Not a good look for the party
Andrew Sabisky, who was brought into Downing Street by Johnson’s senior aide Dominic Cummings as part of his appeal for “misfits and weirdos”, became the subject of intense media scrutiny after details emerged of his views on subjects ranging from black people’s IQs to whether benefits claimants should be encouraged to have fewer children.
But amid mounting criticism within the Conservative party after No 10 stood by the appointment, Sabisky said that he would be stepping down as a “contractor” to No 10.
He tweeted: “The media hysteria about my old stuff online is mad but I wanted to help [the government] not be a distraction. Accordingly I’ve decided to resign as a contractor. I hope No 10 hires more [people with] good geopolitical forecasting track records and that media learn to stop selective quoting.”
If he’d been “controversial” but clever it would be one thing, but no.
One Conservative MP from a BME background said: “I’m not necessarily against hiring intellectually interesting people with sometimes controversial views, but this guy just doesn’t seem very smart, and if you are not very smart and at the very least appear bigoted that cannot be a good look for the party. By all means we should be against ultra-woke nonsense, but we should also stand against alt-right nonsense too.”
Especially from people who don’t seem very smart.
Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and author, accused Sabisky and Cummings of being “bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history”.
He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government … [but] this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”
Away with all this emotionalism. The only issue is whether it would “work” or not.
Regarding your post title, I would say he blends right in. The racism, the sneering at poor people… He is a Tory. The veneer of smartness is their disguise, and something US conservatives abandoned years ago.
Yes but the veneer, old boy, the veneer. If you scratch it the whole shop looks dreadful.
‘Dr Adam Rutherford, a geneticist and author, accused Sabisky and Cummings of being “bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history”.
‘He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government … [but] this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”’
Like, for example, James Dale Davidson & Lord Rees Mogg (the Mogg’s dad), authors of a book, ‘The Sovereign Individual’, that has, it seems, become a sort of Bible among the libertarian right in the US & UK, Cummings and Sabisky are full of stale Silicon Valley cliches about ‘individuals’ and the marvels of computer science, and they believe that they are daring, that they, unlike others, are able to think ‘outside the box’, and that unlike boring old scientists and other intellectuals, they are genuinely ‘creative’ in their thought. And when the Dom picks his way into No 10 in a scruffy sweater and jeans, with his shirt hanging out at the back and a plastic cup of filthy Starbucks coffee in his hand, a lot of people applaud on the false assumption that, yeah, he’s great, he’s a rebel, he’s really sticking his finger in the eye of what they suppose the establishment to be.