Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers

08-13-2018 Angry Reader

From An Angry Reader:

Subject: You are a racist idiot

Your articles and ideas lower the IQ of this country every time they are published. The racism you employ in articles about Black Lives Matter, Crime, and pretty much anything you write is so disgusting its hard to swallow. Truly die in a hole.


Dear Quite, Quite Angry Reader Levi Kimmel,

You score impressively high on our Angry Reader unhinged scale: the personal insult (check), the unfounded accusations (check), the lack of a single fact or supporting element of evidence (check), and the expected threat at the end (check). I’d give your letter an 8 of 10 (the all CAPs, obscenity, grammatical incoherence, and serial exclamation marks were absent).

As to your charges, explain how I lower the IQ of the country. Do you mean people read columns and lose computing or comprehension capacity? Are you drawing on some sort of new neurophysiological research?

I have hardly written at all about “crime” or Black Lives Matter; and when I have it is to note the tragic spiral that we find ourselves in with inordinate per capita black crime creating stereotypes which in turn manifest in increased vigilance concerning inner-city black male youth, which in turn is seen as scapegoating and profiling, which in turn further poisons race relations. Our mutual goal should be to create viable job opportunities in the inner city, offer better vocational training, close the border to offer African-Americans more leverage with employers, and to focus on arresting hardened gang member criminals who make life for others so dangerous. As for Black Lives Matter, I object to any tribal chauvinism whether La Raza (“the race”) or any “white” affiliated group. All lives of course matter equally, and there is no such thing as “the race” that is innately superior to any other.

Finally, we all die, and half us will in truth end up in some sort of “hole,” so I don’t quite follow your final threat. Do you mean at 65 that I should prematurely die now rather than naturally in just a few years?

Why are progressives and liberals so full of hatred and venom? Is it a psychological sort of squaring the circle? Are their natural furor and frustrations projected onto others, as they adopt cosmic for-show liberal pieties to mitigate the elemental anger that drives them to issue threats like your own?

Victor Hanson

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

About Victor Davis Hanson


Leave a Reply


Post Navigation

%d bloggers like this: