THE GENTLEMAN CONSERVATIVE

The Fat Nutritionist 

There’s a dead ‘conservative icon’ named William F. Buckley, Jr. He was a flamboyant closet case with a TV show. Buckley was captain of the debating team at Yale and got his own TV show by running for Mayor of New York and then losing. He also had a famous debate about Civil Rights with the gay black writer James Baldwin. This was at Cambridge University. He lost that too. Then he had a public feud with the gay writer Gore Vidal, and had a series of live debates with him on TV in 1968.

A few years ago there was a movie about the Buckley-Vidal bitchfight called Best of Enemies. The movie is basically about Buckley losing and making a dick of himself in front of a huge audience.

You have to wonder about the debating team at Yale if the only famous debater they ever produced never actually won any arguments. Still, for decades Buckley was the most prominent conservative intellectual in America, despite the fact that he never seems to have held a position that wasn’t ultimately defeated.

Buckley was the son of a Texas oilman who struck it rich, and so he decided to pretend he was a Southern aristocrat with a plantation (the type of plantation that got burned down in the movie Gone With The Wind and so no longer exists). Of course the ‘aristocrats’ who lost the Civil War were just dirt farmers from Kentucky who read historical novels by Sir Walter Scott and then decided to pretend that they were chivalrous ancient warriors from Scotland, even though literally all of them were descended from the same cheap peasants as everybody else in America. But the dirt farmers started getting rich in around 1830 and had a few decades of pretending to be aristocrats until they lost the Civil War.

Buckley defined a ‘conservative’ as “someone who stands athwart history, yelling ‘STOP!’, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Look at the language he uses: “athwart”. It’s part of the act. But also, look at how he defines a conservative as a doomed loser by his very nature: a conservative is someone standing on the beach in his dad’s suit yelling at the tide to stop coming in while there is nobody else around who cares, and the few people who are paying attention are telling him to shut up and get a life, if they even bother to deal with someone that hopeless.

William F. Buckley, Jr. is the inventor of ‘gentlemanly conservatism’. If you want to understand how and why conservatives always lose and fail all of the time, study Buckley’s career. After forty-five minutes on the internet you will get the gist and wonder how he managed to have such a long career without being outed as a self-evident homosexualist. But a lot of people can’t tell the difference between a homo and a gentleman.

There is nothing wrong with gentlemen or gentlemanliness. But there is a big difference between being an actual gentleman, with a family coat of arms, a long line of influential family members, and ancestors who had the right to walk around carrying a sword, and just calling yourself a ‘gentleman’ because you took a fencing class once.

A real ‘gentleman’ is the son, grandson and great-grandson of other gentlemen. Gentlemen are descended from soldiers, statesmen and landowners, and are related to other men of the same status (which is ultimately hereditary). I have to spell this out because of the phenomenon that is the ‘gentleman conservative’.

‘Gentlemanly conservatism’ is the main reason why I never called myself a ‘conservative’ at university. I didn’t want to get stuck hanging out with lower-middle-class virgins who wear fedoras at the age of eighteen. ‘Gentlemanly conservatism’ isn’t so much a political position as a kind of social pathology. It’s what you do when you are too ugly to be gay but still want to advertise to the world how ‘fabulous’ you are.

‘Gentlemanly conservatives’ start young. The youngest I ever met was eleven years old. This was a few years ago at a barbecue. The little shit was the son of one of my boss’s colleagues. He was fat and had freckles and ginger hair. Maybe he was trying to sound witty and sophisticated but he sounded like the pre-pubescent equivalent of a faggot. For the whole night he followed me around trying to impress me with how he was in a “gifted children’s” program at school. It was impossible to get rid of him. I didn’t drink that night because I was worried I might lose it and kick the shit out of an eleven-year-old.

This little shit even quoted Oscar Wilde at me at one point. Obviously he had no idea who Oscar Wilde was, and had never read any of his work except a few one-liners he’d memorised, but was just trying to sound like a cultured grown-up by pretending to have read important literature. Only he chose the wrong writer because Oscar Wilde went to prison for seducing street urchins who were this little shit’s age. Maybe I should have taken the hint and bashed him to death with a cigarette case. According to the testimonies from his trial for ‘acts of gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde gave cigarette cases to his victims before literally committing crimes on their asses.

Usually ‘gentlemanly conservatives’ are not very bright as children, but they still believe they’re more intelligent than the other kids around them. Nobody wants to be friends with them, so they end up thinking they are being persecuted because they are special. Most end up thinking of themselves as ‘scholars’ because they spend so much of their time reading, or trying to. In America, a lot of the ‘gentlemanly conservatives’ end up becoming fans of Leo Strauss either as teenagers or in their first year or two of university.

