Call Me That To My Face, And See What Happens

And you think you’re so clever and classless and free,
But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

—Working Class Hero, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, 1970

A number of intelligent and respectable conservative bloggers have, over time, started regularly quoting and linking blogging representatives of Alt-Right. The better representatives of Alt-Right frequently deliver withering and accurate criticism of PC, Multiculturalism, and the kind of treasonous animosity toward one’s own race, nation, culture, and civilization that Roger Scruton refers to as oikophobia. I have occasionally myself quoted and linked a couple of these bloggers, whose postings I read via Vanderleun and liked.

However, if you start looking at Alt-Right, you find very quickly that that movement is diverse in quality and intelligence. Some people (I would disagree) identify the Neoreactionary Movement (Mencius Moldbug aka Curtis Yarvin, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick “Dark Enlightenment” Land) as the intellectual wellspring of Alt-Right. I don’t think so. These guys (with whom I by-and-large agree) are hyper-intelligent pessimist libertarians.

The real (semi-)respectable roots of Alt-Right, I’d say, can be found with Pat Buchanan who left the mainstream Conservative Movement and retired to his own Isolationist, Nativist, Protectionist fever swamp, where he somehow miraculously spawned, producing The American Conservative and TakiMag.

Alt-Right, however, as an intellectual phenomenon declines rapidly from Pat Buchanan’s bilious desire to hop into a time machine and return to the late-1840s-early-1850s heydey of Know-Nothing-ism and Taki Theodoracopoulos striking reactionary poses to a lot less savory sphere, inhabited by all sorts of unbelievably stupid, vulgar, and objectionable white trash. You do not have to go very far into Alt-Right-land at all, before you start running into White Supremacists and 1488-ers.

One particularly toxic symptom of the contagious influence of the atrocious Neo-Nazi element of Alt-Right on the rest is the spread of the slang insult “cuck” or “cuckservative.”

The word “cuck” has a whiff of obscenity about it, being so close in sound to the vulgar term for the male generative organ, but its etymology is obviously from “cuckold,” a rather old-fashioned pejorative referring to the unfortunate fellow afflicted with an unfaithful wife which was, long ago, during the English Restoration, generally regarded as the most embarrassing and hilarious of all misfortunes.

The mystery, of course, is how on earth did the semi-literate Alt-Right inhabitants of trailer parks, whose Verbal SATs would have been in the two-digits, come up with a truncated form of such a period and esoteric insult. I was puzzled, and made a point of looking into the mystery. I found that cuck seems to have come into use for the first time on 4Chan in 2014, and took on its specifically racialist overtones in attacks on a particular comedian whose stand-up routines featured racial attitudes that people didn’t like. But the 4Chan correspondents, it turned out, were not drawing their reference to cuckoldry from the comedies of William Wycherly. No, the reference was coming from Internet pornography, where there exists apparently a standard “cuck” meme featuring a masochistic white male who submissively looks on as his wife/girlfriend has sexual intercourse with one or more black males.

I decided to comment on all this, specifically because I think the spread of this toxic insult right out of the White Supremacist sewers into mainstream conservative politics is a disgrace and ought to be curtailed.

Iowahawk (below) has it dead right. The use of that term is a dead giveaway of whom you have been reading and what kind of people you are willing to be associated with politically.