Beginning in the 1960s, stakeholders on the American Right began astro-turfing conservative student organizations in order to counter the challenges to their power from the New Left and Black Power student resistance movements. By examining the range of conservative student organizations and coalition building, Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd shows how wealthy donors and conservative intellectuals trained future GOP leaders such as Karl Rove, Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, Pat Buchanan, and others in conservative politics, providing them with tactics to consciously drive American politics and culture further to the authoritarian right and to "reclaim" American higher education.
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Axis Mundy Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, and today just have a great guest, someone whose book I learned about some months back.
I don't know, it might have been over a year, and was like, I cannot wait for that book to come out so we can have that person on, and that person is Dr. Lauren Lesab Shepard.
So, Dr. Shepard, thanks for being here.
Thank you.
It's great to be here.
So, just let me tell folks about you before we get going.
You are an instructor in the Department of Education and Human Development at the University of New Orleans and an Uwe Pouy Society for U.S.
Intellectual History Community Scholar.
Your work's been featured, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Politico Magazine, The Nation, Jacobin.
The Daily Beast and other places.
And we're here to talk about your book, Resistance from the Right, Conservatives and the Campus Wars.
And friends, you might be thinking, wow, that's a timely book because that's happening right now.
Must have been written, you know, about things happening in 2019 or 20 or 21.
Related to COVID or Black Lives Matter.
But in fact, it's written about the 1960s and the ways that there was just a kind of new right of campus organizing during the 60s and the kind of fallout and influence and ripple effects of that movement.
Let me embarrass you just by reading just a bit from page three, and then that'll set up my first question.
The account that follows tells how right-wing students of the late 1960s, following the guidance of anti-New Deal elders who sponsored them financially and professionally, participated in an astroturf mobilization against a so-called liberal establishment in higher education during their time on campus, an era typically associated with the New Left anti-war and Black Power student movements.
So here we are, we're in the 1960s.
Folks often imagine the 60s as a time of student protest against the Vietnam War, as you say, the Black Power Movement.
This is a time for me as I think about California and being an Asian American of organizing in Berkeley, pan-racial organizing Black and Latinx and Asian folks, creating the first ethnic studies departments.
I mean, the 60s are the 60s.
Everyone has their caricature of the 60s in mind, but you give us a much different, more nuanced picture.
Would you mind setting the scene for us?
Why Were these conservative students motivated?
Who were the elders that were sponsoring them?
What did they want to get out of these sponsorships?
So on and so forth.
Yeah.
So, well, first I would say all of that is right.
I mean, the 60s, as we understand them in popular historical memory, most of that is absolutely true.
So that was kind of the purpose for writing the book.
It's like, well, what is...
This title gets thrown around a lot, but what is the other side of the 60s?
That's another book on right-wing activism.
But the conservative side of the 60s is, you know, it's very square.
It's very concerned about its future.
They look around, the students specifically look around at the college campus and say, you know, we're quickly Losing our hegemony here where, you know, white Christian men are being persecuted on campus by intellectuals and the humanities and the social sciences.
And of course, that's not true.
If you look even as late as 1969, white students are still 95 percent of who's on campuses.
Of course, excluding HBCUs, but on mainstream college campuses, they are almost entirely white.
So in terms of like the racial demographics, campuses are diversifying, but very, very slowly.
The faculty is much slower to do any of that.
So starting from that point, we can say, you know, the campus is very, very square.
But this movement of students organizing actually goes back to the 1950s and it begins With William F. Buckley Jr.
following his, some have called it a screed, others have called it a diatribe, others have called it just an academic monograph, God and Man at Yale, about Excuse me, that was published earlier in the 50s, 1953.
But it was about, the whole thesis is the campus is not becoming this safe haven for Christian capitalists anymore.
And there's something that we need to do about that.
And so Buckley's book is followed by M. Stan Nevin's book.
And so there's a lot of a generation almost ahead of the students in the 1960s who begin this movement.
And then throughout their careers, they will turn back towards the campus in the 50s, 60s and 70s, and then identify students who have these sympathies or who they can mold, who they can shape.
They provide them with lots of tools for organizing.
They teach them how to write.
They teach them how to set up underground campus newspapers similar to the ones that the left has.
They teach them how to fundraise in addition to just giving them money.
