Waiter, There's a Fly In My Fly Soup

Once again, a “respectable” “conservative” “gadfly” has been unmasked as a writer for white-nationalist/alt-right sites. John Ganz, a writer who is somehow even more interesting than he is irascible, has written a good rundown of the overall story and I don’t have a ton to add to his analysis. I do want to meander a little bit about what it is that centrists seem to find appealing about these guys, why they keep looking for the “good” alt-right-adjacent-intellectual who will never let them down.

If someone discovered — after centuries of failed results from this hypothesis — irrefutable evidence of blood quanta, or perhaps some other sort of particle (a tiny, isolable “meme” in the old Dawkinsian sense; a mediocrity midichlorian; something else), that carried traits like low intelligence, impulsivity, brutality and cowardice, sex-obsession, an incapacity for anything but physical work (coupled with work-shy-ness, of course), etc., from person to person, and that these quanta were passed on not through familial inheritance or anything as precise as “ethnicity” but actually by “race,” that ethnically remote people from far-separated regions of Africa somehow became particle-attractors and particle-swappers with each other upon their forced removal to America: if someone found these particles and traced their movements, who would be happiest? Who would be most relieved?

It wouldn’t be conservatives.