Comments on: Juvenal Early: Chronicles’ Playboy Taki Presses Flesh With Racism-Spotting ‘Poofter’

By: Juvenal Early

Juvenal Early — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 10:49:36 +0000

Thank you for your perceptive comments, Nicholas. It sounds like your experience of Taki parallels my own. Perhaps if he’d take us aboard his yacht for a week, we’d change our tune, eh? Not that someone like Taki needs the moolah, but I think there are a number of conservative pundits who started out on the left & turned to the right for career reasons. National Review was hiring and the New Republic was full up. David Brooks & David Frum come to mind. Of course, now that NR is a lefty mag, they can all come out of the closet and show their true colors.

By: Ilana Mercer

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 02:28:18 +0000

Perceptive observation: Paying constant homage to the by-gones is an assignment meted out regularly by the Old Boys at Chronicles. You are not supposed to forge your own way. Luckily, my assignment was Mencken, who is the only American writer in whose tradition I follow. https://www.ilanamercer.com/2020/06/h-l-mencken-misfit-21st-century-america/

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 02:09:07 +0000

Thank you, Mrs. Mercer, as always, for bringing Juvenal’s commentary to your readers. He’s a fitting complement to your own trenchant prose.

I can safely say that Taki’s writings have never elicited any strong estimation on my part. His personal brand of flighty gossip recalls too immediately his parvenu playboy lifestyle. For all his opposition to various liberal shibboleths, he is the consummate cosmopolitan socialite whose writing emanates from nowhere in particular, and so his affected praise for the rooted and the traditional rarely rises above the merely aesthetic. His solicitude for Murray eminently makes sense, since for both of them conservatism is primarily a style or social pose.

Gonzalez strikes me as a promising young intellect, though I wonder sometimes if he is too concerned with the role of student and interpreter of the late Sam Francis to develop his own independent critique.