American Spectator: Are We Ever Going to See Evidence That Kevin D. Williamson is a Serious Intellectual and Great Writer, Or Will We Just Have to Take His Soyboy Beta Orbiters' Word for It?

Hey, I remember when nonsequitor vulgarities and idiotic Twitterspeak were considered funny!

It was from 2003 to 2010.

I guess conservatives do yearn for an idealized past -- including the fake ones.

Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys, yo!

This is a funny thing about Williamson's book: he spends pages talking about the importance of culture and the lamentable philistinism of the masses but trades heavily in swear words and toilet humor. The book opens with a quote by Leo Strauss, who said:

'The Greeks had a beautiful word for "vulgarity"; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful.'

The following pages contain jokes and arguments revolving around animal masturbation, animal defecation, human masturbation, vomit, sex toys, testicles and Caravaggio's 'bony cannelloni'.

...

It does not help that Williamson’s insults are so often lazy. Ex-CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill is described as a 'mush-brained half-literate assclown', a 'cretin' and an 'asshole', which are the kind of devastating witticisms that your alcoholic uncle might come up with to describe his ex-wife's new husband....

The strange thing is that I have heard a lot of people claim that even if you do not like Williamson's opinions you have to respect his prose. There are nice flourishes here and there. None of them, however, could make up for his use of the phrase 'dumbasstical shitweasels', which appeared in a paragraph like a dead cockroach in an otherwise passable slice of cake. Bizarrely, Williamson adds a footnote clarifying that by 'dumbasstical shitweasel' he means an 'ordinary constituent of the demos.' If you are going to deride the intelligence of the average man, which can often be justifiably done, do not use a phrase so artless and childish.

This guy is saying that the average member of the demos -- demos meaning "the people," so the average member of the public -- is a "dumasstic shitweasel"?

Should they all just die, I wonder?

The reviewer notes the central problem with Kevin D. Williamson: He's a would-be elitist who mocks the non-elites for not being smart like the elites.

But are the elites smart? Does the dumbtasstic shitweasel Kevin D. Williamson having anything beyond average intelligence, superior self-regard, and very superior contempt for everyone else?

Say what you like about 'neoreactionary' thinker Mencius Moldbug, but when he took his stand against democracy he came with his own powerful if eccentric alternative. Williamson just grouses about the demos. We can agree, of course, that you should not idealize 'the people' when it contains so many embittered iconoclasts, paranoid pattern-seekers and tedious midwits. But we also have to accept that it was not the masses who came up with harebrained schemes like the Iraq war. It is not the masses who got rich off other people’s crippling opioid addictions. It is not the masses who enabled Jeffrey Epstein. Mocking the hoi polloi has its charms, but if you are going to be an elitist then a far more difficult endeavor would be making a case for a better elite.

But he can't do that. He seems like a man who is hateful about his own modest origins, and who only dreams of climbing the social ladder into upper middle class, or "elite" (in quotes), respectability.

How can he criticize the group that represents his life's ambition?

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:33 PM

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