A friend says: <\/p>\n
Dear Luke,<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t 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 \u201ctrue conservatives\u201d such as Shapiro and banished from discourse within the Republican party. I don\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
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\u2019t understand political movements within any sort of historical context that goes back farther than when Reagan was elected.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Washington Post<\/a>: <\/p>\n
If Republicans aren’t careful, they’ll soon see true conservatism banished from their party.<\/p>\n
Constitutional conservatives can\u2019t stand the alt-right. Conservatives \u2014 real conservatives \u2014 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 pass\u00e9; it holds that only nationalist populism on the basis of shared tribal identity can save the country. It\u2019s a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 I worked there as an editor for four years \u2014 with the elevation of alt-right cult hero Milo Yiannopoulos to a position of prominence.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d heard, of course, that the some of Breitbart\u2019s 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\u2019d certainly felt their online wrath, accused by alt-righters of being an anti-Trump \u201ccuck\u201d \u2014 accusations that came with memes of gas chambers and \u201cshekelmeister\u201d cartoons that could have come directly from Der St\u00fcrmer. 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\u2019d yanked her by the arm at a campaign event.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t until March 29 that Breitbart\u2019s full embrace of the alt-right became clear. That\u2019s the day the site featured Yiannopoulos\u2019s lengthy piece glorifying the alt-right. Yiannopoulos had already given interviews in which he stated that \u201cJews run the banks\u201d and \u201cJews run the media,\u201d dismissing anti-Semitic memes as merely \u201cmischievous, dissident, trolly.\u201d He wrote, along with co-author Allum Bokhari, this insane sentence: \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A friend says: Dear Luke, I don\u2019t 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 … Continue reading