Such devastating eloquence from Matthew Continetti!<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
From Commentary Magazine<\/a>: The nasty mouth-breathers Buckley expelled from conservatism have returned. The proximate cause of this efflorescence of the pre-Buckley right is Donald Trump\u2019s campaign for president. Trump has dog-whistled at racists so much for so long that they feel resurgent. They call themselves the \u201calt-right,\u201d a grab-bag category that includes nativists, eugenicists, bigots, anti-Semites, misogynists, reactionaries, aristocrats, monarchists, isolationists\u2014basically anyone who hates today\u2019s America and the modern world and the men and women, of any race or religion, who flourish in it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So, on March 29, Breitbart.com published \u201cAn Establishment Conservative\u2019s Guide to the Alt-Right,\u201d a long taxonomy in which authors Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos argue, \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 Hate to break it to you, guys, but a smart skinhead is still a skinhead.<\/p>\n \u201cIn response to concerns from white voters that they\u2019re going to go extinct,\u201d the authors continue, \u201cthe response of the Establishment\u2014the conservative Establishment\u2014has been to openly welcome that extinction.\u201d Ah, yes\u2014because you know Mitt Romney spends his days thinking about how to punish the white man. What was that about the alternative right being \u201cintelligent\u201d again?<\/p>\n On March 30, TheFederalist.com published \u201cThe Intellectual Case for Trump I: Why the White Nationalist Support?\u201d It\u2019s a rambling, overly long, embarrassingly personal essay mainly about the (Jewish) author\u2019s failed attempts to court an avowed white supremacist: \u201cI 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\u201d (!).<\/p>\n The argument of the piece amounts to this: \u201cWhen 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.\u201d Which things? \u201cIronically, given their loathing of other cultures, the biggest one is bilingual education.\u201d In German.<\/p>\n 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\u2013National Review media universe of embattled, embittered, impotent conservatives\u2014another conservative dark age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading