"Democratic Party elites and billionaire donors are attempting to manipulate Black voters by anointing Kamala Harris..."

"... and an unknown vice president as the new Democratic ticket without a primary vote by the public.... While the potential outcome of a Harris presidency may be historic, the process to achieve it must align with true democratic values. We have no idea where Kamala Harris stands on the issues."

That is a statement from Black Lives Matter.

Quoted in "Identity Politics Loses Its Power/Black Lives Matter’s statement on Kamala Harris seems to signal a shift," by Thomas Chatterton Williams, who continues:

It is still possible to astonish.

I understand how an op-ed columnist can try that rhetorical subterfuge, but an editor should have insisted on acknowledgment.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) January 5, 2024

Trending on Twitter.

pic.twitter.com/iKYCF27BBi

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) March 25, 2023

I can attest to that. I looked at Twitter, saw "Blacks" was trending, clicked on it, and saw contextless videos of black-on-white violence.

Critics of "woke" politics should not use the word "woke" because "one should never rely on language one cannot hope to control or even fully explain."

Writes Thomas Chatterton Williams, in "You Can’t Define Woke/The word is not a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains invested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber" (The Atlantic).

I watched the viral clip of the conservative writer Bethany Mandel...

We watched and talked about that 2 days ago, here. 

Chatterton Williams recommends "limiting our reliance on in-group shorthand, and embracing clear, honest, precise, and original thought and communication."

I wonder if Chatterton Williams was named after the poet Thomas Chatterton. Ah! Yes, he was.

Do you know the amazing life story of Thomas Chatterton?

"Late in Anna Karenina, in a period of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are treated to a tirade on..."

"... the destructive superficiality of the 'free-thinking' young men—proto-disrupters, if you will—who populate the era and have been steeped in 'ideas of negation.' 'In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought,' Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev observes. 'But now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities.' The problem then, as Tolstoy presents it, was that such an ambitious young man would try, 'as he’s no fool, to educate himself,' and so would turn to 'the magazines' instead of 'to the classics and theologians and tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way.'"

Writes Thomas Chatterton Williams, in "The People Who Don’t Read Books/Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character" (The Atlantic). Williams is aggrieved that Kanye West called himself "a proud non-reader of books."

If you wanted to search for Plato with a 7-year old, what would you do?

I'm reading "Searching for Plato With My 7-Year-Old" by Thomas Chatterton Williams — in the NYT — and I see from the photo and the subheadline that he's not doing what I would do. 

The subheadline is: "In Athens with his daughter, Thomas Chatterton Williams could finally pay homage in person to the classical education his own father gave him." 

I wouldn't take a 7-year-old halfway around the world,* spending time in airplanes, hotels, restaurants, and ruins and walking long distances through confusing, complicated environments. What does that have to do with philosophy? (I ask, Socratically). Even for an adult, but especially for a little child, the scale is all wrong.

I would take the little child on child-scale walks on the sidewalks of our town and in the nearby woods, and I would gently and subtly offer simple philosophical questions of the sort that would occur to a child. What is the best life for a child? And I would listen to the child's answers and form new questions, challenging myself to do what is best for the child.

"The uproar over Michael Tomasky’s hiring at TNR underscores the extent to which any institution that isn’t explicitly right wing now faces enormous pressure to go 'woke.'"

"Tomasky is a through and through liberal but is being cast as a villain simply for not being further left." 

That's a tweet by Thomas Chatterton Williams, quoted in a Substack piece John Ganz titled "The Dumbest Tweet I Have Ever Seen/Not Really, but C'mon."

Ganz writes: 

"I hope to live long enough to see future historians pose the very serious question: What *was* wokeness?"

The Jessica “Jess La Bombera” Krug story is waaaaay crazier than Rachel Dolezal’s.

I hope to live long enough to see future historians pose the very serious question: What *was* wokeness? pic.twitter.com/HEQ2g4fEEH

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) September 4, 2020

In case you haven't seen the underlying story: "Professor Jessica Krug admits she lied about being black: ‘I cancel myself’" (NY Post):

“For the better part of my adult life, every move I’ve made, every relationship I’ve formed, has been rooted in the napalm toxic soil of lies,” Krug, 38, writes in a brief but life-shattering Medium post titled “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies.”... “There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy,” Krug writes. “I have no identity outside of this. I have never developed one.... I am a coward... You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself.... I don’t know what to build from here. I don’t know that it is possible to repair a single relationship I have with another person, living or dead, and I don’t believe I deserve the grace or kindness to do so."

More here: "Professor who lied about being black ripped ‘white New Yorkers’ in profanity-laced tirade" (NY Post). With video, showing her using an accent/speech style that must have seemed empowering to her when she was pulling off her assumed identity but is now so embarrassing:

It's obvious to Glenn Greenwald that "the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status."

1/ Regarding the apparent fact that the Letter’s organizer wanted to have me sign but the luminaries actually in control cancelled me (I was never asked), it’s been obvious from the start that the Letter was signed by frauds, eager to protect their own status, not the principles. https://t.co/HfeMi8Gtzd

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 18, 2020

He continues in a series of tweets:

2/ I’ve been defending these principles for decades, as a lawyer & journalist — **not** as a way of protecting honored elites from criticism, but by defending those with no power punished for their views: often by people like those who signed The Letter: [link to "GREATEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH IN THE WEST: CRIMINALIZING ACTIVISM AGAINST ISRAELI OCCUPATION"]

3/ That large numbers of the Letter’s signatories don’t give the slightest shit about principles of free speech & discourse — many have been at the forefront of “cancelling” — but are only petulantly objecting because they now hear criticisms is obvious. Dozens of them are frauds

4/ All that said, that many of the Letter’s signatories are frauds does not impugn the principles they’re cynically invoking for their petty, self-absorbed interests. I devoted our show yesterday to this: it’s the marginalized that need these protections: [link to the video "Elites are Distorting the 'Cancel Culture' Crisis - System Update with Glenn Greenwald"]

Also, in that thread, Matt Yglesias responds:

I’ll just say I had nothing to do with deciding who was and wasn’t asked, had no idea who else was signing it, but think the obvious spirit of the enterprise was that they should welcome as many co-signers as possible.

