring models”. This appears to have been her career trajectory, reading between the lines from the figures she’s associated with.

* Woody Allen in a 1976 interview: “I’m not above reproach; if anything, I’m below reproach. I mean, if I was caught in a love nest with 15 12-year-old girls tomorrow, people would think, yeah, I always knew that about him.”

Posted in Hollywood | Comments Off on Hollywood Reporter: Woody Allen’s Secret Teen Lover Speaks: Sex, Power and a Conflicted Muse Who Inspired ‘Manhattan’

Megan McCardle in WP: Who should decide what topics are off-limits?

Steve Sailer writes: McArdle: You Should be Allowed to Ask if It’s OK to Ask if Race Influences IQ, But Not to Ask if Race Influences IQ

…Okay, but should arguments based on the assumption that there cannot be empirical links between race and IQ also be ruled out of bounds? Should Mayor De Blasio’s argument that the Stuyvesant HS entrance exam must be biased because a couple of orders of magnitude more Asians than blacks pass it also be banned on the grounds that we aren’t allowed to speculate about such questions?

How would that work, exactly?

By the way, one leftist social scientist, James Flynn, actually made a major contribution to knowledge by discovering the Flynn Effect of rising raw IQ test scores in his effort to scientifically undermine Jensenism.

COMMENTS:

* If one wants people to shut up about race and IQ, one should also ask people to shut up about things such as “systemic racism” and blaming White people for Black and Hispanic underachievement.

* “isn’t the likelihood of getting it wrong just too high?”

Money quote. If there’s too high a chance of scientific endeavor producing ‘incorrect’ results, it must be prohibited. As well as asking about it. Even this post should be prohibited, as should this blog. This website–to be safe, the whole internet. Then we’ll get to work with the duct tape.

* This sort of talk is not worthy of the reasoned consideration you grant it. Obscurantism is not a legitimate political or philosophical position. Neither therefore, is the authority, moral, intellectual or political, of those that espouse it. Period.

* the eugenics that fueled the Holocaust.

You keep hearing this sort of thing parroted, but unless you mean something pretty specific–”Aryans” good, other people bad–by “eugneics”, it seems like b.s. to me.

I realize the Nazis killed off some disabled and retarded people, which you could call “murderous eugnics” if you wanted to. (American eugenicists simply argued that the retards and nut jobs shouldn’t reproduce, which i think as well–if you can’t take care of yourself, you shouldn’t be having kids.)

But the trade marked “Holocaust” we keep getting movies about was about killing Jews. That wasn’t eugenics but just race war….

Killing your enemy off has a long history. One could argue it’s the normal human response. (At least killing your male enemy off and enjoying their females has a very long history.) The Nazis would have been much better served to have done either “one nation, one people”–integration–or chasing them out–Zionism–or some combination. And would have done a whole lot less damage to the West. Some people just aren’t forward thinking.

Still how killing your enemy off in the Holocaust is specifically this new fangled thing “eugenics” as opposed to the very old-timey thing “killing your enemy off” … seems like a bunch of b.s.–propaganda–to me.

* Actually, spousal murder has been deemed entirely acceptable in many states. It’s called “battered wife syndrome” and allows you to murder your husband in his sleep as long as you have a good sob story.

* Being smart does not protect against non sequiturs and the like. He who won’t believe me could risk a look at – ehe – unz.com/American Pravda / Holocaust Denial. Not least: Nicholas Kollerstrom – Breaking The Spell – Red Ice Radio…

Individuals are weak. One of the big lessons of the middle ages is the following: Groups and culture allow people to grow/ become wise. Those then – with the help of the heavens above, might act in reasonable ways – and get along well with one another – – -and grow as a society and culture, too. (cf. Arno Borst, Barbarians, Heretics and Artists in the Middle Ages and: The Ordering of Time. From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer.

