Pasteur's Principle and The National Review.

Before Pasteur there was a common belief in spontaneous generation. The tendency of any undisturbed organic matter to erupt in teeming microscopic (and larger) creatures had convinced many that life was a spontaneously arising phenomenon. Pasteur disproved this, showing that life arose only from life and that insects and microscopic animals bred as true as larger lifeforms.

Brad DeLong has discovered a sort of similar principle for The National Review Digging deep into the slime pit of the National Review archives, he unearths the slimy ancestors of today's National Review mold:

The soberly-dressed "clerky" little man... seemed oddly unsuited to his unmentioned but implicit role of propagandist.... Let me say at once, for the benefit of the wicked, fearful South, that Martin Luther King wil never rouse a rabble; in fact, I doubt very much if he could keep a rabble awake... past its bedtime... lecture... delivered with all the force and fervor of the five-year-old who nightly recites: "Our Father, Who art in New Haven, Harold be Thy name."...

The slime mold breeds true.

Or nearly so. There has been a bit of adaptation, with the racism now less overt, the supercilious slanders aimed at other targets.

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