Against Muzzling the Right

Imagine a young man in a small, midwestern U.S. college town, 22-years-old, raised on ‘talk-radio conservatism,’ who opens his phone one evening and discovers that the people who spent his entire childhood promising to defend him now spend their days denouncing him as literally ‘Hitler’ because he laughed at the wrong meme. That young man is not a hypothetical. He is legion. And he is the reason the American—and, to a lesser extent perhaps, European—Right is convulsed once again by what the commentariat breathlessly calls its “final crack-up.”

We have heard the funeral bells before. Every decade or so, someone on our side discovers a heretic whose very existence is said to threaten the entire edifice of ‘respectable conservatism.’ The ritual is always the same: outrage, disavowal, excommunication, followed by triumphant declarations that the conservative movement has been saved by anathematizing the offender. And then the movement limps on, without having learned a thing.

Joseph Sobran was dismissed from National Review (then edited by John O’Sullivan) in 1993 for the crime of commenting on alleged foreign policy patterns that polite company preferred to ignore (editor-at-large William F. Buckley Jr. called his writings “contextually anti-Semitic”). John Derbyshire was ‘disappeared’ from the same magazine in 2012 for writing a column about race and crime that was, whatever its flaws, calmer and more evidence-based than what now passes for casual conversation on certain corners of Telegram. (Today, Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, continues similar analyses, arguing that the high rates of black crime compared to white crime are due to a total breakdown of the family structure, rather than systemic police racism.) Taki Theodoracopulos—long-time contributor at The Spectator in the UK—has spent years as a pariah by the same people who once happily socialized with him or cashed his checks. In Britain, Roger Scruton was sacked as a government housing adviser in 2019 after a journalist at The New Statesman deliberately misrepresented his remarks on Soros and Chinese influence; only a public outcry forced a humiliating reversal. In France, Éric Zemmour has been fined, sued, and condemned by half the French Right for saying out loud what millions whisper in private. Each of these public ‘excommunications’ was meant to be the solution to what observers considered a toxin that required immediate purging. But I believe each ‘purge’ left the conservative movement weaker—and the underlying disease untouched.