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1. okay, I'm deleting this tweet since it was a little too glib about the point I was trying to make, which is that there the symbiosis of the white nationalist right & conservative media is a bit more complicated than the word "infiltrated" quite captures. 
2. First of all, I should say that everyone should read the @RosieGray piece, which is terrific reporting filled with genuinely eye-poping details. buzzfeednews.com/article/rosieg…
3. A key detail in @RosieGray's article is that Katie McHugh's radicalization was the writing of Joe Sobran, whose own career shows how intertwined the mainstream right & white nationalism have always been: Sobran had been a star writer of National Review in 1970s to early 1990s
4. Okay, let's step back a bit: the contemporary American right, contrary to its own self-mythology, was born in the 1930s as an initially inchoate reaction of different factions opposed to the New Deal: the wealthy, "classical liberal" intellectuals & revanchist racists
5. By the standards of 2019, the New Deal seems hopelessly compromised by racism. But in 1930s the gingerly steps FDR & (especially) Elinor Roosevelt took on its behalf (notably championing Marian Anderson after DAR incident) earned them enmity of white nationalist right.
6. After World War II, as the coalescing right tried to work out an effective alliance, leaders like William F. Buckley faced a problem: intellectual wing of the right had a small audience, while the strongest activist energy came from anti-black racists (esp. in South).
7. To put it another way, post-war right was an alliance of the snobs & the slobs. The concerns of the snobs (Voegelin's critique of gnosticism, Strauss on Hobbes, Weaver on nominalism) had little traction among the slobs organizing white citizens committees.
8. We see this in the early National Review, where Buckley tries to maintain a difficult balancing act of having enough intellectual content to be respectable (reviews by the young Joan Didion) & enough red meat (coded in language of states rights) to win the far right.
8. As civil rights and anti-racist politics became more salient in the 1940s/1950s, it was clear that the mass basis for right-wing politics would be the white backlash, originally centered in the South but spreading (by early 1960s) to north.
9. Revilo Oliver, an early, prolific National Review writer, was a palindromious racist who (after breaking with Buckley) became a leading white nationalist thinker. George Lincoln Rockwell, later founder of American Nazi Party, started off selling NR subscriptions.
10. Aside from Oliver & Rockwell, virtually all the big thinkers of the alt-right were at one time Buckley cronies or NR writers/editors: Rothbard (who helped Buckley with Up From Liberalism), Brimelow, Sobran, Buchanan, Francis. The calls are coming from inside the house.
11. It's often said on Buckley's behalf that he purged the right of anti-semites & overt racists. That's true up to a point. But let's flip it around; what does it say about Buckley for 50 years, from Oliver to Sobran & beyond, he had to keep firing the bigots he had hired?
12. To paraphrase The Onion, Buckley needed to ask himself, "why do these Nazis keep working for my magazine?" theonion.com/why-do-all-the…
13. The other aspect of the Buckley legend is that even though the people he purged from the right were usually anti-semites and racists, he didn't always purge them for anti-semitism or racism but for other reasons.
14. Murray Rothbard was purged by Buckley not for consorting with David Duke & the vile stuff in the Rothbard/Rockwell newsletter but in the early 1960s for Rothbard's quite sensible opposition to Cold War militarism.
15. Similiarly, Buckley & National Review worked hard to keep the John Birch Society (although not its leader Robert Welch) in the conservative coalition until 1965, when the JBS came out against (sensibly!) the Vietnam war.
16. Jospeh Sobran was doing edgelord stuff for a longtime (in 1979 in National Review he complained about textbooks devoting time to feminists & Hispanics, or "chicks and spics" as he called them). But only became a problem for NR when he opposed the first Iraq war.
17. I think the true history is this: there was a big purge of the proto-alt-right (the paleo cons) in 1990s spurred on by Iraq war & Wall Street immigration consensus. When politics changed (2nd Iraq war went bad, anti-immigration on right increased) alt-right resurfaced.
18. A bit tangentially, something needs to be written about the widespread cult of Joseph Sobran that sprang up after Buckley fired him in 1993. Sobran was seen by many as a truthtelling martyr, The alt-right was the return of the repressed, in Freud's terms.
19. Thinking more on it, the problem with the "alt-right infiltrated conservative movement" frame is that it elides the really sinister role of the donor class. In a lot of ways, the Mercers & the Kochs are a much bigger problem than the alt-right.
20. By itself, the alt-right is a minor problem: they're small in number, not very bright, and generally goofballs who, as @RosieGray shows, like to pretend to be vikings at summer camp. The real problem is the big money people who worked to mainstream the goofballs.
21. It's the Mercers and the Kochs who have made a knowing decision to elevate the alt-right, doing so on the probably correct assumption that racism will win a mass base that purely libertarian economic policy never will.
