Saturday, October 15, 2016

American Interest / Unz Review / VDare - Steve Sailer - How California Became the Intellectual Capital of Trump’s GOP - Trumpism has laid waste the establishment GOP’s defenses, and has done so overwhelmingly through the force of populist media





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California’s late 20th-century political history helps explain its outsized role in the pro-Trump intellectual right. Heresies tend to thrive on the periphery of a regime rather than in the halls of power. … Since William F. Buckley’s rise to prominence, the intellectual capital of the American right has lain along the Washington-New York axis, home to a sprawling complex of journals and think tanks that define and develop conservative orthodoxy. …
Unlike these earlier heresies, Trumpism has thoroughly laid waste to the establishment GOP’s defenses, and it has done so overwhelmingly through the force of populist media, like Twitter, Facebook, talk radio, Fox News, and lowbrow blogs. Support for the Republican nominee among the legions of credentialed writers and scholars in the capital of right-wing intelligentsia is sparse (though not nonexistent).
And Trumpism certainly has no institutional base in posh Washington think tanks or erudite New York City editorial boards.
Over the course of this tumultuous election year, however, a Trump-friendly intellectual base has come into focus—far from the Atlantic Coast, in a territory so thoroughly in the grips of liberal politics that it might be said to be seceding from the Washington-New York conservative empire altogether: the State of California. ...

     The usual excellent job by Steve Sailer. Of course, in the original article, where the comparisons with the heresies of early Christendom totally break down is that at that time European ethnics all across the West were not being systematically demographically erased. So this would be something like trying to explain the solar system while giving only passing mention to gravity.