And yeah, they really begin this, what has appeared to be a grassroots movement, but which is actually an AstroTurf student movement.
I'm so glad you meant that.
My follow-up was going to be that.
When we think of the 60s and we think of the anti-war movements, we think of black power movements, we think of off-campus movements, women's liberation, queer liberation.
I think of organic movements that are really developing on the ground.
You really make the case in this book that the conservative side of campus organizing was astroturfed, meaning you had wealthy folks who are a generation older identifying campuses, identifying students, and really planting them, right?
Instead of growing them from the ground and watering the soil, they just astroturf over the campus and saying, hey, here's the conservative movement sort of built out of nowhere.
And that just seems really important to keep in mind for many reasons.
One of them is just because that continues to happen today.
I'm really glad you mentioned that.
You do a great job in the book of introducing us to a plethora of these organizations.
I think a lot of us who are from evangelical backgrounds or just have been on college campuses will be familiar with Campus Crusade.
I'm of an age where when I watched TV in the 1980s, the late 1980s, there was a show called Family Ties and Alex P. Keaton Mr. Michael J. Fox himself was a young Republican, so some of us might have heard of the young Republicans.
What were the other groups that were on campuses kind of fulfilling this astroturfed mission for the new right?
Yeah, so I mean, there are a lot of them, so I can just kind of hit the higher ones for you.
But there's different arms, right?
So you mentioned the young Republicans.
There's also the college Republicans.
Those kind of function as like an activist and a partisan arm of the campus conservative movement.
But there's also an intellectual arm, and that's the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or ISI.
And as part of this intellectual branch, it's their job to read conservative literature.
And they're doing the writing and they're attending conferences and they're trying to work on graduate degrees, right?
A lot of them will go on to get PhDs and become professors themselves.
And of course, their credentials are financed by the movement.
So there's ISI, that's one branch.
Young Americans for Freedom is perhaps the organization that I spend the most time on in the book, and that is an activist, a little bit further right group than your standard college Republicans, because in the mid-60s, college Republicans are still Even in the larger Republican Party, there are still some liberals.
So the parties aren't completely ideologically sorted yet, as they will be like we see them today.
So YAF is kind of like the right wing vanguard of the student movement.
And then there's also really, really far right, like neo-Nazi groups, like the National Youth Alliance, which will go on to become what it is today, the National Alliance.
It's founded by William Luther Pierce, who is the author of the Turner Diaries.
And if you're Listeners aren't familiar.
The Turner Diaries is a book that inspired Timothy McVeigh to commit the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
And it's also been cited, you know, as like an inspirational text for other neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
So, yeah, the campus movement, there's Campus Crusade for Christ, YAF, ISI, NYA.
And then you also see these other little pop-up organizations that appear around the 1968 election and around the 1972 election, like Students for Reagan or other student groups that want to see Nixon reelected.
Or that want George Wallace to be elected.
So, I mean, there's all sorts of groups.
And the interesting thing about them is they often have overlapping memberships.
So one of the things that I talk about in the book is that many of these groups, of course, they're not organic because they're founded and they're funded by these elder sort of mentors.
But the students themselves will create secondary groups and then Put all the same members on the roster, right?
So it appears like college conservatism is much more widespread than it actually is.
So in some ways, it's hard to try to—they even confused me in the archives.
I'm thinking, initially, when I started this research, I'm like, wow, there really were lots of college conservative organizations until I noticed that, oh, it's the same people over and over again.
The same people, they're part of eight organizations each.
John and Jerry and Jennifer are all showing up and on the rolls like multiple times.
I want to just hit something that really struck me in the book that I really want folks to take away.
Folks, you really do need to get the book because Dr. Shepard really takes us through the rifts, the splits, the politics, the consolidations, the ways that these organizations that she just mentioned interact with the leftist groups on campuses and so on and so forth.
So there's just a thousand more details than we can get to today.
But one of the big takeaways and one of the like the really For me, essential points was that this movement should be remembered not for what it stood for, but for what it stood against, that there was never a coherent set of policies.
And I know there was many, many infights, much bickering internally, so that maybe that was never on the table.
But I just couldn't get away from this idea that When you got down to it, this was about what they were against, leftists, anti-war protesters, black power, and not what they were for.
Can you help us understand that?
Can you explain that a little bit?
How does that even take shape?
How do you get a movement that's not for anything and is just against whatever the other side is saying?
