I feel like a person who’s been eating only one food group for the past couple of years and has developed a scurvy-like disorder.
My mind is craving thoughtful, non-partisan, deeply intellectual conservative analysis of current events.
Not cult of personality American GOP pop conservatism, not the dumb-dumb outrage machine new media personalities, but rather seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.
The GoodFellows podcast by the Hoover Institute is high quality. [0]
The group is composed of former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, an economist and a historian, so you get diverse intellectual conservative perspectives.
I find that a lot of in-the-weeds economics podcasts and publication tend to hew pretty close to reality in their analysis. Mainly because ideological bent, unless it has an economic basis backed by data, is largely worthless, or even harmful. They don't tend to cover everything, but they do provide a nice reference point to judge other news sources by.
I have a theory that highly intelligent conservatives are much more competitive than cooperative and so choose careers with access to the most money/power/respect. So you'll see a lot of conservative bankers, financiers, doctors, executives, lawyers, etc. This group has an outsized desire to see lower taxes on high earners, so they are big supporters of low taxes (aka small government).
This theory explains why there are not a lot of conservative academics or scientists. Those careers are often low earning and more for the public good, so are more cooperative overall (even if they might be quite cutthroat in their own way).
It also begs the question that perhaps studying something deeply enough to get a PhD leaves a person with a perspective that is less compatible with certain viewpoints. Also, lower taxes for a college professor probably would be a net negative, as their college would be getting less government funding.
That's not an outlandish hypothesis. I'm from a family of medical doctors and entrepreneurs. They are all very conservative, while I'm more of a classical liberal.
I gave up working in the tech industry to pursue a PhD with the hopes of becoming a professor. Considering I research NLP, I could be making top dollar in industry, but have opted for the academia route. My family mostly don't understand and view the PhD as a diversion. Despite securing a postdoc at Cornell, they still ask me to reconsider working in industry so I can become rich and powerful, which they equate with fulfillment in life.
What you have here is actually only a hypothesis since to be a theory it has to have passed at least some means testing. A more probable reality is that as with Mr. Berliner, all the conservative or even skeptical liberal voices have been suspended, deplatformed, shunned, systematically lied about, fact cked by the woke mob and found wanting. They’re denied equal opportunity by the DEI committee, ostracized or outright fired for daring to question “the narrative”, exercise their constitutional right to free speech or actually tell the truth.
Twenty yeas ago I was a A regular contribution to NPR. I considered it a factual though left leaning arbiter of real news. Now it is little different than MSNBC or CNN as a mouthpiece for democratic party woke-ism that will never admit the truth of their complicity in pushing Hillary’s package deal with the DNC, 50 pseudo-intelligence officials, Adam Schiff’s perjured testimony to the US public and all the other dirty tricks performed by those tasked with taking down a president. The shenanigans have only accelerated and NPR is at the vanguard of providing suppressive fire for perhaps the least competent, most dangerous, unliked and least accountable President in our history. If our federally subsidized organizations fail to recognize their part in this progressive destruction of our social fabric this nation will soon cease to exist.
DemocracyNow.org. Listener supported, first-person guests, giving voice to largely silenced voices, daily show, 20+ years on air, syndicated on many local airwaves or via podcasts or video on their website. Pretty much the best news source on earth.
I read The Flip Side, it’s a newsletter that takes a single issue and compares the response across a variety of political leanings. They recently went paid which is unfortunate but the $18/yr price is worth it. They don’t really get you “away from” outrage politics but it does add a softer, more thoughtful layer on top of it.
Not an ad, just a happy reader.
One thing I have noticed again and again since reading the news letter is how often the GOP and Dems just talk completely past each other. They will have their own talking points about an issue that shoot completely over the other talking points from the other side. Quite interesting to see it happen in near real time.
Hanania also has similarly scathing things to say about low class and low end white people. He's not partisan at all, or if he is, he's biased against the more "pathetic" parts of humanity, if you wish to put it like that, rather than having a Dem/Rep bias.
> but rather seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.
you won't find it, because there is none. it's ultimately "fuck you pay me", and it's a great deal if you're in the side saying "pay me". Or a rehash of the same Christian virtues that have have been repeated for centuries.
The point of conservative-ism is that it doesn't change. by definition you're not going to get expansion and growth and new.
William Buckley and his contingent died off around the turn of the century. I don't know what would bring those kind of folks out of hiding, if they even exist any longer. The magazine is still around.
They actually represent about half the country, 80% of the military, 95% of middle America. They aren’t hiding, they’re just busy keeping America operational doing their jobs. They aren’t career activists, they’re raising their families, building and creating things. They are just deplatformed, hidden and ostracized by the media, elites, Hollywood, professorial crowds and the woke warriors.
You appear to be confusing Buckley with Trump/Fox-level folks—not the same group. Buckley and his ilk were educated elites and intellectually-oriented, at least on the surface. We lost a lot when they were overrun with the current mainstream "conservative" folks.
Look up the John Birch Society and George Wallace for example. National Review was able to discredit that similar level of discourse back in the day.
>My mind is craving ... seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.
No offense, but I just don't see how I can believe you, to believe any statement like this in this technological era. When I felt the same way when I started becoming politically active in my teenage years two decades ago, I went to this cool not-actually-new thing called an internet search engine, looked up right-(and left)-wing thought leaders/authors, think tanks, columnists/commentators, university researchers and etc. These people, just like all other political persuasions of public intellectual, have made website pages, books, papers and journals, conferences and expos, broadcasts of roundtables and interviews, and introductory infotainment pieces specifically for people like you, all in every format and length you can imagine.
All of this at least hundreds of hours of content put together over time is either directly accessible online for free or as easily purchasable as any other product on the web today. If it is true that your teeth are falling out because of low vitamin c, it's because you keep trading the orange in your rations for more hardtack. They're not any more difficult to get than whatever else you're reading right now, you just choose to put something else into your url/search field whenever you are in the mood to read. Right-wing intellectuals even happen to have terms for this phenomenon: "Stated preference" and "revealed preference". You state that you'd prefer to read a balance of political media, but someone observing you would reveal you only ever put the thirty seconds of effort it takes to open media on your computer into material that echoes what you've already read in the past. They point out that, as someone with a stated preference is observed over and over to act differently than it, the odds that the stated preference is a better description of their general mentality due to experimental variation than the preference that seems to be revealed by the observation approaches zero.
If you ever change this preference, though, the mentioned thirty seconds of googling got me these pages of Wikipedia's articles on ideology and activism groups in the united states (where I live, since I don't know where you do) categotized by general philosophy [1] [2]. Whenever I want to know what some corner of the political landscape thinks about current events, I follow some of these articles to their orgs' home page and read their recent materials.
My mind is craving thoughtful, non-partisan, deeply intellectual conservative analysis of current events.
Not cult of personality American GOP pop conservatism, not the dumb-dumb outrage machine new media personalities, but rather seriously legitimate academic right wing thought leadership to expand and challenge my thinking about the world. I honestly don’t know where to find it.