www.takimag.com
Columnist/publisher/socialite Taki Theodoracopulos, one of those real people that seems like a fictional character, has launched Taki's Top Drawer, an online political magazine. He told Page Six that the site's chief mission is to shake up the conservative movement which he sees as "dominated by a bunch of pudgy, pasty-faced kids in bow ties and blue blazers who spent their youths playing Risk in Gothic dormitories while sipping port and smoking their fathers' stolen cigars." Hey, Tucker Carlson isn't pudgy at all!
We caught up with Taki, who's in Gstaad, via email. After the jump, read why a old-Europe elitist has taken to the free-for-all of the internet. We'll paraphrase: his father took on the Nazis– why should he be afraid of wusses like David Frum?
ETP: You already co-launched a magazine, The American Conservative, which takes on neo-cons and Iraq-war-backers. What prompted you, then, to launch this new site? Is its mission distinct from that of The American Conservative?
TT: Helping to launch TAC is my finest achievment, ever. It doesn't matter that I financed it for the first three years. I also was a booster, cheerleader, and was always ready to save it from going down. But TAC is a serious magazine and I am a bit over the top with my opinions of lowlifes such as–well anyone in politics. The magazine's editors, Scott McConnell and Kara Hopkins, want to keep the magazine respected and make sure it is taken seriously. I agree with them completely. So although I keep a soft column in TAC, I can let rip in my website.
Another reason I launched the site was to provide a service to my friends and allies, some of whom are too afraid to tell it like it is. Well, I come from pretty strong stock. The Nazis couldn't shut us up during the forties–and the penalty for defying them was death–when my father published the biggest and most respected anti-Nazi daily in occupied Greece. Why should I be afraid to take on such cartoon characters as David Frum, Norman and John Podhoretz, William Kristol, and the Kagans?
ETP: In the past few months, we've seen many of the war's early supporters back off. Do you think a lasting lesson has been learned by neo-cons? Will the figurative pasty kids with bow ties put aside their figurative Risk boards?
TT: I hate to compare these arrivistes who have ruined a perfectly respectable political movement to any genuine royals, but in one sense the neos are like the Bourbons–they learn nothing and they forget nothing. They learn nothing from the blunders into which they goaded the American people, and forget none of the old scores they wish to settle–with real conservatives, with those who were less than impressed with their personal brilliance, with those who resisted their policies. I predict that in 30 years, young conservatives will somehow think that they are obliged to hate the French–though they won't quite know why.
ETP: For lack of a better word, your public image is that of a traditionalist. How, then, do you feel about the internet, and more specifically, the political blogosphere? Do you think that it has coarsened the public discourse? Improved the public discourse?
I avoid the stuff which offends me–which includes most of what passes for "conservative" commentary nowadays, much of which amounts to very low-grade jingoism, driven largely by the desire of overweight layabouts with penis envy to feel macho by sending other, better men off to die. I am very pleased that the Web has opened the floodgates to alternative opinions from the stellar likes of–well, my site's own writers, such as Paul Gottfried, Steven Sailor, Justin Raimondo, and others to whom we link and feature, such as Lew Rockwell, Peter Brimelow, and a long list of other independent thinkers who have been drummed out of the "establishment" conservative publications for their skepticism about neocon fantasies of turning the Arab world into Switzerland and the America into a circus.