Well, it's actually a really easy organizing tool, right?
Because it takes all of the work out, right?
It's like, don't you also hate liberals?
Okay, perfect.
Come join our group.
Yeah, so this is a lesson that the students had to sort of learn.
So the book is kind of divided into two parts.
In the first part, I talk about some of the differences between the groups and all of the infighting, right?
That's a big focus of Chapter 3 and then later of Chapter 7.
And the problem is that some of the economic conservatives or the libertarians and the traditionalist or like the evangelicals were always at each other's throats when it came to different ideas.
So to give you one example, marijuana use, right?
So the libertarians were sort of like They were sympathetic to LSD and to marijuana.
They also shared some overlap in terms of, like, preferences towards, like, countercultural habits and activities and music and style of dress.
And so these things were deeply offensive to the traditionalists.
And so if you if you try to get them all to agree on something, it's not going to work very well.
Right.
Because the libertarians, when they mean liberty, they're extremely They're purist about that, right?
They don't believe that the state should intervene in anything.
And, you know, the traditionalists, on the other hand, want the state to enforce Christian sort of understandings of society.
They want to enforce hierarchy, especially racial hierarchy and economic hierarchy.
So anyway, the only way that you can get all of these people to agree is that we don't like the left.
And that's also really helpful for bringing in people to the movement who maybe aren't ideologues, who maybe aren't conservatives at all, but they just don't like the disruptions happening on campus.
They don't like the strikes.
They don't like protests.
They don't like their classes being interrupted.
And so it's a good way for the conservatives to sort of bring those unaffiliated people into the fold, at least just temporarily.
And so, yeah, so that's it.
That's the organizing factor.
And in some way, that's really just a microcosm of what was happening in the larger postwar conservative movement.
I mean, you see this play out.
I say, you know, Buckley, of course, is the biggest mentor here.
But I mean, that's happening within the pages of National Review as well, his magazine.
Yeah, the campus is just, again, a little microcosm of what's happening.
This is something we talk about a lot on the show is that, you know, it seems as if today when you go to the barbecue and you meet your uncle who wants to give you all the talking points from Fox News and you're like, Hey, what are you actually for?
Your Fox News uncle has to look at you and say, well, what are you for?
Because if you're for it, then I know what I'm against, and then I can answer your question, right?
And reading your book was just this great reminder that that's not new, that as you say, there's a long history of organizing around, we're just against them.
All those people over there with long hair, with queer relationships, with too much melanin in their skin, demanding rights and representation.
We're just against the disruption of order and the civil workings of our campus or our municipality.
That's the thing.
You all with us?
I mean, are you guys tired of hearing these chants and Do you really want these people in charge?
Well, then get with us, because this is not America, is it?
You don't want that for your country.
So come on in here and join with us, right?
We're safer, we're more comfortable, and there you go.
I think I know the answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
Anti-communism, one of those great ways that say, not sure what we're for, but we're definitely against that.
Was that a nice unifying force in this movement?
Yeah.
And also, communism is, of course, just a dog whistle for liberalism, right?
They're not being literal when they say they're worried about communists.
So I guess I should clarify for listeners that my book begins in 1967.
And so we're at the height of the Vietnam War.
And, of course, communism is a global concern, right, in terms of our, like, international politics, our foreign politics.
But communists on campus certainly don't represent a majority.
Even if people in their classrooms are reading Marx, it's not because they're trying to organize and overturn systems.
I mean, we still talk about this today all the time, like the way that universities will come out with land acknowledgments but not do anything genuine actually towards that, right?
No one's actually giving any land back.
So a lot of this is just symbolic.
So anyway, that's something that the student right can latch on to.
And you see this in the way that they speak and in their sort of their written publications, they talk about anyone to their left being a pinko or referring to shades of pink, like fading into red communism.
So yeah, I mean, again, it's so easy to define an enemy when an enemy is I'm always amazed when I hear that Joe Biden is a Marxist.
I'm like, Joe Biden?
really sure what it is but you know that you're against it I'm always amazed when when I hear that Joe Biden is a Marxist I'm like Joe Biden really year old Joe Biden who has been around long enough to like have been a colleague of John Calhoun in the Senate sure Sure, sounds good.
Yeah, when I think of Marxism, it goes Marx, and then Trotsky, then Lenin, then Joe Biden.
