The New York Times has a distinctly weird article, written by a British graduate student, smearing traditional stay-at-home mothers with the taint of “white supremacy.” The writer is able to find actual examples of neo-Nazi racialism in the online “tradwives” community, but it is always possible to find examples of anything on the Internet, e.g., Catholic schoolgirls who grow up to be blue-haired “nonbinary queers.”

Why this article? Why now? The author of the NY Times piece, Annie Kelly, published an article last year exploiting fears of the “alt-right”:

Alt-right extremism is a consequence of mainstream neo-conservative discourse on liberalism, manhood and national security post-9/11. Its success is measured by its ability to project an updated rhetoric of anti-left antagonism into the window of acceptable political discourse.

After the 2016 presidential election, as the US media scrambled for ways to understand the sources of Trump’s support, there was a dramatic proliferation on news sites of profiles of figures from the alt-right such as Milo Yiannopolous and Richard Spencer – many of them alarmingly deferential in tone. Almost immediately, however, there was an understandable backlash from liberal commentators and activists, urging journalists to stop using the euphemistic ‘alt-right’ moniker and to instead refer to the loosely defined digital subculture to which the label was attached as ‘neo-Nazi’.

So, we may conclude, it is the election of Trump that inspired this paranoid witch-hunt for “white supremacy” among mommy bloggers.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.

The problem is not just that liberals are smearing their opponents as Nazis; that’s been going on for decades. The larger problem is that, as the “progressive” Left becomes more extreme and less tolerant of opposition, it provides opportunities for actual neo-Nazis. After all, if mainstream conservatives are being smeared as racists, if Christians are being sued for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings, if James Damore can be fired for criticizing Google’s “diversity” policies — in sum, if any expression of opposition to the Left is punished and silenced — why not just say, “F–k it” and go full-on Nazi? This is not a hypothetical danger, because I’ve personally witnessed intelligent people go down that road.

The first time I met Richard Spencer in 2007, we were both panelists at a forum discussing the Duke lacrosse rape hoax. Spencer was at that time a graduate student at Duke, and spoke about the climate on campus, whereas I was there to address the biased media coverage of the case. Spencer did not strike me as an “extremist” of any kind, although he was quite serious in his dismay at the attitudes exhibited by Duke faculty and students and, like a lot of other thoughtful young conservatives at the time, he was disgusted by the Bush administration’s failures.

Was it inevitable that Spencer would become a “Fourteen Words” type? I don’t know, but I would hope that his example might alert mainstream conservatives to a real danger in the 21st century.

If the Republican Party (and mainstream conservatives in other countries) cannot make effective arguments and enact effective policies to address the kind of social problems that give rise to neo-Nazism, many young people may give up on traditional politics and drift off into that shadowy fringe where voices whisper: “Blame the Jews!”

Say what you will about Richard Spencer, he is not stupid.

Duke graduate student Richard Bertrand Spencer has penned perhaps the single most perceptive commentary on the Group of 88’s intellectual origins. Spencer, a Ph.D. candidate in European intellectual history, explores “the ‘foundational myths’ that underlie the Group’s response and give meaning to its claims,” and in the process helps explain why the lacrosse case “has left serious people with a sense that something has gone terribly wrong with Duke’s academic culture.”

That was Professor K.C. Johnson writing in March 2007. If Spencer was capable of writing “the single most perceptive commentary” on the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, what should we deduce about his drift into disreputable extremism? Doesn’t this reflect badly on mainstream conservatives of the GOP, who have failed to do anything to remedy the increasingly intolerant hegemony of the Left in academia? If the Republican Party is willing to remain silent while our nation’s universities are surrendered to what Professor Johnson called “Intellectual Thuggery,” isn’t it likely that many more thoughtful young people will follow Richard Spencer’s lead, abandoning mainstream politics and drifting into the shadowy fringe?

We have reached the crisis years of the Trump era because soi-disant “mainstream” Republicans considered it disreputable to involve themselves with the kind of Culture War issues raised by the Duke lacrosse case. Why did working-class white voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan respond to Trump’s appeal? Isn’t it in large part because Trump was willing to call out the “fake news” media that has ignored or misreported the problems affecting the lives of those people? Isn’t it obvious that the establishment media has become part of the same degenerate intelligentsia as the faculty of Duke University? And don’t you think that, if conservatives fail to take this seriously, their failure will cause more and more people to heed those whispers from the fringe?

“Blame the Jews!”

In all seriousness, this is beginning to frighten me. Not long ago, I clicked onto a YouTube livestream hosted by a blogger I’ve been following since the 2014 #GamerGate controversy, and was disturbed to hear the participants mention “the JQ” — shorthand for “the Jewish question.”

Were they serious about this? Was this just “bad boy” posturing? Were they merely signifying their contempt for political correctness? I’m not sure, because I stopped listening to that livestream and didn’t bother to investigate the participants. What does it mean, however, when young men think it’s harmless to play games with anti-Semitism?

What’s perhaps most remarkable about this is that Jewish conservatives have been among those who have fought hardest and longest to address the very issues that concern the alt-right. If “tradwives” are concerned about demographic trends that threaten “the existence of our people,” they might be surprised to discover, for example, that the first notable author to examine these issues was Ben Watternberg, in his 1987 book The Birth Dearth: What Happens When People in Free Countries Don’t Have Enough Babies? Wattenberg, who is perhaps the textbook definition of a “neoconservative” (i.e., a former Scoop Jackson Democrat), followed up that landmark book in 2004 with Fewer: How the New Demography of Depopulation Will Shape Our Future. Even if you go drifting towards “Fourteen Words” extremism, you see, there are Jews who share your concerns, and this is true in every aspect of the Culture War. Some of the most vocal and most persuasive early critics of modern feminism, for example, were Midge Decter (The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation, 1972) and Steven Goldberg (The Inevitability of Patriarchy, 1973).

The German socialist August Bebel once said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, but it’s also the conservatism of fools.

So here comes the New York Times with “Motherhood is Hitler” — using a handful of Internet extremists to smear all defenders of the traditional family as Nazis — but what else are we to expect? This should be interpreted as evidence of desperation and despair on the Left.

The defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the subsequent policy successes of the Trump administration, have caused a panic in the degenerate intelligentsia. Leftists in academia and the media have taken off the mask, revealing themselves as totalitarians, who do not recognize the legitimacy of any opposition to the “progressive” agenda.

What the Left would like to do is to delegitimize every possible source of opposition to their cultural hegemony. One way to do this, of course, is to attach a stigma of Nazism or “white supremacy” to anyone who rejects what Thomas Sowell has called The Vision of the Anointed. Conservatives must resist this effort, by refusing to play by the rules that the Left wants to impose on political discourse. If the Left is able to dictate the rules, they guarantee that they will win the game. They know that there actually are neo-Nazis over there in the shadows, but we know this, too. Knowing that the Left will always use this kind of guilt-by-association smear against us, conservatives should prepare in advance to deal with these attacks. Don’t let yourself get caught in a situation where you panic, become defensive, and discredit yourself with absurd apologies.

It’s 2018. Everybody is now “literally Hitler.” And if everybody is Hitler, then nobody is Hitler. Therefore, relax. You haven’t lost your mind. The world has gone crazy, and sanity is now a hate crime.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! A good time as any to remind you that the Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!







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