True Left

It occurred to me, as I read the last few pages of Barchester Towers, that a taste for Anthony Trollope is something else that sends an almost unerring racial signal. You could add “reads Trollope” to the profile of people you would like to meet through a dating service, and you wouldn’t have to specify race. If Detroit still has public libraries, I bet the Trollope volumes never leave the shelves.
...
people who are forced to read him before they are old enough to understand him hate him just as they hate Shakespeare or Dickens, but for those who discover him when they are ready, he is pure joy.

Some people like this kind of writing and some don’t. Some people like opera and some don’t. But I think it is hard to like Anthony Trollope and not be white.

This is hardly unique to Trollope, of course. All the great authors of Western literature — and some critics do not even rank Trollope among the really great — have the same subtle understanding of human nature and make the same demands on readers. They appeal to a sensibility that is not only thoroughly adult, but adult in a way that is thoroughly European.

I believe that Western civilization considers itself superior to non-Western civilizations in the same sense that adults consider themselves superior to children. And just as children have been mostly conditioned to agree that adults really are superior by accepting the adult standards of superiority, non-Western civilizations have similarly been mostly conditioned to agree that Western civilization is superior by accepting Western standards of superiority. Only we can see that the truth is the complete opposite.

In photographs, Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old air national guardsman who has been identified as the prime suspect in the leak of classified intelligence documents, is slim in his dark blue air force uniform. He is youthful looking, barely older than the teenage friends seen in the online group in which the classified documents were leaked.

On Thursday evening, the FBI arrested Teixeira and were searching his home. Video footage from a local TV station showed him being led away in handcuffs.

Teixeira was identified by the New York Times as the leading figure in an online gaming chat group, Thug Shaker Central, on the social network Discord. The details that have emerged about Teixeira have put him in the frame as a person of interest in the leak investigation.

Deployed in the 102nd intelligence wing of the Massachusetts air national guard, Teixeira was also a key member of a group of about 30 people who shared an interest in guns, video games and racist memes.