{"id":113244,"date":"2017-03-23T15:58:57","date_gmt":"2017-03-23T23:58:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113244"},"modified":"2017-03-23T15:58:57","modified_gmt":"2017-03-23T23:58:57","slug":"how-national-review-helped-build-the-alt-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113244","title":{"rendered":"How National Review Helped Build the Alt-Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Slate<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conference\u2014a two-day affair featuring lectures, debates, and conversations about the future of American conservatism. November\u2019s conference came amid surging interest in the alt-right, which owes its very name to the club. In 2008, a speech from the inaugural conference by its president, Paul Gottfried, was republished under the title \u201cThe Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right\u201d in Richard Spencer\u2019s Taki\u2019s Magazine, the earliest prominent usage of the phrase. At November\u2019s conference, Gottfried echoed that 2008 call for the marshaling of an \u201cindependent\u201d and \u201cauthentic\u201d right.<\/p>\n

That right has been marshaled. The alt-right has become a political and cultural phenomenon without recent precedent\u2014the rise of Donald Trump has brought with it newly empowered figures promoting fashionably packaged racism and anti-immigrant animus. As the alt-right has grown, though, mainstream conservatives have loudly shot down suggestions that its rise has anything to do with them. \u201cThey are anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists, they hate the Constitution, they hate free markets, they hate pluralism, they despise everything we believe in,\u201d American Conservative Union executive director Dan Schneider told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees last month. \u201cThey are not an extension of conservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mainstream conservative outlets have denounced the movement as well, none more loudly than National Review, the flagship publication of the American right. Last April, National Review\u2019s Ian Tuttle condemned Breitbart writers for downplaying the racism of the movement\u2019s intellectual leaders, including Spencer and Jared Taylor, founder of the white supremacist publication American Renaissance. \u201cThese men have not simply been \u2018accused of racism,\u2019 \u201d he wrote. \u201cThey are racist, by definition. Taylor\u2019s \u2018race realism,\u2019 for example, co-opts evolutionary biology in the hopes of demonstrating that the races have become sufficiently differentiated over the millennia to the point that the races are fundamentally\u2014that is, biologically\u2014different. Spencer, who promotes \u2018White identity\u2019 and \u2018White racial consciousness,\u2019 is beholden to similar \u2018scientific\u2019 findings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tuttle\u2019s characterization of Spencer\u2019s and Taylor\u2019s beliefs is entirely accurate. At the same time, it would apply equally to the views of three speakers of note at November\u2019s Mencken conference: Robert Weissberg, John Derbyshire, and Peter Brimelow. All were onetime contributors to National Review. Despite the magazine\u2019s disavowal of the alt-right, the platform it provided for these writers and its elevation\u2014throughout its history\u2014of ideas that have become central to the movement tie National Review to the alt-right\u2019s intellectual origins. In truth, National Review can no more disown the alt-right than it can disown its own legacy.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

During a debate on the final night of last year\u2019s Mencken conference, Robert Weissberg offered thoughts on the problems plaguing the city of Detroit and its black population. \u201cI actually attended a conference on Detroit,\u201d he proclaimed, \u201cwhich had a distinguished panel that talked about the problems for about two hours, and guess what never came up?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBrain size!\u201d someone called out. The room erupted in laughter.<\/p>\n

\u201cClose,\u201d Weissberg giggled. \u201cWhat brave soul,\u201d he said eventually, \u201cwould insist that economic progress is impossible in a culture that prizes criminality and sloth?\u201d<\/p>\n

His comment was a blunt reiteration of ideas he explored as an on-and-off contributor to National Review\u2019s \u201cPhi Beta Cons\u201d blog from 2010 to 2012. \u201cThe indisputable evidence is that genetically determined IQ matters greatly, but since many liberals abhor this politically incorrect conclusion, they insist that the entire issue is \u2018controversial,\u2019 \u201d he wrote in one 2012 post. Weissberg was booted from the publication that year, though, when it emerged that he had delivered a talk at Jared Taylor\u2019s American Renaissance conference.<\/p>\n

