In American life, there are a handful of people who have been selected by the faceless regime lurking in the shadows as intellectual powerhouses. These titans of imaginary brainpower are so smart that you’re not even allowed to criticize them. In fact, they’re so off-limits that you’re not even allowed to ask them questions.
Just nod, smile, and be grateful that you’re even allowed to bask in their glory.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, the professional race hustler whose favorite and only subject is himself, is one such example.
During a recent interview on CBS Mornings to discuss Coates’s latest book, The Message (which David Harsanyi aptly described as what may be “the most beautifully crafted blood libel ever published”), CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil made the mistake of doing his job, asking Coates about the radicalism of his argument on Israel.
This was a reasonable inquiry, given the fact that Coates fails even to mention Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Yasser Arafat, or the Palestinian Liberation Organization in his book. He does use the word “terrorist” once — immediately after the word “Zionist.”
Somehow, the controversy here isn’t that Coates has published yet another clump of historical revisionism partnered with his favorite subject: himself. No, it’s that CBS leaders turned on Dokoupil, criticizing him for violating the network’s standards of “neutrality and objectivity.”
The only news here is that CBS had any standards of neutrality or objectivity to begin with. But as if one bloviating pseudointellectual fraud wasn’t enough, Trevor Noah inserted himself into the conversation during a podcast to say that he’s “angry” at Dokoupil for daring to ask Coates about his views on Israel. Noah then proceeded to compare Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre to the American Revolution.
“If you remove America’s history and America’s this — then it’s like, yeah, those people who fought against the British, they were terrorists. You know what I mean? You can call it like, yeah, the Boston Tea Party. That’s terrorism,” Noah said about as eloquently as Vice President Kamala Harris after one too many chardonnays.
Meanwhile, Coates agreed and suggested he could have taken part in the Oct. 7 carnage.
“And I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down. Am I also strong enough or even constructed in such a way where I say, ‘This is too far’? I don’t know that I am. You know, I don’t know that I am,” Coates said.
It’s stunning that this even has to be said, but Oct. 7 was not like the American Revolution or the Boston Tea Party — unless George Washington’s men raped teenage girls at a music festival before crossing the Delaware or the Sons of Liberty burned a family alive and decapitated a bystander with a garden hoe on their way to throwing tea into Boston Harbor.
In reality, Noah is just trying to impress his oh-so-impressive guest, and by trying to mimic Coates’s brand of pseudointellectual fiction, he ended up comparing the creation of the country that has made him rich and famous to the slaughter of Jews.
Either Coates and Noah are dumb, evil, or both. But let’s not miss the fundamental problem here (at least, beyond the justification of mass rape, torture, mutilation, and murder): The podcast’s tagline displayed proudly on the wall is “conversation without limits.”
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But that’s the opposite of what Noah, who claimed to be “flabbergasted” by Dokoupil’s questioning, wants, at least for the people who dare to question his crowd’s brand of armchair terrorism.
Because what they actually want is for people such as Ta-Nehisi Coates to be protected from criticism. Why? Because their ideas are doomed to crumple under even the mildest criticism.
Ian Haworth is a columnist, speaker, and podcast host. You can find him on Substack and follow him on X at @ighaworth.