But as you say, you can just shout out communism, put it on a person.
Could be Joe Biden, could be whoever, and there you go.
They're bad, and dog whistle's the perfect word.
Yeah, and it's great.
Go ahead.
Well, it's also great for race baiting, too, right?
Because there are these associations with like the student black power movement and W.E.B.
Du Bois clubs, for example.
We don't even have to talk about SNCC, which by the time of the setting of my book does become certainly more radical and black nationalist.
But even like literary societies, W.E.B.
Du Bois clubs, You know, they talk about how he's a socialist and that's essentially a communist.
It's the very next step, right?
So, yeah, it's great as a dog whistle.
It's great for race baiting.
And another thing that I wanted to say earlier is, you know, by the time we're in the late 60s, the Vietnam War is our concern.
And so communism is understood to be overseas.
We're past the 1950s where, oh, communism could be in the White House, right?
Dwight Eisenhower could be a communist or JFK, right?
So all of that has kind of been put to bed.
And the only people who still believe that are like...
Or maybe people in the John Birch Society, which is another larger organization that mentored some of these student groups as well.
So, I mean, the connections are all there.
And I just, I try to think all the time, like, you know, if I were a student in the 1960s, and I was encountering this literature for the first time, or if I were encountering these students, what would I make of them?
And I'm still not sure.
But yeah, I mean, as you say, all those things are there.
Pardon me.
Well, yeah, I'll save this.
I have so many thoughts and I'm not going to get off track.
If you listen to the show, you know, I always have 100 things I want to say, but we don't have time for all of them.
I want to ask you about a couple of landmark events in the 60s.
So if folks listening are students of history or they remember some of these things, they're old enough or they've read about them.
But, you know, there's a famous student sit-in at Columbia University.
There's a famous photo of a student with his You know, they've taken over the president's office, feet on the desk and just looking really smug, like, hey, we're in charge now.
Right.
And that's that was scary to a lot of, you know, middle class, upper middle class Americans who are kind of scared of these student uprisings.
There's also Kent State and the murders on Kent State.
So would you help us understand, like, what did those those eruptions of unrest mean?
Specifically for bolstering this conservative movement, did the students in Columbia or what happened in Kent State, did they provide a kind of buttressing effect for the student conservatives or was it the opposite?
Yeah, no, they definitely did.
I mean, it's one more thing to organize around, right?
So if the whole idea is that conservatives are positioning themselves as the orderly students on campus and apart from leftist radicals and students for a democratic society or the student black power movement, like in the case at Columbia, so that that protest in April of 68, It was organized by SDS and also by the Campus Afro-American Society.
And what they were protesting, well, there's two different things.
So SDS, which is mostly white students, many of them Jewish, many of them in leadership are Jewish, protesting the Columbia University's partnership with the Department of Defense, right?
So theirs is an anti-war cause.
On the other hand, the Afro-American society is upset because the university is expanding into the black neighborhood of Harlem, and it's going to be encroaching on public spaces like public parks and into people's residential areas, like in housing.
And so they're trying to build, the university wants to build a gym.
And so the Afro-American Society describes it as Jim Crow because it will literally be racially segregated, right?
It's taking over the neighborhood of Harlem.
And also, even though Harlem residents will be allowed to use it, they'll literally have a separate entrance that is a ground below where the white Columbia, mostly white Columbia students will enter.
There's two separate issues there, and it's just a perfect foil for campus conservatives to say, look at the white Jewish radicals in SDS, look at the black radicals in Afro-American society taking over the administration building, taking over, I think, ultimately four different campus buildings.
And so, yeah, I mean, they can push back against that.
They align themselves with the New York City police.
Who the president eventually has to call, the campus president of Columbia, has to call in to get the sit-in to end.
And so they, I mean, they mark themselves.
They wear armed badges and they have code words like freedom to let the to let the NYC police know that they're friendly and they're on their side and they're not, you know, these radical crazy students.
So, yeah, I mean, that's that's one way that Columbia was extremely helpful for conservatives to realize, like, This is our main recruitment tool.
All we have to do is say, we're against the left.
Kent State, on the other hand, was a different situation.
So there was no sit-in, there was no protest, and it really wasn't even organized by one leftist group.
Kent State is in reaction, it's the whole campus, almost, reacting to an expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and into Laos, so neutral countries.
