More material documenting combox Nazism at The "American" "Conservative"

Speaking of comments not being approved over at The "American" "Conservative", a blogger named Thomas O. Meehan has posted numerous examples over at his site Odysseus on the Rocks of his comments not being approved by Rod Dreher and others. Mr. Meehan is an interesting example to me because I think he's much closer to Amconmag's way of thinking on certain foreign policy issues than I am. But, like us, he is utterly perplexed at how they can continue to advertise themselves as being conservative after displaying so much Obama-love and espousing so many liberal views. He writes this:

I was going to post something later on the President's faux impromptu speech to the White House press corps. And then I noticed an almost giddy puff piece in TAC by some kid they recently hired named Jonathan Coppage. Let me say that this is just the latest signal from TAC that they no longer wish to be considered Conservative in any way beyond their masthead. Along with Coppage's love letter to our mulatto messiah, there was a piece by Goldman attacking the 2nd amendment, a piece by Jacobs in the same vane and a really shameful piece by Millman whining about Human Bio-Diversity. So It's official, TAC is now a sham. It has devolved into a spineless exercise, a hermaphrodite among the journals. It is neither really conservative or left. It is a talking shop for those worshiping at the plastic shrine of the goddess NICE.

[Nota bene, I try not to use the term mulatto even as an adjective, but Kurt used it as a noun, so it probably can't be racist.]

Meehan's entire post is worth reading. I don't know if they published this comment, he doesn't say. Someone else can do that research if they wish. While you're at it, find out if Amconmag has any openly gay traditional religious conservative bloggers yet. They're due for a token of that important conservative voting bloc.

The way I discovered Thomas Meehan was through a snarky comment of his that was published on Jeremy Beer's review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. It's a short comment which I would be proud of writing, subtle but deadly:

This is a very timely and necessary review given Dreher’s extreme reluctance to publicize or advance himself in any way.

Isn't that good? See, that's the trick you need to use if you want a chance at getting a comment approved. He begins with perceived flattery: "This is a very timely and necessary review", but then he packs the business end of his argument in the subordinate clause. It's the Trojan Horse model, and it worked in this case.

Here's another interesting post from about a year ago about comment approval over at Amconmag.

A comment of mine was "excised" by Wick Allison over at the American Conservative last week. Excised is his term for his culling of comments that violate his criteria for respectability. An informed source tells me that Allison is the censor for all comments, without reference to the wishes of the writers. Curious that, considering they pay people to write but don't trust them to manage their own comments. Well, at least they're honest about it.

This is another step in the devolution of TAC from it's nationalist/traditionalist beginnings to something lesser and disappointing. TAC has come to suffer from a form of multiple personality disorder. It still publishes Pat Buchanan's and Jim Pinkerton's articles but it also publishes the work of Kelly Vlahos, resident harridan at the left wing Antiwar.com. Rod Dreher is on board writing from deepest, darkest Louisiana representing the childish crunchy-cons while Daniel Larison does a grand job deconstructing Republican talking points in the manner of a dissertation defense. He also does a very creditable job as agent of the vast pan-slavic mind view. That is, the Russian government ought to pay him. I'm not suggesting that they do, but that's how good he is at advancing the let's not be beastly toward the bear meme. Lately, to further extend the big tent into a three ring circus, TAC brought on people like Noah Millman who at least make no pretense at being a conservative.

He claims he has a source for Wick Allison being the main comment censor, and I don't doubt this claim. It rings true because this level of micromanagement is so odd that I can imagine any eye-witness to it would be willing to relate his strange experience. I have the experience of Wick Allison personally returning emails which was a little bit surprising to me.

The thing that is hard to remember in the aftermath of having a comment deleted is that you most likely scored a point. This is because you're irritated that it wasn't published. That means that you have to go and start your own blog—or go to someone else's who shares your opinion—and relate it there where it won't be excised. But here's the thing: this is the mainstream conservative experience in modern America. The mainstream media—which is dyed-in-the-skin liberal to leftist—used to practically control all the information that got out there, and they still control it to a great degree. Then we had the talk radio revolution—spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, Fox news and the conservative pundits and blogger on the internet. Sites like Washington Examiner provide the counter-balance to WaPo even though they scrapped their print edition. Think of how the liberal mainstream media have tried desperately to censor so many huge stories. Any good news from Iraq back in the Bush years, anything bad about Islam, the Kermit Gosnell case, the dirt on Trayvon and his whacked gang connections, the Benghazi cover-up, etc., etc. But they can't always readily do this, thanks to alternative conservative media.

