Right Richter

Life of Kings?: The HL Mencken Club

I’ve got a hot story up on Campus Progress about the HL Mencken Club, where paleoconservatives hang out with eugenicists.

My favorite part:

And during last year’s meeting, World Net Daily columnist Ilana Mercer wondered aloud in her speech why South Africa’s apartheid government gave up power so easily—a troubling reading of history.

At that time, Mercer also touted her disturbing book about the end of apartheid, Into the Cannibal’s Pot; its cover is illustrated with a picture of a naked white woman, pulled into the fetal position and covered in black handprints.

Paleoconservatism is the most baffling thing, because they really aren’t joking around about either being racists or consorting with them. Whereas your average mainstream conservative is obsessed with having nothing to do with racism.

And yet, Pat Buchanan, the public face of paleocons, is a regular on MSNBC. 

On the topic of Pat Buchanan, it was great hearing Sean Hannity interview him on the radio. Buchanan’s latest anti-immigrant book seems to take a more pragmatic position for Republicans to oppose immigration, even the legal sort, rather than the usual line about Balkanization.

He’s saying that, since immigrants are generally poorer and more dependent on government, increased immigration always gives more power to Democrats. Buchanan’s solution is to put a moratorium on all immigration for a couple decades, until our current recent immigrants can make some money, making them natural Republicans.

Sean Hannity needed serious verbal acrobatics to square that with the movement “Hispanic values are Republican values.”

Hanging Out in the Liberty Treehouse

Glenn Beck’s an easy target, and not that useful of one, since his audience seems to be shrinking and was always overestimated. Still, I reviewed the first week of his online children’s show Liberty Treehouse for Campus Progress.

Here’s a taste:

When explaining the origin of Treehouse’s name (after a tree in Boston that became a popular meeting place during the American Revolution), Nair actually says, “uh-duhhh.” That’s just one clue that he, and the rest of the show’s staff, seem to be confused about the age of their audience.

The Bob Beckel Conundrum

I’m a fan of The Five, Fox News’s replacement for Glenn Beck, where a rotating cast of four conservatives (Dana Perino!) beat up on one liberal, political consultant Bob Beckel. But as much as I enjoy the show, I can’t figure out Beckel. He’s a new sort of Fox liberal that hasn’t been seen before. 

On one hand, Beckel (on the left in the picture) is a little like Alan Colmes. He’s noticeably goonier than his co-hosts, and he lets his co-hosts insult his weight. Beckel even calls into Sean Hannity’s radio show, where he gets similarly knocked around.  

But Beckel is much more combative than the punching bags he preceded. He complains that Fox nixes his topics and won’t talk about the Koch Brothers. It’s like he realizes the hopelessness of his situation, but is helpless to do anything about it. It’s a level of metacommentary you don’t normally see on Fox, or anywhere else, for that matter. 

So what’s Beckel up to, and what’s Fox News up to? I don’t have any answers, but I think this could get interesting.

Money Woes Delay Pamela Geller’s Freedom Flotilla

Someday?

Last June, “anti-jihad” bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer planned one of the oddest, most ambitious endeavors in recent conservative memory: the Freedom from Jihad Flotilla. 

Set up after the cancellation of a joint European-American anti-jihad conference in France (because police there wouldn’t guarantee their safety, according to Geller), the flotilla was meant to be the anti-jihad answer to the Gaza flotilla. It would launch from New York on September 11, 2011 “from the New York harbor closest to the World Trade Center site.” 

From there, Geller’s flotilla would travel to Greece, then skirt along the coast of Turkey, as a tribute to Greek and Armenian victims of the Ottoman Empire. Then it would then head to Egypt, where “all Coptic Christians seeking to escape Islamic oppression will be saved,” according to a press release. Then the flotilla would go on to Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Thailand.

September 11th came and went, and no flotilla. What happened?

The organizations behind the flotilla, Stop Islamization of America and Stop Islamization of Europe, are still raising money for it, according to Geller.

“It seems there is oodles of money for Jew hating Gaza flotillas but little for real victims of oppression and subjugation,” Geller wrote in an email to me. “Maybe you should write about that.”

It’s fair to ask whether the flotilla will ever launch. According to my very rough Google Map of its proposed route, it would cover over 28,000 miles. And that doesn’t even get into the more serious logistical questions, like how do you convince majority-Muslim countries to let the flotilla dock, and where do you take these Egyptian Copts once you rescue them? 

Previously: Pamela Geller, pioneer of Chris Christie’s “Islamist connections”.

James O’Keefe Asks for Help Paying Off Credit Card Debt

Not sure what to think of this, except I am really baffled by how he can get in so much debt but still manage to afford a top-flight GOP PR firm.

Republican Wunderkind Jonathan Krohn Says He Isn’t Conservative Anymore

Arlen Specter. Arianna Huffington. Jim Jeffords.

All Republicans who switched sides. Now add one more name to the list: Jonathan Krohn, the former CPAC princeling, now describes himself, not as a conservative or liberal, but as a freethinker (?).

