Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, April 8, 2012

Conservatives, Racisim and Hypocrisy

Commentary By Ron Beasley


There has been a great deal of blogospheric activity in regards to John Derbyshire's racial screed at the web site Taki's Magazine. Most of it is silly, especially this reaction from Derbyshire's employer The National Review.



Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he�s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, �Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,� or any one of his �Straggler� columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we�d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It�s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.



Of course this is pure BS.  The National Review and it's founder William Buckley was opposed to the civil rights act and desegradation from day one



During the Civil Rights Era, Buckley made a name for himself as a promoter of white supremacy. National Review, which he founded in 1955, championed violent racist regimes in the American South and South Africa.


A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, �Why the South Must Prevail� (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the �cultural superiority of white over Negro� in explaining why whites were �entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically.� Appearing on NPR�s Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. �Well, I think that�s absolutely correct,� Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.


A 1960 National Review editorial supported South Africa�s white minority rule (4/23/60): �The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.� In a 1961 National Review column about colonialism�which the magazine once called �that brilliantly conceived structure� (William F. Buckley, John Judis)�Buckley explained that �black Africans� left alone �tend to revert to savagery.� The same year, in a speech to the group Young Americans for Freedom, Buckley called citizens of the Congo �semi-savages� (National Review, 9/9/61).


National Review editors condemned the 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham Church that killed four children, but because it �set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically,� the editors wondered �whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur�of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro� (Chicago Reader, 8/26/05).


Just months before the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, Buckley warned in his syndicated column (2/18/65) that �chaos� and �mobocratic rule� might follow if �the entire Negro population in the South were suddenly given the vote.� In his 1969 column �On Negro Inferiority� (4/8/69), Buckley heralded as �massive� and �apparently authoritative� academic racist Arthur Jensen�s findings that blacks are less intelligent than whites and Asians.



Perhaps that doesn't mean that conservatives are racists but then what does it mean?  In a comment over at an Outside The Beltway thread Micheal Reynolds  nails it.



Second, by definition, conservatives favor power structures that already exist, and since power has been held by whites since this country was founded, conservatives almost automatically oppose anything that changes the status quo.



We are dealing with tribalism which may or may not be racism. It�s always about tribal power and the need to have someone below you. Until the 60s even the poverty stricken whites in the south had the blacks below them. �The other� was suddenly equal and the world was turned upside down. The Republican�s Southern Strategy took advantage of this.



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