Grateful for your work. But I think you are still overestimating the desirability of having a Michael Anton or Gladden Pappin teaching in the humanities. That’s a lot of misogyny and Francoism to stomach just to get people to do close readings of Xenophon.
Donald Trump, and his second administration, has made the work of Anton and the Claremont crowd impossible. Everything Trump says is a lie. And everything he does is mean, spirited, vindictive, or corruptly self-serving. How can they defend him?
Thank you for this. I can only imagine how hard it must be to be interacting in this world of fury. I have respect for you writing your book Furious Minds. It is an incredible source to understand what is happening now in the US came from. You write in this post "Anton’s claim that I stand against half the country is nonsense." that is nonsense, but I feel they do exactly that. They, in this regard are the people who agree with what is being done by this current US regime. These people do not take criticism very well. They are the ultimate victim, even in victory. That alone proves to me that they are wrong in their view of the real world.
Does Anton not hate half the country? Trump very clearly does, and JD too. ("Our people hate the right people.") At a minimum, Anton is unwilling to make a serious attempt to understand half the country, possibly because he thinks they are "not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term”
Well done and measured, considering. I'm glad you acknowledged that Anton's review casts at least a bit of doubt on your insistence that these folks aren't evil and foolish. If I had one criticism of Furious Minds, it was that you maybe laid that on pretty thick for professionalism's sake. Anton is a hit dog, hollering. And every accusation, a confession or ambition, as the receipts show.
Thank you for this response. I’m persuaded by your critique of Anton, especially because his review seems to enact the very habit your book describes: he cannot distinguish criticism from persecution.
I am also sympathetic to your Athena metaphor and to the idea of “maximal accommodation.” Liberal institutions should be able to tolerate alien and even offensive worldviews. The New Right raises real questions about managerialism, institutional decay, local life, market domination, and the limits of liberal individualism.
But the invitation to engage is not symmetrical.
For a native-born white Christian, these arguments can remain an intellectual debate about how the country should be governed. For an immigrant, a non-Christian, or someone outside the imagined ethnocultural core, the debate is often about whether one fully belongs to the country at all.
That is why rhetoric about America being a “white Christian nation” is not merely a cultural preference. Even without camps, deportations, or formal disenfranchisement, it creates a hierarchy of belonging: some citizens embody the nation, while others merely live inside it.
The crucial distinction is between losing dominance and losing rights. White Christians are not being excluded from American life. They are being required to share cultural and political authorship with people who were once peripheral. Yet the New Right often describes this loss of monopoly as persecution, replacement, invasion, or extinction.
That reversal is politically powerful. Once demographic change is framed as an intentional attack, coercion can be described as self-defense. Exclusion becomes restoration. “Remigration” becomes national survival. Religious privilege becomes moral order. The rhetoric prepares the conscience before the policy arrives.
This does not mean every New Right thinker secretly intends ethnic cleansing. But replacement rhetoric creates the moral grammar through which large-scale coercion can later appear defensive rather than aggressive.
There is an old American pattern here: settlers advanced into Indigenous lands, resistance was detached from the dispossession that produced it, and further conquest was narrated as protection from attack. We keep advancing, yet somehow we are always the ones being invaded.
Perhaps Athena’s accommodation therefore requires reciprocity. The Furies may have a place in the city, but only if they accept that the city belongs equally to people outside their bloodline, religion, and historical identity.
The response from immigrants and minorities is not necessarily anti-white or anti-Christian. It is much simpler:
We are here. We are not going anywhere. We do not hate you. But you must stop describing our presence as your extinction and your loss of dominance as your persecution.
The New Right should have a place in the city. But it must accept that the rest of us are not guests inside its city. We are citizens and co-authors of it.
"Still, to call the New Right out for their naivete and recklessness is not the same as announcing that they will be the ones standing at the gas chamber doors."
Won't they? Those photos of Kristi Noem touring CECOT weren't the work of underground journalists. They were produced and published as propaganda by the administration in the (correct) assumption that rightists would love it. Just like they love the videos of ICE beating people, or the tweets celebrating a future where 100 million people have been "deported". You don't need some dark inferences or convoluted reasoning to see the Third Reich in the "New" Right. You just have to look at the material they deliberately produce for public consumption.
Grateful for your work. But I think you are still overestimating the desirability of having a Michael Anton or Gladden Pappin teaching in the humanities. That’s a lot of misogyny and Francoism to stomach just to get people to do close readings of Xenophon.
