When Elite Juggernauts Collide

Back in October, I found Cold Spring Harbor's rapid response repudiation of James Watson gratifying albeit disingenuous. My thinking then, as now - is that there's simply no way that the board of trustees was unaware of Watson's odious views and because of that fact, complicit in that worldview through its sanction of his executive privileges at that institution.

In November, I chronicled the New York Times and Washington Post's (via Slate) gushing endorsements of the historic American racial genetic determinism of IQ slander of Black folks. Based on what I read, and my expectations for journalistic responsibility and accountability - I concluded that elements of the establishment were blowing propagandistic smoke to cover over institutional/elite blowback from the Watson snafu and simultaneously throwing the weight of their considerable strategic and social capital into the reintroduction of this most dangerous and odious practice of racial pseudo-science.

Yesterday and over the weekend - I witnessed one of the most astonishing outings and subsequent crushing disavowals as Patricia Cohen of the NYTimes lampooned Slate's conservative neo-eugenicist William Saletan and Stephen Metcalf of Slate took him out behind the building and double-tapped him. Now my boy Cobb would say that this only goes to show the trustworthiness and moral rectitude of the American system. For my part, I'll grant that it's a good and necessary thing that a cleanup has taken place after the fact, but I'll truly believe it only when the Times takes Amy Harmon and Nicholas Wade out behind the building and dispatches them with the same ruthless aplomb with which the WaPo dispatched its garbage - and - when the license to publish such egregious anti-Black propaganda is permanently and preemptively revoked.