April 03, 2015
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It took some work, but he admitted he was at least a very large part of Khan’s termination. Trotter was very ambiguous about everything but I pushed harder and eventually narrowed his motive for the smear down to the fact that Razib had not publicly distanced himself from Taki Theodoracopulos” views nor that of other people who write at Taki’s Magazine and VDARE. This was a strange beef because he admitted he doesn”t agree with everything his boss Nick Denton believes. In fact, he chortled at the idea anyone would think he should.
More prodding eventually got us to the magical R-word. Razib Khan is open to the studies of race and IQ, ergo he’s a dangerous racist “ is the crux of the argument. I asked why it’s wrong to study IQ and he said such “scientific racism” could lead to policies that discriminate against blacks. The irony that he had cost a real job by worrying about a hypothetical job was lost on the guy. I asked him to define racism and as is almost always the case with these people, he couldn”t do it. All he could tell me was that it’s “systemic.” It became clear that he hadn”t really given any of this much thought beyond that magic word. Basically, he starts with a loose premise about justice and then just bulldozes his way through other people’s personal lives.
When he’s not getting “racists” fired, Trotter appears to have devoted a huge portion of his journalistic career to outing gays. He has been all over Shepard Smith for a while now and excitedly barked out, “He has a boyfriend!” to me when the subject came up. As far as I know, Shep has been out for a while. However, even if he wasn”t out, “Why bother outing him?” I asked. “Fox News is in New York City” he said using his hands to demonstrate a city on the table, “None of their reporters are openly gay. That’s like not having any black reporters.” I asked, “So?” and he gave me that spiel about how every industry has to very publicly represent the demographic mosaic. When I asked him why there aren”t more white men in basketball or women in garbage collection, he had no answer. I assume he’s equally disgusted with the lack of diversity among the Daily Show’s writing staff.
After two hours of discussing ethics with someone who was clearly not interested in ethics, I dismissed my spies and watched the color drain from Trotter’s face. Once again, it hadn”t occurred to him that there are repercussions for his destructive behavior and he had created a culture of distrust. In the end, his argument seemed to be, Why are you mad at me? I”m just reporting “interesting” facts. You should be mad at the institutions that take us seriously. It was the only salient point he had made during our entire two-hour conversation. I spoke to Razib after the meeting and he had a similar point. He said this is one minor setback and at the end of the day, he will be looking back at a massive legacy of hard work while Trotter will have been long forgotten. He was already over it because he didn”t pay it much attention in the first place. If only the rest of our culture was as sophisticated. Of course “life saboteur” is a vile career to pick. There will always be petulant children shrieking about monsters. The fact that we take them so seriously is the real problem. I have to tip my hat to Comedy Central for recognizing the 1st Amendment when a cool black guy says something uncool. Let’s hope the mainstream can one day extend that courtesy to the rest of us.
