The ghouls trying to steal the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is the most talented public intellectual of our time (OK the only public intellectual of our time. Who else do we have, Bret Stephens? Sorry but Chomsky, while good on domestic policy, is an over-hyped tankie on global affairs).

Coates is making the rounds promoting his book, “The Message,” and well, the message of the book: after visiting Hebron in the West Bank he instantly knew there’s nothing “complicated” about the situation. It’s apartheid, and it’s wrong.

Palestinians aren’t allowed on certain streets. His tour guide told the group of writers that if they wanted to go down a certain street they’d have to go without him.

When Coates tried to visit a market an armed guard interrogated him about his religion. When Coates said he wasn’t religious, the guard inquired about his grandmother’s religion. When Coates said she’d been a Christian he was let through.

He’s been on CBS and the Daily Show. The message is getting out. Although, I suspect after the book, which is a best seller fades from the news, he won’t work again at the same levels as in the past; places like the Atlantic. He’ll likely have to shift-down to lefty media, which has nowhere near the reach of those publications.

But for now he’s having a moment. And entirely predictably, the Zionists and right-wing ghouls are after him. I find the concerted line of attack interesting. Rather than paint him as dangerous—you know, like they do with 20-year-old English majors in kaffieyes—they’re painting his conclusions as facile, shallow—not very smart. They suggest he doesn’t know the history. He doesn’t tell the history. They don’t say his words are frightening (like, they do with the words, “from the river to the sea), they paint them as un-powerful, unserious.

They’re trying to take his words away.

First up, the slimy twerp Coleman Hughes, who’s solidly entrenched in Bari-verse as a young Black conservative who goes against liberal pieties! Credit where credit’s due. He’s figured out the only way left to make a good living in “journalism.” Can’t blame him, and can even feel sorry for him for selling his soul. He’s not dumb and I imagine and hope for a political conversion as he gets older.

Anyway, a few days it was busy in Bari-verse, when everyone involved in that grifter Death Star tweeted nonstop sections from Hughes’s “take-down” of Coates’ book.

“His new essay collection, The Message, is a masterpiece of warped arguments and moral confusion,” Hughes writes. “But it is important to take it seriously, not because Coates’s arguments are serious.”

Not serious.

"Coates is not a journalist so much as a composer—one who uses words not to convey the truth, much less to point a constructive path forward, but to create a mood, the same way that a film scorer uses notes.”

First, Coates went to Hebron. Hughes has not, as far as I know. And a “composer.” Not a person who uses words. This is the section Weiss chose to highlight on her massive platform.

Continues Hughes:

“And the specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics in which everything—wealth disparity, American history, our education system, and the long-standing conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors—are reduced to a childlike story in which the “victims” can do no wrong (and have no agency) and the “villains” can do no right (and are all-powerful)."

Childlike.

When children “speak” they, I don’t know, prattle on about unicorns or whatever and it’s very entertaining, but not meaningfully rooted narrative infused with power based in reality. “Sure, unicorns are cool,” you say back to the child.

I repeat: Coates is literally the smartest essayist we have. I can’t think of anyone better and smarter and a more powerful writer. I never bought into the idea of reparations before I read his famous essay; I just always figured it was such a political non-starter that it was wiser to focus on more attainable goals. Part of the reason it’s a non-starter is that race-based money transfers do seem kind of unfair to people whose ancestors had nothing to do with slavery.

But Coates, who is not only a great journalist but a brilliant historian, lays out how the economic legacy of slavery and racism proceeded apace throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, most obviously in the form of redlining and banks denying home loans (another common theme in the attacks against Coates is to link his current work to previous work like his reparations essay and deem the entire body of work as unserious).

During the time of US slavery, my ancestors were small farmers in some crappy village in Bulgaria. In fact, around the time of the U.S. civil war, a resistance movement in Bulgaria emerged to fight the Ottoman Empire (terrorists, they would have been called by the Ottomans).

But, besides literally zero complicity in slavery, my family benefited from whiteness in exactly the way Coates describes. In the 1970s my grandparents had no problem, in the US, getting a loan to buy a small house, even though they were refugees on working-class salaries. They then flipped into a bigger home, and then a bigger home. That home had such a nice yard, that families clamored to send their kids to my grandmother’s home day care. Ta-da. Money.