* If I remember correctly, early Nazi ideology held that Germany had to be rid of Jews not because they were inferior, but because they were “racially tougher” than the Aryans. After the Nazis took power, however, they found this was too hard a concept for the general public to wrap its head around. So, Hitler’s propaganda machine switched to demonizing Jews as dirty, ugly, subhuman, etc. That was an easier sell to a culture that was already anti-Semitic.

* This is sort of mental “stop and frisk.” You know you suspect something but not enough evidence to be quite sure.

* Exactly our policy prescriptions say that any disparity between the races is because of racism. If in a diverse society that is not the case this needs to be incorporated into our politics.

Also it’s ridiculous for a modern nation state to not have any idea of its human capital potential. The Chinese certainly will know.

* Maybe this is like taking the DNA test that tells you that you will die young of some genetic disease. Maybe you’re better off not knowing because there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.

We really don’t need to know more than we already know. The magnitude of the Gap (which has been fairly constant since the dawn of scientific intelligence measurement and was observed anecdotally since ancient times) and the # of blacks is perfectly well known. No one wants to draw any conclusions because the conclusions are too painful to draw and we can’t change the outcomes anyway.

* “And the potential cost of those particular errors simply too catastrophic to risk?”

What an unbelievably stupid question! How impaired do you have to be not to grasp that in the absence of scientific research we will be left with a completely unscientific — i.e., deliberately false — belief that must be designed to benefit the liars at the expense of others?

* “to the eugenics that fueled the Holocaust”

Idiotic slander on many great Americans and Englishmen.

Brandeis by the way joined Justice Holmes’s decision to uphold Virginia’s sterilization law in Buck v Bell.

Buck’s mother was probably schizophrenic and was unable to care for her three children (by different fathers) who were eventually institutionalized in a state facility with her. Buck was herself impregnated, allegedly by rape of a nephew of her foster family, and that baby was slow and died at age 8. The state judged her metal age to be 9 when she was 18 and thus a “moron.” Gould later claimed to have dug up her report cards from grade school showing she was a pleasant C+ student who was held back once.

Holmes:

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

* Now that I have read the whole article itself, I would say that it is probably a subtle, quasi-troll by McCardle.

She is illuminating the stupidity and cowardice of the academics who are against scientific inquiry, while still keeping herself positioned as miles-away from any career-ending poltical incorrectness.

Her conclusion is that we need to ban the research, but only after a debate. In effect, we should shoot the prisoner but only after a trial. McArdle is smart enough to know how stupid and unpricipled this is.

P.S. The article also deliberately ignores that plenty of research on race and IQ has been done for decades.

* “All societies place some questions out of bounds because they’re too toxic; we don’t debate whether child molestation or spousal murder is acceptable.”

Again, she’s absolutely right. Not too long ago, the question of homosexuality being wrong was out of bounds. Like child molestation, it was not open for debate. It should have stayed out of bounds, but we have crossed the Rubicon – if homosexuality is OK, why NOT debate child molestation? Where (and how) do we draw the line if we are no longer guided by biblical teaching and millennia of Western tradition?

But, once you get around to issues that the Left favors, then it’s suddenly time to draw up the drawbridges and close the debate. Last year, the Left wanted to have a CONVERSATION about race (meaning that they got to lecture you and you were supposed to shut up and listen). But they realized that was a losing proposition (no one way paying them for their emotional labor of denouncing you). So the best bet was to close the debate entirely and declare the subject out of bounds.

* The main rhetorical styles:

Hedge : “(this is unrelated to the question of whether the group differences are partly innate)”

Safeword: “this argument doesn’t assume that the difference is innate in any way”

Default: argue assuming, but not stating, that ability is equally distributed

Password: stating in print that “ability is equally distributed in all groups”

Hedge is a declaration of weakness equivalent to “kick me with impunity, I’m yours.”

Safeword gives deniability to prevent bullying and career destruction.

Default means living another day

Password is a demonstration of fealty and unlocks access to resources and promotion.

