Gawker: In Its Campaign to Destroy Harvard Law Student Stephanie Grace, Racist Web Site Achieves Consensus through Censorship
The Internet promised freedom of speech, raw conflict, and in-depth reporting and discussion, as opposed to intellectually shallow, controlled environments with fabricated consensus, such as newspapers and TV news. Unfortunately, all too many Web sites, such as Gawker, combine the worst vices of pre-Internet media, with the worst vices of the Internet.
If you ever visit the trashy, racist Web site Gawker, you will likely come away thinking:
1. “That’s the most racist, moronic bunch of cretins I’ve ever experienced, this side of Al Sharpton’s Harlem bunker”; and
2. “How do I get my time back?”
With rare exception, commenters’ “arguments” at Gawker consist of fact-free, ad hominem attacks, and are set up by equally fact-hostile, moronic rants and headlines. For instance, the primary ranter, Alex Pareene, and commenters on one thread heaped racist contempt on a group of National Review contributors based on their pictures alone, because the objects of that particular Two Minute Hate happened to be white.
Commenter “JC Hewitt” fantasized,
I love how these guys just argue about how many Black angels are dancing on the head of the pin without talking about fundamental issues... like the fact that Black men are hunted for sport in most cities.
You know that a blog post has to be pretty low, when it inspires me to defend National Review!
Gawker is, to my knowledge, the second Web site to decide to destroy the life of the brilliant, and quite decent, from what I’ve been able to determine, Harvard Law School student Stephanie Grace, for the offenses of: 1. Refusing to spout multicultural lies about race, intelligence, and genetics; and 2. Breathing while white. (The campaign was initiated by the racist Web site, Above the Law.)
The Harvard Black Law Students Association was already busy seeking to destroy Grace’s career, but has denied that the Harvard BLSA members who have written to BLSAs at other top law schools, and to federal judge Alex Kosinski, seeking to pressure him into reneging on the clerkship he had hired Grace for, immediately after graduation, are acting on HBLSA’s behalf. Yeah, right.
The main lesson here: Don't be racist. But if you really, really are—and really, really need to voice your racist thoughts—don't write them in an email to a devious friend who may later sabotage you. Simply find the nearest well and shout your racist thoughts into them [sic]; get it out of your system, and continue on with your bigoted life.
Experiencing Gawker makes me suspect that, in order to get hired to write for it, you have to take an IQ test… and fail.
Wrote commenter “topsy”:
Wow. Ain't nothing like a light brown person [alleged Grace antagonist Yelena Shagall] trying to get in good with white folks and willing to throw darker people under the bus to do so. Guess what Yelena; the only thing that has been definitively proven is that you and your pal [Grace] are inferior to just about everyone else.
Aggressively stupid.
One poster, “DearBrutus,” was possessed of a more refined sort of stupidity, and so his ad hominems flowed more smoothly.
DearBrutus 05/03/10
This is giving me flashbacks of why I hated law school. It wasn't the homework and exams, it was having to deal with the student body as a whole.
I don't know how you prevent racist dingbats from getting into elite schools. But I do I know that these kids would have a lot more common sense if law schools required people to work and live in the real world before enrolling.
It will astound you how little these leagle [sic] eagles know. There was once a kid in my Corporations class who didn't understand the concept of stock dividends. He was a 2L in law school and this was the first time he had heard of stock dividends. His dream job was working with financial securities in a large law firm. He ended up graduating in the top 5% of our class and he now has his dream job. Despite his lack of background, education, or basic knowledge in the field of fiancé [sic], he now helps craft the legal devices for all types of stock transactions.
Their failure to develop socially also causes huge problems. Everyone above the age of 22 would agree that a college senior doesn't know jack shit about life. Having that 22 year old [sic] college senior jump immediately to law school is not going to help this person grow. They need to spend time in the real world, where they will be forced to deal with a diverse group of people in a myriad of new forums. That won't happen in law school. Law school is a very intense enviorment [sic] where you spend the vast majority of your time with whatever small clique of law students you fall in with. This clique will often be the same type of kids you rolled with in college.
The end result is that we have a bunch 25 year olds [sic] graduating from Harvard with underdeveloped social skills and no work experience whatsoever. These kids end up clerking for some of the most powerful judges in America, where they help research and write the judges' decisions. These spoiled brats are not even old enough to run for the Senate, yet we allow them to have a tremendous role in our judicial system. Lovely, isn't it?
/end rant Reply
I wrote, and sought to post the following rejoinder five days ago. Gawker blocked it. I publish it here, exactly as I posted it to Gawker.
@Dear Brutus:
“I don't know how you prevent racist dingbats from getting into elite schools.”
Who’s the “racist dingbat,” Stephanie Grace or you? HLS accepts racist black dingbats, such as followers of genocidal Black Liberation Theology all the time, but somehow I doubt that that is what you’re talking about.
“It will astound you how little these leagle [sic] eagles know.”
Again, who are you talking about? At the tender age of 25, Stephanie Grace has probably already forgotten more than you’ll ever know.
“Their failure to develop socially also causes huge problems…. They need to spend time in the real world, where they will be forced to deal with a diverse group of people in a myriad of new forums.”
What evidence do you have that Grace is socially stunted? If anything, the evidence argues that whoever forwarded her e-mail around to the racist, segregated, BLSA is the vicious, stunted person of the piece. Unlike you, Mr. Ad Hominem, Grace has actually studied serious scholarship on race. How would spending more time around blacks (most of whom are racist to the bone), and which you again assume without proof Grace hasn’t done, have led her to think differently? Would it have caused her to become as intellectually lazy as they are about race, or perhaps caused her to be intimidated into submitting to their racist fantasies?
And why do you hide behind a pseudonym, Ad? Unlike Grace, with your PC talking points, you’re in no danger. You’re not fit to shine her shoes. I don't know how you prevent racist dingbats like you from getting into elite schools, but if such schools respected intellectual diversity, and banned groups such as BLSA, whose very existence violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act, you wouldn’t be able to do much damage.
Signed,
Nicholas Stix
The Internet promised freedom of speech, raw conflict, and in-depth reporting and discussion, as opposed to intellectually shallow, controlled environments with fabricated consensus, such as newspapers and TV news. Unfortunately, all too many Web sites, such as Gawker, are worse than pre-Internet media. Worse, because they are intellectually even more shallow than USA Today (aka “McPaper”), and provide the illusion of freedom of speech, while politically censoring readers as aggressively as newspapers do, at the same time that they promote profanity, the stuff that they should be censoring, and which newspapers still, for the most part, do.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
Cover
•
Commentary
•
Books & Reviews
•
Climate Change
•
Site Links
•
Feedback