When my parents and I came to the US in 1990, it took just three years of my Dad earning an engineer’s salary for us to get a loan for a home in Southern California. I even remember being in the bank with them, seeing then worry about the loan, while I worried that it would take so long I’d get bored. Luckily for everyone it took almost no time to get a home loan approved.

Growing up in that house we never had a single Black neighbor; the only Black kids I knew were bussed into school. The neighborhood was not lacking in diversity: my High School was 40 percent Asian and East Asian. I knew Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Latino kids who lived in the general area.

Anyway, I digress.

“There is no reason why anyone should listen to what TNC says about Israel,” said some random Zionist pundit on Twitter. “He went on a junket and now he mouths the slogans of fanatics and antisemites.” They’re not his words, you see.

The Washington Examiner: “Coates is less a one-note thinker than a toddler banging on a snare drum with a mallet.” Damn. Didn’t realize Coates was also a talented composer and musician. Taking his words away. Making him a child.

City Journal:

The professional writers employ a passive construction so shameless it would give my seventh-grade English teacher an aneurysm: “On Saturday, after sixteen years of siege, Hamas militants broke out of Gaza. More than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed with over one hundred more taken hostage.” The authors’ styling leaves the critical question—by whom?—to our imagination.

Ah now he’s a 7th grader. A step up from toddler, I guess. (Also, yes, dude, a reader would in this environment wonder who attacked Israel on Oct. 7th. They’d probably conclude it was the Swedes every fucking article in every fucking publication for a year includes the line, “When Hamas carried out a horrific attack that….”)

“This is no mere moral inversion. It is childish. And it should come as no surprise that the letter’s first named author is Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Inarticulate child.

This confluence of intersectional nonsense and anti-Israel bile is hardly surprising. Coates’s works, especially Between the World and Me, rely on just-so histories and simplistic victimology analyses. They thus prefigure the anti-Israel narrative as told by Coates, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Sound and fury. Not words.

No one is up to that job—certainly not someone whose critical-thinking skills are so adolescent, to put it charitably.

In conclusion: child. Why not just go with “boy” when describing the distinguished middle-aged Black journalist?

****

One of the points Coates has been making in his media appearances is that there are no Palestinian voices.

It reminded me of something that I wrote a while ago.

Even when U.S. media presents sympathetic portraits of Palestinian suffering, it rarely expresses their voices, their words, the crafting of their own narrative.

These two stories headed up the New York Times front page this morning.

In the first story, reporters interview scores of Israelis ranging from leftists to the most conservative sects. It delves into their feelings. Their psyches. Their political opinions. How the trauma of October 7th realigned their values. How nearly everyone despises Netanyahu for letting the attack happen.

You know—the inner life of human beings.

The second story does not do any of these things. It’s not unsympathic. In reporting the facts on the ground, the reporters guide the reader through the impossible Hell civilians are forced navigate. They’re told to march to “safe areas” where they are bombed; the hunger, lack of drinking water. It’s all in the story.

But not a single Palestinian is quoted. Not one. We don’t know what their feelings are. Sure. In some ways their feelings are self-evident in footage circulating online. “I’m crying because my entire family is dead and I’m only five.” But there’s no comparable effort to get into their heads, their psyches, to assess their political opinions. Virtually anytime anyone in mainstream media asks about what’s going on in their heads, it’s about whether they support, or don’t support, Hamas. In other words, information that solely helps Israel.

Humans are perversly drawn to images of extreme suffering. To violent grief. Car crash rubbernecking, for one. But, if the people graphically broadcasting their grief over dead friends and family aren’t shown to have a deeper interiority, they are just beings that express pain when they are hurt.

Cows do that too. We still eat burgers.

Palestinians’ words are taken away. Sorry if this is a stretch. But I think it’s just interesting that instead of acting like Coates is about to start another intifada, the Zionist Jihad against him is trying to take away his words. They’re not words, they’re the screeches of a toddler beating a drum.

Just … interesting, in that it proves, completely, Coates’ point that Black Americans have a lot in common with Palestinians.