And also students not wanting to be drafted, right?
So the National Guard that is called in by the governor of Ohio, who is a Republican, by the way, and who also wants to eventually run for president.
So he's trying to show this like really tough stance to say students quit protesting on campus.
Everybody go back to your residence halls, back to your dorms.
And then students carry the protests into the streets and the protests last over the weekend.
And so anyway, when the National Guard comes to campus, they fire shots and they hit 14 students and ultimately like A handful of them will die.
One of them will be permanently disabled for the rest of his life.
And also they're not all students.
I shouldn't say that.
One of them was a teenage girl who was just visiting campus.
Anyway.
The details here actually don't matter in terms of how this was super helpful to the right, because it's just another instance where they get to say, look how the anti-war movement is radical.
Look what they've done to themselves.
Look what they made the National Guard do by executing them.
And so, yeah, I mean, it's another helpful tool to position themselves as the responsible, respectful, orderly group on campus.
I just can't resist, and this is me talking now, not you, so I'm not trying to put words into Dr. Shepard's mouth, but for me, these episodes in the book and thinking about them, I just cannot stop thinking about our current moment where we have so many, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, in the kinds of uprisings that happened in the wake of that incident, as well as so many others over the last decade,
I can't stop thinking about the ways that the right has organized and said, yes, like, we're not them.
Look how disorderly.
Look, you know, every time you you you dip your toe into Fox News, they're talking about Portland's on fire.
You can't even walk in Seattle anymore.
Our our college campuses are a woke joke.
Right.
And they just use these events as ways to kind of say, don't.
Hey, Americans, you know, Middle class, suburban, white American.
Don't you guys just want order?
Don't you want to just leave the house and not have to worry about all of this stuff?
People thinking about justice and peace and, I don't know, equality.
I mean, DEI, that's a bad word.
Who wants diversity, equity, inclusion?
Come on.
And I guess for me, I just want listeners, again, this is me.
This is my commentary.
I'm not trying to overextend your work as a historian, but some of the lessons that I learned here were just Please understand that the playbook is 60 years old, right?
When people push for justice, when they push for a change in the social order, they're going to be castigated as rioters, criminals, people that want to come for you and your children, destroy the American way of life.
It's said now.
It was said in the 60s and every decade in between.
And I just, you know, I I just could not get that on my mind as I thought about your book.
This leads me to another question about You know, you talked about astroturfing and an elder generation that really funded this whole movement.
If the movement was never as popular as it seemed, if it had been kind of planted in some sense, what were the goals?
Like beyond policy changes or ideals, what did these wealthy white conservatives want by mobilizing these young folks in this way?
Yeah, I mean, they're just training the next generation, right?
So it's one of the big lessons that I say, if you're asking about goals, it's one of the things I think that the students took away is that, well, first off, they knew that they weren't popular, right?
They claimed that they represented a student silent majority, but that wasn't true, and they knew that wasn't true.
But so one of the things that they could internalize is that it didn't matter that they weren't popular.
They didn't actually need to be popular.
All they needed to know is how systems of power worked.
And that's exactly what they were trained to understand.
And so that's that's a lesson.
And I kind of add this in the conclusion of the book that, you know, many of the people that I talk about will go on to spend the next 60 years of their lives in politics in some way, shape or form.
And it doesn't necessarily mean that they, you know, run for office, although many of them do.
Some of them become Supreme Court justices and vice presidents of the United States.
But others will stay in academia and publish, you know, conservative papers in the field of political science or philosophy.
Others will become boards of trustees.
Others will just be mega donors to their institutions.
Some will even become college presidents themselves.
Larry Arnn at Hillsdale is one example.
They were all involved in these 60s conservative campus movements, most of them in YAF.
And yeah, so I mean, they take that understanding forward with them for the rest of their lives as activists, as politicians and cultural influencers and whatever power that they have.
One of the arguments I make in my book is surrounding the Goldwater campaign of 1964, that there was just a lot of young stormtroopers in that campaign who learned lifelong lessons about politics there.
So one of them shows up in your book in some way, and that's Paul Weyrich, right?
And Dana Rohrabacher, somebody from my backyard who was in that sense.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Yeah, go ahead, please.
Well, so Dana Rohrabacher is fascinating.
He is not in my book, but he was in my dissertation.
