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Notes -
David Cole has quit Takimag:
He's enjoying his freedom from The Crowd:
This follows the end, earlier this year, of the Unz Review. Of course the website still exists, though I have no reason to go there after Steve Sailer, the last interesting writer, left. If you believe Unz, he quiet quit:
This was probably a (well-deserved) gesture of disrespect toward Unz for his descent into increasingly conspiratorial beliefs, ultimately culminating in Holocaust-denial.
I still remember fondly how I would read UR and Takimag in the 2010s. Too bad they succumbed to brainrot and audience capture.
Alas, that was merely a step in the downward trajectory that resulted in Unz releasing a lengthy series of ever more unhinged schizoposts alleging, essentially, that the entirety of modernity itself dating back to the 18th century was a Talmudic conspiracy, finally synthesizing both religious and ethnic antisemitism in a way, dare I say, that only a Jew could. It was sad to see, but it was also inevitable, probably many years ago, given who he surrounded himself with and hired.
Taki was always the most well connected person on the (or adjacent to) the dissident right. His great (all inherited) wealth and connections to pretty much the entire right wing establishment in the UK and the neocon right in the US (who humored him and loved him as an eccentric even as he frequently slammed them in his pieces) meant he was essentially immune from cancellation; at the height of Takimag (after Richard Spencer’s editorship) he was still regularly published in The Spectator despite having published and written hundreds of columns that would have gotten any other writer or editor fired. He was at every party. He was astoundingly well-connected; whenever he said anything about the Jews (which was semi-often) many of the most powerful Jewish people in Britain - all his friends, of course - would quietly ensure that the usual censure never really happened to him. He was finally cancelled from The Spectator only when handed a 12 month suspended sentence by a Swiss court for attempted rape (and then only after the full and final conviction) in 2023.
That same network was of course also his weakness. He couldn’t and can’t stand his friends being criticized. He is at his heart a lecherous old libertine, a ‘racist liberal’ par excellence, a man who lived a life of unfathomable hedonism and excess with zero real consequences and who has had a tremendous time doing so. Cole was amusing for a time, but he can’t threaten the real relationships Taki has; that’s just not who his employer was.
Wow, didn't know all that! Thanks.
I actually wrote one piece for Takimag 15 years ago. Just one, after 5 failed submissions to his daughter who managed the site at the time. Something about BART lunacy in SF.
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Notable that Taki's 88 years old.
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Really? I used to read High Life in the Spectator but I always thought the character was made up. Life stranger than fiction, I suppose.
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