Richard Hoste finds me out (Part V);
and why paleocons belittle the Muslim threat

Yesterday, I spoke half jokingly of “die Austerfrage,” the obsession that some on the paleo right have with me that is not unlike the anti-Semites’ obsession with the Jews. In some cases, however, it’s not a joke. In an entry at his blog, entitled “Auster’s Lies Continued,” Richard Hoste, a leading contributor at Richard Spencer’s Alternative right, says that my brief anecdote the other day about asking for Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad at a Barnes & Noble last Saturday and being told that it was not in stock, was made up by me out of thin air. He says that he thought my story was “bulls**t,” so he called the store, and was told that the book is in stock, and therefore he has found me out as a liar.

However, he also says:

Perhaps they had ordered the book and had it shipped in between the weekend and today (in other words, they had no plans to get it two days ago but have physical copies today), but probably not.

Indeed, since I complained to the clerk on Saturday afternoon about the store not carrying any copies, it is entirely likely that she did order some copies (which she said were at other B&N outlets), and that by Tuesday, when Hoste called the store, they had some in stock. But Hoste, having himself identified the probable and innocent explanation of the discrepancy between my story and his information, dismisses the explanation (“but probably not”) and goes on gleefully calling me a liar and a fraud.

In Hostean spirit, one of his commenters adds:

Didn’t Martin Luther have something to say about Jews and lies?

The incident is insignificant, except for what it shows about the mentality of the paleo and anti-Semitic right. Richard Spencer launched Alt-Right with the announced aim of creating a new conservative movement. Yet he chose as one of the principal contributors and editors, and also as the person who wrote the introductory article about the site’s mission, an individual so base and idiotic, particularly in his attempts to deny the Muslim threat, that it’s amazing he knows how to breathe. (For more on Hoste’s astounding stupidity, see this, this and this). Is Hoste the sort of material from which Spencer expects to build his grand new conservatism?

A reader writes:

Hoste is really going off the deep end recently. I used to respect him, but he’s really pushing the paleo-libertarian pro-Muslim viewpoint now. It’s sickening that they diminish the threat of a group who openly calls for the destruction of the West. And all to spite Jews.

The last statement is somewhat controversial, but note that all these paleos become “We Are The World” leftists when discussing Muslims. It’s not about interventionism or U.S. interests in the Middle East; they seek to belittle the Muslim threat and thereby portray Jews/Israel as paranoid. I don’t have a problem with the former argument, but the latter is not only grossly inaccurate, but it’s anti-conservative and dangerous.

LA replies:

This is a very cogent statement. Among other things, it suggests a similarity between the anti-Israel paleocons’ denial of the Islam threat on one side, and Holocaust denial on the other. Holocaust denial wasn’t just about denying the truth of the Nazi Holocaust; it was an assertion that the Jews had manufactured the biggest lie in history in order to gain power over white gentiles, and thus are unimaginably evil. As I discussed last year, leading Holocaust denier Mark Weber specifically admitted that his real aim in questioning the Holocaust was to discredit and destroy the “Jewish-Zionist power.” Similarly, the anti-Israel paleocons’ dismissal of the Islam threat amounts to saying that Israel and the Jews are manufacturing that threat in order to gain power over white gentiles. Good conservatives must therefore resist the Jewish lies about the Islam threat, since the only alternative, as the anti-Semites themselves constantly phrase it, is to “kneel down” to the Zionists. In both cases, the central aim is to wage war against what the anti-Semites and the anti-Israel paleocons think of as “the Jewish-Zionist power.” Everything they do is directed, not at upholding the two things they say they believe in, Western civilization and the white race that created it, but at fighting the Jewish power, which they see as the principal source of evil in the world.

In this connection, Scott McConnell’s and Patrick Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative published in 2003 an article saying that the modern image of the Muslim terrorist had been manufactured by Jewish neoconservatives. That magazine also also repeatedly charged—including in a cover article by Buchanan—that President Bush’s stated reasons for invading Iraq were a vast lie made up by Bush’s Jewish neocon puppet masters; the real reason was to defend Israel. In other words, the Jewish neocons had manufactured one of the biggest lies in history, in order to send white gentile boys, unbeknownst to themselves, to fight and die for the sake of Israel.

I argued recently that anti-Semitism is the ruling idea of the paleoconservative movement. What I’ve said in this comment provides another angle on that analysis.

LA continues:

So, to connect this back with the original subject, Hoste charges that I made up out of whole cloth the story about what happened in the Barnes & Noble. And why would I make it up? Because I want to make people believe that Islam is gaining power in America, and that this is shown by the liberals at B&N suppressing a book critical of Islam.

In the real world (according to Hoste), it’s not true that Islam is a threat, it’s not true that it’s gaining power, and it’s not true that liberals are denying and suppressing the dangerous facts about Islam. These are myths, advanced by Jews.

