Sensible Sohrab Ahmari vs. frothing extremists Charles Murray & Steve Sailer

"I will happily join an old-school united front against the barbarians: Skull-measurers, IQ-worshippers — it’s really the most terrifying politics there is.”

Sohrab Ahmari is a bright guy, but he's kind of a silly person. A few years, the Iranian immigrant sincerely believed in America as a Catholic country, and now he's full of fear and loathing of people like me who are less ignorant about IQ than he is.

What's next in his wanderings through bad ideas?

From Vox:

Liberalism’s enemies are having second thoughts

Why Trump 2.0 is giving some anti-liberals second thoughts.

by Zack Beauchamp

Jul 9, 2025, 12:00 PM GMT+2

Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.

… Six years ago, journalist Sohrab Ahmari was at the cutting edge of right-wing intellectual radicalism. A Catholic convert who had adopted his faith with proverbial zeal, he had come to see modern social liberalism as an abomination that corroded the traditional values and social solidarity that made a good society possible. …

Together with a mostly Catholic group of thinkers, including Patrick Deneen and Harvard Law’s Adrian Vermeule, Ahmari led an assault on liberal ideas of tolerance and pluralism. Their most notable adherent was Vance, also an adult convert to Catholicism, who openly describes himself as a “postliberal” aiming to tear down the “regime” (by which he means the American liberal elite). …

Yet around the time the movement managed to place one of its own on the GOP ticket, Ahmari started to have second thoughts. In the spring 2024 edition of the liberal journal Liberties, he published a piece on “the poverty of the Catholic intellectual tradition” that read like a renunciation of his former radicalism.

I doubt that the Catholic intellectual tradition is all that impoverished relative to everything else. It just doesn’t have that much to do with the American tradition.

Catholics who believed that “the whole order, the whole regime, is corrupt” — as he once did — were guilty of adopting a “dogmatic ahistorical posture” and fostering “an unhealthy and philosophically indefensible revulsion for the nation and its traditions.” Instead of radical critique, he argued, the Catholic right needed to develop an appreciation for what was good about the American political order.

Duh …

… “I will happily join an old-school united front against the barbarians,” he tells me. “Skull-measurers, IQ-worshippers — it’s really the most terrifying politics there is.”

Here’s Ahmari’s longer denunciation of me from a year ago.

A pretty common phenomenon of high IQ but somewhat unbalanced right wing thinkers like Ahmari who are attempting to remake their careers in the more lucrative Center is they they decide to denounce strawman versions of myself and Charles Murray as the real wild-eyed extremists to prove their bona fides and nice liberals.

Which is pretty funny, but few get the joke.