Answering Steve Sailer's Question "Could Thilo Sarrazin Be Published In New York"
11/26/2010
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Steve Sailer asks below "Would a Sarrazin-like megaseller even find a publisher in New York?". The answer is "Not if Jacob Weisberg has anything to say about it." In 1995, when Peter Brimelow published Alien Nation with Random House, Weisberg wrote in New York Magazine the following fatwa:
Not so long ago, the literature of egregious bigotry was treated like pornography. You had to send for it by mail—from backwoods presses that advertised in the classified sections of conservative magazines—or frequent the political equivalent of dirty bookstores. Today, you just walk into any Barnes & Noble. The Free Press set the precedent last fall with Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, which argued that blacks are genetically less intelligent that whites. Now comes Random House with Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation., another expression of intellectualized white rage that attempts to do for immigrants, and Hispanics in particular, what Murray did for blacks. Odds are it will enrage sensible folk, convince no one, and earn a small fortune.

The National Interest—Jacob Weisberg Xenophobia For Beginners, April 1995

[VDARE.com note: "The National Interest", somewhat confusingly, was the name of Weisberg's column.]

Reason Magazine said that
"A Jacob Weisberg article is like a poverty-row B movie with hammy acting and a tired storyline: You can't take it seriously on its own terms, but it's a wonderful document of the time, place, and mentality that produced it. "
Notice the words "and earn a small fortune." Alien Nation was a national bestseller, and so was The Bell Curve. Thilo Sarrazin's book is selling a million copies in Germany at this moment. That's a lot of money for Weisberg to expect a publisher to ignore out hatred for the ideas in  a political book.

It's not a record, though. When Mel Gibson produced, at cost of thirty million dollars,  a movie about the Passion of Christ, he was taking an opportunity that was available to anyone in Hollywood, since the New Testament is in the public domain. The amount of money earned by The Passion, left lying on the table by Hollywood producers for much the same motives that Weisberg suggests for not publishing "literature of egregious bigotry", came to $611,899,420.

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