Leave Jonah Alone!

As best I can fathom, this appears to be a sincere fan letter to Jonah Goldberg:

When I see people at Crooked Timber open threads asking why they should take you seriously, and spend hundreds of comments calling you an idiot, [. . .] then I want to cry. They’re being dishonest and cruel and not allowing you to make a single mistake. They’re setting you up to fail.

They have no understanding of how to be a genuine scholar. I work like hell to help those around me have the best arguments possible, even if I disagree with those arguments. I understand the spirit Liberal Fascism was written in. And I’m sorry you live in a nation of genuine fascists, and I mean that word in its worst sense. There’s no way I would accept the attitude of Henry Farrell from anyone around me; it is something I would end friendships over.

I’m just amazed you can take this abuse and keep going strong . . .

Goldberg responds by reassuring his readers that he’s going to be OK and that his unserious critics are seriously not serious and that he won’t take them seriously because he’s rubber and they’re glue.

He also wheels out the novel claim that he’s being attacked because he’s “hit something real,” a defensive gesture I’ll be sure to remember when my new project, Freemasons Rule the World, hits bookstores next month. I expect to take some knocks for my argument — which essentially exposes the fact that Freemasons control the world — but I’m pretty sure my anti-Masonic friends will understand that I’m actually making a very cautious, thoughtful argument. In spite of what the title suggests — it comes from an episode of The Simpsons, an allusion my Masonic critics are bound to miss — I don’t argue that contemporary Freemasons actually control the world. Instead, I’m interested in the ways that important Freemasons around the world exert control over lots of things that are in the world, like governments, the global economy, science, and those sorts of things. It’s a work of political theory.

If mouthbreathers choose to mistake my point, I’ll take comfort in knowing that Frederich Hayek, Charles Murray, Allan Bloom — and of course Jonah Goldberg — went through the same ordeal. And if Matthew Yglesias doesn’t like it, it’s because he’s totally mad at me for something I wrote about him, and also because the goatee I’m sporting these days makes him envious.

(Meantime, if LGM readers could do me a favor and read some books on Freemasonry and find the evidence I’ll need to make my argument, I’d be grateful. We’re running up against some deadlines here, and I’m afraid the publisher might have to delay the book’s release again.)

. . . . Praise be! Much as Thomas DiLorenzo appears to have written the rough draft for Goldberg’s book in 1994, Jon Swift — proving that not all conservatives are fascists — has already done the conceptual heavy lifting for my expose of Freemasonry….