- end of initial entry -

Laura G. writes:

Two issues. First, it has come to me as an entirely new understanding that holocaust denial is NOT primarily aimed merely at the denial of a historical fact in order to minimize Jewish suffering, but rather to make the case that Jews maliciously crafted the story out of whole cloth as part of their plan to enslave the world. I had not ever before understood that holocaust denial was anything other than a pitiful denial of a historical event, possibly to avoid the consequences of needing to admit guilt by the perpetrators or their children. Now that you laid it out, I do see that it is so much more. So, thank you for the insight.

Second, I have always considered myself a paleocon from the stand point that I never had a leftist period of my life, so I started as a con, remained a con, and assumed therefore I was a paleocon. In contrast of course to neocons, who were recovered liberals, or at least temporarily recovered. As a Jewish “paleocon”, I am usually at some conflict with the majority of my co-religionists on many issues, and have always felt closest to fundamentalist Christians. They seem to be my soul-mates, and they are the people I most want to have for neighbors. In my taxonomic understanding of political groupings, I didn’t try to distinguish conservatives from paleoconservatives. Now, however, I realize that there seems to be a massive difference, in that there has been a morphing of “paleocons” into anti-Semites. I am not at all aware that this is a general trajectory for Conservatives, and certainly not to the strongest supporters of Jews, the Christian fundamentalists. The anti-Semitic pathway that paleocons is taking is very mysterious, and I frankly do not understand it at all except as a profound distortion of reality, i.e. a psychosis. However, it is not useful in general to medicalize group hatreds, and so that formulation is also very unsatisfactory. Thanks again.

LA replies:

The insight into the real purport of Holocaust denial came to me as a result of reading Mark Weber’s article last year. He was announcing his abandonment of Holocaust denial, which he said wasn’t true. But, he added, this was no loss, because the real purpose of Holocaust denial had been to weaken the “Jewish-Zionist power,” and in recent years better and more accepted ways of carrying on that war have come into existence, so Holocaust denial is not needed any more.

Paleoconservative does not mean “having been conservative from the start of one’s political life.” Such a definition would be devoid of any concrete meaning. Paleoconservatism is a specific ideology which came into existence and was named in the 1980s. Paleocons were reacting against the neocons. Against the neocons’ American universalism, they asserted American particularity; against the neocons’ acceptance of big government, they argued for the traditional constitutional order and localism. I considered myself a paleocon for a while, until I realized that they weren’t just against the unconstitutional expansion of the federal government over the course of the 20th century, they were against the entire United States as it’s been since 1865. Some of them were even against the entire United States as it’s been since 1789.

Daniel S. writes:

You wrote:

In the real world (according to Hoste), it’s not true that Islam is a threat, it’s not true that it’s gaining power, and it’s not true that liberals are denying and suppressing the dangerous facts about Islam. These are myths, advanced by Jews.

I only wish that “the Jews” were warning against the threat of Islam, but, despite the anti-Semitic delusions of Richard Hoste, the Jewish establishment in the West has been a stalwart supporter of Muslim immigration. Hoste is an dhimmi idiot and no friend of the West.

LA replies:

Well, some Jews—neocons, Israel supporters, Islam critics—are, more or less, warning about that threat, though obviously the majority of Jews are liberals and are not warning against it, a fact the paleocons always ignore.

LA writes:

To repeat what I said before, the anti-Semites and anti-Israel paleocons cannot acknowledge the Islam threat, because to do so would be, in their minds, to “kneel down to the Zionists.” To agree with the Jews would be to submit oneself to them, which would be unbearable. The paleocon mind at its core is entirely negative and reactive. And central to what it opposes is the Jews.

Posted June 12

D. in Seattle writes (June 10):

You said “the anti-Semites and anti-Israel paleocons cannot acknowledge the Islam threat, because to do so would be, in their minds, to “kneel down to the Zionists.””

People who think that acknowledging the Islam threat means becoming subservient to the Jews are either delusional, or willfully ignorant of history, or both. To demonstrate it, let’s make a thought experiment: what if the state of Israel had never been established? Or even more extreme, what if all the Jews perished in WW2? Does anyone seriously think even for a millisecond that today Islam would be any less inimical to anything outside it? If anyone believes this, they just demonstrate that they don’t understand anything about Islam.

Think of all the regions of the world where Jews are either non-existent or are such a tiny minority that their influence on society is zero. Think of sub-Saharan Africa, or the Balkans and the Caucasus, or southeast Asia (Thailand, Philippines), or India, or western China. All of those regions have had their problems with Islam for centuries without any assistance from “Zionist conspiracy.” The only way one can be unaware of this is to willfully ignore it in order to fit the conclusions one has accepted apriori, which is a lot like the Climategate—let’s just throw away the data that don’t fit the theory.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 09, 2010 07:54 PM | Send