One of the first things I learned about conservatism, way back in the before times, was that William F. Buckley made conservatism respectable. In the 1980’s, Buckley became a rock star, riding the wave of enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan. Like a lot of young men in that age, I was caught up in it. Being a conservative was suddenly cool and everyone credited Buckley for making it possible. It was hard to argue with the claim. Bill Buckley was a charming, intelligent and sophisticated guy. Who would not want to be like Bill?
The part that no one seemed to notice back then, at least not the people involved in the conservative movement, was that the whole point of the thing was to make the people in it respectable, as judged by their alleged opponents. Pretty much the only thing they really cared about was being seen as respectable. It’s why guys like George Will were not fans of Ronald Reagan initially. They worried that his earthy sense of humor and popularity with normal people would not go over well with their friends on the Left.
A big part of being respectable, at least in modern politics, is drawing the line between yourself and those who are not respectable. In the 80’s, when conservatism was booming, no one thought much about all the people that had been read out of the conservative movement in order for guys like Bill Buckley to be respectable. That was the thing though, by the 80’s, conservatism was nothing but drawing lines between the respectable and the unacceptable, in order to be in good standing with the Left.
That all came to mind when I read this post by the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty. It is the typical flip-flopping equivocation that is a Jonah Goldberg column. If there are two sides to an issue, he will find a way take four sides, all in the same post. Reading one of his columns is like watching a fish flop around on the deck. The basic point of the column is that he fears conservatives have not been vigilant enough in policing that line between themselves and the people the Left finds offensive. Thus the Alex Jones fiasco.
His follow up column is a call to war for his fellow conservatives. Well, it’s more like a long love letter to Bill Kristol and the other paranoids of the neoconservative cult. He provides a long bit of mythology about Buckley and his fights with the anti-Semites. The reader is obviously supposed to make the connection between those long dead bogeymen from the 1950’s and the bogeymen currently haunting conservatism. In Goldberg’s telling, his generation of conservatives are facing the same challenge as Buckley did 70 years ago.
The amusing part is how Goldberg keeps trying to connect himself to guys like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. Maybe being the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty is going to his head. In reality, it is just another example of the intellectual hollowness of Buckley Conservatism. Chambers was a man of great courage and integrity. Burnham was a brilliant thinker whose ideas are still relevant today. Jonah Goldberg is a feckless airhead. He would have been laughed out of the room by conservatives of their day.
That aside, there’s a weird cargo cult vibe to all this. The so-called conservatives don’t even bother to think about the arguments coming from the right. They don’t even pretend to know about them. There was not a single mention of the alt-right in National Review until Hillary Clinton mentioned them. Instead, they carry on as if it is 1955 and they are fighting a heroic battle against the John Birch Society. Goldberg’s post has the feel of a man hoping he can make it all go away just by performing all the old rituals.
It really is weird reading this stuff, given where we are now. These guys could be excused for living in the past when the GOP was right there with them. Five years ago, they had no reason to listen to their critics. Times were good and the living was easy. Now, after their audience has abandoned them and Trump is in the White House, their stubborn adherence to a defunct set of arguments is weird. The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.
The thing is, there are two types of conservatives. There are those who seek only to maintain the status quo, regardless the current laws, morals and behavior norms. Then there are the those who believe there is transcendent moral order that corresponds to the natural order. The Buckleyites were always of the first type. The reason they opposed the Left was they feared losing their place at the table. It’s the same reason they oppose the emerging national populists. They’re old men who fear change.
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The dissolution of the USSR was the worst thing to the happen to the American Right and the USA itself. “Official Conservatism” went off the rails in 1989 and has been wandering in the wilderness ever since. Buckley was a right man for the 60’s and 70’s. Bashing him now is like bashing Jefferson for owning slaves in the 1780’s.
What is “Applied Liberty” anyway? Each of those words has meaning but their combination in that phrase makes no sense.
Lorenzo, that would be as opposed to say, Theoretical Liberty, such as what existed in the Soviet Union. If you ever read the Constitution of the Soviet Union, it sounds like a human-rights paradise that makes our Constition seem extremely underwhelming in nature.
However, IN PRACTICE, there was no liberty in the Soviet Union, unless you were the guy at the very top. The guarantee of Free Speech — violated BY THE GOVERNMENT on a daily basis. A right to a trial — completely corrupted by the fact that the judge in every trial had one job, and one job only — to rubberstamp whatever the prosecutor wanted. Defense attorneys were of the same attitude — those who believed in actually defending defendants were sent to the the gulags with their clients. After the Soviet Union fell apart, one of the big legal hurdles was educating and training judges to take control of their courtrooms, to understand that it’s the JUDGE’s courtroom, not the prosecutor’s, and that judges both can AND MUST keep prosecutor’s penned inside a very small cage — as Solzhenitsin’s “Gulag Archipelego” attest so well.
Once upon a time, labels conveyed useful meaning and enabled preliminary assessment of others in the absence of immediate concrete information. Frequently, this assessment was a soft version of “friend or foe” and either allowed for enhanced trust or wariness depending upon the connotation. Now we live in deceitful times and disinformation often renders labels meaningless. The old standard of looking into someones eyes when speaking with them is still the best alternative to second or third-hand innuendo.
When I think of WFB I think of the following, and it colors everything I read and (think I) know about him, because it seems so spot on (yes, I suffer with my own “Pup”): https://www.anonymousconservative.com/blog/william-f-buckley-a-case-study-in-narcissistic-personality-disorder/
I read that Anonymous Conservative essay some time ago. It was good and revealing. I too have true narcissists in my life. I think AC goes too far on inadequate evidence. Unless you know a person well in real life, it is hard to know whether they’re very self centered or in fact, Narcissistic. Both are bad. But narcissism, clinically defined, is a whole other ballgame. And usually socially and professionally debilitating. AC attributes all of Buckley’s antics to some kind of sado narcissistic impulse, missing the point that often, Buckley simply liked fucking with people. Like his sissy son for instance. He was mischievous. Which helped him take on the establishment when he was young. I’m not saying Buckley wasn’t a dark ego driven turncoat asshole in the last third of his life. Just that the AC essay was over the top. Though I sympathize with anyone who’s grown up with narcissists. It can really mess you up.
For a similar but better take based on personal experience, Google Peter Brimelow’s outstanding essay on Buckley’s narcissism. I don’t have the link handy, unfortunately. It’s devastating and rings with absolute truth.
This one?
“What really motivated Buckley was ego and vanity.” https://vdare.com/articles/william-f-buckley-jr-rip-sort-of
Yes, thanks.
A while ago, someone asked for a definition of “poz”. I found one, and the Bucks are most certainly pozzed.
“The literal meaning of poz is a reference to the practice of political gays of deliberately infecting themselves with HIV in order to be holier than the next homosexual…
The metaphorical meaning of poz is the adoption of policies and programs likely to destroy one’s ethnic group, one’s friends, one’s own career, and oneself, as for example a code of conduct…”
In that case, Sweden is one big poz.
Uhm the West has gone poz. But true, Sweden is ahead of the pack.
