Fake Conservatives

Ever since I deduced that libertarians are very much libertarians at heart (and not the conservatives some claim to be, albeit sporadically), I realized that their libertarian "audience" is so limited that they have to cleverly sell their ideas (and writings) to conservative journals, or subtly downplay their libertarian politics, in order to attract conservative readers.

I've written about this in various posts:

- Peter Brimelow of Vdare fame:
Vdare's Woes
- Ilana Mercer and her articles on conservative sites:
What exactly  is Ilana Mercer?
- Various Canadian "conservatives" who slowly admit that they're libertarians
Where have all the conservatives gone?

There is an interesting discussion at View from the Right after my post "Where have all the conservatives gone", including a response by Canadian writer Kevin Michael Grace. Grace also sent me an email, and I responded. That was the extent of Grace's denials of his libertarian stance, which he never really disproved in either communications.

Here is the email interaction:

Dear Ms. Asrat:

I don't know where you got the idea I am a libertarian, paleo or otherwise. See this. I may be a pessimist, but I am not a nihilist; the biggest influence on my political and social thinking is Hilaire Belloc. As for immigration to my country (Canada), my position is: end it. I see no need for Canada to take in more than, say, 5,000 immigrants a year for the foreseeable future. As for Muslim immigration, my position is: none, ever.

Cordially,

Kevin Michael Grace

Here are the relevant parts of my response, to which he never responded:

I do apologize if I singled you out incorrectly, or unfairly, but this is how I see what's happening. After a prolonged absence, your first article - your comeback article, if I may say so - was on the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Human Rights Commissions. I have written about your article in this post. Surprisingly, I found that your concern over the HRCs and the CHRA was not to disclose their positions on non-discrimination, but to talk about their attempts at censorship - or as you say "self-censorship."

[...]

So, rather than talk about these societal changes, and the historical reasons for the formation of the HRCs and the CHRA, and what fuels them these days which includes high immigration levels, it seems that you preferred to talk about self-censorship as the overriding factor. As I said before, this self-censorship came out of a specific historical and social context. It seems your concern relates to the narrow focus of individual freedoms (of speech, of expression etc.) that libertarians hold dear, rather than to the broader social issues that conservatives try to address, which certainly also includes free speech and expression as part of the whole picture.

The full article, to which Grace responded with his email is: Kevin Michael Grace's Inadequate Take On Section 13 of The Human Rights Commissions.

One of the reasons I took an interest in these writers is because they have a connection to Canada, so I thought they would give me some wise insight into this country. I was pretty much wrong on that, and I'm not even sure how much good they're doing America. (Grace occasionally has his articles published at Vdare, as do Shaidle and Mercer. Mercer is a regular columnist at World Net Daily. Grace has also published in American journals such as Chronicles and The American Spectator).

I have a couple of "letters to the editor" at Vdare (here and here), and I communicated with Mercer for a while, until she her underhanded rude reply to one of my emails which centered around my disagreements on her libertarian politics.

Here is a recent post at VFR discussing Australian blogger Mark Richard's article on the American Right, where Lawrence Auster writes: "...many conservatives are in fact classical liberals or libertarians ." This has been my view for a while now.