The Other Elephant in the Room:
Ben Shapiro & the Ace of Spades Diss the Alt-Right
Spencer J. Quinn
1,340 words
Sometimes I am amazed at how smart people can ignore obvious answers to a problem and instead struggle mightily with convoluted ones. Recently, pundit and activist Ben Shapiro (who is no friend of the Alt-Right) joined conservative blogger The Ace of Spades on his podcast to discuss Donald Trump. You can listen to the podcast here.
Ace opened with the question: “Are we on team Hillary?”
This, of course, is a reference of Mr. Shapiro’s vocal opposition to Mr. Trump and his steadfast adherence to the #NeverTrump movement. If we don’t back the GOP candidate, according to Ace, aren’t we just helping the opposition? The remainder of the discussion consisted mostly of Mr. Shapiro trying to explain to Ace his anti-Trump stance.
And it’s ridiculous.
Mr. Shapiro essentially fears that Mr. Trump will “shift traditional American conservatism to European style populism” which will derail the GOP for the next twenty years. He points to Mr. Trump’s isolationism, his liberal tendencies towards trade, his lack of consistency on certain policy matters, his totalitarian nature, and his constant desire to cut deals and concludes that Mr. Trump would be little better than a Democrat who will later be used as a weapon against the GOP once he fails miserably as President. He also referred to Mr. Trump as a “human pile of filth.”
On the other hand, Mr. Shapiro predicted that if Mr. Trump loses in November, the GOP will be given the golden opportunity to find its conservative soul and be born again.
I find it astonishing that neither of these guys recognized this for the gobbledygook that it is.
First, they didn’t delve into why Mr. Trump has so much appeal. It was almost as if it were beneath them to even ask. Of course, we all know why. Three of Mr. Trump’s main promises (the wall, deportation of illegals, and halting Islamic immigration) are the starting points to getting America back on track to a 90-to-95 percent white majority. The majority of Trump supporters see their country slipping into the Third World and want to stop it before it’s too late. These people quite naturally prefer not to be racial minorities in their own countries. No mystery there. Mr. Trump is the only candidate willing to openly court this powerful and overlooked electorate.
Rather than talk about Trump’s appeal, Ace and Mr. Shapiro preferred to discuss foreign policy, Supreme Court judges, government growth, and the current murky state of conservative ideology . . . as if Trump supporters would care about such things. Of course, they do care, but not nearly as much as they care about Mr. Trump’s top three promises. Unlike these two podcast pundits, Trump supporters understand that any of President Trump’s policy errors short of pushing the button will be reversible. Demographic changes, on the other hand, are not reversible without large amounts of bloodshed.
As racial as the support of and opposition to Mr. Trump is, the Ace of Spades and Mr. Shapiro barely talked about race at all.
Second, neither guy explained how the GOP could be born again after a Trump loss . . . especially if President Hillary offers amnesty to 10-20 million illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom we know will vote Democrat. Maybe the GOP will find its conservative soul in four years. But what good would that do with the White House permanently beyond their grasp?
Third, they engaged in obscurantist sophistry, as if this has any bearing on anything. Ace spent some time wondering why there wasn’t a coherent conservative ideology outside the NRO offices and why the NRO ideologies weren’t more popular with the electorate.
Meanwhile, Mr. Shapiro served up this astonishingly egg-headed lament:
Number one, what is the purpose of winning victory? And number two, how do you achieve it. I think as a party and as a group of people we’ve reversed the questions now. We’re so used to losing that we’ve now gone to Question One: how do we win? And then Question Two: what is the purpose of winning? And if Question One is answered, we don’t give a crap what the answer to Question Two is.
Um, so what? What good is pontificating on the purpose of winning if you don’t win? Isn’t that, like, putting the cart before the horse? Isn’t winning the very point of politics? Anyway, Question One hasn’t been answered yet, so how does Mr. Shapiro know that Trump supporters will stop caring about Question Two?
