December 16, 2004

David Brock, Phony 'Media Watchdog,' Demands I Be Muzzled

"Who is such a sap as to take the word of such a person?" asked journalist Christopher Hitchens about David Brock, another journalist (sort of) who confessed to having penned what he later admitted was a mendacious account of Anita Hill on behalf of the "Republican sleaze machine" (for which he was well paid with royalties and fame). [The Real David Brock, The Nation, May 9, 2002]

Well, lots of people, to judge from the reactions to Brock's latest wallow in self-righteousness, this time directed at me.

Having defected from the right because of his pangs of conscience over his earlier fakeries, Brock has now set himself up as a "media watchdog" who pronounces, to anyone willing to pay attention, on the misdeeds of real journalists (mainly those on the political right, where Brock and his fans like to purport all evil is located).

Last week, he published an open letter to the president of my syndicate demanding an explanation as to why it distributes my column, with a transparent invitation to stop. The particular column he didn't like was the one of Nov. 26 about the now-infamous ABC Monday Night Football ad starring black football star Terrell Owens and white sexpot Nicolette Sheridan.

What bothered Brock was that I denounced the ad as subverting not only "morals and good taste" but also "white racial and cultural identity" through its deliberate glorification of interracial sex.

"We strongly condemn the clear bigotry of this column," Brock pontificated, the "bigotry" presumably being my dim view of interracial marriage. Well, I'm sorry, but I do take a dim view of it, for the simple reason that I would like my culture to continue. I see nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, I'd like to know why Brock thinks there is something wrong with it. Nor am I the only one to think so.

In recent years, any number of prominent Jewish spokesmen have expressed their own concerns about Jewish intermarriage with non-Jews. One in particular is Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Great Britain, who writes:

"The Jewish people, having survived for thousands of years in the most adverse circumstances, including the Holocaust, is today threatened by intermarriage and assimilation. Jewish communities throughout the diaspora are experiencing demographic decline. Why has this happened, and can anything be done to reverse the trend?" [The only argument against intermarriage]

Nor is the chief rabbi alone. A few years ago, neo-conservative Elliott Abrams, then president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington and now on the National Security Council staff, wrote a book, Faith or Fear, in which he described rising rates of Jewish intermarriage to non-Jews as a "demographic disaster."

I'm not Jewish, but these gentlemen are right, and they have every reason to worry about what Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz calls "the vanishing American Jew"—a result of intermarriage with non-Jews.

Gentiles today are not mainly threatened by intermarriage with non-whites, but by their small families—but any group facing demographic decline (as whites worldwide do) and wants to endure as a group could argue against intermarriage, and some well-respected commentators are making precisely that point.

Why can't I?

As I noted in the column, "Blacks are permitted to notice race," and so are most other minority groups. But "whites aren't." If they do notice race, they get denounced for "bigotry" and the people who publish them are invited not to do so, with subtle little hints that if they don't stop publishing them, they will be punished themselves.

But my views are not really in question—I'm pretty plain about them. Nor is my right to express those views, at least among normal people. My syndicate happens to be just a little more professional in its view of journalism and a good deal more committed to free expression than Brock.

What does worry me is that anyone takes frauds like David Brock seriously at all, but to judge from the hate mail I've received and similar demands for me to be muzzled, apparently many do.

We now know the answer to Hitchens' question about who is such a sap as to take him seriously. There are enough of them creeping around out there to cause normal people to worry.

Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future.