Ben Burns made his career in black journalism, usually as the only white editor in the newsroom. He single-handedly put together the first issue of Ebony in his living room. A thread from his memoir, “Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism”: Bribery was common at the Chicago Defender—five dollars clipped to a news release, brand new cars for reporters. Burns thought it was dishonest, but no one else had a problem with it. “The practice became established and was accepted by most of the black community. I had no choice but to ignore and pretend I knew little about what I viewed as a kind of bribery.”

A female scholar interviewed a bunch of senior citizens in Greensboro, NC, about their memories of integration and white flight. Their testimony is interesting, even if the author adds on a lot of nonsense about their “white privilege” and “victimhood narratives.” Most interviewees had children in school when busing came in. “Our son quit takin’ his lunch because they would steal his lunch or his lunch money, so he just didn't eat.” “When my daughter went there . . . she was afraid to go to the bathroom, to the point that we had to take her to a urologist.” “He would have our son get down and lick his shoes and he would say, ‘Your people have slaved my people, now I'm gonna slave you.’”

A conservative billionaire buying an existing prestige magazine and putting a bunch of MAGA people in charge would be hilarious. 

Why doesn’t a right-wing prestige magazine already exist? 

Billionaire stinginess is one reason.

A few thoughts on some others:

https://twitter.com/razibkhan/status/1957500786721890672

1. Lack of talent is definitely NOT the reason. I can think of a dozen writers on the right who are better than Gladwell. I can name them if people want, but just look through back issues of The Lamp, First Things, TAC, CRB, Compact—you’ll see their names.

https://x.com/aaron_renn/status/1957503021413515306

I've thought a lot about this, how the right fumbles its intellectuals. Here are three observations.

1. The left has gotten bad at it, too. Have you read their flagship magazines lately? It's all Trump Derangement Syndrome, race/gender wokeness, and self-help for rich women (looking at you, Atlantic). Who is the most intellectually impressive writer at the New Yorker these days? Who do they have that you would call erudite? Whatever factors have caused the decline in intelligent writing, they've hit everybody, not just conservatives. 2. Too many editors, not enough writers. In conservative journalism, if you want a stable job, you gravitate to editing, which is weird, because editing is easy. Basically anyone can do it. Writing is hard, very few people can do it, and those who have the talent need to work at it full time in order to do it well.

The stupidity of this arrangement struck me often when I worked at TAC. Our purpose is to publish good writing, I would think. As an editor, I contribute maybe 15% of the effort to each piece that I work on, and the writer contributes 85%. So why am I the only person in this equation who gets health insurance?

I'm glad @edwest wrote about the Stephen Lawrence case, because it's baffling to me that Britain's most famous racist incident, which supposedly proved their police "institutionally racist," was probably not a hate crime and involved no police misconduct. edwest.co.uk/p/britain-is-i… Stephen Lawrence, the son of Jamaican immigrants, was killed in an unprovoked stabbing in 1993 while walking home late at night with a friend. A gang of white suspects were accused but the courts failed to convict due to lack of evidence. Excerpts from this book follow:

Amazing used bookstore find: an oral history of the U.S.S. Indianapolis disaster (made famous by the Jaws monologue) as told by survivors. “On the fourth day, a boy from Oklahoma saw the sharks eat his best friend, and I suppose that was more than his brain could stand. He took his knife, which was about 12 inches long, placed it in his mouth (like Tarzan in the movies), and started chasing sharks. They would stay just far enough ahead of him that he couldn’t touch them. He would go under for long periods at a time, making us wonder whether he would come up. I don’t know how long this went on, but sooner or later, I noticed that he wasn’t around.” —Sherman C. Booth

Interesting piece on the lawyer for the Scottsboro Boys, who, apparently, in his earlier career as a New York defense attorney, won acquittals for many clearly guilty people including Al Capone. But the article repeats some common misconceptions about the Scottsboro case itself.

https://twitter.com/tabletmag/status/1748413924678967702

It is usually said the Alabama jury convicted the nine solely on the word of Victoria Price, who claimed she was hoboing on a freight train with Ruby Bates when a dozen black boys climbed in from another train car, threw some white boys out of the moving gondola, and raped them.

Not many people know that if Congress had not passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chief Justice Earl Warren was prepared to step in with a Supreme Court decision that would have accomplished much the same thing. A thread from Boomers. 1/7
The cases Bell v. Maryland and Barr v. City of Columbia involved sit-in protests at private lunch counters and hinged on whether the owners’ actions in removing the protesters were unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment as they would have been if it had been gov't property./2

Hilarious account of a Western-sponsored training seminar for NGO workers in Serbia. The trainers really did not like it when one man stepped up during the team-building exercise to coordinate the tasks. They kept badgering the group to feel bad about not being more egalitarian.

“Was there someone that felt … suppressed? Somebody that did not feel like an individual?”

“No, we did not feel like that.”

We had an amazing 2023 at @amconmag. As an editor, I'm always looking for pieces that couldn't be published anywhere else. TAC has a unique mission and a special contribution to make. Lots of articles this year hit the mark—here are a few examples: /THREAD





10. @JuliusKrein's review of Sam Gregg genuinely advanced the debate over “market fundamentalism” and the New Right. The last third of the piece is a sweeping retelling of a century of economic history, which made a lot of pieces fall into place for me: theamericanconservative.com/the-last-gasp-…

My takeaway from this book, Animal Welfare in China, is that the stereotype ("If it has four legs and is not a chair…") is basically true, and Americans who oppose animal cruelty should realize what a big cultural gulf exists here. amazon.com/Animal-Welfare… "Dogs and cats are often victimised out of sheer malice. A college student microwaved a live puppy following an argument with his girlfriend. A man in Weihai, Shandong drove for miles dragging his dog behind his car… A Changsha policeman beat a golden retriever to death in broad daylight on the last day of 2017."

