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Matt and Sam bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement, discussing two recent and related articles in the New York Times. The first: Sam’s profile of Arizona GOP senate nominee Blake Masters, who, like J.D. Vance, is bankrolled by his former employer and mentor, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. And second: an in-depth look at the Claremont Institute by Elizabeth Zerofsky, whose excellent reporting gives the boys an opportunity to refine their thoughts on the West Coast Straussian legacy of Harry Jaffa.
It’s KYE classico. Enjoy.
Cited:
Adler-Bell, “The Violent Fantasies of Blake Masters,” NYTimes, Aug 3, 2022.
Adler-Bell, “The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right,” The New Republic, Dec 2, 2021.
Elizabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” NYTimes Magazine, Aug 3, 2022.
Marc Fisher & Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute triumphed in the Trump years. Then came Jan. 6.” Washington Post, Jul 30, 2022.
Glenn Ellmers, “‘Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough,” The American Mind, Mar 24, 2021.
Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t)right?” Claremont Review of Books, Summer 2019
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, U Chicago Press, 1982.
Harry V. Jaffa, A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War, Roman & Littlefield, 2000.
David Tucker "Why Did Harry Jaffa Change His Mind?" Law and Liberty, Jul 3, 2019.
For more on Claremont/Jaffa/Strauss:
KYE: "Midnight in the Garden of American Heroes" Feb 2021.
KYE: The Long Farewell to Majority Rule (w/ Joshua Tait), May 2021.
I want to ask one more question about masters, one of the ads of his you describe, he ends up out in the desert with a rifle and he says this isn't for hunting, this is for killing people, right? Yeah. This is a thing within the GOP now that I actually find extremely disturbing, which is the use of guns in political ads and photos, you know, like the Christmas photos with like, you know, you're five kids all holding AR15 or whatever or one as a pistol, one as an AR. What's so disturbing to me about it is maybe that I am just revealing myself as a shit lib here, some hopelessly normie, whatever, but I really do feel like in a important way, you can determine how to organize a society and make decisions about what to do via politics or via like war and killing each other. Yeah. But obviously politics can mask violence or submerge it or whatever, you know, I'm not trying to deny those critiques, but I feel like the importation of guns that are explicitly named by candidates to kill people, putting that explicitly into the political discourse, it's just, it's one of the things that alarms me the most. One of the things that I was really struck by with masters, which is different from this kind of classic thing of the Republican candidate with all this family holding guns, because those pictures are really silly, you know what I mean? They're scary when you think about the implications, but they're silly, you see the toddler holding it like an AR15 and they're all wearing matching pajamas and it's like, it's kitsch, right? It's kitsch. And one of the things that I think masters has done as a real like aesthetic innovation is like, there's no kitsch, it's not going to be funny, it's not going to be campy, it's not Trump up there dancing to YMCA, it's masters in a desert holding a gun and saying like, this isn't for hunting, this is for killing people, and then the music in the background is this like pulsing strings that's just like menacing on purpose. And I think that that plausible deniability of like, this is a silly American thing, you know, like when Europeans see those pictures and they're like, what is wrong with this culture where they have kids and pajamas holding guns, you can still smirk at it. What masters has tried to do is like, make it so you can't smirk at what he's doing. There's no plausible deniability, I'm not using this gun to hunt. I'm going to use it to kill people if my family is in danger. You have no choice with Blake Masters to take him both literally and seriously. ♪ Freedom's got it ♪
Matt and Sam bring you the latest from the “caesarist” wing of the conservative movement: including a new piece on the Claremont Institute and Sam's profile of Blake Masters. Subscribe on patreon.com/knowyourenemy to hear the rest.
