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Second rate reporter says what?

This chaos was totally avoidable.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Fight them, without becoming them!

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Eugenics Open Thread: Why Are There So Many Skunks At Every ‘Conservative Intellectual’ Garden Party?

Late Night Eugenics Open Thread: Why Are There So Many Skunks At Every ‘Conservative Intellectual’ Garden Party?

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It took just 80 minutes after racially incendiary emails started flying for the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank, to shut down an email Listserv connecting hundreds of high-profile conservatives.

The emails that sparked the controversy began ricocheting midday Tuesday, in response to a plea from Darren Beattie, a recently fired speechwriter for President Donald Trump, for “those on this list with media influence” to come to his defense. The White House over the weekend dismissed Beattie after CNN revealed that he had spoken at a conference alongside a racial provocateur.

Charles Johnson, an alt-right provocateur and Trump loyalist, was first to respond.

“Beattie’s offense is that he spoke at an event where — gasp! — there were white nationalists afoot!” Johnson wrote the group. “Heaven forbid that some thinkers — like the American founders who favored our country be majority white — think that the U.S. of A should stay majority white! Perish the thought. Can’t have that.”

A little more than an hour later, as senior administration officials and white-shoe lawyers asked to be removed from the list, the Claremont Institute had scuttled it entirely.

On Wednesday night, Beattie told POLITICO: “In 2008, I had the privilege of being a Claremont Publius Fellow. I sent what I intended to be a private email to the broader Claremont network to apprise them of the disgusting smear campaign against me by CNN. As with any big email list, I had no control over what replies I received, whether well- or ill-intentioned, or whether people on that list desperate for attention and relevance would use the injustice against me for their own purposes, whatever they may be.”

The episode provides a window into the challenges facing the Trump-friendly right as it has struggled to build an intellectual movement that can outlast Trump — and to rid itself of bigots and fringe elements who have glommed on to some of the president’s immigration rhetoric…

Founded in 1979 by students of the late political scientist Harry Jaffa, a professor emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Graduate University, the Claremont Institute is home to a coterie of right-leaning scholars who have helped make the case for a Trump presidency. The organization, which has no affiliation with any of the Claremont Colleges, was an early defender of candidate Trump, publishing Michael Anton’s controversial essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” in the Claremont Review of Books in the closing months of the 2016 campaign. Anton would go on to become a spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council.

The Claremont Institute is not the only organization on the right to grapple with how to build a populist conservative movement without inviting white nationalists, racists or those who associate with them into the fold…

(If you don’t immediately flash on the metaphor at issue, it involved a lawsuit by Chuck ‘Not the LGF Guy’ Johnson — aka ‘the Rage Furby’ — against Gawker Media. Warning: NSFW)

Reader Interactions

47Comments

  1. 1.

    Platonailedit

    "Bucktooth Nosferatu" Rudy Giuliani warns if Trump is impeached, the American ppl will revolt. Seriously? Not only would the American ppl not revolt, but joining them in merriment, the overwhelming majority of the world would turn Trump's impeachment into a global celebration.

    — Bill Madden (@activist360) August 23, 2018

  2. 2.

    Platonailedit

    Democrats strategy of keeping mum on impeachment in the halls of Congress is beginning to take its toll on Republicans.

    Not only does it force THEM to discuss impeachment – for the first time – but even Trump is talking about his own impeachment.#TheResistance set the table.

    — Grant Stern (@grantstern) August 23, 2018

  7. 7.

    SRW1

    Conservatives are shocked that there is racism going in the alt-right. Shocked, shocked, shocked! I tells you.

  8. 8.

    Platonailedit

    the challenges facing the Trump-friendly right as it has struggled to build an intellectual movement that can outlast Trump

    LMAO @ gopolitico shitheads

  9. 9.

    karen marie

    Wait, but I thought conservatives HATED listserves. Did I miss something?

    Oh,yeah, it’s only listserves for leftwing groups they hate. Carry on.

  11. 11.

    Jay

    In Canada, Maxime Bernier has gone full Brutus, stabbing Scheer and the Con’s in the back, to form his own White Nationalist Party.

    LMFAO

    How will the Con’s survive with out their “base”?

  13. 13.

    TheMightyTrowel

    OT WITH A SIGH. Having a major work headache because my (outgoing! finally! thank god!) head of school, who is also head of a specific discipline within our school and is also a crazy person is furious we went around her to fix one of her stuff-ups re: our students. In short, she did an admin thing to the classes in her field that isn’t allowed that meant that one of our (not her field) students was supposed to be put into the exact same class twice in two years (with different course names, but literally the same class with the same exam) so we did a little black magic to get around it. Unfortunately we forgot to send one email and she found out and now somehow we’re the ones who breached academic standards. SIGH. I’m letting my boss deal with this, he was involved at all stages.

  19. 19.

    SRW1

    the challenges facing the Trump-friendly right as it has struggled to build an intellectual movement that can outlast Trump

    Brain stems kind of by default do not esteem cortices.

  21. 21.

    TS (the original)

    @Platonailedit:

    No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms.