I have never read a word of Strauss, but from hearing midwits talk about him I know that he has this idea about hidden messages in books. According to their version of this theory, great writers and philosophers never say exactly what they mean, but write in a sort of code so that the people they really want to communicate with can read between the lines and figure out what the real message is.

The theory is probably more complex than that, because this sounds too dumb to be worth thinking about. But you can see how psychologically attractive it must be for people who label themselves as intellectuals. It gives them a reason for thinking they’re the Chosen Ones who can decode the secret messages in the great philosophers of the past, while the rest of us can’t understand because we don’t have the magical gift of spending every Friday and Saturday night from the age of 13 onwards reading books on our own because nobody wants to spend time with us.

Arguably the saddest ‘gentlemanly conservative’ I have ever known was a fat Chinaman. Let’s call him Chunk. Chunk was an only child who was spoiled by his hysterical mother so that by the time he was an adult he weighed over three hundred pounds. He spent his teenaged years fantasising about English boarding schools that his parents could never afford, then got sent to some third-rate university in Australia where he joined the monarchist society and began drinking port. But he could never find anybody his own age to play this old-man dress-up game with him, so he decided to apply for a Master’s degree at Cambridge.

Cambridge has a one-year MPhil in Political Theory (or maybe Political Philosophy) that ought to be internationally famous because it is such a laughable fraud. There are no standards to get in, and if you fall for the scam and hand over your money you spend a year getting no real teaching, and wasting your time with other scammed low-quality MPhil students from all over the world. You leave after nine months, having spent well over £30,000 of your own money for the privilege of writing a useless thesis that you might as well have written on your own at home because nobody ever gave you any access to actual resources.

Nobody who is gullible enough to fall for this scam ever talks about it afterwards. Because the suckers still want to believe that there is some sort of prestige related to their Vanity Master’s degrees. It’s the only thing in the world they can brag about, once they have blown their life savings on this fraud. Chunk probably still hasn’t recovered financially from his MPhil in Political Theory, and maybe never will.

I know a few people who knew Chunk at Cambridge. They weren’t really friends, but they felt sorry for him because he was just so pitiable, waddling around the college on his own watching his dreams get crushed in front of his eyes when he saw that Cambridge undergraduates wanted as much to do with him as Australian ones did, and didn’t care about his opinions on Winston Churchill. But even the Winston Churchill experts didn’t want to talk to him because he didn’t really know anything about Churchill either. The experience must have been crushing.

By the time I met Chunk he was working as a political adviser to some politician in Malaysia or Singapore. He was maybe twenty-six at the time but I thought he was fifty because he already had heart problems and sweated like a motherfucker even in an air-conditioned conference room. Also, he talked about literally nothing else except Cambridge, the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, and everything else that nobody who actually went to Oxbridge ever discusses. He was even wearing a college tie and cuff links. Nobody at Oxbridge would be caught dead wearing college merchandise except the waiters in the dining halls, or the jaded, bitter ex-cops who work security. It’s part of their uniform.

I was friends with Chunk on social media for a little while but had to block him because it was too sad to watch. He was so desperately clingy and intrusive. Everyone else he interacted with was someone he met six years ago at Cambridge and had already forgotten who he was. These Cambridge people seem to have been the only ‘friends’ he ever had. Cambridge was the only association in his life that wasn’t self-evidently second-rate, except that his only association, the MPhil course in Political Theory, was also second-rate.

Chunk is now surprisingly influential in his country as some sort of political analyst. You can see him on TV news sometimes, sweating in a cheap suit and tie and getting ripped apart in staged debates because he has no idea of how to present an argument in a sound bite on camera. He still pictures himself in a House of Lords debate from 1795 wearing a wig and calling somebody “the Honourable Gentleman”, so he is absolutely fucked any time he is faced with someone who ignores ‘parliamentary procedure’, which is to say literally everybody on business news channels in Southeast Asia (mainly shrill harpy-women from Hong Kong).

Chunk is invited onto TV precisely because everybody except Chunk knows that he’s a willing player in a rigged game that is set up for him to lose. He thinks of himself as a ‘gentleman’, but doesn’t actually know what one is, and thinks it mainly involves putting up with emasculation rituals from businesswomen who are richer than you are and then obediently pretending to enjoy the humiliation. Nobody ever explained to him that “close your eyes and think of England” was advice for Victorian women who were about to get a baby fucked into them. Being a ‘gentleman’ is the only real basis for self-respect he has left, even though in his understanding it mainly involves this kind of public humiliation in exchange for a glass of port, or whatever the low-cost reward is.

