Thread to keep tabs on noxious right-wing thinkers and writers (Claremonts, NatCons, AmCons,

The ascendant voices of the illiberal right, such as they are. Felt like it needed to split apart from the NRO thread, since NRO these days isn't mostly as far right as these folks.

Mostly started the thread to post this, though. Shockingly it appears Rod Dreher's dad may have been an actual Klansman.

In 1965, a disgruntled Ku Klux Klan leader gave the FBI the names of most of the Exalted Cyclopses (ECs) in Louisiana. According to the list, the Exalted Cyclops in St. Francisville was one "Ray Drear (ph)" [phonetic]. pic.twitter.com/IN0EYZTYPR

— Tim Barker (@_TimBarker) December 26, 2022

Much as I hesitate to attribute the sins of the father, for a lot of these guys the influence of their fathers appears to be pretty important--consider the Kochs, for example, and the influence of their dad, who co-founded the John Birch Society. It strikes me that the sons have figured out how better to package their essentially reactionary projects.

*attribute the sins of the father to the son

Yeah, Dreher's own oft-expressed views are very much of the "was your dad in the Klan" variety.

We all turn into our dads at some point

I'm kind of fascinated by Compact Magazine, Sohrab Ahmari's white/Christian nationalist/supremacist project, which on the surface takes a more intellectual and nuanced approach than the modern National Review or the American Conservative but all at the service of terrible ideology. I've read a few Compact pieces that start out seeming like interesting explorations of one thing or another but always lead back to the same bad ends. I'm mostly curious who the audience even is for it.

We all turn into our dads at some point

I've always felt very fortunate that I have much more in common with my mom than I do with my dad.

I'm mostly curious who the audience even is for it.

Ted Cruz?

Does he read? I mean I guess it's mostly Stephen Miller types, the ones who aim to be the brains behind the next Trump or whatever.

I wonder whether Miller quite fits in with that crowd, since he was raised and (as far as I know) remains a Jew.

We all turn into our dads at some point

Mind your manners.

So Dreher responds here — at GREAT length — to the news about his dad being in the Klan. He spends zero time arguing it's not true, and a whole lot of time tying himself in knots trying to see things from all sides. He reaches no useful conclusions, I don't recommend devoting much time to it.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/a-darkness-revealed/

He reaches no useful conclusions, I don't recommend devoting much time to it.

Of course he doesn't — he's Rod Dreher. I do recommend reading till you get to this paragraph, though (emphasis in original):

Again, my parents didn't teach my sister and me white supremacy, and I would be very surprised to learn that any white kid's parents did. (The local Klan wound down in the late 1960s, I learned at some point, under FBI pressure.) But they didn't have to, because the ambient culture, while post-segregationist, meant that one absorbed these values unconsciously. Plus, black people and white people really were very different in terms of culture. What a shock it was to me to go to a rare evening assembly at school, when I was 13 and was then moved to the same building as high schoolers, and to see girls only a year or two older than me, whom I would see daily in the hallways at school, carrying their babies while their mothers doted on them. This was how local black culture was. It was also very, very strange to me, as a kid, to learn from black classmates in elementary schools that they had no fathers in the home. I eventually began to wonder to what extent the white taboo against "race mixing" was merely out of pure race hatred, and to what extent it was a form of protection against the sexual code that was destroying the black family.

What a piece of shit he is. Hungary can have him.

Yeah that's his favorite — it's not about race, it's about culture. So I can't be racist if I'm critiquing culture, do you see.

That is one of the go-to moves of this generation's racists (see "packaging their reactionary projects," above).

It's also horseshit, of course.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/20/us/dei-woke-claremont-institute.html

Yet even as they or their allies publicly advocated more academic freedom, some of those involved privately expressed their hope of purging liberal ideas, professors and programming wherever they could. They debated how carefully or quickly to reveal some of their true views — the belief that “a healthy society requires patriarchy,” for example, and their broader opposition to anti-discrimination laws — in essays and articles written for public consumption.

In candid private conversations, some wrote favorably of laws criminalizing homosexuality, mocked the appearance of a female college student as overly masculine and criticized Peter Thiel, the prominent gay conservative donor, over his sex life. In email exchanges with the Claremont organizers, the writer Heather Mac Donald derided working mothers who employed people from “the low IQ 3rd world” to care for their children and lamented that some Republicans still celebrated the idea of racially diverse political appointments.

(I see Alfred already posted this in the US politics thread, but it took me 10 minutes to find this one bc I was searching for "Claremont" singular.)

As I was taking my evening power walk in the hood here (upper east side) and seeing all the nannies of color walking school children back to their apartments, it struck me again the bizarreness of females deciding that their comparative advantage is in being an associate in a law firm, say, and thus that they should outsource the once in a lifetime unduplicable unrepeatable experience of raising a unique child to some one else, especially someone from the low IQ 3rd world, while they do the drone work of making partner. The child is evolving so quickly, absorbing so many influences, and yet they would rather absent themselves from its life to show that they are as good as males. such a distribution of labor is allegedly pareto optimal. Another curse of feminism.

(I see Alfred already posted this in the US politics thread, but it took me 10 minutes to find this one bc I was searching for "Claremont" singular.)

Just be glad I didn't use "Claremonsters," which is the best name for them.

The podcast “Know Your Enemy” seems kinda germane to this thread

Yeah, I'm a fan. Take a shot every time they say "West Coast Straussians."

Love KYE. It's helped clarify for me the connections between various movements and camps — and of course, the core repeated insight that the "intellectual right" is a tiny group fueled by seemingly endless amounts of cash that has an outsize impact.

especially someone from the low IQ 3rd world

immediately apparent this person has zero experience of the third world or the people who live there. this is just blind pig-ignorance.

Given the anti-Thiel reveal, I wonder how difficult it would be to stoke in-fighting to the point of everyone exhausting their entire treasuries?