6. After World War II, as the coalescing right tried to work out an effective alliance, leaders like William F. Buckley faced a problem: intellectual wing of the right had a small audience, while the strongest activist energy came from anti-black racists (esp. in South).
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7. To put it another way, post-war right was an alliance of the snobs & the slobs. The concerns of the snobs (Voegelin's critique of gnosticism, Strauss on Hobbes, Weaver on nominalism) had little traction among the slobs organizing white citizens committees.
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8. We see this in the early National Review, where Buckley tries to maintain a difficult balancing act of having enough intellectual content to be respectable (reviews by the young Joan Didion) & enough red meat (coded in language of states rights) to win the far right.
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9. Revilo Oliver, an early, prolific National Review writer, was a palindromious racist who (after breaking with Buckley) became a leading white nationalist thinker. George Lincoln Rockwell, later founder of American Nazi Party, started off selling NR subscriptions.
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10. Aside from Oliver & Rockwell, virtually all the big thinkers of the alt-right were at one time Buckley cronies or NR writers/editors: Rothbard (who helped Buckley with Up From Liberalism), Brimelow, Sobran, Buchanan, Francis. The calls are coming from inside the house.
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11. It's often said on Buckley's behalf that he purged the right of anti-semites & overt racists. That's true up to a point. But let's flip it around; what does it say about Buckley for 50 years, from Oliver to Sobran & beyond, he had to keep firing the bigots he had hired?
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12. To paraphrase The Onion, Buckley needed to ask himself, "why do these Nazis keep working for my magazine?" https://www.theonion.com/why-do-all-these-homosexuals-keep-sucking-my-cock-1819584210 …
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13. The other aspect of the Buckley legend is that even though the people he purged from the right were usually anti-semites and racists, he didn't always purge them for anti-semitism or racism but for other reasons.
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14. Murray Rothbard was purged by Buckley not for consorting with David Duke & the vile stuff in the Rothbard/Rockwell newsletter but in the early 1960s for Rothbard's quite sensible opposition to Cold War militarism.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Rothbard and David Duke? Seriously? Rothbard was Jewish
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Read the Rothbard/Rockwell Report. They saw Duke as a promising development. By the way, aren't you dead?
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Replying to @HeerJeet
Lol. I’ll have read that. I always thought Rothbard was a scumbag (Rand too), but for the reasons given by WFB and Whittaker Chambers
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Replying to @KWittfogel @HeerJeet
Rothbard hated Israel so I can believe it
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End of conversation
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