Slate: National Review Helped Build The Alt-Right

Slate is blaming National Review for laying the foundations of the Alt-Right:

“Early in November, just a few days before the election, a gathering of white nationalists, heterodox academics, libertarians, and other misfits of the right convened in Baltimore. The H.L. Mencken Club was meeting for its ninth annual conference—a two-day affair featuring lectures, debates, and conversations about the future of American conservatism. November’s conference came amid surging interest in the alt-right, which owes its very name to the club. In 2008, a speech from the inaugural conference by its president, Paul Gottfried, was republished under the title “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right” in Richard Spencer’s Taki’s Magazine, the earliest prominent usage of the phrase. At November’s conference, Gottfried echoed that 2008 call for the marshaling of an “independent” and “authentic” right. …

That right has been marshaled. The alt-right has become a political and cultural phenomenon without recent precedent—the rise of Donald Trump has brought with it newly empowered figures promoting fashionably packaged racism and anti-immigrant animus. As the alt-right has grown, though, mainstream conservatives have loudly shot down suggestions that its rise has anything to do with them. “They are anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists, they hate the Constitution, they hate free markets, they hate pluralism, they despise everything we believe in,” American Conservative Union executive director Dan Schneider told Conservative Political Action Conference attendees last month. “They are not an extension of conservatism. …”

If memory serves, the Alt-Right emerged in the 2000s and defined itself against George W. Bush and “mainstream conservatism.” National Review was our foil at the time. In our eyes, it represented everything we were not: pro-immigration, pro-war, pro-free trade, politically correct, indifferent to White interests and submissive to the mainstream media.

It’s true that National Review and “mainstream conservatism” has become less interesting over time. I suppose you could argue that it laid the foundation of the Alt-Right by purging anyone who was remotely interesting on the Right (Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, Peter Brimelow, Joe Sobran, Revilo Oliver, John Derbyshire, etc.) and replacing them with mediocrities like Jonah Goldberg. This was done to appease powerful donors and business interests and to stay in the good graces of the mainstream media which previously had the power to control status and determine respectability.

Shouldn’t National Review get credit for censoring itself? After all, this is what the Left wanted them to do. They wanted National Review to be their loyal opposition and play by their rules. The Standard was that National Review had to purge Peter Brimelow and Pat Buchanan, but The Atlantic could continue to publish Ta-Nehisi Coates and Slate could continue to publish Jamelle Bouie.

In the end, the internet, social media and the smartphone put an end to the ability of mainstream conservatives to police rightwing discourse. Now, anyone on the Right who wants to influence public opinion can do so by sending a tweet, uploading a YouTube video or by publishing articles on their own websites. They have all the tools at their disposal to build platforms like Breitbart and Infowars which have surpassed National Review in size and influence.

David French is right that the Left has given us “the bricks and mortar” to build the Alt-Right. Why should we play by the old rules? Those rules were imposed on our predecessors in a radically different information environment when the “mainstream media” was trusted and perceived as legitimate.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

41 Comments

  1. I hope these idiots keep thinking nonsense like Buckley built the Alt Right despite his effete East Coast ass banning Buchanan, Sobran, and Coulter from his magazine. Keep believing this hokum. The Alt Right is not an organic movement by any stretch.

  2. The stone that has been rejected has become the corner stone.

    When you purge every shipment of bricks, you end up building a straw shack, until the big bad wolf blows it down.

    “Wait – we purged you; you aren’t supposed to be relevant! Where’s Jeb!”.

    The alt-right ignores the cucks and fights. But considering how tiny the cuck-lective is, and that they aren’t on the battlefield, the only wonder is that someone still finds one.

    They will have to appeal to the endangered species act.

  3. Let’s not lump William F Buckley Jr into the broader Jewish take over of not just the National Review, but the world (excepting a few valiant nations).

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/buckley-bush-not-a-true-conservative/

    In this CBS interview Buckley remarks that Bush II did not govern according to conservative principles.

    “Is Bill Buckley ‘George Bush’s Walter Cronkite’?”

    https://www.lewrockwell.com/2006/03/michael-tennant/george-bushs-walter-cronkite/

    I recall Buckley after Bush II’s Inaugural Address quipping “what did he say?!” in terms of Bush’s Wilsonian foreign policy.