And that's partly because he wouldn't talk to me.
I reached out and tried to interview him, and he didn't want to talk to me.
But he, in the 60s, was actually a very libertarian, which is shocking now because he's super Trumpy.
But he was like a folk artist.
Like, he made folk music, which is just so striking now because, you know, He's moved much further to the right, but I mean, yes, anyway, go ahead.
I just had that aside about Rohrabacher.
No, let's do it.
Okay, if you're listening, guess what?
We're going to nerd out about Dana Rohrabacher for a minute.
So if you don't want that, go get a cup of coffee or something, just hang out.
So Dana Rohrabacher is described by now ousted Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy as Putin's favorite congressperson.
He's from Huntington.
Well, he's actually from like close to Los Angeles in the 1960s.
He actually, I write about this in my book, he actually like hid in a tree one night because he got word that people were going to attack the Goldwater campaign headquarters near his house.
So he waited in the tree for the bandits to come and like take over the Goldwater camp and he was going to get them, I guess.
But I would love to talk a little bit more about this because Rohrabacher starts out, as you say, as a principled libertarian.
He becomes like a Reaganite.
He's like part of the press corps, right, in the Reagan administration.
But then he's like totally in bed with Putin.
And Putin, if you're libertarian, is not necessarily what you want.
Because Putin is about big government that like overreaches its stay into your life by regulating everything.
Right?
So it's a really fascinating sort of trajectory for Dana Rohrabacher.
Would love any, like, I never get to nerd out about Dana Rohrabacher.
So like, you know.
Guy, give me your minute and a half on what it looks like from your end.
Well, I don't know if I can contribute much more than that, because like I said, he wouldn't talk to me.
Yeah.
Where I found him was in, like, in articles in the New Guard, which was Young Americans for Freedom's magazine.
But yeah, I mean, he is a character, and I really think that his eccentricities just embody so many other examples, right?
A lot of these people who were students, libertarians in the 60s, didn't move further right.
Throughout their career.
And another example, and this person I do talk about in the book, he actually wasn't a college student, he was a faculty member, is Revlo Oliver.
So he was a like a far right classicist by training.
So he's a professor of the classics and also languages.
He teaches And he's fluent in like 12 different languages.
But he is a mentor of the far right.
And I have been studying his career pretty closely.
And it's almost like as the decades go by, he just he goes from being, you know, sort of a skeptic of democracy to a full on neo-Nazi, like to a proud fascist, Holocaust denier.
I mean, the full spectrum.
But yeah, I mean, it's almost like it takes years of being steeped in a movement before you're really comfortable to just let it all out.
Well, before I got sidetracked on Dana Rohrabacher, I apologize to everybody, but what I was trying to drive out there was it really seems as if what you're saying to us is that, hey, if we can train at least a handful, if we can just really get a handful of future leaders trained up, We can get folks who will become presidents, academics, vice presidents of the United States, presidents of colleges, and they will carry this.
They will be true believers because they will have been trained as young people.
So when they get to be 30 and 40 and 50 years old, like the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, they're not going to be putting it on for the camera.
They're not going to be sort of saying this one in public and then doing things in private.
They will be actual militants who think this is the way to save the nation.
And that seems to be part of the goal and part of the program.
Is that fair in your mind?
And is that why so many of them end up further and further right as time goes on?
Well, I think the explanation of why they end up further right is just because they're so comfortable being there.
And that's sort of the milieu that they operate in.
I will say that I don't think that they're all purists.
I do think that there's grift.
I do think that they're, you know, they say one thing to the audience and they kind of race bait and they, you know, wave the white flag or whatever it is.
And then they, sorry, wave a bloody shirt.
And then, you know, they go back to their, like, They're close audience and they can be more truthful or more honest about what it is they do or don't believe.
So, I mean, I think if we need a good example of that, you can just think about the denialism around the 2020 election.
Right.
How many of those people that voted You know, to overturn the election, don't actually believe that, but they know that they have to vote that way in order to keep their position, in order to not be primaried.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't, again, I don't think that they're all purists, but I think that they know enough, and they know other purists, that they sort of, like, know how to talk the talk and walk the walk.
All right.
Last question.
I know we're getting, there's like about a million things I'd love to ask you.
Let me ask you this in conclusion.
There's a lot of folks today.
I just read an article this morning.
