1. Really good thread on how fundamental anti-monarchism is to USA political culture & how odd it is that American right has now embraced the crown. But that also has roots worth thinking about.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1373274373868650497
2. Buckley up people, we're doing an old style Jeet tweetstorm. Some thoughts on American monarchism, William F. Buckley's spanking fantasies involving the Queen of England, Spanish dynastic politics, fascism, George Wallace and Jack Kirby.
3. So, the praise of the British monarchy from American sources like National Review & Heritage Foundation has struck many people as strange. Aside from long-standing USA anti-monarchism, the American right has long had a powerful anglophobe strain.
4. Pat Buchanan is maybe the sole surviving example of the older right-wing Anglophobia. Of German-Irish descent, Buchanan still writes Lindberghian books blaming Brits for snookering USA into fighting WWI and WWII.
5. In contrast to Buchanan, William F. Buckley shows how USA right gave up anglophobia as part of embrace of American led global hegemony. Nora Ephron summed up this evolution by saying of Buckley, "give an Irishman a horse and he'll vote Tory."
6. Like his father, William F. Buckley was originally an isolationist. The family had a yacht called "Sweet Isolation." In 1930s when he was 7 or 8 the young squire wrote an indignant letter to the King of England demanding that America's war debts be repaid.
7. Buckley shifted from isolationism to internationalism after WWII, a process hastened not just by Cold War but Buckley joining the CIA and becoming indoctrinated in the need for USA global hegemony.
8. The psychic trauma of Buckley's shift from anglophobic isolationism to anglophilic internationalism is played out in his spy novel Saving the Queen (1976), where Buckley's alter-ego spanks and fucks the Queen. 
9. The hero of the novel, Blackford Oakes, is a transparent Buckley stand-in (isolationist, prep school, Yale, CIA). Like Buckley, he was spanked in an English boarding school. Unlike Buckley (I think), Oakes gets his revenge by spanking the Queen (an alt-world Queen).
10. Aside from Buckley's sex fantasies, post-war American conservatism of the National Review variety was a fount of monarchism. Again, the Cold War context is key. European, Middle Eastern & Asian kings seen as bulwark against communism and socialism.
11. One of National Review's columnist was Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, an ardent monarchist. In 1960s, Kuehnelt-Leddihn told George Wallace, "Governor, what you need in America is a king." Wallace wasn't sure the people of Alabama were ready for that.
12. Another National Review contributor was Otto von Habsburg, then the pretender to the Austrian throne. Von Habsburg insisted that National Review was the only magazine that spoke sense to the American people.
13. Buckley's brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, Jr. moved to Spain in early 1960s (because he thought the fascist regime was the ideal Christian society) and became heavily involved in Carlist movement, a dynasty vying for the throne.
14. Bozell's neo-Carlist movement should not be dismissed as fringe weirdos. They had a real importance on Catholic right in creating the model of fighting reproductive freedom by harassing clinics.
15. To be fair, idea of using monarchs as USA Cold War allies was not just confined to the far right. USA Middle East policy and Japan policy had similar impetus.
16. In 1976, the same year William F. Buckley wrote about wanting to spank and fuck the Queen, Jack Kirby created an allegory about a neo-aristocratic American elite that wanted to destroy democracy by fomenting racism and culture war.
17. Kirby's Madbomb story (Captain America 193-200, 1976) is a bicentennial epic about a plot to turn Americans into raving mobs fighting each other. The villain turns out to be a plutocrat named Malcolm Taurey (i.e. Tory) who wants to restore aristocracy.
18. I wouldn't want to make too much of a claim for Kirby's Madbomb story except that it does map well with the emergence of an American right that is explicitly nostalgic for aristocracy and can succeed only by divide-and-conquer race war.
19. One last thing. If you want to hear William F. Buckley read out his sex fantasies about the Queen of England (interspersed with reflections on American power and boarding school stories) do I have a Youtube for you.
https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1373328678659178500
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