    Buckley in the 2000s did concur with the alt right that an alternative was needed to what the Conservative Movement had become; but he would have probably eschewed the Nietzschean “God is Dead”, “create the super man”, and “trans-valuation of all values” that the alt right pushes for something along these lines:

    1) Trump now, and when he falters, white nationalism.

    2) The vanguard of the right has the solemn responsibility to be Trump’s “brain” and not self-lobotomize with bizarre and insane rhetoric and conduct

    • Buckley sold out by 1958. In fact he was a Judas goat from the beginning most likely. He was unethical–downright questionable–with fellow people right when he was planning National Review. Torpedoed another ally magazine to steal their subscribers. Oliver discusses that and more in his “America’s Decline: The Education of a Conservative.” That is a must read book. A lot of very candid remark’s by Oliver in addition to several interesting movement and people histories, and a good helping of his usual top notch scholarly essays. He talks about Buckley, Welch and several bizarre conservative incidents, censorship, and scandals.

      • Revilo P. Oliver, Willis Carto, William Luther Pierce, Commander Rockwell, Gore Vidal…..all great men. And they all disliked Bill Buckley Jr. I suspect Buckley was little more than a…a…poseur. There, I said it and I’m glad I did. Thanks for the reminder to read that book by Dr.Oliver.

        • Gore Vidal was a fag, and a degenerate, and a lefty in a lot of ways, but… yeah, he still had some kind of feeling for the historic American nation. Good historical novels, and I always kind of liked that “Once again, words fail (((Norman Mailer)))” anecdote.

          And yeah, Buckley was controlled opposition from the start; well before the obvious neocohen takeover.

  4. It could be argued that the alt-right was a reaction against the cuckservative homos at NRO, like George “Pantywaist” Will.

  5. The left is attacking the fake right for not doing a good enough job of keeping us controlled, and, given that that is actually the only real purpose of the fake right to begin with, they are being put on notice that unless they do a better job their services may no longer be needed.

  6. Slate is written by lunatics for lunatics to amass clicks from the OCD types of the Left who without a constant barrage of propaganda that they are “winning” have meltdowns.

    The cuck right cannot even legitimize the lunatic left anymore, the left is all trigglypuffs and milk is a white sooooooopremasis plot believers all the way down. How can even a chinless screwball like French legitimize that?

      • Well we can troll the Respectables into denouncing “White Genocide” turn them from respectables to usefuls.

        Matter of fact would it not be epic to have Maddow have French on the set with his ball gag removed while she badgers him to denounce white genocide all the while he uptalks his hatred of the alt-right and their white sooooooopremicis beliefs.

        Pepe drinks milk

    • French? David French? Isn’t that the guy we bullycided on Twitter, the NRO comments, etc. when he briefly accepted the offer to be Bill Kristol’s shabbos goy candidate?

  7. Not even the libtards, progs, liberals, or SJW believe in half the crap they spew. They spew to troll you into a rage or much worse a sperg like lengthy essay which does little more than legitimize the spew of the libtard.

  8. Buckley may have been the real deal before he went on TV. He had to compromise his principles (assuming he had any) in order to get on the airwaves. It was all downhill after that.

    • John Birch Society was a flop from start to finish It never drew the masses just the upper class with fanzy talk; average person on the street looked elsewhere for info such as funny papers appeal to emotion.

      • According to the late Eustace Mullins JBS was started with Rockefeller money. The latter bought Welch’s candy company for ten times what it was worth. IMO, JBS was another level of controlled opposition, basically appealing to the most patriotic workers and volunteers, getting them to harmlessly run around a cull de sac.

  9. Slate, Huffington Post, Salon, CNN, MSNBC – THEY all helped build the alt right. I never read National Review in my life. I read writers who formerly worked for National Review, though. Alt right is a reaction to having false pieties shoved down our throats at every turn.

  10. Damn. I was expecting them to bitch about NRO not closing the comment section sooner. Was half hoping to see some screengrabs of our glorious trolling.

  11. Funny reading the same warped psychos babble on ad infinitum in their little chat rooms pretending they’re powerful. Thanks for the laughs!

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