Possibly. In the book I say “some of”
Laura, you made me laugh as I read this response. Well done!
Donald Trump, and his second administration, has made the work of Anton and the Claremont crowd impossible. Everything Trump says is a lie. And everything he does is mean, spirited, vindictive, or corruptly self-serving. How can they defend him?
Thank you for this. I can only imagine how hard it must be to be interacting in this world of fury. I have respect for you writing your book Furious Minds. It is an incredible source to understand what is happening now in the US came from. You write in this post "Anton’s claim that I stand against half the country is nonsense." that is nonsense, but I feel they do exactly that. They, in this regard are the people who agree with what is being done by this current US regime. These people do not take criticism very well. They are the ultimate victim, even in victory. That alone proves to me that they are wrong in their view of the real world.
Does Anton not hate half the country? Trump very clearly does, and JD too. ("Our people hate the right people.") At a minimum, Anton is unwilling to make a serious attempt to understand half the country, possibly because he thinks they are "not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term”
Well done. I take it CRB will not be publishing this response?
They are welcome to it, maybe I will ask
Please ask. I suspect CRB has zero interest in an honest exchange of ideas.
Well done and measured, considering. I'm glad you acknowledged that Anton's review casts at least a bit of doubt on your insistence that these folks aren't evil and foolish. If I had one criticism of Furious Minds, it was that you maybe laid that on pretty thick for professionalism's sake. Anton is a hit dog, hollering. And every accusation, a confession or ambition, as the receipts show.
Thank you for this response. I’m persuaded by your critique of Anton, especially because his review seems to enact the very habit your book describes: he cannot distinguish criticism from persecution.
I am also sympathetic to your Athena metaphor and to the idea of “maximal accommodation.” Liberal institutions should be able to tolerate alien and even offensive worldviews. The New Right raises real questions about managerialism, institutional decay, local life, market domination, and the limits of liberal individualism.
But the invitation to engage is not symmetrical.
For a native-born white Christian, these arguments can remain an intellectual debate about how the country should be governed. For an immigrant, a non-Christian, or someone outside the imagined ethnocultural core, the debate is often about whether one fully belongs to the country at all.
That is why rhetoric about America being a “white Christian nation” is not merely a cultural preference. Even without camps, deportations, or formal disenfranchisement, it creates a hierarchy of belonging: some citizens embody the nation, while others merely live inside it.
The crucial distinction is between losing dominance and losing rights. White Christians are not being excluded from American life. They are being required to share cultural and political authorship with people who were once peripheral. Yet the New Right often describes this loss of monopoly as persecution, replacement, invasion, or extinction.
That reversal is politically powerful. Once demographic change is framed as an intentional attack, coercion can be described as self-defense. Exclusion becomes restoration. “Remigration” becomes national survival. Religious privilege becomes moral order. The rhetoric prepares the conscience before the policy arrives.
This does not mean every New Right thinker secretly intends ethnic cleansing. But replacement rhetoric creates the moral grammar through which large-scale coercion can later appear defensive rather than aggressive.
There is an old American pattern here: settlers advanced into Indigenous lands, resistance was detached from the dispossession that produced it, and further conquest was narrated as protection from attack. We keep advancing, yet somehow we are always the ones being invaded.
Perhaps Athena’s accommodation therefore requires reciprocity. The Furies may have a place in the city, but only if they accept that the city belongs equally to people outside their bloodline, religion, and historical identity.
The response from immigrants and minorities is not necessarily anti-white or anti-Christian. It is much simpler:
We are here. We are not going anywhere. We do not hate you. But you must stop describing our presence as your extinction and your loss of dominance as your persecution.
The New Right should have a place in the city. But it must accept that the rest of us are not guests inside its city. We are citizens and co-authors of it.
"Still, to call the New Right out for their naivete and recklessness is not the same as announcing that they will be the ones standing at the gas chamber doors."
Won't they? Those photos of Kristi Noem touring CECOT weren't the work of underground journalists. They were produced and published as propaganda by the administration in the (correct) assumption that rightists would love it. Just like they love the videos of ICE beating people, or the tweets celebrating a future where 100 million people have been "deported". You don't need some dark inferences or convoluted reasoning to see the Third Reich in the "New" Right. You just have to look at the material they deliberately produce for public consumption.
I meant to counter Anton’s claim that I would be persecuting them.