Buckley gets a lot of shit from both the Dissident and the Alt-Right but the underlying assumption here is that anyone who want’s to call themselves “Right” should automatically become part of the club, and that Buckley was wrong in opposing this notion. Don’t get me wrong, Buckley did go off the rails later on, craving establishment acceptance over Truth, but early on he was right to purge some elements. In 1957, Buckley published, “Big Sister is Watching You”, by Whittaker Chambers which devastated any libertarian claims to membership of the Right, well before anyone else did. Furthermore, his expulsion of the Natsocs and Birchers was right in my opinion.
Buckley purged, but he purged wrongly in some instances especially later in his life. The question is where to draw the line, and until that’s established we shouldn’t be so unthinkingly critical of him.
It’s a year after Charlottesville and the Natsocs have been a complete disaster for the Right. The only good to come from it is that the Left has done for us what the Right could not do “in house”, that is force a split between the Alt-Right and Dissident.
Eff those old cucks, what about guys like me who eagerly await the change and worry about being too old by the time the fun starts?
Speaking as an old man who doesn’t like change, since 9/11 I’ve had Instapundit at the top of my bookmarks list. It’s been a source of some irritation that the blog, and Ed Driscoll in particular, seems to be doing its level best to rehabilitate Goldberg, with regular links and long quotes. I like Glenn Reynolds a lot, but the libertarian slant and the support for NR there increasingly bugs me. That’s my problem, but old habits are hard to change at 70 years old. On the bright side, started reading Shots Fired, a collection of essays by Sam Francis. Highly recommended, a prescient man.
The “Instapundit” of old is no longer. It’s been a subsidiary of PJMedia for some time. PJM was a Roger Simon/Charles Johnson/Aubrey Chernick enterprise. I don’t know who backs it now.
The proper term for nasty old conservatives like Buckely and other intellectuals iin the movement is “kept men”.
They were whores for the establishment – controlled opposition. This is why Buckely purged the movement of populists, Birchers, immigration restrictionists. Those men were threats to the established ruling order and could introduce “doubleplusungood bad thoughts” into the population.
Hell the movement was in such bad shape by the time Trump showed up, the only real conservative left were the Paleocons.
I understand the changes you’ve been through about Bill Buckley. Long ago, I took him at face value: deep thinker who could quote from the classics, slayer of liberals in debates, etc. That side of him was real enough, but it took me a while to get it that despite his personal charisma he was a Quisling.
You mention George Will. I admired him for a long time, even while recognizing that he was puppet opposition, the Washington Post’s token conservative. In some ways I still appreciate what he was in a different era, say in the ’80s. His columns could be eloquent. He had a sense of humor rare in the political world. Will always seemed to have an anecdote or someone else’s witticism, relevant to the issue he was discussing, ready to hand — this before the internet when you couldn’t just punch a few keys to come up with a snappy quote.
What happened to that George Will? He began confusing conservatism with the Republican Party. His writing was less about principles than about electoral number crunching. I won’t speculate about his personal life but I am guessing that comfort and acceptance by his peers (the Washington Establishment) became important to him, as it does to many aging people.
And then Donald Trump came along. Suddenly many commentators in the public eye found they couldn’t avoid taking a stand. A candidate and then a president was talking about things that actually mattered (e.g., immigration) rather than glittering generalities (okay, Trump did and does offer his share of those, but they aren’t everything he’s about).
By Will’s standards Trump is uncouth, lacking in cool gravitas, out to win instead of making debater’s points in polished phrases. The country club Republican inside Will is no longer relevant except in his own circle. I feel a little sorry that he has come to this. But that’s only when I think about it.
GravityDenier. Nice comment in a way. But it’s a bit late in the game now for you to be harboring sentiment for Will. Same about Buckley “slaying liberals in debates.” Vidal and Chomsky made him look almost ignorant at times. I’d say Buckley was downright slothy in debates. No one has time for his slow motion windup look-at-me questions. I’m not even that impressed with his violent threat to Vidal. Can you even picture Buckley throwing a punch? 10 to 1 he threw a baseball like a girl.
Funny how Sobran was always on to Will. I remember reading some NR archives at the library. Seems Sobran was taking him to task as early as the late 70’s. He wrote one article that slammed him as a fake conservative. A fake person actually, iirc. I have the article. I can’t find it on NR online archives. Anyway, Will was Sobran’s punching bag. Same way Goldberg and Shapiro are Zman’s punching bag today.
Cover story in The American Spectator of Sobran’s review of Will’s “Statecraft as Soulcraft.”
https://spectator.org/george-will-and-the-contemporary-political-conversation/
https://spectator.org/george-will-and-the-contemporary-political-conversation/
Thanks for the link, Frip.
I never knew that Mr. George Will had been called out as a hollow man and cuck… 35 years ago.
Frip, thanks for linking to the Joe Sobran review. An excellent piece. I may have to edit my retrospective estimate of Will based on what I thought was his better days. And, not having been familiar with Sobran other than having heard of him, I will check out his output as well.
Here’s a minor Happy little sprouting seed for any youngish Gen Xers or older Millenials. https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2018/08/dooms-mortally-challenged-comment-has-sjws-calling-it-gross-and-anti-immigration/66299/
Now it’s only gaming, it’s something I stopped a long time ago and its not the cultural High ground. But it is rhetoric of our’s delivered through top class trolling. Doom is a big deal in gaming, and it will sell spectaculary. If our rhetoric is trickling down to troll Leftie thats a big plus. The whole gamergate thing was one of the first time Prog Pozzing of entertainment got a bloody nose. A lot if the chaps maybe neets, hakikomoris, spergy and all the other stereotypes but they’re Our Autistes. They exposed Eric Clinton ( granted Leftie stacked the deck against justice) James Gunn raked in billions for the Mouse, but they claimed his scalp, and for scaring that nauseating horse voiced bitch Sarah Silverman they deserve our gratitude. God Bless those plucky denezins of the chans.
NR’s obit for Sobran, 2010:
“Our former NR colleague, Joe Sobran, passed away today after a long battle with a variety of ailments. He was relatively young, just 64, and while physically beaten at the end, he also departed spiritually triumphant.
Surely, in short order, there will be ample reflection — much of it critical — on the hyper-talented, hyper-controversial writer. There will be a recounting of his history at NR, the break, the following years, and Joe’s soured relationship with WFB (happily, they rekindled their friendship before Bill passed away). Good, let’s discuss all that, and more. But later. Right now, let us, if only for a minute, pray for the repose of his soul, to hope: That he abides now with his old boss, and they together with our Creator. For the peace that proved so elusive in this lifetime, Joe, may you now have it.”
At least these jackals acknowledged his passing. But that entirely unnecessary “if only for a minute” blew it all. May as well have said, “while we hold our noses”. Or “after the one minute mark we can start praying for him to rot in hell.”
Ann Coulter came out with a great eulogy. Oddly, never found anything from Pat Buchanan on his passing.