Greenwald answers Yglesias:

I’m sure that’s true. TCW has been clear that he worked with a small handful of people — 4 in particular — to help spearhead the letter and I’m sure they’re the ones who played the key role (“outvoted” as he put it re: me). I’m almost sure I know who did it but won’t speculate.

Poya Pakzad asks:

I think Chatterton was being unclear about who did the voting. In that interview he said they were five ppl that did the reaching out to people. Were it those five people that out-voted you and didn't want to associate with you, or were it some of the signatories?

Greenwald answers:

Yeah, one was George Packer. He and I have had harsh criticism of each other’s work over the years. I’m sure it was stuff like that that drove it. But that’s kind of ironic, no? They were all proud of themselves, claiming they wanted to sign with those they disagree with.

"I deleted a tweet that in retrospect was mean spirited. I’m mad at myself for commenting on someone’s looks..."

"... instead of their ideas, especially so because I didn’t realize their identity, which obviously could make my comment more hurtful," tweets Thomas Chatterton Williams, who wrote that "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" we were all talking about last week.

So what was the tweet? Whose looks did he disparage?

I don't think it's the "In the middle of nowhere expelling" tweet that became a meme, explored on Know Your Meme:

"In the Middle of Nowhere Expelling" refers to a tweet by Harper's columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams. In the tweet, he relays a story about "expelling" a person from his house because they insulted New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss. Many parodied the tweet online as a phrasal template, replacing elements of the tweet with various other absurd situations....

Hilarious. Though he deleted that post too, it's not what I'm looking for. Whose looks did he take a shot at? I'll just take a shot at his looks — he reminds me of Pat Paulson and Taylor Mead...



... but I'm going to guess that his target was Robin DiAngelo, because that's someone he's been tweeting about substantively lately:

How many "white" people can really relate to earning up to $150,000 per month from one of their revenue streams?

"during the year preceding Covid-19 [she] gave eight to 10 presentations a month, sometimes pro bono but mostly at up to $15,000 per event." https://t.co/kmKPKAQNm3

— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) July 16, 2020

I think DiAngelo looks great in that picture. Just perfect for what she is and what she's purveying. So maybe it's someone else. Maybe Mary Trump? I tried to watch some of her interview with George Stephanopoulos and got a little absorbed in her looks...



I think it's good, if you're a writer, to have some lines about how a person looks, but I can certainly see pushing back your antagonists for talking about anybody's looks in a negative way. And there's a certain conventional etiquette that forbids speaking about looks, even in a positive way. Thomas Chatterton Williams wants to be a public intellectual, but he's showing how easy he is to push back. Stand your ground!

"Okay, I did not sign THE LETTER when I was asked 9 days ago, because I could see in 90 seconds that it was fatuous, self-important drivel that would only troll the people it allegedly was trying to reach — and I said as much."

Tweeted Richard Kim, the enterprise director of HuffPo, quoted in "Artists and Writers Warn of an ‘Intolerant Climate.’ Reaction Is Swift. An open letter published by Harper’s, signed by luminaries including Margaret Atwood and Wynton Marsalis, argued for openness to 'opposing views.' The debate began immediately" (NYT). (Here's where we discussed the letter yesterday.)

From the NYT article:

[T]he letter... spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, began taking shape about a month ago.... “We didn’t want to be seen as reacting to the protests we believe are in response to egregious abuses by the police... But for some time, there’s been a mood all of us have been quite concerned with.”

"Thomas Chatterton Williams is the son of a black father and a white mother, but grew up identifying as black on the basis that even one drop of black blood..."

"... defines a person as belonging to that often besieged minority. His father claimed that his mother was a black woman at heart, and brought up his son to oppose the implicit racism of passing, though Williams has a complexion more tanned than sub-Saharan, and is often mistaken for an Arab in France, where he lives. Williams married a white woman and both their children were born with blond hair and blue eyes. Are they, too, black by the one-drop rule? In questioning their determinative race, he has plumbed not only his own but also the complexity of racial identity for people outside the prevalent white/nonwhite binary.... Williams’s solution to the 'invented category of blackness' is to cast it off. He speaks of a 'racial injury,' then explains, 'I can think of no better start than rejecting the very logic that created and perpetuates the injury in the first place.' He is ready to retire from race, 'stepping out of that flawed and cruel game.'... Some readers will find his rhetoric perfidious and reactionary, with its dismissal of identity politics and the concomitant particulars of the African-American experience. But he is so honest and fresh in his observations, so skillful at blending his own story with larger principles, that it is hard not to admire him...."

From "How Moving to France and Having Children Led a Black American to Rethink Race" a review, in the NYT, of the book "SELF-PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE/Unlearning Race."

Thomas Chatterton Williams explains "How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power."

A NYT op-ed.

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander....

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates....

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish.....

Thomas Chatterton Williams comes very close to calling Ta-Nehisi Coates a white supremacist.