So the latest attack on the right from an important liberal publication comes from Britain, the place where the locals most slavishly imitate everything American Progs come up with, including the woke madness. I usually ignore these things, since there's nothing else to do. But this time, everyone involved is a person or organization I'm working with, so I'm honor-bound to stand up & be counted with my political friends. (Except the politicians mentioned, primarily Gov. De Santis, an admirable man, but not someone I've ever met or have anything to do with.)
The primary target is Mark Granza, the founder & editor of IM-1776, one of the indispensable publications of the period of Covid despotism, with all the censorship & propaganda that entailed. I was there at the founding, I've been advising Mark whenever he has had need of advice, & I'm confident that it's an even more influential & important publication now than it was when it was a lone dissenting voice. His crimes, according to The Guardian, are especially things like support for the president of El Salvador Nayib Bukele, for his violation of human rights! This is, of course, typical of liberalism in our time, looking at a democratically-elected guy who helped save his country from horrible violence & finding no compassion for the civilians raped, murdered, & terrorized by organized crime, but only for the people getting arrested. There are more intelligent ways of dealing with politics. Read Ben Braddock in IM1776 on Bukele.
So much for politicians; on the more intellectual side of politics, Mark is accused of promoting the work of Renaud Camus, a French writer now infamous, everywhere from The Guardian to Wikipedia, as a far-right conspiracy theorist. In reality, Camus is a gay socialist '68 student; when there was a left, he was on the left. Not my kind of guy. But he did come up with an observation, the Great Replacement, the vast transformation of European & American demographics that has been happening since the ‘60s, through immigration from what used to be called the Third World (I think liberals now prefer the moniker Global South). Now that France is a country where Muslim immigrants, mostly from Africa, riot regularly & the elites do their best to hide, minimize, & condone the crimes, Camus has been redefined as a figure of the right. This is madness & it is in bad taste... You can read a Braddock interview with him too in IM1776.
(Mark is also accused of applauding Gabriele D'Annunzio, who's called a proto-fascist. This is quite contemptible: The Vate was the most impressive dramatist in the early Italian kingdom, perhaps a rival to the musician Verdi, another famous nationalist, he became a national hero later, & was also a decadent or libertine. He lived long enough to see Mussolini, indeed he died in 1938, & he did not join Fascism. Moreover, if everyone at the Guardian were assigned some of D'Annunzio's writing as mandatory reading, maybe they'd become better writers & possibly even achieve some poetic awakening...)
It's a certain sign of success that Mark is now facing such attacks. It is harder & harder for prestigious liberal publications to ignore the success of right-wing writers. Obviously, they could hire better writers & rethink what magazines can do, bring back old ideas or come up with new ones, but all that would require a preference for talent over silly moralism, so it's not going to happen. If there's one thing that surprises me about the rather pathetic attack pieces liberals or Progressives come up with is that they're not screaming their heads off that most of us rightwing writers are men, whereas publishing & publications on the liberal-left side are dominated by women. It's usually the subtext, but rarely the theme, say, anti-feminism. If anyone among our adversaries reads PoMoCon, you're welcome to the idea, indeed, ask me for an interview, we'll give you a great story &, for once, one true to the facts…
The most important part of the attack is directed at Chris Rufo. The Guardian says, Rufo complains about our “guilt by association” tactics, well, here's an association he actually declares. Smoking gun! Well yes, we, all know each other & we all work together. It's not even shocking that The Guardian's readers finally discover all our doings: Everything is public, the X spaces where we talked about Rufo's book (I reviewed it here), the manifesto Rufo wrote for IM1776 (it's wonderful, read it), or the Logos Fellowship where we all taught together & mentored young journalists, activists, &c. None of this is done in hiding! None of us are worried. Mark is getting great publicity out of this attack piece. If The Guardian editors had the brains & manners, Mark would have gladly talked to them, despite, or because, of the political dispute. Or such editors could ask to join us at our IM1776-Chris Rufo event in March in NYC. Yet they don’t. Well, prestigious liberals are almost impossible to teach; they’re learning very slowly that they cannot ignore writers on the right, & next they will learn they're in no position to censor or destroy our reputations, so they might as well try to ruin us with respectability. This is what smart oligarchs do—but our gynaikocracy lacks female cunning…
It’s essential to writers on the right that we are can act publicly; it’s a new development that scandal brings popularity, prestige, or both. Because of Elon Musk, it’s possible to succeed through some kind of activism on X. Hard to say whether that will last. The last decade or so has seen a major change in the opinions of young men & those who, then young, are now middle-aged. It’s a remarkable attempt to figure out extra-institutional paths to success, at every step depending on the ever worsening mistakes of our elites, who mix cruelties with confused inaction in a way that’s not hard to exploit to one’s advantage. But everything about this conflict suggests to me that the next decade will be uglier than the previous. The ongoing attacks from the precincts of elite opinion are in a strange way dangerous, because they are helping to form opinion about this unfolding conflict, though the intelligent people on all sides notice how clueless these attacks are.
Let me leave you with some words of hope. Before Rufo became a political actor of importance, indeed, before he was born, The (once Manchester, but long since globalized) Guardian was a paper of importance, indeed it goes back centuries. I can’t name any worthy writers it publishes in our time, but then liberalism has mostly smothered good writers & Progressives try to destroy their careers, so it’s not such a surprise. But once upon a time, when the English had impressive writers, the Manchester Guardian published the young Malcolm Muggeridge’s reports from Moscow, while most of the British press was trying to suppress news of the evils of Communism—like the American press, come to think of it. So things have changed much for the worse, but they could change for the better, which should cheer us up. The Guardian could collapse into irrelevance!
& some advice: Look carefully at Rufo, you’ll notice he’s wearing a fine blue suit. Do likewise!
And, the mere fact of the tie is more of a statement than the quality of the suit.
See Phillippe Beneton, Equality by Default.
Quite an enjoyable and informative piece, Titus. Merci beaucoup. I too wanted to say something about the Rufo suit, but Carl beat me to it - and quoting Bénéton to boot! So glad to see that Carl remembered his Equality by Default! It's a really good book (the original version; the updated one didn't work). Two things: I'm putting together a "French collection," a collection of my French work; and I recently purchased two tweed three-piece suits. Rufo has nothing on me! (Well, maybe many things on me ... .) Anyway, very intelligent and a moderately spirited piece by our friend, Titus.