Sobran was something of a self saboteur. One instance is when Buchanon and Scott McConnell wanted him to play a big role with The American Conservative. Sobran was going to speak at some Holocaust denial conference. The other two pleaded with him not to, and said if he did, then TAC couldn’t give him a platform. Sobran insisted on speaking at the dead end conference and so threw away his chance at career redemption (and literally being able to pay his heating bills for once.) Not sure if that’s why Buchanon never mentioned his passing. Who knows what kind of private falling-out people have with each other.
More details please. Even sketchy ones. . .
McConnell in TAC, April 2018:
“TAC faced some painful choices in the early going. Buchanon, with my full agreement, had hoped that we could publish regularly Joe Sobran, the very talented Catholic writer who had run afoul of Midge Decter for writing critically about Israel…I didn’t think Sobran had written anything that had justified Buckley’s action…He was, it was widely known, in financial difficulty.
A couple of months before our first issue I read in The Forward that Joe was slated to speak at a Holocaust denial congress. I called Pat immediately, and he agreed that this was both sad and deplorable.
We separately called Joe on his cellphone, reaching him at the airport headed for David Irving land, and entreated him not to go. He was defiant, declaring his right to speak where he wanted. He told me the whole thing would soon blow over.
Of course it wouldn’t and didn’t, and there really was zero chance that we would publish any writer who used “questions” about the Holocaust as a polemic against Zionism or Jews or anything of the sort. Sobran had made himself unacceptable to us, and that was the end of it.”
Scroll down about 10 paragraphs for full:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/author/scott-mcconnell/
I forgot to mention that NR made sure the reader understood that the Sobran obit was written by a single individual with a name. And did not come from the magazine as a whole, or the editors.
The New York Times obit for Sobran is remarkable for its restraint, even perhaps, charity. Relatively speaking of course. It somehow managed not to refer to him as an anti-Semite (it did allude). And it even offered a sympathetic/rational quote from Joe on the issue.
Who’d have thought back in the 70’s that one day the NYT would give Sobran a generous obituary, and NR would not.
(I see now that NR did offer a longer piece on Joe a few weeks after his death. Still…”if even for a minute”. F them)
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/books/02sobran.html
Goldberg’s column on how special he and those like him are was a pathetic circle jerk. Those types find themselves in a strange place: no longer of interest to the Right, no longer of any use to the Left/Marxists they faithfully served so long. Reading the National Review and like publications these days is astonishingly like attending a concert given by a dinosaur rock band, hearing familiar tunes sung by older, weaker, offkey voices accompanied by instrumentals about as gripping as Middle Ages harpists.
I, you, and likely several others here came to find even commenting a NRO too tedious to bother. The commenter exodus without even the threat of a ban mirrored larger Conservatism, Inc.’s utter irrelevancy to modern thought, politics and culture. If any moment signaled the end of National Review, in particular, it was when Mark Steyn, a garden-variety civic nationalist with no illusions about mass migration, got the boot for not being PC enough. The few writers who remain and have opinions worth examination likely will, like the commenters, just leave at some point. Conservatism, Inc., can’t even attract trolls.
The Right needed to cut loose the Buckleyites and they left on their own. That’s win/win.
When you’re young you assume accepted political writers simply write what they think. Then after you get the idea of social status, in-groups, etc, you realize there’s about 5 different reasons why a writer writes what he does.
Buckley was an anti-Soviet cold-warrior in a pre-internet world, which is hard to put in context today; sacrifices were made to expediency. It is true that a “transcendent moral order” was not always the first consideration. Conservatism was never “booming” enough for that luxury, even in the 80s. Funding was always an issue, as was described in detail in yearly appeals to subscribers. He consequently had to be accepted by (((them))), and it is clear that he lost control of the magazine to (((them))) in his dotage. He wrote column after column condemning post 9/11 neocon foreign policy choices, yet staffed the magazine with the wrong people.
His Firing Line persona was off-putting to plenty, but uniquely memorable. He lived in an era of 3 TV channels + sesame street, and did what was required to get the word out. The media was at least as hostile as it is now, being infiltrated by real class-warfare communists and haters of America at every outlet. The likable Walter Cronkite was an actual commie loon. Buckley did the high-class act to say to middle America – it’s aspirational to be high class, don’t buy the commie line.
We bitch about Reagan and Buckley losing. Maybe we made too many sacrifices to beat the Soviets and their real sympathizers at home. Or maybe globohomo just never quits.
“Or maybe globohomo just never quits.”
This is the distilled essence of the entire problem, as well as something that belongs in a tag line. They’ve been ‘at it’ for a cool century plus now. This rot started gaining momentum at the turn of the PREVIOUS century. They tried manifold ways to break down the gates, killing millions in the process.
Then they realized it is much easier to infiltrate and lift the gates open yourself once you’ve infected the entire population with the mind virus. ‘The long march through the institutions’ is now basically complete. Witness by the glorious summary above about guarding a single section of wall in a city burned down to ash & cinder. That is a master stroke piece of writing that I copied for future use.
Agree, another +1 for those lonely tinpot helmets.
Globohomo never quits. China was raised up by the multinationals to replace the USSR, who failed to capture the Emerging World.
The depopulation occurs when Moorish Europe, successfully reconned by globohomo, wages a limited nuclear war with the Han Empire to seize control of the Belt.
Impoverished Mulatto-Mestizo America will watch helplessly.
“Or maybe globohomo just never quits.” Great line. A kind of black pill. If I were a pozzed merchant I’d make it into a t-shirt. “Globohomo never quits.” Man. I think you’re right. Terrible truth. We must crush. To mangle John Lennon, “Crush is the answer.”
I find it a good rule of thumb that if a writer has been kicked out of National Review, they’re worth reading: Joe Sobran, Peter Brimelow, Ann Coulter, John Derbyshire, Mark Steyn. I’m probably forgetting a few.
Too true.
Z – your writing prompted me to look up Whitaker Chambers. In the fog of history it is easy to forget who was who in the Alger Hiss story. Not so amazing is how a long list of democrats dismissed his allegations for so many years. I was surprised to learn of the impact that the book Witness had on Ronald Reagan (who I still think is the greatest president of my lifetime by orders of magnitude. I also found an interesting quote in the Wikopedia write up:
According to conservative commentator George Will in 2017:
Witness became a canonical text of conservatism. Unfortunately, it injected conservatism with a sour, whiney, complaining, crybaby populism. It is the screechy and dominant tone of the loutish faux conservatism that today is erasing [William F.] Buckley’s legacy of infectious cheerfulness and unapologetic embrace of high culture. Chambers wallowed in cloying sentimentality and curdled resentment about “the plain men and women” — “my people, humble people, strong in common sense, in common goodness” — enduring the “musk of snobbism” emanating from the “socially formidable circles” of the “nicest people” produced by “certain collegiate eyries.”[42]
Typical George Will, who I have always had a distaste for. He has to find some reason to attack the form and as much substance of the book rather than applaud what I understand to be a tremendous piece of work, written, by all accounts, by an excellent writer. In my mind, George Will is the benchmark of efite snobbery, always ready to sit down with the progs to criticize anything on the right over form, rather than substance.