* IQ is the third rail of social discourse just because it correlates with everything: directly with civic engagement, wealth, health, and social capital; inversely with crime, reproduction rate, and welfare dependence. IQ data provides highly persuasive evidence for tight immigration controls and eugenics. Only Christian ethics condemns eugenics and demands that we not discriminate according to IQ, which makes it hilariously hypocritical that liberals and immigrants push for effectively Christian social policies while at the same time condemning Christianity as white imperialism.

* I normally like McArdle but this is moronic – what’s she really saying, along with everyone else who says this is an area that is off-limits for discussion – is not that the odds are that it’s wrong are too high, it’s that the odds that it is correct is too high.

The entire leftist political platform and its policy prescriptions (along with most of the right as well) are that build on the idea that people are all basically the same, that your ancestry or sex is entirely irrelevant in determining where you end up, your capabilities, interests, etc. Therefore, anything other than near-perfect representation of every segment of society in every endeavor is evidence of oppression and malign forces.

Destroy that belief, and then the social engineers of the right and left have to admit that their prescriptions are useless and all the lack of success to date isn’t a product of lack of funding, not trying hard enough, etc. Obviously it would be better for everyone if we recognized that some people are smarter than others, some have different interests and so on, an this accounts for the massive academic achievement gaps, difference in who goes into what type of employment, and then we could stop fighting about it and accusing others of evil intent. But that’s not what works politically, so we’ll just keep pretending that we’re all just biological widgets that should all perform just how our betters think we should.

* Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but civic nationalist is just a stop-gap as well. I’ve already gone down your path, started as a libertarian and moved to an iSteve civic nationalist. I was happy there, certainly didn’t want to change, but the reality of the situation in the U.S. just keeps hitting you in the face. You can ignore it for awhile. (Actually, you’re a lot smarter that I am, so you’ll be able to ignore longer than I did.) But sooner or later, you start to notice that civic nationalism in a multi-everything society made of tribal groups simply doesn’t work.

The low IQ blacks and Hispanics combined with the high IQ but tribal Jews, South Asians and, to a degree, NE Asians will destroy civic nationalism. These groups have either no real understanding or no real love of the values and ideas of a bunch of dead white men. To them, the United States isn’t a ideal but an open-air market where they get the best deal for themselves and their kind.

* The interesting thing is that while we wring our hands and worry that perhaps we ‘just shouldn’t research this at all’, the Chinese are studying the hell out of this. It’s obviously important research and it’s obviously true.

And that’s the thing: while we’re writing mass-signed letters condemning blatantly obvious facts, people on the other side of the world–who are not our friends–are using these obvious facts as a foundation for far greater insights.

Time and tide wait for no man. This is what’s happening, we have to deal with it.

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NYT Flirts With Mass Suicide, Take That Pete Davidson

00:00 NYT: Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?
10:00 Ariana Grande, Pete Davidson
28:00 Texas dad could lose custody of 6-y-o son for not affirming transgender identity
36:00 Sam Harris quits Patreon, protesting deplatforming
40:00 Criticizing Islam
1:06:00 New media hits stumbling block, scaring away some investors
1:11:00 Tony Blair pushes for a second referendum on Brexit
1:13:00 Rep Darrel Issa believes Mueller’s case against Michael Flynn will be THROWN OUT of court
1:20:00 10-YEAR-OLD BOY DANCES ON STAGE FOR MONEY AT ADULT GAY BAR IN NEW YORK
1:22:00 Google and Apple selling creepy apps that let your lover spy on you, monitor your calls and search your internet history
1:27:00 Inside the mind of Kanye West
1:43:00 WP: Russian disinformation teams targeted Robert S. Mueller III, says report prepared for Senate
1:45:00 The crypto-tranny appeal of gun-nut girl propaganda
1:57:00 What If G-Men Went After the Washington Post as They’re Going After the Enquirer?
2:00:00 Is Israel the real enemy of America?
2:08:00 Should Millenial Woes platform Jews?
2:10:00 The Homosexual Question
2:12:00 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces ‘self-care’ break before congressional session even starts
2:21:00 Three arrested in Spain for working on the Spanish section of the Daily Stormer.
2:55:00 The German Question

