Farewell!

We are witnessing the end of an era.

A mighty warrior for conservative liberalism has fallen.

Yesterday, David French permanently signed off at National Review to join his colleague Jonah Goldberg at The Dispatch which will compete with Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes’ The Bulwark in the shriveling market of conservative liberal sites which no one reads anymore. Meanwhile, Rich Lowry is on NRO pimping his new book about … nationalism?

What’s going on here?

We should reflect on how far we have come since George W. Bush was president. I clearly remember the days when the likes of Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol were ascendant on the Right. The Weekly Standard was one of the most influential news magazines.

In the 2010s, Trump was elected president on essentially our platform – restricting immigration, ending neoliberal free trade deals and withdrawing from endless wars – and The Weekly Standard collapsed. Millions of people who voted for neoconservatism when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were president died off and were replaced by younger voters.

Blompf hasn’t been able to follow through on that agenda. This is largely because he is one man stranded in the White House in a sea of conservative liberalism. Whether it is his own administration, the federal courts, the Deep State, Congress or outside the government in the donor class and opinion setting organs like FOX News, there is no one in the government who is really on his side. Tucker Carlson is the closest thing he has to someone who is on his side. Jared Kushner and Ivanka aren’t even really on his side on most issues.

Donald Trump is a man who has massive personal flaws. He ran for president as a Herman Cain or Mike Huckabee tier candidate. He never expected to actually win the nomination and the election. The reason that he ran for president was to promote the Trump brand. It was ultimately one big vanity project, not an ideological one. He had good political instincts though and knew which buttons to press to move the masses. He had absolutely no idea how to run the government though and so he leaned on his own family and the existing conservative apparatus.

Trump won the 2016 election because Conservatism, Inc. was hopelessly decadent and had grown out of touch with its own electorate:

The Republican coalition is united by authoritarianism and social conservatism and opposition to Left-Libertarianism. It is united by the social issues, but divided by economics. The center of the electorate is authoritarian, socially conservative and economically populist.

Look at the Trump rally in Dallas:

These people are all authoritarians.

Nationalism is rising around the world for a reason. It is because the liberal order is a disintegrating force. It is causing mounting social disintegration and economic distress in the electorate. These people are pessimists who want a strong man to restore the social order which they perceive as under threat. In better times when people feel more secure and less stressed like in the homogeneous in 1950s and 1960s, they are naturally more liberal.

The upshot?

We haven’t seen our day in the sun yet. Whether it is French Fry getting the pink slip at National Review after impotently railing against the Alt-Right virus in August, the “National Conservatism” conference or Trump winning the whole thing in 2016, the cake is baking but it is not yet done. For a number of reasons, it will be ready in the 2020s. It was always going to be ready in the 2020s due to the pace of changing demographics.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

30 Comments

  1. If it wasn’t for HW I don’t think that bald, ugly creep David French would have any readers at all.

  2. Darn. I thought you were announcing his death… and imminent judgement by YHWH for his blasphemies.
    Oh, well. Back to the prayer – “Dear Lord, deliver us from the Pagan, the Turk, and the Jew- and David French. Amen.

  3. The cuckservatives deserve respect for the way they regroup under new publications in difficult times, and the dissident right has something to learn from their good habits. By contrast, the dissident-right discourse, even with some favorable tailwinds, is in a terrible condition, and not due to censorship, but due to increasingly bad habits of laziness, carelessness, or misjudgment on the part of both leaders and followers. One big problem, for example, is that a large part of the dissident right has neglected an unglamorous, but necessary chore of intellectual housekeeping: the habit of taking positions in cogently-written opinion pieces and articles. Hunter’s website is among the laudable exceptions. Overall, the dissident right’s discourse has devolved into a semblance of childishness and nihilistic confusion, in comparison to the cuckservatives’ discourse, which has managed to retain some appeal to the audience of intelligent, responsible adults.

    • Some good thoughts here, Pius. I would say that censorship has been a major problem, however. It’s difficult to attract people when the search engine algorithms steer people away, and/or access to important tools like webhosts and payment processors aren’t available to you, simply because of wrongthink.

      Also, the cucks have been able to regroup because they have sugar daddies with deep pockets. One of the two new publications mentioned, I forget which one, has $6 million in the bank. Even if their readership numbers are as anemic as they now are at National Review, the cucks could last for years just based on the funds they already have. Imagine what HW could do with a few million salted away!

      • I grant that funding and censorship are major problems, but they’re not the root of the problem for those bad habits of which I was complaining.

        To understand why, look at the case of Hunter. Hunter is someone who lacks neocon-level resources and also someone who is operating under the same conditions of adversity as the rest of the dissident right. Yet Hunter has kept up certain basic standards, like writing out and publishing his opinions. And so, in light of Hunter’s example, it’s reasonable to challenge the wider dissident-right for failing to demonstrate a similar standard.

