Such devastating eloquence from Matthew Continetti!
Ricky Vaugn tweets: “William Kristol’s son-in-law has an article in Commentary today lamenting that in the internet age there is no Buckley to purge heretics.”
From Commentary Magazine: The nasty mouth-breathers Buckley expelled from conservatism have returned. The proximate cause of this efflorescence of the pre-Buckley right is Donald Trump’s campaign for president. Trump has dog-whistled at racists so much for so long that they feel resurgent. They call themselves the “alt-right,” a grab-bag category that includes nativists, eugenicists, bigots, anti-Semites, misogynists, reactionaries, aristocrats, monarchists, isolationists—basically anyone who hates today’s America and the modern world and the men and women, of any race or religion, who flourish in it.
For a while the alt-right was confined to the comment sections on websites, then it moved to Twitter, then it created websites of its own, and now, most disturbingly, its ideas, such as they are, are being published and defended and celebrated on sites associated with the conservative movement and Republican politics.
So, on March 29, Breitbart.com published “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right,” a long taxonomy in which authors Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos argue, “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.” Hate to break it to you, guys, but a smart skinhead is still a skinhead.
“In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct,” the authors continue, “the response of the Establishment—the conservative Establishment—has been to openly welcome that extinction.” Ah, yes—because you know Mitt Romney spends his days thinking about how to punish the white man. What was that about the alternative right being “intelligent” again?
On March 30, TheFederalist.com published “The Intellectual Case for Trump I: Why the White Nationalist Support?” It’s a rambling, overly long, embarrassingly personal essay mainly about the (Jewish) author’s failed attempts to court an avowed white supremacist: “I continued to send out feelers and message and speak with her online, keeping my ethnic heritage a secret at first so I could probe her ideology” (!).
The argument of the piece amounts to this: “When you strip away the swastikas, imitation Hugo Boss uniforms, and Klan hoods, there are things that even rabid, clannish white nationalist society does better than our own.” Which things? “Ironically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.” In German.
What at first seem like absurd and unintentionally hilarious articles are in fact quite malevolent. They are the vehicles by which anti-liberal and dehumanizing sentiments become legitimized in conservative circles. They are evidence that we are living in the midst of a sort of historical counterfactual: What if the Birchers had expelled Buckley, and not the other way around? They are stepping stones on the path to a pre–National Review media universe of embattled, embittered, impotent conservatives—another conservative dark age.
