With the fourth estate, including Brendan O’Neill, once again last week indulging in the virtual stoning of a blameless individual, one is forced to wonder how many times this degrading spectacle will be played out. Forever? Will it ever be enough? What if, say, Sabisky killed himself, as only recently someone else subjected to this treatment has. Would anybody feel remorse? Do any of his persecutors have the empathy to imagine their own faces, for example, on the cover of a mass-circulation daily as a designated racist ‘weirdo’ for an officially approved two-minutes hate. “But I’m not a racist weirdo,” you insist. Are you sure? Who again is free from sin?
One is again reminded of Cardinal Richelieu’s remark that it requires only six lines in any honest man’s handwriting to find enough to hang him. What has Andrew Sabisky really done? Floated some controversial thoughts on social media, now dug-up, and twisted out of context. Told some silly jokes, now repeated without humor, as if by an interrogator in the basement of Lubyanka. Accurately stated the dictionary definition of eugenics, from the Greek ευ, meaning good, and -genic, relating to genes; with this statement now taken for evidence he is proposing a Hitlerian extermination program. And accurately cited data on mean test scores between two population groups — data which nobody disputes, even if they dispute the cause.
For this, Sabisky had been hounded from his job, and his reputation trashed. What, precisely, was his crime? What is so despicable about his thinking, compared, for instance, to the thinking of his persecutors. What is, in specifically the problem? Can anybody clearly say? Does the existence of a difference in mean test scores, on one variable, mean that one population group is fundamentally superior to another? Not in the eyes of God. Nor is cognitive capacity, as such, a virtue, or indicative of moral value: there are plenty of reasonably intelligent people, some who work in media, who have no moral value whatsoever. Integrity and courage, not to mention kindness, are both worth more than intelligence.
It is the ethical horizon of our society, which places moral value in abstract technical capacity, which is abhorrent. Nothing in the differences in mean test scores discharges the responsibility, in fact the privilege — in fact, the highest privilege — of judging individuals based on the content of their character, rather than their race, for better or for worse. Nor does it change the fact that there are hundreds of millions of individuals of every race who are superior in every way to the men and women who participated in this disgusting spectacle.
We are told, by men like Alex Wickham and Joe Mulhall that Sabisky and his views are evil and immoral. It is they who are immoral.“Is this an example of cancel culture?” asks Isabel Hardman in the Spectator. Yes, but cancel culture is a misleading term. What is at stake is the power of a network of intimidation, comprising extra-judicial secret police organisation Hope Not Hate, propaganda media like the Guardian, brownshirt militias like Antifa, and cynical journalists like Alex Wickham to engineer spectacles of brutality calculated to project their own power to destroy people’s lives. This demonic, paranoid and violent network, no different in principle, only in degree, to the witch hunters of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Russian NKVD, or the East German Stasi — is the real contemporary evil — it should be systematically destroyed.
Sabisky is guilty of one thing — he abandoned his position in the face of the intimidation he received. Others will have to show greater resolve.
