The "Party of Ideas."

 Paul Campos points to John Ganz who has been cataloguing the atrocities over at the Claremont Institute.

It's a striking the roster that Ganz analyzes here. (He goes on in the linked piece to dive into the OG Claremont Guy, but that's less important.)

The basic criticism from the Claremontsters (as they call themselves) is that Western Civilization is in a critical state of decline and decay. Fascist poet Ezra Pound called European civilization after World War II:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

The explicit criticism from certain corners of the "intellectual Right" has been focused on this perceived state of decline for centuries, which should probably tell you about the actual state of decline. If we've been in critical decline and decay since 1945, you'd think we'd be gone by now. 

This represents the more high falutin state of Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and the replacement theory that motivated the Buffalo shooter. The basic idea is that America is White and Christian and "conservative" and that a bunch of Brown people who can't possibly be real Americans have warped this country into something that can no longer be accurately called America.  

If this is the intellectual underpinnings of your political movement, then violence like Buffalo is inevitable. It's preordained. What's more, it's tacitly welcomed by people like Tucker Carlson or Elise Stefanik who once represented the moderate GOP establishment. They have now wholly sold their souls to dark ideas that were the foundations of Trump's erratic impulses. Trump's cognitive inability to focus or plan made him ultimately a failure, but people like Ron DeSantis are capable of planning and following through on basic fascism in the name of...American liberty?

Difficult to see how we survive as an existing country if these fuckers win in the next election.