John Derbyshire, a longtime Review contributor, had been canned just days earlier for a post he\u2019d written at Taki\u2019s titled \u201cThe Talk: Non-Black Version.\u201d The piece , a reference to \u201cthe talk\u201d black parents often give their kids about how to navigate situations that could subject them to racism and police brutality, detailed advice he\u2019d given his children about black people, including recommendations to \u201cavoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally\u201d and avoid being \u201cthe Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he\u2019s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer,\u201d Review editor Rich Lowry wrote affectionately in a post announcing Derbyshire\u2019s firing. \u201cDerb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lowry\u2019s characterization of Derbyshire\u2019s prior \u201cline-dancing\u201d struck some commentators as odd given that Derbyshire\u2019s bigotry had been pointed out long before his ouster\u2014perhaps most cogently by John Derbyshire. \u201cI am a homophobe, though a mild and tolerant one, and a racist, though an even more mild and tolerant one,\u201d he told a blogger in 2003.<\/p>\n

The third prominent National Review alumni and Mencken Club speaker there that day last fall, Peter Brimelow, was a former editor at the magazine who had been canned in 1997. That was a key year for the publication, one which also saw the demotion of National Review editor-in-chief John O\u2019Sullivan. Brimelow and others have concluded, reasonably, that the shake-up was the culmination of a gradual retreat from a stance on immigration both men shared, which, in Brimelow\u2019s case, has since veered into more open racism. VDare, founded by Brimelow in 1999, regularly publishes articles on the purported biological inferiorities of minorities and is one of the most well-known online bastions of xenophobia. \u201cDiversity per se,\u201d its mission statement reads, \u201cis not strength, but a vulnerability.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with Derbyshire, Brimelow\u2019s racist commentary was a regular feature well before his ouster. His 1995 book Alien Nation argued that black crime could be easily explained because \u201ccertain ethnic cultures are more crime-prone than others,\u201d warned against an incoming tide of \u201cweird alien\u201d migrants \u201cwith dubious habits,\u201d and said that visitors to the waiting rooms of the Immigration and Naturalization Service should expect to soon find themselves \u201cin an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to these three, Paul Gottfried, leader of the Mencken Club, was himself ousted as a National Review contributor in the 1980s. But he believes that racism was not, ultimately, the cause of any of the firings. \u201cThey didn\u2019t throw anybody out because they were racist,\u201d Gottfried told me. It was the capture of the conservative movement by business and political interests supportive of immigration and multiculturalism, among other things, he alleges, that led to a series of purges of proto-alt-right figures such as himself. These were akin, Gottfried posited, to National Review founder and conservative icon William F. Buckley\u2019s renunciation of the conspiratorial John Birch Society in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

If Gottfried is right, the purges seem to have been incomplete. Victor Davis Hanson, a current writer for National Review and a frequent critic of multiculturalism, for instance, published a National Review piece about race and crime a year after Derbyshire\u2019s firing that loudly echoed his offending column without similar repercussions, right down to the paternal recommendation to avoid black people. Jason Richwine, a researcher who left the Heritage Foundation after the discovery of his doctoral dissertation, in which he\u2019d argued \u201cthe low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent,\u201d currently writes for National Review on, among other issues, Hispanic immigration. Charles Murray, whose 1994 book The Bell Curve promoted the idea of inherent racial differences in intelligence to wide controversy, wrote a defense of Richwine for National Review in 2013 and was a contributor as recently as last year.<\/p>\n

As often noted in alt-right circles, National Review\u2019s early years were characterized by explicit racism. American Renaissance resurfaced this history in the wake of Derbyshire\u2019s firing in 2012 when it republished a 2000 essay by James Lubinskas lamenting National Review\u2019s gradual \u201cabandonment of the interests of whites as a group.\u201d From that essay:<\/p>\n

The early National Review heaped criticism on the civil rights movement, Brown v. Board of Education, and people like Adam Clayton Powell and Martin Luther King, whom it considered race hustlers. What used to be an important part of the NR message is now dismissed as illegitimate \u201cwhite identity politics.\u201d
\nLubinskas went on to cite numerous passages detailing National Review\u2019s erstwhile support for white supremacy: an article arguing the hopelessness of integration given IQ differences between whites and blacks and the threat of \u201cattempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls.\u201d An article condemning the forced integration of Little Rock, Arkansas\u2019 Central High School. An article by conservative philosopher Russell Kirk defending apartheid in South Africa on the grounds that granting the black majority the right to vote \u201cwould bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n

