There are few public “intellectuals” whom I disdain as much as Thomas Chatterton Williams. TCW, as he’s often referred to by his legion of haters (in which I count myself a centurion, at least), may have escaped your attention (good!), but y’all probably recall the aging-ever-more-poorly A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, AKA the Harper’s Letter, for which he was the lead organizer.
The letter decried the influence of the Oberlin Student Council™ on public discourse. Slightly more seriously, that letter, published in July, 2020, argued that the most serious threat to liberal politics and culture came from the left, whose “intolerance of opposing views” and “blinding moral certainty” represented an existential danger to an open society.
The letter had a number of authors and 153 signatories, many of whom were usual suspects and some of whom really should have known better. For all of its spectacular (and, ISTM, intentional) point-missing, it was a clever move in the attention sweepstakes. By suggesting that people, Black folks, say, or women, might be out of bounds when they challenged the arbiters of discourse in elite media and universities,* the letter’s organizers struck a chord with what may have been their true audience: those elite gatekeepers who could do them some good.
As we all know, the notion that the left is the true enemy of civil society has not aged well–ever more spectacularly so with each new data dump from the Epstein files.
Enter Ken “Popehat” White, with the definitive ruination of the entire Harper’s Letter scam
Here’s an extensive taste of White’s piece, which expands on the original’s title: “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate About Raping Children.” (Posted here with White’s permission.)
The honorable ‘Hat acknowledges the existence of a problem:
Powerful protests against raping children are leading to overdue demands that people not rape children, along with wider calls for greater avoidance of raping children across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.
But is that the really significant issue?
But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments against raping children that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.
After all, can’t we see who the real victims are here?
The free exchange of information and ideas with rich and powerful people irrespective of whether they have raped children, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty that raping children is bad and that people who rape children are bad, even if they can give us rides on helicopters and make us feel important.
Speech is fine, of course. But consequences?
…it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought, such as socializing with and promoting child-rapists and treating them as cherished friends. More troubling still, institutional leaders…are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Crucially, these punishments are not just levied against regular employees whose role is to listen to us. They’re being imposed on us: editors, writers, journalists, professors, the heads of organizations, the people widely and justifiably recognized as the leaders of society.
In sum, this is the courageous response to the illiberal demands of the anti-child rape crowd:
We refuse any false choice between opposing child rape and embracing child rapists. We reject the censorial and repressive demand that we reflect on whether our normalization and promotion of child rapists enables them to rape more children.…We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement about whether to accept money and plane rides from child rapists without dire professional consequences…Please join the few proud and brave institutions that realize that we should continue to thrive in our careers even if, for completely defensible reasons that prominent people like us are best suited to understand, we think child rapists are cool.
Everyone involved with the Harper’s Letter should seriously look into a sabbatical year at a Benedictine monastery. The echoing wrongness of that effort from conception to conclusion has been ever more obvious as we endure this second age of Trump.
That’s the beauty of White’s piece: it goes all Carthago delenda est on whatever last pretension to seriousness those associated with it may cling to. Go check out the whole thing at the Popehat report.
This thread is as open as the Monday mic at your favorite club.
*The letter’s authors may have put this thought in somewhat different language, but the subtext was there for those with eyes to read it.
Image: Carlo Randanini, Study of a Courtier, 1877
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