Over at Campus Progress, Dylan Matthews and Jesse Singal revisit Ross Douthat’s college-era writing for the Crimson and the Salient. I remember reading Ross’s stuff in college, though I didn’t know him personally back then. But until I clicked over, I forgot the most important part — back then he was a really impressive prose stylist, but hadn’t yet developed his appealing Red Tory side. Instead, it’s the same far-right views on culture you know today basically uncut by any heterodoxy on anything. And of course at the time he, like me, had views on Iraq that in retrospect were totally wrong and absurd.
He also thought that too many Asian-Americans are “weird” which, considering how powerful the human rights in China lobby has become these days, should get him in hot water real fast.