Luke Ford

A friend says:

Dear Luke,

I don’t want to insult Ben Shapiro. Others have done a good job in exposing his pretentiousness. But for him to warn that the Alt Right will take over the GOP and banish true conservatism is pretty funny. Perhaps now he will have more empathy for paleo conservatives such as Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis, Joe Sobran, Anne Coulter and Paul Gottfried, who have been dismissed by “true conservatives” such as Shapiro and banished from discourse within the Republican party. I don’t remember Shapiro taking a never Mitt Romney pledge or a never John McCain pledge or a never George Bush pledge, as all three of them certainly did not show fidelity to the conservative principles that Shapiro listed. Unfortunately for Ben, there are very few true conservatives of his ilk within the United States; instead until Trump came along the dominant Republican media outlets became an echo chamber. Basically two thirds of the Republican voters never bought into the Republican principles but voted for Republicans because of antipathy toward the Democrats. Trump has exposed that there is at best a small Republican base supporting Republican media such as Shapiro.

Shapiro has two problems as I see them, and in that sense he is not unlike Obama. He thinks he is the smartest person in the room and he is young and doesn’t understand political movements within any sort of historical context that goes back farther than when Reagan was elected.

Washington Post:

If Republicans aren’t careful, they’ll soon see true conservatism banished from their party.

Constitutional conservatives can’t stand the alt-right. Conservatives — real conservatives — believe that only a philosophy of limited government, God-given rights and personal responsibility can save the country. And that creed is not bound to race or ethnicity. Broad swaths of the alt-right, by contrast, believe in a creed-free, race-based nationalism, insisting, among other things, that birth on American soil confers superiority. The alt-right sees limited-government constitutionalism as passé; it holds that only nationalist populism on the basis of shared tribal identity can save the country. It’s a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.

Trump himself has flirted with the alt-right for months, from taking his sweet time distancing himself from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke to failing to condemn alt-right anti-Semitic attacks on journalists. The alt-right association came into focus after I left the site in early March — I worked there as an editor for four years — with the elevation of alt-right cult hero Milo Yiannopoulos to a position of prominence.

I’d heard, of course, that the some of Breitbart’s comment sections had been occupied over previous months by a motley collection of white supremacists and anti-Semites (I generally never check the comments). I’d certainly felt their online wrath, accused by alt-righters of being an anti-Trump “cuck” — accusations that came with memes of gas chambers and “shekelmeister” cartoons that could have come directly from Der Stürmer. Such material flowed into my inbox and Twitter feed. That flow escalated dramatically after I declared that I would not support Trump, and it escalated again after I left Breitbart over its attempts to smear its own reporter, Michelle Fields, in order to shield then-Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski against charges that he’d yanked her by the arm at a campaign event.

But it wasn’t until March 29 that Breitbart’s full embrace of the alt-right became clear. That’s the day the site featured Yiannopoulos’s lengthy piece glorifying the alt-right. Yiannopoulos had already given interviews in which he stated that “Jews run the banks” and “Jews run the media,” dismissing anti-Semitic memes as merely “mischievous, dissident, trolly.” He wrote, along with co-author Allum Bokhari, this insane sentence: “There are many things that separate the alternative right from old-school racist skinheads (to whom they are often idiotically compared), but one thing stands out above all else: intelligence.”