The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics

The New Right is not only opposed to civil discourse; it’s opposed to pretty much any discourse with those it considers the enemy. It’s a working strategy. Peter Thiel secretly funded a legal battle between Hulk Hogan, a man he didn’t even know, and the gossip website Gawker, one of the mainstays of sneering media progressivism. The result was the

To realize that we live in an absurd culture where we are taught absurd things by absurd people and threatened with absurd consequences for defying all of it is to achieve a level of contentment. As Camus concludes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Yet despite the establishment propaganda, every time the Republicans have run a right-winger in the last forty years they have won the White House—and every time they’ve run a moderate they have lost. George H. W. Bush was especial proof of this, winning as Reagan II in 1988 before hiking taxes and moving to the center in time for a 1992 defeat.

Furiously and famously, Mises declared, “You’re all a bunch of socialists!” and stormed out.2 Much like Rand with rent control, Mises felt that once income distribution is on the table, the jig is basically up.

The universally lauded Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a full-frontal assault on the implicit idea that biology plays virtually no role in social issues and norms. Nicholas Wade, at the time a New York Times science writer, wrote A Troublesome Inheritance about “Genes, Race and Human History.”

It’s not even an American—it’s Nigel Farage, former head of the UK Independence Party (UKIP). Before Farage came along, British anti-EU sentiment was strongly tinged with racism and even white supremacism.

“If the big fear is that there is a secret Jewish cabal controlling the government,” I said, “how can someone be pro-Trump when two of his children married a Jew? He is the Jewish cabal!”

(And what of it?)

shell game