    • Pius Faust,

      I get where you’re coming from. Are you acquainted with Jason Köhne and Jerad George over at No White Guilt? Take a peek. I believe that you will find that they do good work and produce intelligent and practical content.

      https://nowhiteguilt.org

    • ” One big problem, for example, is that a large part of the dissident right has neglected an unglamorous, but necessary chore of intellectual housekeeping: the habit of taking positions in cogently-written opinion pieces and articles. ”

      This is an incredibly important point. We have to stay in the news cycle and take reasonable sounding positions on current issues. It’s not enough just to talk about theories and history and to act above day to day politics.

      That was how Weekly Standard got the better of National Review when NR was not totally cucked yet. WS came out more often and was very much in the news cycle, rebutting whatever Democrat talking points were in the newspapers that week. NR was more into big pieces about concepts and history that fewer people wanted to read.

      We should be organizing pro-white sites for each state to keep on top of state level news and state politics in an organized way.

  4. “Blompf HASN’T BEEN ABLE to folow through on his (populist) agenda”.

    HW is still doing the CYA.

    Drmpf is plenty “able”. But not willing, because

    he’s a lifelong Jew York liberal democrat and

    the Jews own him.

  5. Isn’t this periodical, “National Review” where the late William F. Buckley a civic nationalist used to write – (I think he might have been the founder and part of the editorial group too) ????

    So, National Review, from a traditional American periodical with Civic Nationals writing articles, it has been taken over by these liberal cosmopolitan jews????

    Do you see a pattern here – cultural marxism anybody ???

    P.s.
    to my everlasting enemy, the hook nose tribe – this is a way of things to come – GET USED TO IT !

      • He was an arrogant and pompous pr**k. I agree.

        But he touched on issues – even though he come to the wrong analysis – that no else would speak of.

        And he did have GREAT guests !

        • Firing Line, along with the Dick Cavett Show and David Suskind, were the most intelligent talk shows ever. Nothing of comparable quality is on TV these days.

  6. You believe Trump is a man stranded while I believe he’s a con artist and part of the swamp himself.

    Though immigration no loner rouses my passions, I care less about it. But I do agree that he campaigned one way and then governed the other, though I think its him being a con artist.

  7. Yea, Hunter, go easy on that title of the column. I about flipped out for joy, French was french toast. Then i read further. Oh well, he’s headed for a for an empty alley going no place. Nobody really cares what he thinks anyway.
    I cringe just looking at the guy.

  8. “We should reflect on how far we have come since George W. Bush was president. I clearly remember the days when the likes of Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg and Bill Kristol were ascendant on the Right. The Weekly Standard was one of the most influential news magazines.”

    I’m a little older than you and was into alt-right politics since the 1992 Buchanan campaign. I remember an even worse period in the 90’s when alt-right views were getting less popular with grassroots conservatives each year. Neocon ideas were winning new converts and conservatives who used to be against immigration changed their minds and decided that mexicans were “natural conservatives” and good for the economy.

    That trend towards neoconism got even worse after 9/11, which is the when the Israel First stuff really took off.
    The momentum didn’t reverse until late in the Dubya regime. Anyone who was in the pro-white scene back in that era is optimistic now. Only people who have joined recently are despairing. They have no idea how bad it was 15-20 years ago with these yahoo boomer morons.

    I remember when the Weekly Standard was launched and quickly got a higher circulation than National Review, which was pretty good on immigration at the time. That was horrifying to witness. Lots of conservatives in that era would say things like “we can have open borders if there is no welfare.” That kind of talk is dead now.

  9. Guys like French get showered with money from Rich Cucks and Jews. However, “The Kids” no longer take these people seriously. Anyone who still takes Cuckservatism seriously that is under 50, is a careerist/hanger-on.

  10. Pius Faust (@PiusFaust) | October 19, 2019 at 5:09 pm | Reply
    The cuckservatives deserve respect for the way they regroup under new publications in difficult times, and the dissident right has something to learn from their good habits. By contrast, the dissident-right discourse, even with some favorable tailwinds, is in a terrible condition, and not due to censorship, but due to increasingly bad habits of laziness, carelessness, or misjudgment on the part of both leaders and followers.

    I respond:

    “We” American identitarians, race realists, immigration patriots, dissident right, alternative right, JQ aware we’ve just not been good at many important things, such as …

    Fund raising.

    Hunter W , like most of our best writers, thinkers doesn’t like to do fund raising, he doesn’t like to ask people for $ money. Thanks to ZOG, Cucks, the powers that be, we can’t get any paid advertising, but we can and must get people who feel like we do to give us $ contributions. Look at all the people who gave $ to President Trump or even to Mitt Romney in his failed presidential campaign. These lists are available and all it takes is someone (Preferably a bright, good looking young woman) to ask these donors or just our OD readers for $ contributions. No we shouldn’t do this everyday, but ~ 6 times a year is fine. There are older wealthy, middle class people who do want to $ contribute.

    OD’s one fundraiser was a success.

    We have to make the dissident right a place that does business in a sensible way. L Brimelow at Vdare is a good fundraiser.

    Does anyone want to step up and give this fund raising job a try?

Comments are closed.