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The Sins Of Leon Wieseltier

Joseph Epstein writes:

My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all but single-handed savior of Commentary magazine. The author of the letter, he went on to report, was 25, had gone to Columbia, thence on a fellowship to Oxford, and would be spending the next few years as a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard. He ended by wondering if, were he to shore up one day in Chicago, we might meet for lunch.

As a scribbler for small-circulation magazines, my threshold for praise may be a touch or two higher than most people’s, but even I did not believe the extravagant praise in young Leon Wieseltier’s letter. Still, as one grows older, and I was then 40, one is pleased to have the praise of the young. Such praise leads to the doubtless delusionary hope that one’s own work will live on after one has departed the planet. I wrote to Leon Wieseltier, thanking him for his generous words and telling him that, yes, sure, should he ever find himself in Chicago, he was to let me know, so that we might meet.

Six or so months later, I received another letter from Wieseltier informing me that he planned to be in Chicago in six days and wondered if we might have that lunch. The letterhead was now that of the Harvard Society of Fellows. I wrote back to say yes, of course, and gave him the address of a Chinese restaurant where I thought we might meet. When he entered the restaurant, he turned out to be tall, slender, with close-cropped dark hair. Conversation flowed easily enough. He told me that, like me, he wished to write for the intellectual magazines. He filled me in on his own background. His parents were immigrants, survivors of the Holocaust. His early education was at the Flatbush Yeshiva, where Talmud study had made all subsequent classroom learning seem a pushover. We told each other Jewish jokes. We searched for the French word for “a light,” as in to light a cigarette ( allumer). I was editing a magazine myself in those days, and he said he would like, if I didn’t mind, to send me an essay he was thinking of writing about his Oxford days.

Toward the close of the meal, he took out a scrap of paper and read out an address on Sheridan Road in Chicago and asked how far it was from the hotel in the Loop where he was staying.

“It’s roughly a 20-dollar cab ride,” I told him. “Who lives on Sheridan Road?”

“Oh,” he said, “Saul Bellow. I’m having dinner tonight with him and his wife.”

Just then I wondered how many letters of the kind he had written to me, with appropriate variations, he had written to others. I also thought, this kid is doing intellectual tourism, and I am merely Siena.

Three or so months later, he sent me his essay, which was passable but no great shakes. Still, wanting to encourage the young, I agreed to publish it, which, with a bit of editing, I did. Meanwhile, I noticed his name beginning to turn up over reviews in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books. These reviews were of books on serious subjects—I remember a Gershom Scholem book at the center of one—and were not especially notable, not for distinction of style or for penetrating ideas, but good imitations of the kind of reviews that appeared in both places. His essay on Oxford that I published attracted no comment but for a letter from a reader pointing out that its author had made a factual mistake. I wrote to tell him, Leon, all that was required was his acknowledging his error and apologizing for it. He replied by asking if it were possible that I could attribute the mistake to “a printer’s error.” I replied absolutely not and printed the letter without a response. This was the second time in my brief acquaintance with him that I sensed Leon Wieseltier was a young man worth watching. And so I did, and continued to do. I never saw him again, but I found myself following his career with fascination and much amusement. Quite a career, close to fabled you might say, it turned out to be.

Around this time, while in New York, I had a meeting with the literary critic Irving Howe. He had been generous to me, running some of my early writing in his magazine Dissent and going out of his way to get me, a man with no advanced degrees, a job teaching in the English department in nearby (to me) Northwestern University. We met in Irving’s office. He sat behind his desk, upon which sat an ample manuscript. He told me it was for his book to be called World of Our Fathers and that its publisher thought it had a chance for a large sale.

