There is a worldview that has now become prevalent in the United States and across the West. It is actually, truly evil. It has consequences for our politics and for the election of 2024.
There is a clip that is now going around the internet of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a racial conflagrationist author who believes truly terrible things. He’s been given pretty much every award that our self-defeating, white liberals have to offer.
Over the course of his career, he has received a wide variety of awards. He was given, for example, a MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation. He won a George Polk Award in 2014 for commentary. He was given a 2015 National Book Award for nonfiction. He is the toast of the town. Coates is treated as though he is a moral paragon, a sort of prophet of our times.
He is treated this way by the entire media, so much so that if he is asked a difficult question, all of CBS News melts down — which is what happened last week. A reporter asked him a tough question, and that reporter then took it directly in the teeth from the CBS News brass.
But what Coates believes is actually evil, and it is emblematic of a broader worldview that has now infused large swaths of the upper elite of the Democratic Party who believe exactly what Coates believes. Huge swaths of the Left in Europe believe what Coates believes. This is a person who’s considered perhaps the leading intellectual light of the Left in the United States. His new book, “The Message” is basically just a rabid screed about how evil Israel is. Prior to that, he used the same exact worldview to discuss how evil the United States is.
But the thing that is setting people’s hair on fire is what he said in an interview with former (alleged) comedian Trevor Noah. In it, he justifies the October 7 attacks saying that, were he Palestinian, he himself might have entered Israel and slaughtered men, women, children, and engaged in rape.
In the interview, he says:
I haven’t said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Were I 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open-air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might be shot by somebody off, you know, a side of Israeli boats. If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot.
If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because they’re no, you know, facilities to do that in Gaza and I don’t get the right permits, she might die. And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, “This is too far.” I don’t know that I am.
First of all, put aside the lies, put aside the idea that Israel is somehow keeping cancer-ridden children in Gaza for no reason. There are several dozen hospitals in Gaza, most of them having been used as fronts by Hamas. Billions of dollars flowed into the Gaza Strip, and they are used entirely by Hamas in order to build up terror facilities.
But it is also true that many of the people who were slaughtered in the Gaza envelope by Hamas were people who made it their daily business to drive people with cancer from Gaza to Israeli hospitals. In fact, Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was in jail and the Israelis treated him for brain cancer, healed him, and then released him.
When Coates talks about people being shot for picking olive trees, what he describes is not the case. If you get too close to the “No Man’s Land” in the border area and you refuse to obey orders, you are then taking the risk into your own hands.
All that aside, what he is saying is simply insane. He is justifying the massacres of October 7 because they are the “victims.”
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So Coates spends a lot of time justifying the unjustifiable. To understand why this matters for America, it must be understood that this is not about Israel. For Coates, it’s about something far deeper. When he’s justifying terrorism, what he’s really doing is saying that if you are a member of a victim class — a class that he, as a self-appointed prophet, gets to define — you have the right, perhaps even the obligation, to engage in full-scale violence and terrorism.
What Coates says about Gazan civilians crossing the border and engaging in rape, murder, and the slaughter of children could very easily be applied to the slaughter of white Americans under his own worldview and rubric. He’s been very clear about this. He’s not exactly hiding the ball. And this is the amazing thing: There’s nothing new here.
Jean-Paul Sartre, who’s a ridiculous communist French philosopher who has been taken seriously by liberals for half a century, wrote the exact same thing in his introduction to a book called “The Wretched of the Earth” by Frantz Fanon. In it, he suggests that the West should essentially accept violence upon itself from Third World peoples in order to expiate its own sins of colonialism.
That is also what Coates believes. If you’re a member of the victim class, you should be able to do violence to people who are members of the “victimizer class.” And anybody who’s a member of a “victim class,” according to Coates, has no agency. Thus, Coates believes if you’re a member of a victimizer class, you deserve violence to be done to you and your children.
This is part of a broader worldview that applies to the United States. This worldview has been taken into the bones of the Left. This used to be a fringe, crazy-town worldview. Jean-Paul Sartre was not representative of the party of, say, Hubert Humphrey in the United States in 1968.
But Coates is a lauded, celebrated, champagne-drenched intellectual in the pages of The Atlantic. He is treated as though he has something important to say.
But what he is saying about Israel is really not about Israel at all. Right in the middle of the racial reckoning, Coates published “Between the World and Me,” because after all, Ferguson happened in 2014 and this is his worldview. His big example of experiencing racism in the United States is one time he was on an elevator and someone said something to his child. And this becomes his telescoping of all of America’s racist history into an incident on an elevator in New York.
The whole book is written as a letter to his child. He writes:
As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you and said, “Come on.” Many things now happen at once. There is the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect your black body and more. There was my sense that this woman was pulling rank.
I know, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush because she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know, that there would be a penalty for it for such an action. But I was not out on my part of Flatbush and that was not in West Baltimore, and I was far from the Mecca.
I forgot all of that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this woman and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history.
This is the incident that is the supposed “inciting incident” for his realization about race in America. He’s on an elevator with his child and a white woman is irritated because the kid isn’t moving fast enough — in New York, a place of the rude. He immediately telescopes all of America’s terrible, evil, racial history into this incident. It never occurs to him that maybe the lady’s just rude. It never occurs to him that maybe she’s in a hurry because she has a reason to be in a hurry.
No, it’s “all of America is racist and evil,” and you can find that out by looking into the eyes of another person and never asking them a question. Because Coates, an incredibly rich and celebrated author, is a victim, and that white lady in the elevator was a victimizer — a racial victimizer, not just a victimizer of the child by being rude, in a class sense. She’s a member of a victimizer class.
So what does that mean for Coates? It means, for example, that he doesn’t care about September 11. He actually writes this in his book. It is beyond comprehension that this country would grant the worldview of people like Coates any time of day at all, let alone make this person a celebrated author.
He’s an immoral imbecile, though that’s too kind because imbecility suggests that stupidity lies at the root of this. It’s not imbecility. It is malign evil.
In his book “Between the World and Me,” Coates writes about September 11, and the firefighters and police officers who were turned to ash:
They were not human to me, black, white or whatever. They were menaces of nature. They were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could, with no justification, shatter my body.
Now, throughout his writing he uses the term “body” because he believes, I assume, that if he writes “body” as opposed to “me,” it makes it have more import, and becomes all about the physical being of black people or something. In reality, it’s just a cheap way of trying to buy literary cred.
In an interview with New York Magazine that same year, the death of one particular black person at the hands of police so alienated Coates that when he watched 9/11, “slightly stoned, on the roof of his Brooklyn building,” he recalls that he felt nothing at all. “You must always remember,” Coates writes to Samori, “that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.” This is the setting up of a victim class that is then justified in doing anything he feels nothing about — September 11 or otherwise.
Let me just express, if someone feels nothing about September 11, they should not be in the United States. It is that simple. They do not belong in the West. If you feel nothing about September 11 — the greatest act of evil of my lifetime — you don’t deserve to be here. You don’t deserve to be living off the fruits of the civilization that you are currently leeching off of, which is what Coates is doing. He is a scavenger and a leech on the body of Western Civilization.
