The Intellectual Right Is Mad at the Mess It’s Made
· The Atlantic
In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization.
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By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics.
Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.”
And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi.
In October, Politico published racist and misogynistic group-chat logs from members of the New York Young Republicans Club. The conservative writer James Lindsay, who made his name by opposing what he viewed as overly sensitive “woke” culture, chastised his fellow right-wing scribes for not taking the revelations seriously. “The group chat exposé is the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and your denialism isn’t helping a damn thing,” Lindsay wrote on X. Later that month, the conservative commentator and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza wrote that he was seeing more “vile” anti-Indian racism on the right than he had ever encountered in his 40-year career. In December, the right-wing writer Scott Greer complained that the right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination “exposed the idiocy and weaknesses of the modern conservative movement,” as well as “its addiction to conspiratorial thinking.”
Richard Hanania has been one of the loudest and most consistent critics of the right from within its own ranks. He has publicly criticized the conspiratorial and racist tendencies that have become popular on the right, but he told me that these frustrations are also being discussed in private. Hanania said several high-profile conservatives have reached out to him to share their grievances about what the movement has become.
The most notable public protests have come from Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who works at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. Since 2020, Rufo has been influential chiefly because of his crusade against how he believes matters of race were being taught in public schools. His campaign against critical race theory—a 1970s academic framework that posited that racial bias is embedded in American law and society—helped turn some school boards across the country from sleepy, overlooked features of local government into political battlegrounds. Rufo is also seen as a driving force for the Trump administration’s campaign to banish diversity training across the federal government. But in February, he posted on X that “the Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.”
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In the post, Rufo didn’t say whom he was talking about. But he has been critical of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. Since September, Owens’s podcast has focused on a convoluted conspiracy theory about how Kirk, her fellow conservative personality, was killed—possibly by the Israeli government—as part of a plot that’s now being covered up by shadowy forces. She also has questioned the character of Kirk’s widow, Erika, in a YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie.” Fuentes is a young white supremacist and anti-Semitic streamer whose profile was elevated in the right-wing mainstream by his easygoing, sympathetic interview in October with Tucker Carlson. Lindsay and Hanania, among others, also take a dim view of Carlson, partly for his own conspiratorial views and partly for his elevation of Fuentes and another interview subject, the Nazi-apologist podcaster Darryl Cooper.
Bookish conservatives are fond of the tale of Buckley banishing the John Birch Society to the fringes. But that’s not the whole story. Buckley walked a fine line, publicly criticizing Welch while otherwise trying not to alienate the society’s rank and file, the historian Matthew Dallek argues in his 2023 book, Birchers. Buckley’s gripes were more about the group’s style and its leaders than its ideology. Birchers were widely derided for being racist and conspiratorial. But Buckley, the genteel conservative, was broadly in alignment with some of the group’s views, calling white people “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review, supporting Jim Crow segregation, and writing a book defending the red-baiting propagandist Senator Joseph McCarthy.
[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’ ]
Some members of the modern right-wing intelligentsia have their own awkward tension with the people they are now criticizing, having espoused comparably extreme views in the past. Greer, for example, has pseudonymously written racist and anti-Semitic articles for the white supremacist Richard Spencer’s website, Radix Journal. In the ’90s, D’Souza argued that “we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously,” including the chance that there is a “natural hierarchy of groups: whites or Asians concentrated at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.” Similar arguments are now being used to justify the racism he is speaking out against. He’s also continued to spread his own bigotry—in January, he shared a video of a racist caricature of a Somali person. (He did not respond to my request for comment.) HuffPost reported in 2023 that Hanania made his own pseudoscientific arguments about the inferiority of Black people. (He has since said that he regrets those views and has renounced them.) As a group, the right could be said to have seeded the same extremism that they now condemn.
When I asked right-wing writers about this, I received a range of responses. Lindsay, who has broken from the right and now describes himself as a classical liberal, was the most contrite. “I’ve reckoned with it on my end,” he told me. “I seriously lament any role that I played in contributing to this. I seriously reevaluated how and who I’ll work with.”
Greer told me that his past associations with Spencer and like-minded people were a necessary part of politics and coalition building. He said that despite working with Spencer and Radix, he’s not a white nationalist. “I didn’t write about killing people, so I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said. “I’m a right-wing, conservative American nationalist. White separatism is stupid. No one wants it.”
Hanania has apologized for his past work. When I asked him about his previous writing on the links between race and IQ, he told me that “different groups score differently on standardized tests,” but that focusing on this is not healthy or conducive to “maintaining a kind of social harmony.”
Rufo was less penitent. In 2024, Rufo co-wrote a Substack post titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio,” which claimed to have video evidence of an African immigrant in Dayton grilling a cat. Rufo also offered a $5,000 “bounty” for anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” Statements from local officials and subsequent reporting from Drop Site News cast doubt on Rufo’s story. On the campaign trail that year, Trump and J. D. Vance made similar claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.
In 2021, Rufo encouraged his followers on X to call teachers who discuss LGBTQ matters “political predators” and accuse them of “ideological grooming”; he made a similar point the following year. When I asked Rufo about these statements, he said the “framing of this story is disingenuous, littered with factual errors, and even after I have repeatedly corrected them, they are still here.” He did not provide details.
If some of these conservatives are reluctant to revisit their own role in fostering hatreds they now condemn, their shifting views might nevertheless be significant. Again, Buckley provides a potential model. By the late 1960s, he had grown more sympathetic toward the mainstream. “I think he understood, as the ’60s moved on, that conservatives had an opportunity to win real power, and to do that, it made a lot of sense politically to moderate,” Dallek told me. “I do think that he did evolve, and he was not clamoring for a return to Jim Crow in the mid-to-late 1960s.”
Frustrations over the right’s inflammatory factions may be seeping into the intellectually inclined wings of the White House as well. A senior administration official, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, explained the right’s tolerance of bigots as a product of politics and “foxhole sympathies.” In the past, conservative thinkers were more tolerant of the anti-Semitic and conspiratorial right because they felt that the left was more powerful and intent on demonizing their ideological adversaries. Since Trump’s return to the White House, that sense of camaraderie on the right has dissipated, and the extremists—the administration official termed their views “feverish, howling Nazism”—are now viewed by many as hurting the cause. The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been one of the key enablers of the right’s most extreme fringes.
In their heyday, intellectuals such as Buckley and Will were the closest thing to influencers on the right, heavyweights whose written words in national publications made them prominent conservative voices. Buckley could make or break careers and help determine policy priorities.
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Today, the most influential voices on the right are the people the intellectuals are criticizing. Owens’s show is the fourth-most-popular news podcast on Spotify and the second-most-popular conservative news show. Tucker Carlson’s podcast is first in both categories. The overtly anti-Semitic and white-nationalist politics of Fuentes have made such views more popular than they’ve been in decades. They’ve also gained purchase among young members of the right, who will shape the movement’s future. Even though relatively high-profile voices on the right have stepped up to condemn the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, they don’t seem powerful enough to stop it.