Until about an hour ago, I had never heard of Ekaterina Jung, now calling herself Cathy Young, a writer for something called Newsday and the website, The Federalist. This link was in my twitter feed along with a bunch of snarky comments. The article is another tantrum about the growing army of people who have had enough of so-called conservatism and went elsewhere for their arguments.

The phrase “alt-right” has become an abracadabra phrase for the commercial Right, in the same way that “extreme right-wing” is a magic phrase for the loonies of the Left. The theory is that if the good-thinker says the phrase three times, their tired old excuses and arguments are declared the winner and they can dismiss their critics. The hacks of Conservative Inc now call everyone to their right, “alt-right” so they can avoid debating them.

The Cathy Young tantrum is fairly typical. She spent an hour breezing through some sites like VDare and Unz looking for “evidence” she could use to pad out her claim that the bad-thinkers are all racist Hitlers and stuff. I’m old enough to remember when Lefty used to write these sorts of columns about Buckley Conservatives, using National Review as the source material. That’s how far the Overton Window has moved left.

Anyway, two things are interesting to me. One is the bio of the writer. According to Wiki:

Born in Moscow, the capital of what was then the Soviet Union, Ekaterina Jung was 17 when her family emigrated to the United States in 1980. She became a naturalized citizen in 1987 as Catherine Alicia Young, and graduated from Rutgers University in 1988.[1] At Rutgers, she wrote a column for the student newspaper The Daily Targum and worked as a student writer for The Detroit News. She also completed her autobiography, Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, published in 1989.

Continuing her association with The Detroit News, Young was a regular columnist for the newspaper from 1993 to 2000 and worked as a freelance journalist for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, National Review, Salon.com, The Weekly Standard, and Reason.

From 2000 to 2007, Young wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Boston Globe. In 2008, she began to write a regular column for RealClearPolitics.com. In 2012, she became a weekly columnist for Newsday. Over the years, Young has had a close association with Reason, where she is a contributing editor and was a monthly columnist from 2001 to 2007. Since 2014, she has regularly contributed to Time.[2]

Young is a research associate at the Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank Cato Institute, for which she co-authored a 1996 policy analysis paper, “Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?”. Her writing covers a variety of topics in politics and culture, with particular focus on gender issues and feminism, reflecting an individualist feminist perspective (c.f. Wendy McElroy), frequently agreeing with men’s rights activists, while criticizing them for emulating the identity politics associated with some forms of feminism. In addition to appearing on a number of radio and television shows, she has spoken on college campuses and, during 2001 and 2002, taught a 3-week gender issues course at Colorado College.

Young supports legally recognizing same-sex marriages.[3]

Young is basically a liberal woman who likes money so she defends the people who give her money. Today, that happens to be the Koch Brothers so she is a libertarian. You don’t write for those hyper-progressive publications without having been cleared by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Throw in the middle-aged woman’s obsession with her vagina and you have a Cato endorsed social justice warrior.

That’s the thing with libertarians. They agree with the Left on all the important stuff. Their quibble is mostly over who gets sent off to the camps and by what means. Liberals want the state running the camps while libertarians think Elon Musk should get the contract. Over 50 years ago, Whittaker Chambers pegged these people and nothing much has changed, other than the fact the Buckley Conservatives surrendered to them.

The other interesting bit is this at the end of the Young’s tantrum:

Today, the excesses of the “social justice” movement have brought us to a point where reasonable conservatives, libertarians, and liberals are ready to join forces against quasi-totalitarian identity politics. We need to start reclaiming the principles of common humanity, freedom, and universal values, not put a positive spin on a different brand of divisive identitarianism.

Progressivism is based on the claim that all humans are the same. Egalitarianism is the foundation stone of the Left. Their coat of arms is decorated with the phrases “common humanity” and “universal values.” These are not conservative expressions or sentiments. They are antithetical to traditionalism, conservatism and biological reality. What Cathy Young finishes with is a call for total surrender.

That’s why the Buckley Right is collapsing. Decades of surrender and excuse making have sapped them of their legitimacy. What’s the point of following these guys if all they do is lose and blame you for it? You may as well throw in with these new guys, who may be nuts, but they are spoiling for a fight. If your culture and people are going to be erased from the book of life, you can at least put up a fight on the way out.