Finally, Ace and Mr. Shapiro almost completely blow off the Alt-Right. The one group of people who understand the entirety of the problem and offer workable solutions, and these two professional pundits refuse to even give us a seat at the table. At one point, Mr. Shapiro offhandedly dismissed us as a “sh*tshow.”
Where Ace started to grope in the Alt-Right’s direction by painting Mr. Trump as a possible bulwark against “a powerful racist coalition on the left,” Mr. Shapiro would have none of it. He flatly declared that white nationalism as a response to racial tribalism on the left would be immoral.
And this points to the other elephant in the room: Race. Neither guy wanted to discuss it. If they did, they would be forced to discuss ugly topics such as IQ differences and crime statistics and reproduction rates and then be forced to reach the same race-realist conclusions the Alt-Right has. Instead, they opted for highbrow angst over Mr. Trump like a couple of bookish wallflowers fretting over why he isn’t asking them out on a date.
In Mr. Shapiro’s case, the answer is fairly straightforward. He’s Jewish and is made uncomfortable by the anti-Semitism on the Alt-Right. Fair enough. But he should realize that the Anti-Semitism coming from the left, especially if President Hillary gets her way and increases the flow of Muslim “refugees” into this country, will be far worse. In the next fifty years, American Jews would be better to cut a deal with the Alt-Right and others willing to fight to keep America white than be forced to choose between living in a Mexifornian barrio, a crime-ridden black slum, or a New-World caliphate. Without racially conscious whites with the will and wherewithal to resist the “browning” of America, this is the direction in which we are inexorably headed.
In a broader sense, I believe that both Ace and Mr. Shapiro are loath to embrace the Alt-Right because the Alt-Right is a wartime movement. This is not the same to say we are violent. We are not, of course. But, in a figurative sense, we already have our swords drawn. We know there will be another civil war here in America. It could be in our lifetime. Definitely in our children’s. And it will be primarily about race, just like the last one was.
Samuel Huntington describes this in his classic work The Clash of Civilizations. Non-white civilizations attempt to solve the problem of Western modernity by accepting the latter but rejecting the former. According to Huntington, this is especially the case with Muslims. So what would America look like in thirty years when whites are a racial minority and surrounded by nonwhites who are fully modernized but despise the Western traditions?
Pretty scary, huh?
No wonder people avoid thinking about the Alt-Right and would rather prattle on about taxes and unemployment and government spending and conservative ideology as if America is going to remain white forever. To do anything is to seriously contemplate war. And war is hell.
But sometimes, tragically, war is the only solution.
Remember that scene in The Godfather when Michael kept Tom Hagan out of his business dealings in Las Vegas? When Tom asked him why, Michael responded that the Corleone family was going to war and that Tom wasn’t a wartime consigliere.
Well, the Alt-Right is currently white America’s wartime consigliere. We just need to convince our people that war is coming. And the longer we wait to draw swords, the harder it will be for us to ultimately win.
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19 comments
Nice article Mr. Quinn,
I do take issue with the following quotation, however.
“We know there will be another civil war here in America. It could be in our lifetime. Definitely in our children’s. And it will be primarily about race, just like the last one was.”
Tom DiLorenzo, Murray Rothbard and others claim the the War Between the States was primarily about the tariff, not about race and slavery. Their arguments are very powerful.
DiLorenzo’s works are shallow and nearly useless. The Civil War was fundamentally about slavery and its extension beyond the existing slave states. Any other issues, such as tariffs, were clearly secondary. The Democrat party did not split in 1860 over tariff policy. The revulsion of the South for the Republicans led them to be labeled as Black Republicans not Tariff Republicans.
I agree with PlatoX616. None other than former VP John Calhoun believed that the strife between north and south was mainly over slavery. Sure, there were other elements, such as the tariff of abominations and other regional disputes. But those alone wouldn’t have been enough for the South to address the issue with arms. In the main, they felt that Lincoln and the Republicans were a threat to their way of life, and they knew they didn’t have the numbers to protect themselves at the ballot box. The Republicans had been formed as a party to stop the spread of slavery, and the South knew that with Republican control in Washington, it was only a matter of time before slavery would be abolished (even though Lincoln himself was not a ‘radical’ Republican per se).
