January 11, 2009
By Steve Sailer
My wife mentioned today: “Normally, I only read one article in The Atlantic at a time because each one gives me so much to think about. But I read three pieces in a row in the new issue—I think because they were so boring.”
The reason the January/February issue of The Atlantic Monthly is so boring: editor James Bennet decided it should focus on race.
But you can’t write intelligently about race unless you’re willing to tell the truth. And how many journalists want to do that today?
Not surprisingly, this Atlantic issue reads like my VDARE.com articles with the punchlines amputated and replaced by conventional wisdom.
For example, political reporter Marc Ambinder [email him] notes in his article, entitled Race Over, something I wrote about last February. In his words:
“In the primaries, a discomfiting pattern emerged: Obama did best in states with the biggest or smallest percentages of African American voters—think of South Carolina, where blacks made up 55 percent of the Democratic-primary vote, and Vermont, where they made up less than 2 percent.”
Now why would that be? Could it have anything to do with black Democrats voting ethnocentrically while white Democrats in Vermont, who have no experience with being ruled by black politicians, are more naïve than white Democrats in states with more blacks?
Well, you won’t hear that from The Atlantic.