The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made | Conservatives are criticizing influencers for going too far

The "intellectual right" is an oxymoron.

The what right?

"Intellectual right": Galbraith had their number back in 1964. > The modern conservative is not even especially modern. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man's oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities.

What? I disagree with the premise of the entire article! "Intellectual right" my ass, That is not a real thing.

There is no intellectual right.

Riding a rabid lion results in leopards eating faces?

Spelled intolerant and intoxicated wrong in one sentence kudos

Since when is there an 'intellectual right'?

A few issues highlighted: >In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization. > >By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics. > >Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.” > >And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi. > >... > >Bookish conservatives are fond of the tale of Buckley banishing the John Birch Society to the fringes. But that’s not the whole story. Buckley walked a fine line, publicly criticizing Welch while otherwise trying not to alienate the society’s rank and file, the historian Matthew Dallek argues in his 2023 book, Birchers. Buckley’s gripes were more about the group’s style and its leaders than its ideology. Birchers were widely derided for being racist and conspiratorial. But Buckley, the genteel conservative, was broadly in alignment with some of the group’s views, calling white people “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review, supporting Jim Crow segregation, and writing a book defending the red-baiting propagandist Senator Joseph McCarthy. > >Some members of the modern right-wing intelligentsia have their own awkward tension with the people they are now criticizing, having espoused comparably extreme views in the past. Greer, for example, has pseudonymously written racist and anti-Semitic articles for the white supremacist Richard Spencer’s website, Radix Journal. In the ’90s, D’Souza argued that “we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously,” including the chance that there is a “natural hierarchy of groups: whites or Asians concentrated at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.” Similar arguments are now being used to justify the racism he is speaking out against. He’s also continued to spread his own bigotry—in January, he shared a video of a racist caricature of a Somali person. (He did not respond to my request for comment.) HuffPost reported in 2023 that Hanania made his own pseudoscientific arguments about the inferiority of Black people. (He has since said that he regrets those views and has renounced them.) As a group, the right could be said to have seeded the same extremism that they now condemn. > >When I asked right-wing writers about this, I received a range of responses. Lindsay, who has broken from the right and now describes himself as a classical liberal, was the most contrite. “I’ve reckoned with it on my end,” he told me. “I seriously lament any role that I played in contributing to this. I seriously reevaluated how and who I’ll work with.” > >Greer told me that his past associations with Spencer and like-minded people were a necessary part of politics and coalition building. He said that despite working with Spencer and Radix, he’s not a white nationalist. “I didn’t write about killing people, so I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said. “I’m a right-wing, conservative American nationalist. White separatism is stupid. No one wants it.” > >Hanania has apologized for his past work. When I asked him about his previous writing on the links between race and IQ, he told me that “different groups score differently on standardized tests,” but that focusing on this is not healthy or conducive to “maintaining a kind of social harmony.” > >Rufo was less penitent. In 2024, Rufo co-wrote a Substack post titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio,” which claimed to have video evidence of an African immigrant in Dayton grilling a cat. Rufo also offered a $5,000 “bounty” for anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” Statements from local officials and subsequent reporting from Drop Site News cast doubt on Rufo’s story. On the campaign trail that year, Trump and J. D. Vance made similar claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets. > >... > >In their heyday, intellectuals such as Buckley and Will were the closest thing to influencers on the right, heavyweights whose written words in national publications made them prominent conservative voices. Buckley could make or break careers and help determine policy priorities. > >Today, the most influential voices on the right are the people the intellectuals are criticizing. Owens’s show is the fourth-most-popular news podcast on Spotify and the second-most-popular conservative news show. Tucker Carlson’s podcast is first in both categories. The overtly anti-Semitic and white-nationalist politics of Fuentes have made such views more popular than they’ve been in decades. They’ve also gained purchase among young members of the right, who will shape the movement’s future. Even though relatively high-profile voices on the right have stepped up to condemn the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, they don’t seem powerful enough to stop it. This is part of the problem with both making common cause with conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, and christian nationalists, as well as with encouraging the populist elements within the movement to the fore. Either of them independently would or should be deeply problematic for serious-minded thinkers of any stripe, but together this is a toxic and potent combination that is highly corrosive to any kind of public discourse. Unfortunately it seems that the right from the ultra conservative to the moderates are now firmly in the grasp of the beast that they've created.

To qualify for the "intellectual right," one needs to master the Gish Gallop and a weaponized vocabulary. That's all it's ever been, all the way back to Buckley.

"The Intellectual Right" must be the new jumbo shrimp

There’s being an intellectual and there’s being on the Right. Pick one. Calling anyone who espouses and promotes rightwing viewpoints intellectual, is a slap in the face to those who have actually had to work very hard at intellectual pursuits and understandings. There are pseudo intellectuals and provocateurs who are “just asking questions!” only a dipshit would think is smart, but the well of logical thought is bone dry on that side of the political aisle.

Is the "intellectual right" just Kid Rock wearing glasses?

There is no such thing as the 'intellectual' right. There is the 'con artist' right, and the 'conned' right.

>The intellectual Right lol holy shit that’s funny 

"There are dozens of us! Dozens!!"

The intellectual right? You mean the ones whose most impressive accomplishment is knowing that 1 + 1 = 2?

"Influencer" and "intellect" do not go together. Thought requires consideration, not a lemming leader who is after all headed for the same cliff of mindless rushing to nowhere except destruction. Especially when the "influencers" are bots.

Waaaa. They're getting what they wanted. Can't be mad now.

Then fix it.

a nazi with a college degree is still a nazi

What a chimera of words. Are we using intellectual there for what theyre trying to be?

America is cooked.