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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15. Similiarly, Buckley & National Review worked hard to keep the John Birch Society (although not its leader Robert Welch) in the conservative coalition until 1965, when the JBS came out against (sensibly!) the Vietnam war.
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16. Jospeh Sobran was doing edgelord stuff for a longtime (in 1979 in National Review he complained about textbooks devoting time to feminists & Hispanics, or "chicks and spics" as he called them). But only became a problem for NR when he opposed the first Iraq war.
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17. I think the true history is this: there was a big purge of the proto-alt-right (the paleo cons) in 1990s spurred on by Iraq war & Wall Street immigration consensus. When politics changed (2nd Iraq war went bad, anti-immigration on right increased) alt-right resurfaced.
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Replying to @HeerJeet
I also think crime decline/welfare reform in that era reduced salience of race in conservative (and national) debates, and encouraged hope (palpable under W.) of leaving Southern Strategy era behind.
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Yes, George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism was genuine effort to move beyond race on the right. With collapse of Bushism, we're back to 1960s/1970s backlash politics.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @DouthatNYT
Because Bushism was the last gap of naive boomerism
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