For 12 straight hours, and now again today, rapper Taleb Kweli — who’s evidently a big deal, though I hadn’t heard of him — went on the attack against me, and against some of my followers.
It was bizarre.
On my entrepreneurship email list I wrote about some business lessons I drew from this.
It began when someone linked to my lecture on Hitler’s views of economics, in order to demonstrate to Talib that Hitler wasn’t really a free-market guy.
Instead of evaluating my claims, Talib went around looking for evidence that I was a bad person.
He then replied, speaking about me:
“He is a vile racist.”
Huh? Evidently Talib based this claim on an article by — of all people — Max Boot, who as I recall did not actually accuse me of racism. Boot is a pretty awful neocon, though, and in any case I
The Church Confronts M…
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smashed his article in a reply that appeared in The American Conservative.
Then Talib said:
“He is not respected in his field.”
So I linked him to reviews of my book The Church Confronts Modernity (published by Columbia University Press), which was praised by all the major journals: Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Journal of the Historical Society, Catholic Historical Review, Choice (review publication for academic libraries), and numerous others.
Yes, I know it doesn’t matter whether a rapper attacking me knows any of that, but sometimes you just say things anyway.
Now for a few snippets. (If you have images disabled, you won’t see them.) Hard to reproduce many of Talib’s, since his language is so foul, but it’s all there…