All ‘gentlemanly conservatives’ want is an audience to play-act in front of, and if possible some old-man luxuries like single-malt Scotch so that they can pretend to be nineteenth-century robber-baron tycoons, even though they never want to do the actual hard work that earns you real power. They just care about out-of-date symbols of power.

The most successful ‘gentleman conservative’ I have ever met is a stunning example of just how low some men are willing to sink in order to be allowed to pretend not to be a loser from nowhere. Let’s call him Lancelot. His real name is almost as lame.

I met Lancelot at a party in Scotland. Back then he was an undergraduate at Oxford, which was a surprise because I thought he was at least forty. Lancelot had a moustache, goatee and haircut that made him look like William Shakespeare. This was actually a cunning thing to do because he had such a weird-looking head.

Lancelot was a ‘character’. He talked like a character out of a 1930s movie, and nobody who is genuinely upper-class ever has that voice. Probably he learned it from spending every Saturday afternoon of his life watching old black-and-white movies on BBC2 and then practising afterward with a microphone and headset. But all credit to Lancelot, he was so good at his act that real aristocrats sometimes invited him to dinner parties. Never more than a few times though, because after that he ran out of material.

Lancelot bombed his final exams, so he tried to become a lawyer, but he sucked at that too, so he failed into the Church of England. The Anglicans are desperate for anybody who can help them slow down the process of becoming a low-grade matriarchy like every single other mediocre bureaucracy in the world. But they aren’t very good at choosing their saviours.

As one of the only allegedly straight men in the Anglican clergy Lancelot became successful quickly and was made the chaplain of an Oxbridge college. So despite being a failure as a scholar he could more or less live out his dreams. In some senses it was the perfect job for him, because he got to live in historical buildings, wear swishy clothes and play the part of resident ‘whimsical eccentric’. Naturally he developed a loyal following among clueless international students on Vanity Master’s degrees.

Lancelot uses social media mainly to post pictures of lace-covered vestments, or tell cute self-deprecating anecdotes about himself, or talk about the anniversary of some sixth-century English saint that nobody has ever heard of and involves some local tradition that nobody has bothered to observe for two hundred years. This assures the old ladies in his audience that he’s ‘traditional’. But he’s also started using his Facebook page to advertise how harmless he is to the hard left who are really in charge of the universities and the Church of England. Now he’s a well-known snitch on priests (and sometimes even parishioners) who hold right-wing views.

Lancelot is too much of a coward to name the priests he’s snitching on. Instead he frames his attacks as cute little anecdotes about how he heard the most outrageous story in the tea room, or was horribly shocked to hear someone’s sermon that was ‘Islamophobic’ or “in clear contradiction of” Church of England pro-tranny policy. He makes sure he gives enough detailed information about dates and locations so that anybody with internet access can instantly figure out who the priest is who needs to be punished.

So far he’s taken down at least six men. All were forced to take early retirement, and replaced by progressive dykes. Obviously the Church of England cracks down much harder on right-wing views than on grooming and molesting a choirboy. But this is still shocking.

There’s photo of Lancelot from January 2017 during a protest against Donald Trump. He is standing there with his unattractive wife and a couple of hag-woman academics. They are all wearing pink knitted pussy hats. Lancelot’s pink clerical shirt not only matches his pussy hat, it also ensures that international students will mistake him for a bishop.

Nobody has a problem with real gentlemen. In fact we need more of them. Genuine ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour is part of a warriors’ code. You show respect to everyone, not just your friends, and you treat women properly. You show you have strength by not wasting it on irrelevant nonsense, or showing off. If you’re born a gentleman, you act like one so you don’t disgrace your family, and if not you act like one so your descendants have a chance to grow into the real thing.

Obviously there’s a big difference between acting like a gentleman and just play-acting. For ‘gentlemanly conservatives’ like Buckley and Lancelot, you play-act for an audience and maintain your position by throwing allies under the bus. Chunk and that eleven-year-old little shit might never even have allies to throw under the bus. Their play-acting is part of an elaborate lie they tell themselves so they might not even be trying to fool anyone else.

‘Gentlemanly conservatism’ is an aesthetic attitude disguised as a political position: a pose with nothing behind it. That’s why ‘gentleman conservatives’ get such a thrill out of being hypocrites. They secretly want to get caught using coke, or paying for hookers, or turning out to be public-toilet homos. Because ultimately they can’t justify all this even to themselves, let alone anybody else. They can’t take the stress of living this sort of lie, even though it’s their main source of sexual thrills. There is no hard core of belief underneath. That’s why the ‘gentlemanly conservative’ feels zero guilt for ratting you out or stabbing you in the back. Because all he cares about in the end are his deluded pleasures and fake symbols.

Why tolerate these people, when the least-bad ones are just weak, useless, repellent and a waste of time, and most turn out to be active sellouts and traitors?