That are like, you know, as a Democrat, as a leftist, as a something, I really long for the days when there was a Republican Party that stood for things.
It had a platform.
It had principled ideals about how to construct a government or society.
Today, we have MAGA Nation.
We have increasing fascist ideas and practices in our public square.
The good old days, whether that be the Reagan, Times or the Buckley thoughts or the whenever's, those were the times when we had a real opponent and at least we could struggle over the lofty principles of what it meant to be a democracy or a republic.
Reading your book, I kind of think you would say to that person at the dinner party, yeah, those days never, maybe they existed, but it surely was not the 1960s, and it surely was not by way of Buckley, Nixon, or Reagan.
Is that fair, or what am I missing, or what do you want to expand on there?
Yeah.
So I would parse out first the Republican Party from the conservative movement.
Maybe there is like a sunny Reaganism that people are nostalgic about or like, you know, a Bush type of compassionate conservatism that people miss.
But that's not true at all for the conservative movement.
Right.
There's this old understanding that Buckley functioned as like a gatekeeper, either bringing people in or kicking them out.
Of the post-war conservative movement, but several scholars in the last few years have shown that that just wasn't true, right?
I'm thinking if readers are interested, a lot of the literature on the far right, so like John S. Huntington's Far-Right Vanguard or Ted Miller's biography of Robert Welch, A Conspiratorial Life.
Matt Dalek's new book, Birchers, they all show that even though Buckley may have, like, taken them off the masthead of National Review or even if he symbolically kicked Robert Welch out of Publishing the National Review are out of the conservative movement.
Those men didn't go far.
And Buckley always kept up correspondence with them specifically.
And when he did, I'm using air quotes, kick them out of the movement, he singled them out.
But he didn't kick out all of the birchers.
Right.
He still is relying on those votes.
He needs people further to his right.
He just doesn't want them to be the spokespeople.
So, yes, I mean, I would push back on that thesis because they never go that far.
And maybe the Republican Party has just finally caught up to what the conservative movement is.
And that's because the conservatives have eaten the GOP.
And so that's what we have now.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, again, thinking, yeah, there's just so much there to think about in terms of, I guess the conclusion that I'm drawing here from what you just said is that thinking about someone like Buckley as the intellectual purist who really just wanted to fight for true conservatism in terms of an ideal or a philosophy He was actually somebody who was more than happy in one side of his mouth to say, hey, no more birchers in my publication.
And then in written correspondence or meetings or wherever, say, we actually need you all.
And strategically, I understand you're going to come from this flank when it comes to this election or this issue, even though we can't be too cozy.
I recognize.
I mean, again, it reminds me of Goldwater, who came to despise the birchers and Robert Welch.
But who welcomed them in order to get the campaign off the ground in California and ended up being the GOP nominee in 64.
And still lost.
And so, well, and, you know, by a landslide, right?
Right.
Even with those votes that he, you know, held his nose while he begged for, he still lost handily.
But, like, it goes to a point you make in the book, which is that, you know, conservative student movements are not nearly as popular as they'd like you to think, but conservatives don't win the popular vote nationally, right?
It just doesn't happen.
I mean, it happened with Bush Sr.
It happened with Bush Jr.
in 2004, but those are outliers, right, over the last, you know, 30, 40 years.
Well, even that 2004 election, right, that had to go, I mean...
Well, no, I guess after 9-11, yeah.
The 2000 election was a big mess, the 2004.
Anyway, I think those points are really, really important and I really appreciate it about your work.
All right, I need to stop.
Friends, if you're listening, you can probably tell I want to nerd out and talk for about three more hours.
Dr. Shepard has a million things to do.
And so, let's just say, go buy the book, Resistance from the Right, Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America.
You can just go to our show notes, click our October book recommendations, and guess what?
It's right there.
So, two clicks, you'll be there, the book will be on the way, and you can read all about it.
Dr. Shepard, what are other ways people can link up with you, can find your work and places you're publishing and other stuff that's coming in the future?
Yeah, so you can check out my website.
It's LaurenLassab.com, L-A-S-S-A-B-E.
I am on Twitter, or X, at LLassab.
I'm actually on all social media platforms at LLassab, so you can find me anywhere.
And then my website has a contact form.
And I'd love to chat with anybody, so hit me up.
Perfect.
That's great.
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