That the Kendi endeavor proceeds despite its intellectual deficiencies and despite his personal failings is, on one level, appalling and worthy of mockery, which is why I have mocked it. In this light, Kendi’s refusal to debate critics (because they’re not arguing against him but “are arguing against themselves”) merely reinforces the weakness of his worldview.

But there’s another level on which one could grudgingly tip a cap to Kendi. Somehow, he has overcome the intellectual failures of his project and prospered personally in the process. Composer Richard Wagner created works that he intended to be experienced simultaneously in multiple artistic media (known as the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art”). As an “artist,” Kendi has given us a total work of grift, straddling multiple fields of American life. In this light, his refusal to debate critics seems less like a philosophical statement and more an affirmation of the old principle: de gustibus non disputandam est — there is no accounting for taste.

[That’s one way to look at it. Another is that Kendi saw that there was a vast market of white guilt and an unresolved demand for expiation, and he merely supplied what people wanted to buy, until they stopped buying it. It’s like the two women who charged primarily white and liberal women thousands of dollars to scold them over dinner. You have to admire the entrepreneurship that sprang from the demand for masochistic debasement. — Ed]