Alright, I've got some thoughts on this, after a lot of contemplation and arguing. In short: the guardrails within and among conservative media and institutions are gone.
@benshapiro argued last week that cons were better at ousting bad elements (racists) than liberals. nationalreview.com/2018/08/conser…
Here are the problems with this assertion:
1.) If you have to continually purge your publications and institutions of white nationalists, that's not a sign of institutional wellbeing. "Good news: we got all of the rats out of the restaurant kitchen again!"
1.) If you have to continually purge your publications and institutions of white nationalists, that's not a sign of institutional wellbeing. "Good news: we got all of the rats out of the restaurant kitchen again!"
2.) The publications that do these purges no longer hold big time sway among right-leaning voters. NRO is a storied publication. NRO's site traffic is dwarfed by other sites, like Daily Caller, which has a tiny "we keep hiring white nationalists" problem. mediashift.org/2018/01/nine-i…
When John Derbyshire got pushed out of NRO -- and by the way, should have gotten pushed out years earlier -- he didn't fall into the abyss. He went to go write for VDare. The same VDare whose own Peter Brimelow hangs out with Trump's chief econ advisor.
3.) The article never mentions Trump or the Trump administration. That's important, because the issue here isn't just "there are bad racists within the conservative movement," the issue is that those bad racists have jobs and close ties within the Administration.
Farrakhan is a rabid anti-Semite (and hates LGBT people, also). Farrakhan is also not working for the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
With the flattening of media, there's no means by which conservative media or institutions can really "remove" someone because they will largely maintain much the same platform (especially w/ social media) and audience.
And a creeping moral relativism within conservatism has led to the misguided sense that every idea is equally worthy of attention, so when pubs do fire someone, they now argue "mah free speech is being limited because you won't let me rant about Jews" -- and people listen.
(Side note: "why don't you just best the racists on the debate stage" is like saying "why don't you explain why it's a bad idea for this person to murder you" as if that's a sensible thing to say)
This is a problem. This limits the potential growth of the conservative movement, and with time, will warp the very concept of conservatism itself.
Conservatives can, and have, pitched conservatism to non-white audiences, and with some success. But by responding to the continued problem of white nationalists and racists within the movement by saying "what about Linda Sarsour" instead of asking big, uncomfortable questions...
They will fail to grow this movement. And I think, in some ways, they have already begun to give up on conservatism ever being a political ideology that could be embraced by someone like, well, me.
Get the rats out of your own kitchen, block all the holes, set up traps, clean the grout, solve the problem, and then you can get back to telling me about how the left is secretly super racist because Harvard has a graduation ceremony for black students or whatever.
“WHAT ABOUT THESE MICE IN OTHER PEOPLE’S KITCHENS, AT LEAST WE JUST HAD LIKE, TWO RATS”
