-By Warner Todd Huston
This week redoubtable conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg noted that the conservative movement must “John Birch” the Alt-Right, meaning we need to destroy them and kick them out of the center right tent. But Jonah is being ridiculous. In reality we need to go back to ignoring this group of loudmouthed misfits because they are insignificant.
In his August 31 article, Goldberg waxed poetic over how wonderful Hillary Clinton has been for defending conservatives against the racists, hatemongers, and nutballs of the “Alt-Right.”
Hillary recently went on a tirade against this mysterious Alt-Right, denouncing them as racists, and slamming GOP nominee Donald Trump for playing the Alt-Right’s racist, white supremacist game. Goldberg apparently thought her speech and focus was wonderful and suggested that instead of Hillary shouldering this task alone the whole of the center right coalition should come down on the Alt-Right just as hard as William F. Bucklyites did against the John Birch Society in the early 1960s.
For a bit of history, the John Birch Society (JBS) was a very large and potent pseudo conservative group founded in 1958 and led by a messianic leader named Robert W. Welch, Jr. The group’s main appeal was a virulent anti-communism, which was a popular ideal at the height of the Cold War. It also developed into a strong nationalist organization that opposed the U.N. Welch even attacked President Eisenhower as a communist plant in the White House and there were also elements of racism among JBSers.
At one point the group claimed to have a million members but whatever its real number it certainly had chapters all across the nation. And all its members were fed by Welch’s newsletters and propaganda.
Eventually the group got so radicalized that Buckley, founder of the National Review magazine, decided that it was time to ostracize them from the conservative movement and make sure Americans understood that the JBSers were absolutely not part of the conservative movement.
That is what Goldberg is proposing that we now do to the Alt-Right, an internet fringe that grew out of white separatist ideals, crypto Nazism, and filled with Ku Klux Klan members who grew to feel the Klan was just a bit too radical even for them.
Now, Goldberg would be correct in his prescription to ostracize the Alt-Right if they were of the same potency as the JBS once was. But they aren’t. In fact, even giving them the name “Alt-Right” gives them more credit than they deserve.
You see, the JBS was a tightly controlled, heavily organized group that had at the very least a hundred of thousand members if not more. On the other hand, these Alt-Right nutballs are a tiny, insignificant number of Internet ragers. They have no central ideology, not principal organization to belong to, no real leader, and no “membership” that can be quantified.
JBS was a large enough group and definitely needed to be opposed. But this Alt-Right is a meaningless group of nobodies that is better left ignored. Yes, this is the tactic that Buckley originally took with the JBS, but the JBS was not such a tiny group that ignoring could kill.
Whereas millions of Americans were aware of JBS before Buckley got his dander up to have them made anathema to conservatives everywhere, almost no one had ever heard of this “Alt-Right” business before Hillary Clinton delivered that great, grand speech Goldberg so much admires.
So, in the end, no there is no reason to get all worked up about the racist nutcases in the Alt-Right. They have no power, no representatives in the conservative movement, no influence in the Republican Party, no wide voice among the people of the country, and no one except wonks like Goldberg even knows who the heck they are.
This truly is a case of talking about them gives them power they’d otherwise never attain.
So, guys… let’s just go back to ignoring them like everyone else has been doing since the Internet became a Bug House Square for every wacko with a computer.
The Alt-Right doesn’t need an organized effort to denounce them. All they need is to be ignored so they can crawl back under their digital rocks.
Hillary wants to gives this cretins power so that she can tar the entire conservative movement with their hate. But with his focus on the Alt-Right, Goldberg is serving Hillary’s ends, not serving to clear the name of conservatives.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, BizPac Review, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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