Last week, two prominent intellectuals in the conservative movement, Hugh Hewitt and Jonah Goldberg, took to talk radio to grapple with “the alt right.” Who are they? For what does their faction stand? What should conservatives do about them?
“The one thing they all agree on,” Jonah Goldberg argued, “is that we need to organize this society on the assumption that white people are genetically superior, or that white culture is inherently superior, and that we should have either state-imposed or culturally-imposed segregation between the races, no race mixing with the lower brown people. And I take them at their word, that that’s the stuff that they believe. And I think rather than poisoning or blurring that distinction, we should take them at their word and say we want nothing to do with any of that.”
Hugh Hewitt agreed that a faction like that exists, and that they should be shorn from the conservative movement. But he added that while the core of the faction is racist, there are other people who have taken to describing themselves as “alt-right” without knowing what it means, and who want nothing to do with a racist project. He urged that in the process of exiling racists from the right, care should be taken to avoid folks who say they’re on the alt-right but reject that abhorrent agenda.
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