Shapiro’s trump objections can be summed up in a handful of words – It’s not good for the Jews
Jews made this mess under the guise of being White, just like they did in Rhodesia, just like they did in South Africa. There will be no alliance. There will be no going back.
No matter the outcome.
I’m bundling this article along with Lawrence Murray’s review of Waking up from the American Dream and Greg Johnson’s ‘Relevance of the Old Right’, and sending them to all the conservative fence-sitters I know. They’re a perfect outline of where we are as a nation, what we need to do, and why we can’t wait another election cycle to fight back.
Thank you, Claude!
Great article. I’ll note that I’m seeing more open mention of civil war (and race war) in discussions on the Alt-Right. It won’t be long before it moves into the mainstream.
Thank you, LBF!
This was an excellent article. I look forward to the future with the help of writing like this.
Thanks for reading, Joe!
Is there any wonder that Ben Shapiro said all he said? I remember an old eastern proverb: A dog’s mouth doesn’t sport ivories. He is a Jew. His tribe has always been disingenuous, and has always wanted out destruction. Period.
I guarantee Ace has thought about race in America. Last summer, Ace’s coblogger Gabriel Malor attacked anyone who wanted to close the southern border as a “racist”. Ace defended him half-heartedly, perhaps merely reflexively. Hateful Heretic responded to Ace with a post at TRS that I saw described on /pol/ as “if he shot any straighter he would defy gravity”.
Ace knows the USA will go irredeemably to shit with unlimited 3rd world immigration. He knows that Latin Americans vote for socialism there and do so here. But he cannot abide by losing his status (and income) by agreeing with the Alt-Right. He’s trying to play the safe middle between us and #NeverTrump and failing. Most of his cobloggers have quit due to his unwillingness to call Trump the devil. He’s in quite the pickle. His readership are mainly Baby Boomers and even some of them get it. I hope he jumps off his safe perch.
Yes, Ace will have to not be afraid of being called a racist or anti-Semite or extremist before joining the Alt-Right. Trump is really confusing him, though. He dislikes Trump for his personal failings, but despises Hillary for, well, everything about her. He doesn’t want to support Trump, but with Hillary being far worse, he has to. Further, every time the left gets violent or engages in racism against whites, Ace speaks out. He does this, seemingly not out of racial solidarity but because he still adheres to the egalitarian ideal of a non-racist society.
I hope he comes to our side soon.
I had no idea about Gabe Malor quitting. I knew he was one of Ace’s squishier co-bloggers, though.
John Ekdahl and Malor have been MIA for months. Not sure they officially broke ties with Ace , but neither has been on the podcast since January or so; nor have I seen blog posts from either.
I recall Ace having a brief dalliance with supporting Trump late last year….mainly to poke the establishment in the eye it appeared, and perhaps to test the waters with his peers. Malor and Ekdahl got quite butthurt about it. Gabe supports 100% of GOPe’s graft/scams/cucking in what appears to be a mission to become the GOP’s gay mascot. Ekdahl has a serious case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that he was never able to articulate beyond, “I grew up in Jersey. I’ve always hated him.” He would get emotional and girly like a leftist, but apparently didn’t feel that articulating his actual concerns would be rhetorically effective.
Drew still appears from time to time I think.
I have respect/affection for Ace. He’s been far more honest than most of the traditional right blogosphere, even about his own shortcomings/weaknesses/prejudices. He clearly despises GOPe (e.g. – “These people only use their political capital to get their policy preferences (TPP/amnesty/H1B, etc), and give the voters zero. How long do they expect the voters to go along with that before revolting?”). For Ace I think it comes down to money – if he went Alt-Right he might not be able to support himself.
Thanks for the recent background on Ace. I have been reading his blog for more than 10 years – but read him less these days. It’s been interesting to see him move from Republican Renegade to irrelevancy mainly due to Trump.
