Kevin. D. Williamson recently wrote a piece for the National Review about the problems effecting Illinois, particularly the city of East St. Louis, as a commentary on the failings of Gov. Pat Quinn (D).
The article opened with the following passage in which Williams describes an encounter he had with an African-American child in East St. Louis.
“‘Hey, hey craaaaaacka! Cracka! White devil! F*** you, white devil!” The guy looks remarkably like Snoop Dogg: skinny enough for a Vogue advertisement, lean-faced with a wry expression, long braids. He glances slyly from side to side, making sure his audience is taking all this in, before raising his palms to his clavicles, elbows akimbo, in the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge. Luckily for me, he’s more like a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg, a few inches shy of four feet high, probably about nine years old, and his mom — I assume she’s his mom — is looking at me with an expression that is a complex blend of embarrassment, pity, and amusement, as though to say: ‘Kids say the darnedest things, do they not, white devil?’”
Williamson described the event as getting “yelled at by a racially aggrieved tyke with more carefully coiffed hair that your average Miss America contestant.”
This isn’t the first article for which the conservative author has come under scrutiny. During the 2012 presidential election, Williamson wrote a ridiculous, misogynistic diatribe for the National Review saying that Mitt Romney should receive 100 percent of the female vote because he would attract more women as “the conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status.”
He said,
“You want off-the-charts status? Check out the curriculum vitae of one Willard M. Romney: $200 million in the bank (and a hell of a lot more if he didn’t give so much away), apex alpha executive, CEO, chairman of the board, governor, bishop, boss of everything he’s ever touched. Son of the same, father of more. It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis — Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap.”
He elaborated that Romney’s manliness was somehow tied into the fact that he had produced only male offspring. “President Obama?” Williamson wrote. “Two daughters. Might as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.”
The best part of Williamson’s argument is that it was completely wrong. President Obama won the female vote by 11 percent over Romney. Women overwhelmingly did not vote for the “apex alpha executive,” the status symbol Williamson so desperately thought they desired.
The GOP of late has been trying to convince voters that it’s not the party of the rich white guys, the party of racists and xenophobes, the anti-woman party. Williamson’s words prove that not much has really changed; it’s still politics as usual for the Republican Party.
