May 20, 2020
THE rIGHT IS NOT CONSERVATIVE:
Is Holocaust Denial Conservative Now?: Trump's no-enemies-to-the-right mentality has made it impossible for the right to police itself. (MONA CHAREN MAY 20, 2020, The Bulwark)
The woman Trump thanked is a columnist and social media entrepreneur who was a respected member of the conservative commentariat - emphasis on the past tense. Her books were published by Regnery, she was a featured speaker for the Young America's Foundation and at CPAC, she was a regular on Fox & Friends - the full fandango. In the past two years though, she has been pretty well shunned by respectable conservative outlets, or what passes for such nowadays. She is no longer welcome at CPAC. The Young America's Foundation has dropped her, and the Daily Wire and National Review discontinued her syndicated column.The occasion for the deplatforming was Malkin's swan dive into the right-wing fever swamps. Who can say whether the rise of Trump emboldened her to consort with racists and Holocaust deniers? Something like those tendencies were in evidence long ago. In 2004, she published a book titled In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and The War on Terror. That was a tell, but the real nutbaggery didn't set in until about 2017, when she endorsedalt-right candidate Paul Nehlen ("Paul Nehlen slams . . . corporate open-borders elites!"), and contributed to the VDARE website which frequently hosts white nationalists, racists, and anti-Semites.Her most grotesque relationship though, and the one that got her booted from the Young America's Foundation, was with a group calling themselves "groypers," led by a 22-year-old YouTube host named Nick Fuentes. To get a sense of just how loathsome this figure is, have a look at this video in which he wonders, grinning, about whether 6 million "cookies" could really be baked in ovens and how the "math doesn't add up."Holocaust jokes. How droll.Fuentes, you will not be shocked to learn, is one of the "very fine people" who marched with neo-Nazis at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Remember Pepe the Frog? He's their mascot. He described the mass murder in an El Paso Walmart as an "act of desperation." Turning Point USA is too tame for his tastes, and his group has lately been heckling speakers like Ben Shapiro, Dan Crenshaw, and even Donald Trump, Jr.In other words, if anything is beyond the pale for a civilized country, the "groypers" are it. Yet Michelle Malkin has declared herself the "mother of groypers" and called them "good kids." When she was rebuked by mainstream conservatives, she declared her allegiances proudly:They want me to disavow Nick Fuentes and VDARE and Peter Brimelow and Faith Goldy and Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys and Steve King and Laura Loomer and on and on. They want to do to me what they've done to brilliant academics who've told the truth -- Amy Wax at the University of Pennsylvania and Darren Beattie and Jason Richwine and Steve Sailer."They" did want that, or at least some mainstream conservatives were willing to draw a line (the grosser MAGA-types like Mike Cernovich and Jim Hoft were not). But now Trump has vitiated that work by praising Malkin.
Scratch a Trumpbot....
Posted by Orrin Judd at May 20, 2020 12:00 AM
