Postgame Update: Quoth the Dave’n

A debate about a quote in my column

(Dave’s Substack is free and always will be. But you can show your appreciation via Buy Me a Coffee!)

My apologies for not posting here for the past few weeks; four months of nonstop storms (the one last week being perhaps the most violent yet) kicked the livin’ crap out of my creaky old house and poorly-maintained yard, so I’ve been preoccupied with repairs.

Yes, this tiny, nebbishy, lazy Jew rolled up his sleeves and went to work...calling cheap Mexican laborers to fix shit as I sat around drinking rum and watching zombie films.

That takes a lot out of a man, so I was way too exhausted to write anything beyond my Takimag columns.

I’ll try to post here with greater regularity, at least once a week, from now on.

This week’s Taki’s column is the kind nobody will read, share, or remember, as it doesn’t mention Trump, blacks, or Jews. But it’s still a pretty solid piece of work that compares and connects the “satanic panic” molestation mania of the 1980s to the current trannykids craze.

But is it solid?

Did ol’ Dave err?

Well, author and scholar Neema Parvini (aka OGRolandRat on Twitter and Academic Agent on Youtube) thinks so. In my column, I presented him as an example of current-day rightist pundits and commentators who mistakenly believe that the 1980s satanic panic was a rightist venture, and a justified one at that.

I cited these two tweets from Parvini, from April 2022:

I said that every rightwing moral panic for the past 300 years were justified INCLUDING the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and suggested Ace and T777 do a stream on the latter. They did! I’ve learned a great deal so far and only 20 mins in.

The Satanic panic was justified and @7homas777 should do a stream with Ace exploring the topic.

I found nothing in those tweets or in the thread that followed to suggest that Parvini was joking. However, Parvini reached out to me after my column posted to let me know that the tweets were written “ironically” and “sarcastically” and “not entirely in earnest.”

Look, I don’t know Neema, I don’t know what’s in his head, so I can’t tell you if that’s true. But I’m more than happy to give the guy his say; it’s only fair.

I asked him to confirm that the tweets in question were not intended to be taken seriously, and he replied:

Yes that’s right. I could offer proof if you’d like. I have a little radio show I do on the side where I play music and had a whole stream dedicated to songs from that period. The context which may seem obscure is that the actual show that Thomas777 did on it explained why it was a somewhat nonsensical and even manufactured panic. Much of what we do in our little space is look at some of the mistakes of the right to date to explain why they lost so badly and not to repeat them, but very much an uphill battle.

The tweets seemed earnestly-intended to me, but he says they weren’t. I could very well be wrong, and it’s always of premium importance to me that I not misrepresent someone else’s words. The best I can do is present his side, and you can follow him on Twitter and YT and make your own call. Certainly Parvini’s been more than civil about the matter, and that speaks well of him (I’ve read some excerpts from his recent book, and I recommend you check it out).

Funny thing is, even though I’m subjected to countless attacks in the press as a “denier,” I’m rarely misquoted, because I’m rarely quoted. I go out of my way to never write a word on the Holocaust that can be misinterpreted. This is a lesson I learned in the early 1990s. Back then, as a kid, I’d sometimes let my oygenflaaaaaygen Seinfeldian wacky Jew side come out, and I’d make jokes, or speak in a disrespectful manner about eminently respectful things, and I’d get a well-deserved drubbing.

By the time I was 23 or so, I’d learned to never hand the press the knife with which to shechitarize me. Oh, they’d still attack me, but they’d be forced to invent quotes. Yeah, I continued to get pulverized up the ass, but at least I could sleep nights knowing that I didn’t assist in my own reaming.

So these days, as I never give the press anything they can hit me with, and as (unlike in my 20s) I have enough dough to hire a lawyer if they invent quotes like they used to, journalists generally avoid quoting me at all. They just “summarize” my views without using my own words, or they creatively truncate sentences (in 2019, for example, a Gannett newspaper hack took my sentence “Auschwitz was not an extermination camp, but Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Chelmno were” and chopped off everything after the comma...you know, for “space considerations,” and one of the last remaining advantages afforded to print journalists is being able to use that lame excuse to cover deceptive reporting).

You can be as careful as you like, but you’ll still get boned.

I, however, never wish to be the bone-er. In my relationship with the press, I only play catcher. So if I indeed misrepresented Parvini’s views, it was unintentional. Read the gentleman’s work for yourself, and come to your own conclusion regarding his intent with the “satanic panic” tweets.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Juan and Gustavo are finished repairing my flattened fence, and it’s time to reward them with the giant bag of empty recyclable liquor bottles I give my Mexicans in lieu of pay.

Build the wall! Deportations day one! But...let my guys finish hauling away those dead trees first.