You are still doing God’s work. Please keep doing it.
This is going to sound pretty off tangent, but I know one of Z’s favourites Mencken had a disdain for democracy, and favoured something resembling an Aristocracy as it would function like the aristocratic families of Europe, gate keepers and sponsors of High Culture. One of the things about Grand Old families of Europe, and the Southern U.S was the ubiquitous Military Service. Maybe just my interpretation going from Talebs skin in the game concept which is fairly common sense. Having to serve in the Armed forces with enforced discipline tends to be a great dose of reality. You get the impression with Will et all that their dildos. Dilletantes with no commitment or care for the culture they claim to uphold. Like Ted kazynski noted, a fighting Aristocracy tends not to decline into idle rich. Predictive text put in dildo at first. Probably a better description to be honest. Figured I’d leave it in.
SO sorry, Shane, but upper class Southern US young men no longer enter the military and that has been true for c. 50 yrs or so. I live in a city named for a Revolutionary War hero. His descendants live here still. Not one of these guys served so much as a day in service, esp during Vietnam, yet they continue as members of groups like the Order of the Cincinnati. Phoneys, all!
Will was always an opportunist. In the mid-70’s, he opposed Reagan until it became profitable to be a Reaganite. He’s the type of conservative that opposes change just because he opposes change. Once Reaganism became the default on the Right, he was a Reagan conservative. As the neocons took over in the 90’s, he slowly came along with them. His aim has always been to be the Left’s favorite conservative. To his credit, he made a lot of money doing it.
Fair point Z, but that Escobar chap made a killing from Colombian pharmaceuticals and agricultural production. Still seems a little bit dishonest
Word is he is a vile man on a personal level. Berating subordinates with F bombs etc.
Yeah, Zman, but Will was quite good at making his pitch plausible to foes of the Left.
In Statecraft as Soulcraft, he stood rather tall, in explaining Burke’s emphasis on Prudence, and in defining conservatism as the view, that tradition is *instrumental* to assessment of the Good, rather than determinative of the Good.
Too bad that he became such an UberCuck.
“Burke’s emphasis on Prudence”, jesus christ no wonder my conservative books are collecting dust in my attic
Burke would have admired the string of editors, of which Soban was only one, who left NR when they figured out Conservative Inc. and Buckley were only holding the fort for Progs. Burke was a giant, who opposed the British war against the colonies even as he sat in government, and later single handedly turned public and private opiinion against supporting the Frecnh revolutionaries, and in so doing demolished their mouthpiece in Britian, Tom Paine. Buckley maintained insufferable affectations, Burke had none.
Well said
The safe bet is Will doesn’t have any actual core belief other than self-image. In his excerpted rap on Chambers, Will likely isn’t expressing anything he believes (the probability is he doesn’t care one way or another). Will’s criticism is to ingratiate himself with the Leftists who put food on his table, including his wife’s employer, more about which to follow. No, Will is virtue signaling, indicating he also shares his patrons’ disdain for Chambers albeit with a purportedly conservative gloss.
If you want to get really nauseated, read Will’s love letters to the great liberal Senator Daniel “Pat” Moynihan. Like Will, Moynihan was an utter fraud and hypocrite. He would publicly bemoan the state of black Americans but privately was what we now would call a “race realist” and acknowledged the role of genetics. Those two things aren’t exclusive but the cowardice of what was shared is telling. Moynihan also was considered an intellectual inside his bubble, which accounted for much of Will’s obsequiousness (Buckley would treat Moynihan and people like John Maynard Keynes the same for the same reason).
Finally, Will became an open borders fanatic after his wife went to work as a lobbyist for ConAgra, which is all you need to know about the man.
I could go on, but the short version is Will always has been an insincere phony. The “conservative movement” was controlled and rendered an utter fraud by men like him. The damage that did to the nation by not pushing back against the Progressives and/or Marxists is incalculable.
Fuck George Will and his showy, also phony Bow Tie Brotherhood.
+1 for “The damage that did to the nation by not pushing back… is incalculable.”
People don’t realise how much Chambers had at stake taking on Hiss. Hiss was the Establishment and the elites could not even contemplate the notion that he was guilty. Venona proved them wrong.
So far as I can tell, Buckley pared down conservatism to the single issue of anti communism, which was already an anachronism for our side, but was becoming congenial to the neoconservatives. It was all a leg in the takeover of the right by the neocons. Now Buckley’s children are distinguished writers with big Hollywood movie deals, while we sculk in anonymity. There has not been a defining issue or ideology for conservatism since the demise of the Soviet Union. National review and allied publications have been like a compass at the North Pole, wobbling through 360 degrees, since 1991.
My point being that it’s all a distraction from THE issue, the national question, the only issue of any substance. Why are both sides so against it?
Why are both sides so against the national question? Because both sides are funded by a transnational tribe that insists on the end of homogeneous white countries. Also, GOP is paid to reduce labor costs through mass immigration while Dems want voters.
That explains a certain Dylan song, lol
Boy they jumped all over you for that! Pardon the leading question!
“feckless airhead”. Man that stings. I’m now moved to do everything in my power, every single day, so as never to be called a feckless airhead.
When civil war goes hot it would be fun watching Goldberg, Kristol, Will and their adherent cucks equivocating over which side would actually protect them. They’d be changing their socks every hour with all the piss running down their legs.
I think of conservatism as more of an institution than a movement. A movement has political goals. An institution is, generally speaking, concerned with perpetuating itself. And conservatism has all of the hallmarks of a failing institution.
Conservatives ignoring the alt-right aren’t much different from record executives ignoring the internet, or Kodak fixating on photo printing. They only know what they know, and somehow manage to convince themselves that their obvious deficiencies are somehow a competitive edge.
In regards to “Peisistratos”, Trump, in the most dangerous job in the world, is trying to play one group of billionaire donors against another group of billionaire donors. Conservative Inc. vs Globalist Left.
The problem is transparency, and borders.
These are vertically integrated groups, shrouded in the Cloud’s secrecy, operating above borders.
“Corporations bigger than most nations is the problem. Multi-nationals are the work-around to the Constitution. The Constitution restricts government, allegedly.” (Web comment)
How to counter this?
Who’s Church has the megaphone?
The Buckleyites told us that the status quo WAS the transcendant natural order.
Nature, though, disagrees with the Hive Mind.
The question, then, is this:
Will Nature’s God- “race”- supercede the multinational Cloud Hive?
As the Z says, Goldman realizes this, Goldberg does not.
Goldberg’s father-in-law was Paul Gavora (d. 2018). His incredible story here:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/newsminer/obituary.aspx?n=v-paul-gavora&pid=189118987&fhid=39890
Paul had nine children and worked his butt off. He built a business empire in Alaska. His daughter (at 38) married Jonah (at 32), and they only have one (1) kid.
What disappointment he must have felt when his daughter told him she was marrying Jonah. What disappointment when his daughter chose to write speeches instead of making babies and a home.
That’s why I love reading Taki himself.
He gives such delicious dish, reminiscing about the lost High Age.
