January 01, 2015
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3. No one can finish writing an article about David Cole/Stein.
Murky though the literary swamp may be, occasionally a genuinely daring and funny writer like David Cole/Stein will put together a hooky enough premise and a good enough publicity machine to get some momentum. Unfortunately, if you”re smart and daring, your hooky premise is probably going to scare people.
His 2014 book Republican Party Animal hit #1 on Amazon’s list of best-selling Jewish biographies this summer, but the topic of said book”Cole’s double past as both a Holocaust revisionist and a booze-fest organizer for the GOP”incited former friend and fellow conservative Eric Golub of the Washington Times to declare him “pure evil” and “an affront to 6,000 years of Jewish tradition.”
Cole”who faked his death and changed his name to “Stein” when his career as a revisionist got too life-threatening”spent the latter half of the year watching journalists begin writing stories about him, then chicken out and pull the plug. He’s a moderate revisionist; Jewish himself, he’s looking for the truth about history, not the guts of the Hebrew Conspiracy Spider. But he’s treading taboo ground, and that’s enough to make the new yellow journalism wet itself.
His publishers, Feral House, are notorious for their dark subject matter”satanists, terrorists”and their ability to get publicity for their authors nonetheless. But the outlets that are usually open to FH are less bold when it comes to Cole. The Guardian“which Stein calls “the paper that got a lot of mileage out of outing me publicly [as a revisionist] in 2013″”the New York Post, and the L.A. Times all killed their write-ups in vitro.
He says things reached their “inevitably lunatic conclusion” when Radio-TV Interview Report (RTIR) refused a paid ad from Feral House for Republican Party Animal: “Yes, they actually said no to money… in order to prevent the public from learning about a book that I doubt anyone at RTIR had actually taken the time to read.”
2. Lena Dunham has not been pushed out of the airlock.
As I”ve mentioned, Dunham is in fact the worst thing to happen to literature in history, but I refuse to physically place her in any “number one” slot, so here she is at number two.
Sure, the blithely entitled overshare in which her “book” indulged when she finally wrote it walked her into a sex scandal, which was entertaining. But no one discussed the real problem: the world’s worst writer is being allowed to suffocate the writing world. If the next generation has managed to develop any curiosity about the fine written arts, this human cholesterol plug is poised for maximum obstruction. Imagine you”re a serious 16-year-old, trying to self-educate. The Internet trots out Dunham’s sitcom as a modern “literary product.” You decide your cultural development would be better advanced by watching dogs play poker.
1. I-Télé yanked Ãric Zemmour off the air for a word he never said.
Days after I wrote about him last, French journalist Ãric Zemmour got fired from his job at I-Télé because, back in October, he apparently told a reporter for the Italian paper Corriere della Sera that five million innocent, French-flag-waving Muslim citizens should be deported.
I thought that didn”t sound much like the laconic Zemmour. Indeed, a couple of clicks” worth of “investigation” reveal that not only did Zemmour not say anyone should be deported, he wasn”t even asked whether they should be deported. The reporter asked him whether Muslim foreign nationals (not French citizens) living in France might be encouraged to perhaps board planes and boats. (Zemmour’s answer was ambiguous, and he finessed it further by discussing his concern that large numbers of unassimilated foreigners, many of whom are actively hostile toward their host culture, could spark a civil war.) The question was rephrased to “deported” when it went into print, and then the left in France ran with its own fantasy tale.
Funny thing is, the scandal played out just as the country reeled from a spate of jihad-inspired violent crimes. It would seem that naughty words are still more dangerous than ramming your car into a crowd of pedestrians.
Which is why it’s still worth continuing to write.