In her piece on surrogacy, @carmel_writes notes that international adoption has practically disappeared. My first thought was: oh, Third World babies are languishing unchosen because American parents are opting for designer surrogate babies instead. But that's actually wrong./1 What really happened is that international adoptions became a racket, so sending countries banned it. Scandals involving "child laundering," kidnapping, baby selling, etc., in Guatemala, Cambodia, Liberia, Nepal, and elsewhere led to crackdowns. /2

The Army retroactively pardons the black Houston mutineers of 1917, who rampaged through the city shooting white civilians at random, including a teenager who was just sitting on his porch—what part of their actions are we rehabilitating exactly? wsj.com/us-news/army-o… Thread with details on the Houston Mutinty of 1917, including the murder of civilians. "Each shot seemed to be followed with a sickening thud as if they were pounding him with clubs."

https://twitter.com/herandrews/status/1673736385214267405

My proposal for how to fix cancel culture is not a return to liberalism/free speech, but a revival of professional standards. Everyone doesn't have to be neutral on everything, but a doctor has a duty to treat patients neutrally; a professor to teach; a lawyer to represent. /1

https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1722261874266517524

Professional standards are much older than liberalism—think of the Hippocratic Oath! They exist to compensate for the power that professionals have over their clients. Wokeness has attacked professional codes in every sphere: banking, medicine, law. /2

Three tweets from the past week, plus a comment. Each tweet is about immigration. I don't mean to single out these people, their tweets just happen to be representative.

1. "I think we need a conversation about cultural compatibility and immigration."

https://twitter.com/DouglasCarswell/status/1715858523806990582

2. "We can build a just, decent immigration system that acknowledges tradeoffs."

https://twitter.com/DLeonhardt/status/1716451848897319290

This is hardly the worst thing about this statement, but I can't get over the fact that the president of Harvard sounds like a 6th grade teacher. To give a sense of the decline, here is a speech from a Harvard president in 1961 saying roughly the same thing about free speech:

https://twitter.com/sfmcguire79/status/1712793185108340930

Nathan Pusey, president of Harvard 1953–71, opens the speech with this letter from an alumnus worried about subversives on the faculty: “When a whole Harvard department is so strongly promoting measures leading to totalitarianism, it seems I would be weak-minded to support it.”

The way rifts in the left coalition have always worked before is that groups are allowed to disagree privately—Muslims not liking the trans stuff, Asians resenting college admissions or crime—as long as they line up with the rest of the coalition when it matters. “Lining up with the coalition” means the diverse masses outside the elite keep pulling the lever for Dems and the diverse people who make it inside the elite shed their dissent (like the Muslims of the Squad going all in on LGBT stuff).

This book about the successful struggle to integrate amusement parks ends with a discordantly sad final chapter, in which “the majority of traditional urban amusement parks closed by the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Some stories from the book: amazon.com/Race-Riots-Rol…




Olympic Park, Irvington, New Jersey (1903-1965): “Olympic Park remained segregated until the mid-1950s and Newark’s black community felt unwelcome even when they gained access to the park. By 1965, however, young blacks began to take buses to the park to enjoy daylong excursions. On opening day of 1965 a large group of Newark teenagers, numbering perhaps one thousand, arrived at the park. They expected to pay only ten cents per ride, a tradition on opening day that the park owner had eliminated that year. By the evening many had run out of money as a result. Fearing trouble, park officials tried to close early. Guards ushered the angry teenagers from the park, but there were no buses to take them back to Newark because of the early closing time. The crowds then descended on downtown Irvington, shattering some shop windows and frightening pedestrians…

Two weeks after the riot the town council met to discuss denying the park’s license renewal… By the end of the season the owners had sold Olympic Park to land developers, and Newark youth no longer had access to any major amusement parks.”

BBC documentarian David Harrison interviewed a black man in Soweto, Solly Madlala, in 1978 and again in 1980. In the first interview Solly was miserable ("There is actually no life worth living in Soweto"). "Two years later Solly Madlala was a changed man." What happened? 1/4

First, the government abolished many forms of petty apartheid like separate queues at post offices. "We had to wait hours on end… All that has been eliminated. What I used to do in two hours, today I do in 45 minutes. Without any commotion everybody is served, like a person."

Thanks, @edwest, for highlighting the chapter of BOOMERS on white flight. There were many anecdotes of school integration in DC that I included in early drafts of the book but later cut for reasons of space. Here are a few. /1 edwest.co.uk/p/the-great-am… x.com/edwest/status/… “People have asked me how my white children and colored children got along together… When the colored children first came over, my white children treated them as guests, and they would go and get them desks and chairs and give them pencils and look at them as if to say, ‘Are you all right?’ That was the general attitude, that they were hosts and hostesses to the colored children. But it got to the point where no white child could swim in the swimming pools of the city or play on the playgrounds. You ride by them and you don’t see any white children… I think there was force exerted. Threats, and I think there was some violence. I don’t know personally, except the children said, ‘We can’t go over there, we get beat up.’”

The question I get asked most often, believe it or not, is for my reading list on South Africa. You should probably ask an actual South African, but in the meantime here are some suggestions. If you read only one book, make it R.W. Johnson’s South Africa's Brave New World. 1. Getting your bearings