    From your link

    Around the world, one in three people are thought to drink alcohol and it is linked to nearly a tenth of all deaths in those aged 15 to 49.

    I’m older than the danger zone

  24. 24.

    NotMax

    Shudder to think what Dolt 45 will spurt out about this.

    An up-and-coming baritone singer alleges he was drugged and violently raped in 2010 by two of opera/classical music’s shining stars, David Daniels and Scott Walters.

    Daniels, 52, the most famous countertenor in the world, has been a favorite of the Metropolitan Opera, while his now-husband Walters, 36, is a respected conductor.

    The couple is so highly regarded that they were married in 2014 by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Source

  25. 25.

    Balconesfault

    So the party that has spent the last 50 years telling it’s voters that it’s legit to resent blacks and browns getting a fair shake is frustrated because it has become irrevocably intertwined with the white nationalist movement.

    Oh, and bars are frustrated because they attract drunks.

  30. 30.

    J R in WV

    @NotMax:

    @Balconesfault

    Alain 86’d the edit function as a stopgap fix.

    Actually I think it was just an attempt to achieve stability on the web site, so that they could work from that point of stability. Always a good thing to be able to start from a position that’s knows to work reasonably well.

  31. 31.

    A Ghost To Most

    Trying to separate the racists from the conservatives is like trying to separate the peanut butter from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

    It’s not possible because they stick together.

    They’re not “stuck together”. They’re one and the same.

  32. 32.

    oldster

    “Everything was going great on this @ClaremontInst thread when Chuck Johnson came in and just . . . huh, trying to think of the right metaphor here….”

    Dropped a turd into something that was pretending to be a punch-bowl but was already a bowl of turds, wearing bow-ties? And then the other turds started acting huffy because this one wasn’t wearing a bow-tie?

  33. 33.

    Unknown know

    @TS (the original):

    I’m older than the danger zone

    I’m sure that this was tongue in cheek. But the reason alcohol is a predominant killer of young people is because they don’t die of much else. Among the olds it has to vie for a spot in the mortality rankings with heart disease, etc.

  34. 34.

    Unknown known

    @TS (the original):

    I’m older than the danger zone

    I know this is tongue in cheek, but the reason that alcohol is a predominant cause of death for young people is that they don’t die of much else. For the olds it has to compete in the mortality sweepstakes against the heavy hitters like heart disease.

  35. 35.

    JGabriel

    C @ Trippypea47 via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    Trying to separate the racists from the conservatives is like trying to separate the peanut butter from a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

    It’s more like trying to separate the peanuts from the peanut butter.

    Take peanuts out of peanut butter, and all you’re left with is Sugar, Molasses, Fully Hydrogenated Vegetable Oils (Rapeseed And Soybean), Salt, Mono And Diglycerides; take the racists out of American conservatism and all you’re left with are empty clothes.

  36. 36.

    JR

    @SRW1: @JGabriel: Look, some of them simply want to fuck over everybody, not just selective groups of people. These are people with taste, I tell you, taste!

  37. 37.

    RAM

    Definitely hard to “build an intellectual movement that can outlast Trump — and to rid itself of bigots and fringe elements who have glommed on to some of the president’s immigration rhetoric” when everybody in the ‘intellectual’ movement is comprised of bigots and fringe elements. I mean really hard!

  38. 38.

    kindness

    The phone calls….they are coming from inside the house!

    Said every bad horror film and now rightwing think tank.

  42. 42.

    Martin

    When Charles Johnson, one of our more than 650 alumni, began using a private email group to espouse views that are incompatible with the principles of the Founding Fathers

    Excuse me? The founders are the ones that literally wrote, with their own human hands, ‘3/5 of a person’. Yes, some of the founders opposed that inclusion but many of them even had slaves. We didn’t get national elected leaders that really, truly gave a shit until maybe Kennedy, and even he and Johnson were able to accept minorities being abused in favor of other political considerations. Even Obama slow-rolled the LGBTQ community and wasn’t willing to fully go to bat for native populations.

    So, spare us this ‘founding principles’ revisionist bullshit. Johnson was the one spouting ‘founding principles’ here, and y’all shut things down rather than be associated with it.

  44. 44.

    California Stars

    A couple of years ago (before the election) a friend of mine sent out a link to a lengthy screed published in/by/in association with the Claremont Institute, in support of a Trump presidency that was pretty much a white supremacist manifesto in silk sheets. I mean, it was lightly veiled but it’s not as though anyone reading it could have mistaken its intent. So it’s laughable that Chuck Johnson is now “too racist” for them. He’s not. He just said it out loud, at an inconvenient time. Anyway, good good fucking riddance.

  46. 46.

    r€nato

    @Martin: regarding that 3/5 of a person business… think beyond the immediate issue of valuing a slave as 3/5 of a human for political purposes.

    If the slave states had had their way, every slave – 100% of whom were without political rights – would have been counted the same as a free white person.

    The slave states would have had significantly more power in Congress, in other words, if slaves had been counted the same as non-slaves.

    It was a good thing, the 3/5 compromise. An even BETTER answer would have been to not count them at all, since they had no political rights whatsoever.

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