Another interesting blog is Protein Wisdom. Jeff Goldstein (despite his stance as an “Outlaw!!” – ie hater of the mainstream GOP – over the years) has gone full on anti-Trump (3 guesses why). His blog has been hacked and he doesn’t seem to care having apparently given up on America itself.
It’s strange watching these guys who have been screaming for an alternative to the GOPe for years, oppose the alternative when it finally appears.
Interesting points, Pete and Victor. The alternative to the GOP that Ace had been pining for for so long was an *ideologically conservative* alternative. Like another Reagan. Ace’s trepidation about Trump, aside from Trump’s boorishness, ideological inconsistency, and overall lack of wonkishness, is the fact that Trump is not truly conservative in an economic or ideological way. Trump *is* conservative when it comes to race however, and unless Ace starts to really think in racial terms soon, he will never fully support Trump and be relevant to what’s going on in America today.
Money might be a big reason for this. Who knows?
A common enough theme among Republican pundits is that “Democrats are the real racists .” What the pundits appear to miss is that perhaps the real racism among Democrats is why the Left keeps on winning. That is, the Left sees politics as a race based struggle, while the Republicans are going on about economics.
Republican strategy appears to be something like this: “Let’s put a real conservative into office and he will then lower taxes, raise defense spending and balance the budget.” This strategy might make some sense in a country which was 90+% white, but in a multi-racial state? What happens is that the Left fights on the wider front of the cultural struggle, mobilizes assorted non-white racials, and gains control of institutions like academia, the media and increasingly the bureaucracy. The Left also creates street fighting organizations such as Black Lives Matter.
The result is akin to an insurgency. While Republicans may control the centers of power (e.g., Congress, the armed forces), the Democrats have the “countryside” (academia, the streets, etc.). This increasingly isolates the Republican maneuver space to a narrow range of issues. They can discuss tax cuts but not securing the borders or ending affirmative action. To do so is to be faced with massive resistance on the airwaves and in those streets. And as Leftist control of the “countryside” expands, conservative strongholds (like the armed forces) come under increasing siege, infiltration and then takeover.
Despite (or because of?) the obvious lessons of American politics since the mid-20th century, the Republican establishment does little to support conservative activism. I did my time in YAF and there was little in the way of funding, organization or support from that GOP Establishment. This was so even in the 1980s when liberalism was on the defensive and Reagan was popular. A concerted conservative activist offensive could easily have retaken the campuses, but no such offensive occurred, nor is it in the cards today. Why? From what I have seen, it’s because the GOP Establishment sees the activists as a threat to their own prestige and power within the party. Insofar as conservative street-campus activism was/is tolerated, it’s to get out the vote every election cycle and place more of the those real conservatives into office. Once GOP candidates are ensconced into their Beltway offices and gate communities, the activists on the front lines are left to fend off Leftist counterattacks on their own.
All this might have made some sense if Republican officeholders would actually do as they promise and reduce the size of government. They might start by cutting every affirmative action and “diversity” program, something which would not only reduce government but also undercut some of the primary recruiting and agitprop agencies of the Left. But a Ronald Reagan could cut not even abolish the federal Department of Education! His administration did declare its war on drugs which resulted in much of the Bill of Rights being scrapped, i.e., expanding the government.
Is American conservatism then a big con game? Or the sloganeering of a political class which is besieged by those Leftist insurgents?
This gets to one reason why Trump has gained much popularity. He at least gives the appearance of creating a wider activist movement, and his stated policy objectives do have a strong nationalist, if not racial, element. No wonder the GOP Establishment is in a panic!
Let me close this out by noting that even if Shapiro et alia dismiss the Alt-Right, the movement has obviously broken through to their consciousness. To put this in insurgent terms, the Alt-Right has become the Third Force in American politics. It needs to be taken to the next stage.
R_Moreland, That was one of the best summaries of American conservatism I have read in a while. Thank you.
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