Plagiarized from Kunstler’s Clusterfuck Nation, despite it’s loony virtue sniffers:
“That’s what happens when you opt for multiculturalism as your number one political principle.
Why can’t the solution be like in old New York city with its Little Italy, China Town, and so on? Why was that not considered multiculturalism? It seemed to work well for all, no?
…there are no shared values and can’t be in a system of ‘multiculturalism’.
We have been tearing down those ‘shared’ values for 2-3 generations to the point where there is now nothing to ‘converse’ about,… except the spoils left to divide. And, those spoils are dwindling fast.”
Yeah, Alzaebo, Kunstler’s site has its virtue sniffers, but he’s *very* good at speaking to *Normes*, and some of his commenters are at times quite gripping, e.g. Volodya and FincaInTheMountains.
Kunstler’s a delight, his readers mention the Zman, but I come for Janos.
Multiculturalism is a code word.
For “white annihilation.”
To sell Normies on this, “rub their noses” into NYT’s backing of Jeong on “extinction”.
Another way to split conservatives into two groups is by differentiating between those who are sincerely committed to conservative principles and those who are mere careerists of the popular movement. George Will and the National Review crowd seem not to give a damn about anything aside from their own status. I suspect the same of Ben Shapiro as well. It’s legitimate conservatives versus Conservative, Inc. Would the careerists ever risk their good fortunes by going out on a limb to defend some higher yet controversial value? It’s doubtful in a lot of cases.
Yet another way to split conservatives is between biological realists and biological denialists. It amazes me that practically all of the conservatives I encounter buy into most or all of the egalitarian hogwash that so informs (and distorts) the progressivist worldview. It lends credence to Z’s idea of left-wing progressives and right-wing progressives. Real conservatives appear to be in short supply. And virtually everyone, no matter where he or she falls on the ideological spectrum, is far too preoccupied with having “acceptable” opinions at the expense of factual and logical accuracy.
You “suspect” Shapiro, as well?
Have you been living in a cave? That little adenoidal voiced, whiny tribe member is happily, gleefully throwing away OUR country, with both hands, & is totally cool with the whites being cleansed to make way for the browns. That is, in between the times he’s not actively pushing for white, Southern Christian boys to go fight & die in a proxy war for him & his fellow desert merchant Semites.
F*CK Ben Shapiro & the Jonah Goldberg he rode in on.
The only thing I want to hear from the commentariat toadies is “Alex Jones (Richard Spencer, Louis Farrakhan. . .) is a United States citizen with all the attendant rights and privileges accruing to that status.” Spare me the virtue signalling and the tacit approval of de-platforming. Isn’t there even one cuck with a spine?
I fear change.
I look at the trash people flooding into my country and I fear for its future. I look at liberals telling their daughters to embrace their vices and abandon their virtues and I fear for them too. Now their men are doing the same with contemptible practices like ‘game’ and ‘pick up artistry.’ I watch the collapse of the mass media and I fear we have no voice in official channels. Watching the tech giants move against unofficial channels like Oytube, Twatter and Fecesbook is no cause for comfort.
To tell the truth I would rather not be here on the dissident right. I’d love to pretend that moslems pouring into the country will do alright and get along with joos. I’d like to pretend single moms can raise healthy families. I’d like to pretend that blacks, women and vibrants can build bridges that don’t fall down and kill people.
Confronting reality is no picnic. I now have to do things I hate. I gotta buy a gun and stockpile ammo. I gotta prep and lay in supplies. When my daughter came home and told me she had quit university and had decided to become a gay artiste instead I had to be the only adult in the family to tell that kid she was making a very poor life choice. When the women in the family tried to emasculate me and undermine me as a father and my daughter as a young woman, I was pushed out the airlock for refusing to go along.
To the right of me, I see latent homosexuals like Vox Day, Jim, Cerno and flamers like Milo.
Maybe Jonah has enough money to avoid the reality that faces the rest of us. Maybe his bubble is immune to the social consequences facing the rest of us. I can’t trust Jonah… but I can forgive him. It’s no fun being here…
We’re the White Russians.
Kulaks today, zeks tomorrow.
I stopped calling myself a conservative a year or so ago, in large part because Donald Trump made it so obvious that famous conservatives are talkers and not problem-solvers.
Conservatives do little more than TALK about how the country is going in the wrong direction, but when some can-do person steps up to the plate and vows to FIX things, the dunces in the Beltway country club unite in confederacy against him. Sarah Palin showed up as John McCain’s VP, and the lapdog media spent years ridiculing her until she finally stepped down from politics. Donald Trump shows up and gets elected President, and the NeverTrumpers not only openly stated they preferred Hillary Clinton (claiming that her presidency would be “survivable,” implying that Trump’s would not be), but to this day, they push the muh-Russia narrative in the hopes that this will weaken Trump.
I know what I believe, but I honestly don’t know what to call myself now.
Welcome to the Dissident Right!
The average conservative voter lives a consumerist lifestyle not that distinct from their liberal bugman peer. Boomer male NFL fans often complain that the game is “too soft” even though we know it causes brain damage. Then they act shocked when they find out that most NFL players are black nationalists. Meanwhile Mr. Boomer’s (second, third) wife is an avid fan of Starbucks and reality TV.
Try “Alt Right” on for size:
From: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/01/dont-resist-truth.html
…
This is why the Alt-Right Revolution is inevitable. Despite the propaganda in which the young man has been steeped for his entire life, despite being “smart” and “informed” and “well-educated”, which is to say “brainwashed” and “misinformed” and “maleducated”, truth and tribe attract him.
There are not two alternatives. …
…
The Alt-Right is not a temptation, it is the answer for those who wish to save America from its loss of meaning, identity, and legitimacy. It is not the nationalism of the Alt-Right, but the civic nationalism of the Alt-Lite that is a mirage and a false ideal. Civic nationalism is no more true nationalism than social justice is true justice. And there is no reason for American men and women to resist the pull of the Alt-Right, because the Alt-Right is the only current political philosophy that is in harmony with science, history, reason, and current events.
…
And from: http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/02/a-churchian-response-part-iii.html
…
Politics do not supersede culture or identity. This is not only backwards, but utterly absurd and flies in the face of all political history as well as the politics of every political entity on the planet. The churchian also contradicts himself when he asserts that Christians – a religious identity – necessarily take up certain political ideas. That is simply another case of identity dictating politics.
As the extraordinarily successful politician Lee Kuan Yew wisely noted, “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
Buckley purged all the relevant and talented writers right before NR and Buckley himself became irrelevant.
I wouldn’t know anything about the goings on of NR or even Goldberg if it wasn’t for Z’s writings here. Over two million bucks from some guy named Asness eh. They truly are an incestuous bunch. The position was probably created as an advance for future favors.
I always hear this stuff about “being acceptable on the DC cocktail party circuit.” I reckon it’s true, and based on that, when I’m dictator, I’m bringing back the full panoply of manners. E.g. Derb somewhere quotes Bertrand Russell quoting Gladstone: “This is a very good port they have given me, but why have they given it me in a claret glass?” Since nobody in America has manners anymore — Buckley did, give him that — we’ve replaced all the argle-bargle about which wine goes in which glass with ruthless ideological conformity.
