Pink State

Guest Post by The Zman

O’Sullivan’s First Law states that any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time. The law is named after British journalist and former National Review editor John O’Sullivan. This is especially ironic as O’Sullivan was forced to abandon most of his right wing positions in order to avoid being purged from National Review. Diseases are often named after a famous victim, but this is the first time the victim named his disease before he contracted it.

Red State is a website that was originally started as sort of a “conservative” alternative to the left-wing blogosphere. I put quotes there because Red State’s brand of conservatism has always been the housebroken type of stuff popular on the Bush wing of the GOP. Like a lot of so-called conservatives in the Bush years, Red State was basically just a cheering section for the Republicans. Whatever Team Bush proposed, Red State branded as “Reaganesque” and “principled conservatism”, especially if it meant killing Muslims.

That probably sounds harsh, but I’m just getting started. Serial plagiarist Ben Domenech, pen for hire Joshua Trevino and the portly proselytizer Erick Erickson saw an opportunity to promote themselves, and maybe lever their popularity with conservative voters, into the careers they thought they deserved. The whole point of Red State was to ball-gargle the establishment, hoping to turn their obsequious rumpswabbery into a Jonah Goldberg lifestyle. The three of them are emblematic of what went wrong with conservatism.

Anyway, this all came to mind because of this post on Red State that looks like it should be on the Daily Lunatic.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is supposed to be the sane, responsible anti-immigration group of the John Tanton-sphere. Tanton is a former Zero Population Growth activist who bankrolled anti-immigration groups like CIS and FAIR after native American birthrates dropped below replacement.

But now CIS is falling down the same Alt Right pit that Tanton for years has denied courting!

One of the leaders of the “Alt Right,” which is the successor to the White Nationalist movement, which was the successor to the American Nazi movement, is National Policy Institute chairman Richard Spencer, based in Arlington, just like American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.

Spencer (who totally isn’t a skinhead, as he only shaves the sidesof his head), is hosting some speakers to promote his ideology, including VDARE founder Peter Brimelow, and VDARE contributor Kevin MacDonald. This is the pseudo-intellectual forefront of the alt-right, white-nationalist movement in America.

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CIS being reasonable and mainstream has every reason to distance itself from the likes of these. But no: they’re promoting the works of Brimelow and MacDonald, promoting VDARE links and MacDonald’s own writing. CIS wants you to read more of the alt right. CIS is allying with the alt right as part of its extremist anti-immigration ideology.

I’ve gotten criticism in the past for calling out groups like CIS and FAIR. Defenders have held onto CIS though, hoping that Mark Krikorian would keep the group from falling into crazytown. But he has failed. CIS would rather work with the alt right, than bend on their extremist policy of banning all immigration.

And therefore conservatives must stop pretending CIS and FAIR are groups we can work with, since the last thing we need is to poison our movement with the alt right.

The fat dope who posted that nonsense is a good example of the sort of people who infiltrate the organizations that are not “expressly right wing” and turn them into left wing organizations. His primary motivation is signalling his fidelity to the One True Faith by pointing at the nearest heretic and yelling “witch.”  Fatty was probably dressed as a vagina down at the Women’s Waddle in Washington. That’s because “principled conservatism” means locking arms with liberals to oppose Trump.

Anyway, you see all the cons used by social justice warriors in that post. There’s guilt by association, the use of the transitive property to link the targeted enemy to some imagined evil and, of course, the demand that the target abandon their position or face being branded a heretic. In this case, it means the very sensible and respectable Mark Krikorian must denounce people he does not know or he and his issues are ruled out of bounds for decent people. Fatty does not have an argument to make. He just wants to curry favor with his fellow lunatics by accusing someone of heresy.

Like all of the sites in the cuck-o-sphere, Red State has seen its traffic collapse over the last year. That’s because they were never expressly conservative. They were always just to the right of the Official Left. As progressives rocketed off into identity politics, all of these guys tagged along behind them, convinced that being a little less enthusiastic for the latest liberal fads was enough to make them “conservative” and keep the good times rolling. As a result, they claim anyone not falling for their act is a Nazi.

Red State becoming Pink State is no surprise as it was never expressly right wing, rather it was just a marketing vehicle for the people who started it. All of them have moved on as the enterprise served its purpose. Now it is being overrun by rotund rodents like Neil Stevens, launching purity campaigns against everyone to their right. It’s a good lesson for those inclined to support the emerging voices out of the Dissident Right. Not all of them are in it for the right reasons so taking any of them at face value is not a good idea.