Krohn, then 13, made his name on February 2009, with a speech at CPAC that went viral and features, in retrospect, a crazy Kermit the Frog impression. It had “I’m not a Republican, I’m conservative” talk, which was especially delicious at the time, since Republicans were still smarting from their 2008 loss. Fame and fortune followed, and he even got to hang out with Karl Rove.

And conservatives loved him! When his book, Defining Conservatism, was published, it was blurbed by Newt Gingrich and radio host Mike Gallagher. Bill Bennet called him “a force of nature”!

But the diamond has lost its luster.

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Bryan Fischer Suggests New Reason to Oppose Mitt Romney

Someday, I’ll write about how the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer is playing us all (and by “us all,” I mean Right Wing Watch) for fools, because he is actually a marginal conservative figure who can only increase his profile by saying things that are outside the conservative mainstream that liberals get angry at. The end game being that he leverages that outrage into more mainstream conservative prominence.

Anyway, here’s Bryan Fischer with a take I haven’t seen elsewhere on Mitt Romney. A lot of policy talk about Mitt Romney’s record focuses on “Romneycare,” but I haven’t seen anyone talk like Fischer about Romney’s record on gay marriage.

Fischer blames Romney for the spread of gay marriage across the country, based on a New York Times article from 2007. After the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage, Romney pushed for an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage. In the meantime, though, he told county clerks to start issuing gay marriage licenses, which seems in keeping with the court ruling. Fischer says this makes Romney “the man who kick-started the push to legalize sexually abnormal relationships at the state level.”

While Fischer is a fringe conservative figure even among the far right, it’ll be interesting to see how this Mitt Romney-gay thing develops.

Whoa! We’re on Disqus!

Thanks to hero reader Brendan, who pointed out how easy it was to get a commenting system set up, we now have Disqus comments at the end of each post.

In the past, I’ve been pretty loose with comments, and I intend to be the same here. Threats and insults directed at me are not only requested, they’re encouraged. But try to keep the same attitude towards conservatives that I try (and sometimes fail) to hold: most of them are great people.

Any crap like this will not be deleted, but it will make me and the ghost of Russ Feingold very sad:

Throughout the night, I eavesdrop on conversation after conversation, desperate to find some exchange that will redeem my home state. I do not want to write that, almost without exception, these people are terrible. Overconfident. Insistent. Ignorant and proud of it. I do not want to write that America, as a whole, would be better off without any of them.

Cool eliminationist rhetoric, bro!

I know it’s a digression, but hey, try not to do that.

James O’Keefe Pleads Poverty

James O’Keefe, right wing video prankster/artiste, has been fond of pleading poverty lately.But if his organization is so poor, how is it able to afford the services of one of Washington’s premier public relations outfits?

Yesterday on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Hannity and O’Keefe were talking about how O’Keefe made sure every recorded phone call was made in a one-party consent state. Hannity asked if O’Keefe had a legion of lawyers reviewing everything he did; O’Keefe said he wished, but his Project Veritas organization is so poor that they have to rely on pro bono help.

O’Keefe strikes a similar note on the website of his fake Muslim Brotherhood front group:

James O’Keefe might look like a million bucks, but he’s actually poorer than a squeegie man. But consider how much Project Veritas has accomplished and exposed so far in spite of O’Keefe’s woeful destitution: corruption at Planned Parenthood, ACORN, the Census, and the New Jersey teachers union, and now NPR.

This “squeegie man” approach works—since Veritas started the NPR sting roll-out, its donation page has raised more than $24,000.

But if his outfit really has this “let’s put on a show!” budget, why is he represented by Alexandria, Va. firm Shirley & Banister? The Project Veritas contact page refers interview requests to Kevin McVicker at Shirley & Banister, a PR company whose clients include conservative heavy-weights like:

• The Carmen Group
• The NRA
• The Heritage Foundation
• American Conservative Union
• The Manhattan Institute
• The National Taxpayers Union
• Club for Growth
• Citizens United
• Federalist Society

Who knows, maybe Shirley & Banister is loaning their top-rate PR talents to O’Keefe out of the kindness of their hearts, or just to help out conservatives. But it’s strange to hear O’Keefe begging for help on the radio when he is able to employ one of conservative Washington’s top firms.

Columnist Loves Rudy Giuliani, Gives Awesome Cabinet List

Ah, Renew America. You’re stuck in an uncomfortable place between World Net Daily and Townhall on the crazy/respectability spectrum, so you dabble in birthers and vaccine people, but won’t go whole hog. Make up your mind!

That’s a topic for another day, but what isn’t is RA columnist Joan Swirsky’s column on Rudy Giuliani: “Guts & gonads make Rudy the only choice in 2012”. This column struck my eye because it is literally the first time I’ve seen a conservative root for Rudy Giuliani in 2012. But it’s also a useful Rosetta Stone to how Swirsky, and surely at least some other marginal conservative thinkers, see various Republican figures. There’s even Chris Christie Islamist talk.

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