Yeah, Severian, Buckley’s manners were really important. Imagine if he came off like another Sauce-dominated McCarthy, his cause would’ve been set back decades.
Likewise with Goldwater, who could pull no punches on substance, but also be well known for his *friendship* with JFK.
If we stand our ground on *substance*, but speak to (well-behaved) others with the civility which we *demand* from them, we’ll show that we stand for Civilization in all respects, e.g. in our rigorous analysis of issues, and in our individual comportment.
Such conduct would contrast us favorably with the Antifa etc. types, whose conduct keeps getting loonier, e.g. at the Unite the Right affair in DC the other day, where they attacked cops and a NBC reporter.
And, such conduct would earn us slack with fair-minded people, when we stand up vs. the SJWs’ bullying of Normies, of the sort assessed by Matthew Cochran, at http://theFederalist.com/2018/07/05/left-uses-civility-Weapon-drop-Fight-Back/#disqus_thread .
And, Normies should see the Documentary “Best of Enemies”, showing Buckley’s struggle to keep a grip, in the face of Vidal’s systematic effort to provoke him, by Bratting it Up in their 1968 TV debates.
And, then show Normies the SJWs’ penchant for “calculated GUILT trips” of whites, as *specified* by Briahna Gray, Senior Politics Editor at Greenwald’s “The Intercept”, in her striking essay at https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/the-politics-of-Shame .
There she scolds Lefties for their stupid habit of trying to *shame* whites, and admits that SJWs’ “gloating over ‘white tears” just stiffens white resolve.
Horse shit. We should lace up jack boots & curb stomp them until their eyeballs are dangling from their sockets & their jaws hang at an unnatural angle from their heads.
Nothing less will do.
“stomp them until their eyeballs are dangling”.
From whom, upon whom, how, and when?
Should individual Trump supporters stomp all SJWs, even the 15 year-olds who could flip to us in a heartbeat, esp. after they get earfuls, from Normie Elders revolted by the growing/ coming Game-Changing exposes, of the Hillary/ Obama/ Brennan/ WaPo/ CNN etc. plot to frame Trump?
(See Sundance at the Last Refuge, and R. McGovern, etc., at https://consortiumnews.com/ .
Sundance calls the coming storm “The Big Ugly”.)
Why wouldn’t you wait to give Trump a chance, to line up the *legal* machinery, say, after his foes lose the Nov. election?
This event is rather likely to kill, once and for all, the SJWs’ fantasy of impeachment, and to free him to fire Muller and Sessions, and declassify the smoking-gun evidence (tho he might dare release that stuff weeks before voting starts).
Such evidence could bring to the Dems an UBER-Watergate, devastating their public rep for a generation, and putting the rest of the Left hugely on their heels (save for that handful, incl. Chomsky [!!] who have called BS on this Trump-hacking fantasy).
(Already there are many thousands of sealed Federal indictments in the hopper, many more than there were in Obama’s day.)
And, even if they get to impeach him, are you really pushing for mass vigilantism, or what?
Before I consider supporting anything of the sort, things will have to get *far* worse than they are now.
I’ll trust the foxy Trump to Sting his foes, like he’s done before.
We might castigate the women for their underlying instincts- to select for the worst killers- but, in the end, they may be entirely, naturally right.
Are you saying Zeroth Tollrants is a woman? If so I’m honestly scared.
I cheer both her and (Mr.) Severian’s wicked, scathing wit.
I will bet you dollars to donuts she’s a Western gal- the kind who’s gran happily shot back at Injuns and outlaws. A true Celt.
Jack boots don’t have laces.
“The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.”
Killshot.
Who says they don’t?
VDH is the only National Review writer I still read. I think he may be their only writer who doesn’t live in the Imperial City or a leftist enclave – and the only one there who understands Trump’s appeal. When he leaves, they can just shut the place down.
Reading his latest – VDH has a good time making fun of our Ivy League idiot overlords.
VDH has a problem with Southerners for some reason. Just sayin’.
Most pundits outside the South have a problem with Southerners. In a column a few months ago, Kurt Schlichter made reference to the North gathering its forces and going South and teaching us another lesson. Of course with a surname of “Schlichter” he’s a Fake American and has to go back.
Yeah, Drake, VDH really gets it on the Ivy League crowd, and on Trump’s appeal, unlike cucks like David French, whose recent Freudian Slip, on a key part of the Jeong issue, shows us a way to present Trumpist etc. thought to Normies, as being utterly *realistic* about the state of US culture (contrasted with cucks etc., who hide from clear tho brutal realities).
At https://www.National Review.com/2018/08/sarah-jeong-twitter-controversy-anti-white-racism-exists/ , French spat out the following whopper:
“There’s NO realistic scenario, where ‘the tables are turned’, and black Americans visit on white Americans a reverse version of the worst aspects of American history.”
NO realistic scenario??? Here, friends, is a simple way to frame the diffs between us and cucks/ Lefties:
“Hey, Normie, do you *really* believe that there’s NO realistic scenario, where “the tables are turned” against whites?
If you don’t believe that, you should understand that all of the Establishment *does* (purport to) believe that, and purges from its ranks those who don’t believe such tripe.”
Assuming the Normie responds appropriately, we could tell the story of Derb being purged from NR, for expressing similar sorts of fears, in his White version of The Talk.
French is positively drooling over that visit of a ‘reverse version’, isn’t he?
Alzaelbo, even if he’s not, he’s opened the door, for us to *fairly* deride his myopia on this ‘reverse’.
And, while we’re at it, we can hit Normies with the view of Archdruid J.M. Greer, that the (‘New Left’- influenced) Elites’ hate of the white working class (e.g. for ducking the 1960s ‘Revolution’) hides behind their pushing ID politics on race etc., see http://theArchdruidReport.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-Hate-that-Dare-Not-Speak-its-name.html .
(My sense of it is, that Greer has much respect in Environmentalist circles, esp. after he called Trump’s victory, in *JAN.* 2016 !! See http://theArchdruidReport.blogspot.com/2016/01/down-ratholes-of-Future.html .)
Careful, now. French is employing a straw man argument here. He’s saying there’s no possibility that blacks will be able to impose a reverse version of the WORST aspects of American history — black slavery and black segregation enforced by terroristic methods such as public lynchings
Of course that wont happen. Blacks would need to be in the majority and own a monopoly on violence and whites would need to be overcoming centuries of conditioning that made them believe they were less than human. An all out war would erupt long before any of those goals could be realized. And of course we are not saying that at all. We are saying that certain groups want to impose a soft version of this — with public shaming and ostracism taking the place of lynchings
Well, Callmelennie, some might be saying that “certain groups want to impose a soft version of this”, but others are saying that the coming version may well be *quite* unsoft.
Once M. Johnson systematically mowed down 5 Dallas cops, *and* Obama’s speech about it subtly flipped the bird to the dead cops’ families, different scenarios got much more realistic.
