As near as I can tell, the takeaway point from Bryon York's piece on now-resigned Heritage Foundation thinker Jason Richwine is that it's all an unnecessary tragedy; this poor Richwine has had a career pockmarked by accidentally writing and saying racist-sounding things and sometimes accidentally posting them to racist websites and isn't it sad that he kept accidentally doing all that stuff
because now people are being mean to him and he's sad.
Heritage expected that debate. What it did not expect was the firestorm that broke out Wednesday morning when a liberal Washington Post blogger posted an article titled, "Heritage study co-author opposed letting in immigrants with low IQs."
That was the dissertation written with the constructive input of
Bell Curve author Charles Murray. Then there's also the two posts to a white nationalist website, and then there's the panel discussion in which Richwine asserted that "at least in America, you have Jews with the highest average IQ, usually followed by East Asians, then you have non-Jewish whites, Hispanics, and then blacks." Fast forward to now, and Richwine is stunned that he would be "portrayed this way."
It might just be me, but this situation seems to happen with some regularity. "Oh no! I accidentally have hypothesized that white people are smarter than other people, and accidentally posted a long explanation to that effect on a white nationalist website!" That seems to come up, like, crazy often for conservatives. It's second only to "Oh no, I am a staunch conservative family-defender but I have accidentally wandered into a gay bar and gone home with a gay man and now I am accidentally having sex with him!"
Yes, yes, it's a tragedy that you keep saying un-"nuanced" things about brown people and IQs that makes you sound like a closet phrenologist. It's quite an oopsie that of all the places you could choose to have your discussion on whether Hispanic immigrants are a more criminal-minded group than others, you chose a thinly veiled white nationalist site run by crackpot Richard Spencer. Damn, that sure is a lot of unfortunate things that happened to you.
You know what I think the problem is? I think this fellow hangs out with the wrong crowd. It's not his fault, of course, but studies have shown that young white conservatives are more likely to hang out with racist assholes than any other ethnic group. They seem to have a genetic predisposition to it. First they hang out with racist assholes, then they start writing intellectual-sounding papers on why white people are super-awesome, and before you know it they've run off and joined a conservative think tank.
I'm not saying we should be deporting these guys or anything, but it really is a problem America needs to come to terms with.