No, Rich Lowry didn’t say the N-word

Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of National Review, is being cancelled for calling Haitian immigrants the N-word. One problem: he didn’t. Lowry was on Megyn Kelly’s podcast to talk about the claims, amplified by Donald Trump and JD Vance, that Haitians have been snacking on local cats in Springfield, Ohio. He commented on a combative interview Vance gave to CNN’s Dana Bash and scoffed at Bash’s dismissal of the feline-fressing allegations on the grounds that city records only showed complaints about geese. Lowry observed:

‘I think it was in that interview where Dana Bash says the police have gone through 11 months of recordings of calls and they’ve only found two Springfield residents calling to complain about Haitian migrants taking geese from ponds. Only two calls!’

MAGA lunatic Rich Lowry just dropped the n-word while talking about Haitian migrants. Does anyone need anymore proof that many Republicans are targeting these folks because of their race??? pic.twitter.com/qvIOPF69Ww

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) September 16, 2024

If you’re wondering where the N-word comes in, it is in Lowry’s pronunciation of ‘migrants’. He began by rolling the final syllable of ‘Haitian’, with its concluding ‘uhn’ sound, into the first syllable of ‘migrants’, thus pronouncing it with the short i of ‘immigrants’ before correcting himself to use the long i of ‘migrants’. This produced the garble: ‘migger-uh-uh-migrants’.

Any fair-minded person who watches the video will come to the conclusion that Lowry was not the victim of a Freudian slip which betrayed an internal racist monologue but of a trip of the tongue which revealed him to be a human, and therefore fallible, public speaker. Some, however, aren’t interested in fair-mindedness. They regard Lowry as their ideological enemy and glimpse an opportunity to destroy him.

Black millennial-targeted magazine The Root pronounced that he had ‘obviously used the N-word’ and, though he had denied it, ‘he was literally caught on video’. Madeline Peltz of leftist hit squad Media Matters for America professed herself to be ‘having a hard time coming to any conclusion besides the obvious one about what Rich Lowry catches himself blurting out here’. Under the headline ‘Conservative editor backtracks after seeming to use n word regarding Haitian migrants’, The Advocate began by reporting that Lowry ‘appears to have used a racial slur’ but by the second sentence of its story all doubt had been removed and Lowry had ‘dropped the slur in place of the word “migrants”’. Gen-Z progressive influencer Harry Sisson told his quarter-of-amillion X followers that ‘MAGA lunatic’ Lowry had ‘dropped the n-word while talking about Haitian migrants’ and this was proof that ‘many Republicans are targeting these folks because of their race’.

Addressing the accusations, Lowry writes over at National Review’s The Corner blog about ‘malicious accounts on X the last few days that have insisted that I said a racial slur during an appearance on The Megyn Kelly Show’. He notes that ‘these ridiculously false accusations’ on social media ‘have now resulted in cancellations in the real world’.

Lowry is firmly to my right on most issues but I’m content to know he’s wrong about a lot of things; I don’t need him to be a Grand Wizard too. Others seemingly do, for our thoroughly secular age is more in need of demons than ever before. It is not enough that Lowry has different ideas, wrong ideas, even heretical ideas; he must harbour the gravest malevolence in progressive demonology: racism. Now, if Lowry had said the N-word to insult Haitians, that would be deserving of censure, for racial prejudice is fundamentally at odds with the ideal, if not always the practice, of the American constitutional republic. But Lowry didn’t say that word and we have video of him not saying it, yet he is being treated as though he did say it because enough people want him to have said it. It is commendable that he manages to balance his National Review duties with his new role as the lead character in a Philip Roth novel.

This absurd episode is darkly humorous but only up to a point. Lowry says he has had a speaking gig at Indiana State called off, as well as an address to the Badger Institute, a conservative think tank out of Wisconsin. If either institution did cancel Lowry’s appearance over this fictitious furore, their leadership is a quivering mass of cowardice with a spine made of jelly.

True, in the grand scheme of cancellations, Lowry’s ranks pretty low. He’s a prominent right-wing commentator and not about to find himself on unemployment assistance, but his treatment is not materially different to that meted out to ordinary Americans who say the wrong thing – or, in this case, don’t – on social media or in the workplace. Shorn of Lowry’s advantages, they suffer the full personal, financial and social brunt of cancellation. But Lowry’s experience is another opportunity to say that the mentality that seeks to punish wrongthink is illiberal, if not entirely at odds with the instincts and doctrines of contemporary American liberalism. Then again, perhaps the problem isn’t all that contemporary. It was more than half a century ago that one of Lowry’s predecessors wrote: ‘When a conservative speaks up demandingly, he runs the gravest risk of triggering the liberal mania; and then before you know it, the ideologist of open-mindedness and toleration is hurtling toward you, lance cocked.’

If American liberalism’s pivot away from free expression is to be lamented, so is the closing of the liberal ear to conservatives and conservatism, an intellectual and empathetic pulling up of the drawbridge that leads otherwise rational, level-headed people to believe the worst of their political adversaries, no matter how implausible or demonstrably untrue, because the alternative involves conceding the existence of other ideas. Once you do that, politics is no longer an apocalyptic struggle between the enlightened, inclusive and virtuous and the dumb, racist and evil but a debate between thinking persons who just happen to think differently. Politics is rendered banal, an imperfect instrument for ordering a society rather than a noble crusade to correct the flaws of human nature. Demystify politics and you wound the American liberal more grievously than if you were to debunk every policy position he holds.

Rich Lowry didn’t say the N-word. He said the M-word, which isn’t even a word. He said it because he misspoke, and he misspoke because he is human and prone to error. His detractors should have the good grace to recognise that, to apply intelligence and charity to this episode, and to concede the existence of other viewpoints and the legitimacy of expressing them. Liberalism would be all the better for debating Rich Lowry instead of trying to destroy him.