Why shouldn’t we fear, that cops could become so intimidated, that such blacks can look forward to a day, when they’ll see no real pushback for their emulation of Johnson’s conduct, at not only cops, but *all* whites?
And, didn’t the NYT make that day seem closer, when they stuck by Jeong’s celebration of the idea of white extinction?
How much more evidence must a D. French see, before he’ll concede that there is a realistic scenario, where an unsoft version could emerge?
The worst of Obama’s speech was, where he touted the Sterling case as a legit beef vs. cops.
Normies should read a lefty cop on this, at http://www.CopintheHood.com/2016/07/Obamas-Dallas-memorial-speech.html
Those groups that are saying that the coming version may be “unsoft” – have their heads up their collective asses. They have no real way to carry thru with those threats – therefore they’re engaging in something that isn’t much more than a revenge porn fantasy cosplay exercise.
Blacks are still a distinct minority in this country. And on a per capita basis: they own FAR less guns. They’re also congregated to a large degree in the cities. Gunning down another gangsta doesn’t make you a guerilla fighter.
At least some of them are smart enough to know that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VqG_4ADFfQ
“when the crackers come down in the hood and say load up in the truck – yo ass is gonna load up in the truck”
And despite the massive amounts of cuckery coming out of white people on this subject (white women in particular) – I still think if the blacks decide to touch off some sort of race war – then white (especially women) – are going to wise their asses up right quick.
One of my close friends has three daughters. The middle daughter has always been a handful. During high school – she decided to bring the only black kid in her class as her date to the prom. This is VERY attractive blonde haired girl. That was high school – high school was all fun and games and screwing with your parents because you’re the middle child.
Then she went to college. The college she went to was in a city with a high minority population – so the college she was in also had a high “minority” population. Apparently that first semester – black kids were harassing the hell out of her. From the way I catch the story she had a really bad time there. She left after the 1st semester. I don’t know what prompted that, could have been just the black kids responding to 8 years of Obama in power and them growing up thinking they own the world – or it could have been they found out she had dated a black guy before so they figured it was open season (this was my wife’s observation).
Either way – that was that – she left – and won’t be going back. She’s also apparently none too fond of black people now if I read between the lines on what my friend is telling me. At least she learned at a young age.
What’s the point here? The point here is that given an inch I am perfectly confident that any sort of black revolution will take a couple of miles right out of the gate – and turn a sizeable part of the population of whites that might be defending them now – against them with a vengeance. All that will be left will the absolute worst of the virtue signalling whites – which will be no great loss anyway. It will be easy to draw the battle lines then. With enough hard-core chimping out there might even be enough political capital to roll back all sorts of pro-black set asides like affirmative action and stuff like that.
Either way – I am not really that afraid of some sort of black-led chimp out insurrection. I think they’d be digging their own graves on that one.
Carlesdad, with all due respect, I suspect that they may well have real ways to *significantly* carry thru with those threats, at least for a while.
Just for starters, one well-placed Micah Johnson can do major damage before he’s taken out, ESP. in a JIT-delivery economy characterized, in at least some parts, far more by “efficiency”, than by resiliency.
One, or 19, well-placed black Osamas can do huge damage, before he/ they are taken out.
If 19 Osamas were willing to DIE to kill thousands of us, there may well be 190 black Osamas willing to die to kill millions of us.
When such a famous rag as the NYT covers for Jeong’s “extinction” rhetoric, we’d be fools not to give more thought, to how her black pals might be able to at least *partly* make her dream come true..
A charge that our heads are up our “collective asses” is really quite unfair, and ill-considered.
“Why shouldn’t we fear, that cops could become so intimidated, that such blacks can look forward to a day, when they’ll see no real pushback for their emulation of Johnson’s conduct, at not only cops, but *all* whites?”
Because that would be an irrational fear.
Irrational?!!
More so than blacks’ fear of cops, which is pushed by the likes of T. Coates, who is in turn deified by the MSM?
With French, the reason is obvious isn’t it? He is a no-holds-barred libertarian who believes that race absolutely doesn’t matter, even to the point of adopting a black child.
When looking at blacks raised by whites, how did Barack Obama or Colin Kaepernick turn out? Their black parents ditched them, yet they identified all the more strongly with them.
I think the Frenches, kindhearted as they are, are in for a rude awakening.
“The National Review crowd should be writing their columns while wearing leisure suits and listening to disco.”
Now that almost approaches the realm of poetry. Juvenal would have approved.
They’re still hoping to go to the Playboy Club.
In my 20s I absorbed NR cover to cover. Sans internet it was the only game in town, and reading it WAS counter-cultural. When I was a WH staffer (of the military variety) during the Clinton years, I did my part my leaving old copies of NR in the AF1 seats of liberal staffers. I even remember seeing Sandy Berger reading one, not that it did him any good, useless & bumbling oxygen-thief that he was. Ultimately I have to credit WFB for making good arguments (rhetoric); and it was NR that introduced me to the legacy of Whittaker Chamers (as you mentioned, a giant among men.)
The key with reading any commentary is to chew the meat & spit out the bones. In its heyday NR was red meat. Today it’s like eating a blue crab … have to pick around to find any meat, and the morsels are minuscule. And then there are guys like Goldberg that make you want to vomit. In the internet age NR is obsolete, primarily because it’s packed with whiny non-conservatism. Conservatism, to me, is when one shuns ideology, takes a steely-eyed view of the world and embraces reality – the way things are as opposed to the way thing you want them to be. That was WFB in the early days of his career. He was pompous & loved the accolades to be sure, but weighed in the balance & in the context of his times, I think he did king’s work. His successors – concave chests, all of them. Z-man’s assessment of Goldberg applies to the entire swath of NR writers.
> I even remember seeing Sandy Berger reading one,
> not that it did him any good, useless & bumbling
> oxygen-thief that he was.
Not to mention, document-thief…
I didn’t dislike Buckley but I always thought of him as a pretentious windbag. My father graduated from Yale magna cum laude with an Economics degree and did NOT talk with an affected accent like somebody had shoved a broom-handle up his ass.
I liked Reagan, liked Pete DuPont, Milton Friedman, and Barry Goldwater. I was suspicious of Bush and was proven right.
Buckley’s brother nor his sister had an accent. Funny huh?
Buckley was the classic arriviste. I always had the impression that he very badly wanted to be a White Shoe WASP.
Yes, as an actual Winthrop WASP, that part was always funny. But his willingness to correctly address Gore Vidal as a “queer” and threatening to kick his ass on a national broadcast will always endear him to me.
Wasn’t english Buckley’s third language? Maybe he acguired the accent.
A mid-Atlantic accent is always deliberately acquired, it’s not a dialect that’s native to any region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent
I mean, the guy had style. I got a kick out of the accent. He pulled off the whole image exceedingly well. You gotta let an eccentric be an eccentric. Especially when his cool saved conservatism from its fuddy duddy image.
I’m also not down with calling him a windbag. It’s simply a misuse of the term. Windbag is reserved for hollow bullshitters. There’s no doubt Buckley was highly intelligent and cared to speak with meaning.