These essays and others, spanning decades, mirrored the views of National Review founder William F. Buckley, who famously defended the right of whites to deny black Americans the vote and maintain white supremacy in a 1957 Review editorial titled \u201cWhy the South Must Prevail.\u201d \u201cThe White community is so entitled,\u201d he wrote, \u201cbecause, for the time being, it is the advanced race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buckley\u2019s views on immigration, echoed through his magazine, also prefigured the alt-right. Though Buckley took pains to distance himself from the open white nationalism motivating some immigration restrictionists, he did back curbing immigration specifically to fight multiculturalism. Buckley also expressed skepticism of the \u201crelative acculturability\u201d of nonwhites. \u201cThe Ellis Island cultists resist plain-spoken reasoning,\u201d Buckley wrote in 1997. \u201cIf pockets of immigrants are resisting the assimilation that over generations has been the solvent of American citizenship, then energies should go to accosting multiculturalism, rather than encouraging its increase.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buckley, like the alt-right, was particularly perturbed by Muslim immigrants and saw ominous signs of Muslim upheaval in Europe. \u201cWestern Europe has a Muslim problem,\u201d he wrote in a 2007 column. Muslim migrants, he opined, had particularly become a threat to \u201cthe British way of life\u201d commensurate with \u201ca continental army threatening invasion or Nazi bombers darkening the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n

National Review planted its flag firmly in favor of culture-based restrictionism in 1992, with a 14,000-word cover essay on immigration written by none other than Peter Brimelow. The essay is an attack on nonwhite immigration that, in its fixation on America\u2019s \u201cshifting ethnic balance\u201d and \u201cthe reality of ethnic and cultural differences,\u201d hints at white nationalism. \u201cAmericans are now being urged to abandon the bonds of a common ethnicity and instead to trust entirely to ideology to hold together their state (polity),\u201d Brimelow wrote. \u201cThis is an extraordinary experiment, like suddenly replacing all the blood in a patient\u2019s body.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brimelow would expand upon his views in a 1995 episode of Buckley\u2019s show Firing Line that saw him speak in favor of the debate position \u201cResolved: That All Immigration Should Be Drastically Reduced.\u201d Over the course of the debate, Buckley endorsed the idea, proposed by Brimelow in his National Review essay and in Alien Nation, of pausing legal immigration. This past November, Richard Spencer himself endorsed a 50-year immigration pause..<\/p>\n

Just a few short years after the Brimelow cover, the magazine started closing itself to rhetoric and argumentation on immigration that aligned it too closely with openly bigoted restrictionists. That move began with Brimelow\u2019s firing and editor-in-chief John O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s demotion in 1997. National Review went on to adopt a stance described by Ramesh Ponnuru in a 2001 essay as \u201crestrictionism that can succeed.\u201d Even in that piece, however, Ponnuru praised Brimelow for \u201cbravely and wittily\u201d challenging \u201cpro-immigration consensus and the taboos that sustained it\u201d and criticized Brimelow\u2019s rhetoric largely for its impracticality.<\/p>\n

The magazine\u2019s shift away from Brimelow\u2019s brand of restrictionism was itself practically rather than morally motivated. Buckley, in a 2000 letter to Jared Taylor that Brimelow would later publish at VDare, said so himself:<\/p>\n

It seems to me that the idea traditionally defended of endeavoring to maintain existing ethnic balances simply doesn\u2019t work any more. A defense against the kind of situation portrayed by Raspail would seem to inhere in immigration laws, particularly in the idea of unrestricted immigration.
\n\u201cRaspail\u201d here is Jean Raspail, French author of The Camp of the Saints, a racist 1973 novel about the invasion of the West by murderous and sexually violent Third World migrants. The book has been praised widely for years by white supremacists, including American Renaissance\u2019s Jared Taylor. Trump adviser Steve Bannon has also praised the novel repeatedly and Iowa Rep. Steve King recommended the book in a recent interview. In a 2004 National Review column on African migrants to Europe, Buckley would laud Saints as a \u201cgreat novel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, Buckley and others at the magazine retained sympathies for Brimelow\u2019s position on immigration that were deemed too embarrassing or too futile to continue to espouse as openly as they once had. Nevertheless, Brimelow, having been designated a liability, would found VDare in 1999 as an outcast, to continue promoting the line he advanced in his National Review essay. John O\u2019Sullivan, demoted but still employed by National Review, would serve on the site\u2019s board of directors. O\u2019Sullivan\u2019s position at VDare was revealed in 2012 in the wake of Derbyshire\u2019s firing. O\u2019Sullivan responded with a post in which he called white nationalism \u201csilly\u201d and claimed he had resigned from VDare in 2007. O\u2019Sullivan was nevertheless listed as a member of the board in VDare\u2019s nonprofit filings as late as 2010\u2014the year the site gave more than $34,000 to Richard Spencer for the launch of the flagship publication Alternative Right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Slate: Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conference\u2014a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=113244"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":113245,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113244\/revisions\/113245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=113244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=113244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=113244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}