NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the ooga-booga race-baiting stuff coming out of the rightwing talkshops these days. I've been discussing the phenomenon here at alicublog, but in the Voice piece I tried to tie the whole thing together efficiently for folks who aren't as familiar with the brethren and their peculiar ways as you Real People are.

In composing it, I was struck (not for the first time, but more forcibly than usual) by how much racist bullshit even A-list rightbloggers like Robert Stacy McCain spew without raising an outcry -- I mean, McCain's gotten more shit from Patterico on that score than from mainstream (let alone liberal) media. I think this speaks to the weird marginal-yet-prominent status of political blogs in general; they're like the off-off-Broadway or indie hit of the moment; they're usually short of actual patrons, but generously covered in ink and pixels, which gives them influence and credibility far beyond what their drawing power would by itself afford. The rightbloggers' yapping about big bad black people doesn't reach too many actual people, but is read by commentariat, and eventually will influence David Brooks sufficiently that he will tell us in the pages of the New York Times, gosh, there seems to be a lot of chatter about black crime, which indicates an influence far beyond what you might see in mere statistics (which lie!), etc. Thus crackpot ideas enter our national debates, as they have done for decades.

UPDATE. Commenters have noticed that the Voice column has attracted the attention of race-obsessed people, probably sent by Bill Quick, who thinks that by pointing out historic crime rate drops I'm covering up for black people.

That Edroso, wrapped in the outdated intellectual shroud of lefty political correctness, still tries to cover up this unsettling fact, only betrays his own unconscious racism: since most of the victims of this black crime wave are themselves black, what he is really advocating is ignoring the depredations of criminals in and on the black community.

As usual, I'm the real racist, and the African-American community's best friends are internet commenters who go around saying that black people are irredeemable criminals. I suspect Quick's solution to black crime is to be very afraid and vote Republican.

UPDATE 2. Half Sigma's in on it too:

According to the liberal who wrote the article, crime has been dropping year after year (which is true), and therefore there can’t possibly be a new crime wave happening.

Just because crime in general is down, this doesn’t necessarily mean that a certain specific type of crime can’t be on the increase. But arguing with a liberal is useless.

With arguments like that, I can imagine why he'd think so.