Conservatives think Harvard is okay, but just this one time.
For a guy in love with his "scholarship" and "research" and hyperfocused on IQ, Heritage's Jason Richwine sure was kinda stupid.
Hunter has already hit his interview with Byron York, where he whines about how unfair it is that all those racist things he did came back to haunt him. But I feel compelled to pile on.
"It still amazes me that it would be me who is portrayed this way," Richwine says. "I have a pretty good educational background, I have a good background in doing very good quantitative work. The idea that I am some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth extremist never even crossed my mind."
He is a Harvard graduate, how could this happen to him? HARVARD! That makes his racism very respectable, you see.
Richwine published the rebuttal in a relatively new website, [the white nationalist] AlternativeRight. Why there? For several reasons, Richwine told me. First, The American Conservative declined to publish the response on its own site, which left Richwine looking for a place to post.
Gosh. It's so hard to find places to publish your written word on the internets that aren't white supremacist! If only someone had invented the tools to self-publish online, like a log, on the web. The could call it ... logwebbing.
"I thought it would be like a paleo-conservative website. I had seen that [former National Review writer] John Derbyshire had also published something there.
Paleo-conservatives are the GOP's old-school
unreconstructed racists.
Like Pat Buchanan. The fact that John Derbyshire wrote for them should've been a
dead giveaway. And if it wasn't, well, he went to HARVARD! He could've figured it out. He is a white person with godlike IQ powers, after all.
Richwine and others also pointed to the fact that his ideas were expressed most completely in a dissertation done at Harvard, of all places, under the supervision of a group of distinguished scholars, and that the dissertation was accepted and Richwine was awarded a Ph.D.
Did he mention he went to Harvard? He did! HARVARD! The article mentions Harvard eight times, in case you missed it the first seven times. Now I thought we were supposed to hate anything coming from those liberal outposts of groupthink, but apparently, now the entire work product from Harvard must be accepted as TRUTH. But only work product by Jason Richwine. Because had Harvard squelched a piece of "research"
so poor that no one has ever cited it since, it would've been proof of the academic conspiracy to squelch conservatism.
York doesn't exactly shine, either:
The Heritage report, target of so much criticism by proponents of comprehensive immigration reform, had nothing to do with either Richwine's dissertation or the things he said in the past few years that are now so controversial.
If you think that a worldview which holds that brown immigrants are stupider than white Americans, and
will always stay stupid, has nothing to do with a report which argues that brown immigrants will get on welfare, and
always stay on welfare, then you're as stupid as the guy who thinks his Harvard degree is a shield for his bigotry.