“Must be nice to hear,” I said.

“I suppose so,” Irving answered, “but you know such accomplishments as I’ve recorded have always been dampened for me by a remark of Elizabeth Hardwick some years ago that got back to me.”

“What was it?”

“ ‘Irving Howe,’ ” she said, “ ‘another Jew-boy in a hurry.’ ”

I thought, of course, of Leon Wieseltier.

After his years at Harvard, a school useful above all for making connections, Leon had acquired a job at the New Republic, a liberal weekly that had not long before been bought by a man named Martin Peretz, a wealthy, part-time instructor at Harvard. During his early days on the magazine, Leon published a longish piece there on, of all things, nuclear war. Nothing very distinguished about it, either, the thought of taking him seriously on such a large subject was in fact slightly gigglesome, but it suggested to me that young Leon, with all the possibilities open to him, the good student with superior tuchus-lecking skills, was considering that of becoming our next Henry Kissinger. I subsequently learned he was aiming higher.

Before long Leon was given control over the back of the book, the literary and cultural sections of the New Republic. His byline would appear mostly over something like a column, not every week but fairly often, on the last page of the magazine. These columns increasingly became moral diatribes. Whatever the subject, one thing they all had in common was that he, Leon Wieseltier, not only had a clearer vision of the world and what was important in it than anyone he was writing about, but also a deeper moral imagination. Along the way, he had developed a style which entailed short-sentences that suggested the aphorism. This style worked nicely to elevate himself while dismissing anyone who happened to disagree as a moral idiot, scum really, who if he understood how wretched he was would go instanter into the intellectual equivalent of a witness protection program.

In this new style, on his single page containing 800 or so words, Leon took on the role of moral conscience of the intellectuals, the Jews, the nation at large. His self-emplacement as spokesmen for the Jews especially caused me to wince and shiver. Still a fairly young man, Leon Wieseltier was setting up shop as one of the leading moralists of our day, and with absolutely no legitimate claims to it that I could see, and a few, from personal experience, that I knew disqualified him. Yes, his was a career worth watching.

Meanwhile, the name Leon Wieseltier, sometimes accompanied by photographs, began to turn up in places like the New York Observer and those small photographs in the party pages at the front of Vanity Fair. His hair had turned prematurely white, he had put on weight, his complexion become pinker than I had remembered. Someone told me that on trips to Hollywood he had become not merely acquainted but friendly with those two queens of ditz, Barbra Streisand and Shirley MacLaine. In Washington, where the New Republic was located, he was often seen in the company of Al and Tipper Gore. He somehow managed to wangle a small part—two lines at a Jewish wedding—in an episode of The Sopranos.

He began turning up on television. I recall him pontificating about the Middle East and the fate of Israel on Charlie Rose. Charlie (if I may) asked him to explain the complexities of Middle Eastern politics; Leon obliged. Appearing on the occasional cable station panels, he could have been, if he so desired, among the punditi, but his intellectual allusions elevated him at least two stages higher. Leon was one of America’s leading experts in—in whatever you’ve got.

On television I noted that he put on weight, his hairline greatly receded, his skin grew pinker and he, somehow, grosser. (If Orwell was correct when he said that at 50 one has the face one deserves, then Leon was going to need cosmetic surgery at 60.) When I searched him out on YouTube, which I began to do in recent years, he wore a standard outfit, trousers, jacket, T-shirt, outershirt, long tallith-like scarf worn indoors, cowboy boots, all of them black; he was a kind of rumpled reversal of Tom Wolfe in his white suits. An Internet photo has him wearing a cowboy hat above his jowly face. His dominant feature, though, was his hair, two great white tufts of it, growing out of both sides of his head, framing his coarsening features and causing Gore Vidal to remark of him that he had “important hair,” with the clear if unspoken implication of “and nothing else.”