So the really pathetic thing about Amconmag is that they're doing what the drive-by media does on a tiny little scale. They really aren't much bigger in popularity than someone like R. S. McCain, and they are dwarfed by NRO and Hotair.com (source = alexa.com). By using a fine-tooth comb on comments with which they don't agree, they are just forcing people like Thomas O. Meehan to drop his subscription and to join the chorus of other conservatives in the rest of the world who doubt there's anything very conservative or even American about the "American" "Conservative". And they'll never engage us naysayers directly since they wouldn't want to give us hits, or maybe because their noses are at such a steep angle that they can barely even see us.

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(Update: I added Meehan's middle initial after finding out he shares a name with a famous comedy screenwriter.)

I Agree With Daniel Larison

Larison says here that "...[Jonah] Goldberg demonstrates once again that he still has no idea what "crunchy" conservatism is." And he is right because no one really knows what crunchy conservatism is. As Kathleen famously observed here:

"[C]runchy cons" is a cipher, therefore it's anything you want it to be. Great taste and less filling!

Of course, Bubba the Energizer Bunny has pointed out many times that Rod doesn't really know what crunchy conservatism is either. For example.

Jonah's post is sensible and worth reading, as usual. It's also read-able which distinguishes it from writing that blogger Mark Shea might nickname the "IreallyreallyreallyloatheJonahGoldbergandhislittledogtoo" blog.

Daniel Larison also comes to Crunchy Conservatism's defense, typically protesting that I don't know what I'm talking about. Uh huh. I read the book. I participated in endless debates with Rod about it when his original article came out. It seems to me that Larison wants it to mean something other than what Rod has said time again. Maybe this is because Larison thinks that Crunchy Conservatism amounts to a useful marketing tool for his brand of "paleo" conservatism. I don't know, and I'm not going to try to read the mind of someone who's shown such unremitting hostility towards me. But he does simply assert that Crunchy Conservatism is what he says it is — i.e. a reformulated anti-statist paleoconservatism which "abhors" federal interventionism — and I find his assertions otherworldly. I know Rod says some nice things about Russell Kirk and the Agrarians (though his use and abuse of Kirk left a lot of people cold). But that's hardly a compelling presentation of evidence.

Hey, go back and check out that Claremont review, "Soft in the Middle". It's a slam-dunk and it contains great lines such as

One supposes it would surprise Dreher to know that achieving a workable balance between "we" and "I" is one of the defining achievements of Western civilization, an achievement that goes a long way to explain why the East, and not the West, has been historically mired in despotism (see Herodotus, et al.).

Also, while we're on the subject of smack-downs, Kathleen just reminded me of the insightful Mises.org article which came out exactly a year ago entitled "Crunchy Conned". Excerpt:

It never occurs to the author that his crunchy way of living is a consumable good — nay, a luxury good — made possible by the enormous prosperity that permit intellectuals like him to purport to live a high-minded and old-fashioned lifestyle without the problems that once came with pre-capitalist living.

He has fallen for some romantic notion of the past — happy, faithful communities raising their own food and working their own land — without considering the downside: infant mortality, plagues, lack of sanitation, short lives, surgery without anesthesia, and all the rest. The market — that global matrix of exchange that forms its own order out of billions of individual decisions — is his benefactor, and he seems completely unaware of it. A writer like this can make an economist wish that the invisible hand were slightly more visible so that at least its merits could be appreciated.

There are times when his romanticism is overt: as when he favorably cites John Ruskin's claim that the Industrial Revolution "came at the cost of [England's] soul" and ended up "debasing the soul of man by treating people as mere consumers." This line of thinking makes good poetry but has nothing to do with reality. How does a switch from wood fuel to fossil fuel debase the soul?

All good stuff by these "smart guys".But indulge this average American and let me, for the record, explain to everyone what crunchy conservatism means to me. I just thought of this while playing Rockem Sockem Robots the other night. Remember the old commercial saying that "4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum"? Crunchy Conservatism is embodied by that fifth dentist who flatly refused to be controlled by the corporate interests and all that. We don't really know what this wise prophet standing alone on the mountain peak recommended chewing, if anything, but I believe that whatever it was it is most certainly the key for our very survival, the regaining of our......"lost community soul". (Oooh! That was a good one! Yeah!) What do you think? What does Crunchy Conservatism mean to you?