Beware the New Buckleyites

Reframing what it means to be a 'Dissident'

The new Gate Keepers have arrived.

Their arrival is trumpeted from the rooftops by way of a Vanity Fair magazine article.

Breathlessly they are jabbering all over Twitter about how they’ve ‘made it’.

They’ve made it alright, they’ve fallen right into the trap that ConInc sets and creates. To neuter and absorb any actual dissent and create a legion of gate keepers that prevent things going too far.

The article in question is worth reading if you have not so I link it here .

In truth I feel that most of this opinion piece could just be quotes from the article and perhaps a number will feature but this is really an important moment to capture.

There has always been a spectrum of respectability - the fancy term is the Overton Window. What is considered acceptable discourse. The window has been blown open and the real Dissident Right has been instrumental in blowing that window open. If nothing else we have exploded a number of narratives and despite the best efforts of the propaganda machine we continue to grow and make more and more forays into mainstream discourse and society.

Naturally that means more moderate types will begin to examine our ideas. They will very rarely admit to it, they will make apologies if they do, but they are doing it. They read us in secret or behind a veil of plausible deniability. They smell blood in the water and a lot of these sharks are more predators than most of us can ever be. That’s dangerous.

Dangerous because it is still the ‘respectable’ media like Vanity Fair that will promote characters like Jack Murphy and Dave Rubin, both mentioned in this piece. In fact one wonders if for a fleeting moment if the journalist in question is perhaps some kind of fan of the bisexual Murphy as moments of the article resemble a full blown rehabilitation of this admitted cuckold and grifter. It is truly interesting to see who is referenced in more positive and neutral lights by the Vanity Fair crew.

Yarvin is well into his 15 minutes of fame and for a man who just lost his wife rather recently seems to have leapt at the opportunity to chase liberal tail. We bizarrely meet his fiance in the piece

“His writing doesn’t really represent who he is,” Laurenson told me. “So I answered this email and I was just like, ‘Hi, I’m a liberal, but I have a high IQ. And I want kids, and I’m actually just really curious to talk to you.’ ” The two are now engaged.

His writing of course here refers to the once edgy takes Yarvin spoke of like you know criticizing Nelson Mandela or writing an article explaining why he was not a WN.

She goes on:

“I have a background in social justice,” she said. But she was “horrified” by “how the mainstream media covered the riots.… It was just such a violation of all of my values.”

She’d had a strange realization after she and Yarvin started dating, discovering that some of her friends had been reading him for years. “I found out that all these people had been reading NRx stuff just like me. They just never told anyone about it,” she said. “It has been very striking to me,” she said, “how cool this world is becoming.”

It’s no secret that lots of the NRx audience and contributors in the early days were tech nerds in these circles - I wonder how many of her friends wrote for Social Matter…But again here it is, that meshing of acceptability. The liberal girlfriend route - is Yarvin copying Spencer just to greater success? Either way he now gets to throw off anything truly dissident he once wrote about and retreat into the respectability he always obviously craved.

More than anything you one realizes how malleable these kind of people actually are. They are explorers, exploring ideas and picking up what they like. Do they have any real disdain for the modern America, the visceral rage most of us feel when living in the Empire of Lies?

Perhaps what was most glaring about this was just who the article didn’t mention. Once it seemed that they would attempt to tar association of such people with you know the real bad guys out there. Drop Dukes name in there perhaps, or even Adolf can be cited. But there was none of that here, even BAP didn’t get a look in. That to me is fascinating in an of itself. These people are deliberate and careful in how they portray people in such pieces. This is why I think everyone name dropped here is likely to become an heir of Buckley.

Tellingly there are a few connections made:

Vance sits somewhere in between these two tendencies—at 37, he’s a venture capitalist who is young enough to be exposed to the dissident online currents. But he’s also shaped by the most deeply traditionalist thinking of the American right. He is friends with Yarvin, whom he openly cites as a political influence, and with Dreher, who was there when Vance was baptized into the Catholic Church in 2019

Ah yes Rod Dreher. The most awful mainstream ConInc commentator there is. Noted for his attacks calling Pat Buchanan a ‘white supremacist’. Noted for backpeddling and accusing VDare or the same imaginary crime. Interesting to promote one of the weakest spined individuals who is ‘on the Right’.

So here we are in 2022 - Vanity Fair has relatively positive articles about a slew of figures who orbit our circles.

The script we’ve seen before though.

It’s to keep people from reaching past further, from delving any deeper.

The acceptable face of the 'Dissident Right’ is here to stay (and grift).