In 1995 an article appeared in Vanity Fair written by a man named Lloyd Grove, commenting on Leon’s social-climbing skills, his unbreakable connection with Martin Peretz and the power it gave him at the New Republic, his all-but-self-confessed cheating on his first wife (the Pakistani daughter of a man described in the article as a “merchant prince”). The article also remarked on how these various activities apparently got in the way of Leon, despite his rather extravagant intellectual pretensions, getting any serious intellectual work done: no books, few articles beyond those back-page moral diatribes. He was, he told Grove, contemplating a book on sighing, a fine Leon touch, in the realm of intellectual pretension. The unspoken charge was laziness.

Toward the close of the article what one might have thought a more serious matter arose: that of Leon’s reputed cocaine habit, which caused him to load up his Honda with the review copies of books sent by publishers to the magazine and sell them to support his expensive drug habit. I looked at future issues of Vanity Fair to see if Leon had written in, in his best moralizing tone, refuting such a story, but no letter appeared.

One might have thought this last item—drugging and petty thieving—might have taken the highfalutinness out of Leon’s moral tone, but, near as I could make out, not in the least. The heavy moralizing, the portentousness, the pomposity, all continued, business pretty much as usual. Evidently, he beat his cocaine habit.

Leon grew older, balder, fatter, his white locks longer (the Benjamin Franklin de nos jours someone called him). His speaking engagements, at shuls, universities, in Israel, if anything seemed to increase. The role and responsibility of the intellectual became one of his signature topics. But he had many. Watching him on YouTube being interviewed by earnest young rabbis, professors, editors, on one occasion appearing with the female president of Harvard, I sensed that, on the basis of no concrete intellectual achievements, Leon Wieseltier had taken upon himself the role of a tzaddik, for the hasidim one of the world’s righteous and all-wise leaders. He was a tzaddik, of course, without followers or even a belief in God, a freelance tzaddik, you might say, working for what I assume were substantial speaking fees.

On these various interviews, it was as if his interlocutors, looking over at him in his black get-up, slouching in his chair, thick fingers on his expansive pot belly, one cowboy-booted leg crossed over the other, were appealing, “Oh, tzaddik, give unto us your wisdom, what do you think of the Holocaust, the future of the university, the role of the humanities, the Netanyahu government, mobile phones, the role of technology in contemporary life .  .  . ” With neither flinch nor stammer, Leon told them, prattled away, gave them crumbs from the great tzaddik’s plate, and they seemed to slurp it all up. Did he believe all, or even any, of his moral pronunciamentos? Who knows? Even Leon may not have known. No one seemed to call him on them, or on his authority generally. He had a tight act.

I noted that in recent years Leon had added to his repertoire the notion that he was, as he put it, “the intellectual son” of distinguished men: of Lionel Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Saul Bellow, and others. “I have many intellectual fathers,” I heard him say in more than one of his interviews. Since all these men were dead, I thought, what a pity they couldn’t, as all would doubtless have wished, deny paternity.

Still, Leon Wieseltier seemed to go from strength to strength. He turned setbacks into victories. When a young Internet millionaire, who had bought the New Republic two years earlier, announced plans in 2014 to transform the magazine for which he had worked for decades into a “digital media company,” Leon resigned in his by now well-practiced high moral dudgeon, accompanied by much favorable publicity, claiming the owner knew nothing of the higher purposes of intellectual journalism.

Upon his quitting the New Republic, a famous think tank quickly took Leon on as its Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow (Daddy would have been proud) and the Atlantic appointed him a contributing editor. The wealthy widow of Steve Jobs stepped up to fund a new magazine he planned to edit called Idea. In a well-known anecdote, the conductor Herbert von Karajan is said to have got into a cab, and when the driver asked him where he wished to go, von Karajan replied, “It doesn’t matter. They want me everywhere.” Leon Wielseltier seemed to be in the same condition.

