Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

by Elizabeth Sandifer

While the fascination with who to blame is wholly uninteresting (and the answer of “the Jews” idiotic), the underlying pathology has potential. It suggests a weakness in white culture so deeply embedded as to be functionally inseparable from its basic nature. This forces us to consider white culture as a set of perpetual ruins—as something that has always been lost, and that can only be apprehended as a tenuous and incomplete reconstruction. But more to the point, it resolves one of the fundamental idiocies of white nationalism. Obviously just one; anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are just as disqualifyingly idiotic as scientific racism, after all. But it’s hard not to admit that anti-Semitism is a more complex sort of moronic racism than “black people are inherently unintelligent and were better off as farm equipment.”