Good column but I can sum it up in few words
It’s all vanity without virtue
“Pretty much the only thing they really cared about was being seen as respectable.”
What is respect? Dictionary says it means a high or special regard, or to esteem. That’s a little high-brow for me. I’d like a more practical definition on the order of “Don’t fuck with that guy/group.” Respect should have a component of wariness to it. Getting invited to the right parties in NYC or the Beltway isn’t a sign of respect, its just what the Left is willing to pay those of the Right who don’t stand in their way. The Left knows mainstream conservatism is spineless and the GOPe are just gutless, sniveling toadies; but they’re still somewhat useful idiots until the actual gulags are set up.
Buckley got me to Derb, and Derb took me over. So I can’t whack WFB too hard.
But NRO’s “gatekeeping” is a little silly in the internet age. It’s like a city in ruins, Vandals and Goths running around smashing everything, and they’re still protecting their lonely gate, even though the wall that the gate used to be in has already been smashed to pieces.
NRO is really just a trophy of the left now, a former formidable enemy which is now just one of the harem girls.
“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”
The Left loves it some National Review. Everything they publish is the shriek of a loser. It’s sweet music to the leftist ear, and if NR were ever faced with actual extinction, I bet Soros would cut a check just to keep the music going.
Since my g-g-grandad worked for Uncle Billy I’ve always preferred his take… “My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
“I can’t whack WFB too hard.”
Yes, yes you CAN! And probably should. The fact that YOU started out way behind (as did I, no slur) does not mean that without Buckley providing you with new/foreign info, you’d have stayed there! You might, indeed, have come farther sooner, without the “play nice” admonitions that have so mired the “conservatives,” who can’t even conserve women’s bathrooms!
I stuck wth NR for too long. I noticed the rot when I no longer found Sailer or VDare’s founder in the magazine. And when WFB published his Anti-Semitism issue, I was “Huh? What drug is he on?” (Turns out, mega-doses of Adderal & amphetimenes.) And then WFB chose the pantywaist as his successor.
But the Derb Defenestration was the last straw. Never looked back at NR after that. They have been dead to me ever since.
Phenomenal and succinct this visualization you just gave here. So much so, that is *really* deserves its own meme or political cartoon. A nice simple piece of art showing Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol, and David French standing on a gated wall with tin pot helmets on in the scene you described.
“Respectable conservatives” always talk of finding the common middle ground as a way of seeming intelligent that they can see both sides of an argument.
However there are far too many issues where there is no middle ground to take, like on illegal immigration, crime etc
As many have said basically the “conservatives” have just conceded to parts of the leftists plans for the last 50 years.
Their goal is not to preserve any sense of conservative values whatsoever. The whole point of National Review is to maintain the post-WWII NATO dominated order, this matters even more than cutting taxes on the rich. Buckley was a CIA guy, his project was to ensure that the Right does not return to the traditional foreign policy of the US, as laid down in Washington’s Farewell Address.
Buckley was Buckley. There was always that part of him that followed the First Rule of Yalies (and now vegans)—Thou shall inform the listener that you went to Yale within the first five minutes of any conversation. I’m inclined to be a little easier on old Bill. Just old enough (a bit more than Z) to remember when Buckley was one of very few choices on menu. Still recall picking up a copy of “The Jewelers Eye” and thinking “who is this guy?” So for me he was the “ferryman”. By the time Reagan came along, I was already on the other side and ready to go.
Ha! By the time Reagan came along, I had already read Wilmot Robertson’s “The Dispossessed Majority” and had subscribed to “Instauration” magazine. I was waiting on the other side locked and loaded.
“Who?”, said Wisner’s Wurlitzer and Operation Mockingbird, as they did business with Martin Luther King, Elijah Muhammid, Whitey Bulger- and William Buckley.
The first of those two posts by Asness Chair has the following line: “Meanwhile, my National Review colleague David French, a prominent First Amendment lawyer ….”
Obama was a “constitutional scholar.” Credential inflation is a late phase feature.
Is that credential inflation or just more leftist horseshit?
Seems like another commie-like butchery of the language to call Obama a “scholar” in anything. The Frankfurt School made had no compunction about saying that one of the ways you denigrate a people – is to denigrate their language. A man is a woman and a woman is a man. Obama is a scholar. Blacks are the same as whites. The United States is an “idea”, and so on and so forth…….Pretty much the same thing as far as being words that begin to have no meaning at all once they just get applied at random – AND (this is the important part) : people start to believe it.
Don’t forget ‘Iraq War’ veteran David French. That always gets wheeled out at some point, as if he spent his tour kicking down doors in Fallujah. In fact, he was in the JAG Corps. The closest he came to an explosive device was a shaken can of coke.
Sorry, but Buckley always seemed like a jerk to me.
Yeah, he was. Even long after I’d become disenchanted with the left, the National Review crowd still left a bad taste in my mouth.
Still, he wasn’t entirely wrong to do what he did, either. The left had the zeitgeist at their back, and had become the arbiters of public morality. Largely, they still are.
Perhaps there was another way forward for the right, but at this point that’s just Monday morning quarterbacking. As they say, politics is the art of the possible. Yeah, Buckley was a cuck, but let’s remember how badly NR was burned for supporting segregation. Being right has never dissuaded an angry mob. In retrospect, it’s surprising that Buckley was able to recover from that at all. It remains to be seen if Richard Spencer will be so lucky.
Buckley was a lot worse than a mere cuck. He was a demon infested winged monkey servant of the Satan worshipping Globalists. His main job was to discredit and marginalize the John Birch Society and anyone else who tried to expose the treason going on at the highest levels of the US government. It’s true that the JBS was naïve in thinking that it was a “communist” conspiracy. They had no idea how deep the rabbit hole went, and I think none of us STILL have any idea just how evil and wicked and bloodthirsty and perverted the Globalists are.
Ramzpaul had a joke awhile back, something about how when the left starts trying to ram through trans-marriage, Goldberg will speak up against this change, saying it will violate the sanctity of gay marriage. There are some guys on the mainstream right (not Goldberg) who I believe are semaphoring (in a very guarded way) their openness to the idea that maybe the people to their right aren’t wrong about everything. If someone writes an article saying, “The alt right’s fear of white minority status and genocide, based on farm murders in Zimbabwe and South Africa, is ridiculous and unfounded,” you’d have to be a pretty dim bulb not to be able to see “WHITE MINORITY” and “GENOCIDE” in big letters, and everything else in small font.
When I was a young man I worked with a middle-aged Jewish guy named Henry. He was one of those Mel Brooks sort of guys that everyone liked. One day at lunch I asked him about our boss going on the wagon. He was a classic Irish drinker, doing a classic Irish thing by giving up booze in his middle years. I figured Henry would have some funny quips. He said “When Jews get old we become more Jewish. When the Irish get old, they stop being Irish.”
Goldberg is a couple of paces behind David Goldman on the journey to becoming defender of the faith. The difference is Goldman gets it and Goldberg does not.
Rubber cucky takes a bath?