And then— Pow! Crash! Crunch!—the roof fell in. Amid a clump of sexual harassment scandals, featuring movie moguls, right-wing television commentators and executives, big-money journalists, Leon Wieseltier’s name turned up. For nearly his entire tenure at the New Republic, the unrefuted accusation was, he was a regular offender, kissing young women full on the mouth against their wishes, describing their bodies to them, recounting his own sexual exploits, sputtering obscenities, bringing tears and shame to females under his power. Everyone on the New Republic apparently knew about it, but, owing to his close connection to the magazine’s owner, no one on the staff, man or woman, had the courage to call him out on the awfulness of his behavior.

Leon’s modest fame was just ample enough for a lengthy story about his atrocious behavior to appear in the New York Times. His villainous behavior was suddenly all over the Internet. Leon made his apology, thereby owning up to the truth of the accusations against him, but the apology, though it seemed little more than perfunctory, did include the nice Leonic moral touch near the end, where he assured everyone that he “will not waste this reckoning.” At least he had the decency not to claim that he was going into therapy.

What made it all so rich, of course, was the Tartuffian quality of its perpetrator, Leon Wieseltier, the earnest young man who wrote to me from Oxford some 40 years ago. The great humanist turned out to be inhumane, the tzaddik wore no tzitzit but all these years was mentally undressing and offending his female co-workers. Untoppable, such a story, as Molière recognized nearly four centuries ago.

Soon after the story of Leon Wieseltier’s years of sexual harassing broke, the wealthy widow canceled his new magazine, the Brookings Institution stripped him of his fellowship, the Atlantic dropped him from its masthead, other journals on whose boards he sat found him, to put it gently, an embarrassment.

I, for one, shall miss Leon in, as he might say, the public square, or rather I shall miss his act, which over the years has been a source of high amusement for me, who viewed it as a one-man intellectual sitcom at the spectacle of which I may have been the only one laughing. In his middle sixties, now that he has been publicly shamed and self-confessed as a creep, the Leon Wieseltier Show would seem to be over. No comeback for its star, surely, is possible, or so one might think. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

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Transgenderism & Becoming Who We Are

Pat emails: If a man insists he is a ‘woman’, others have to call him as he demands. His self-perception is the only truth. If you still see a man and not a woman and say as much, you are a thought criminal(or thought vigilante) who must be stopped.

If a man insists he is not a ‘white supremacist’ but a ‘white advocate’ or ‘white liberationist’, others may still designate him as such according to their own perception of him. His self-definition doesn’t count. So, all the media can smear Jared Taylor as a ‘white supremacist’ even though he rejects the label.

So, with the tranny business, the self has the final authority. We must all comply with the individual’s demand, which is backed by official PC.
But with white identity, the self has no authority. A white person may be smeared as a supremacist even though he doesn’t regard himself as any such.

In both cases, it’s matter of the Power. Since the Power is behind LGBTQXYZ, it promotes the ‘right’ of self-identification among homos, trannies, and the like. And the Power denies the right of independent perception among others. So, if straight people perceive trannies to still be male, they better shut up or be shut down.

In contrast, since the Power hates the idea of white identity, independence, and individuality(liberated from ‘white guilt’), it denies the right of self-identification among white people. Even if whites identify as ‘white advocates’, the media and academia still get to call them ‘neo-nazi’ or ‘white-supremacist.’ Whites have no right of self-identification. They are named by others(like dogs are given names by the master) who are favored by the Power.

The Power bestows the right of autonomous identification among homos and trannies.

But whites are not to have autonomous identification. Their ideological affinity get to be decided by Others(who denounce white people as ‘white supremacist’ unless they cower before globohomo supremacism).

The Glob accuses whites of ‘dog-whistling’, but the Power goes for all-out dog-beating when it comes to white identity. The Master gets to name the White Dog… and beat it up too when it doesn’t answer to its designated name.

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