Josh Abbotoy
American conservative writer and entrepreneur; managing director of New Founding (a self-described “Christian nationalist” investment and venture firm); author of “Is a Protestant Franco inevitable?” (First Things, 2023) — the wiki’s principal touchstone essay for the contemporary mainstream-conservative entertainment of Franco-style authoritarianism as a possibly-inevitable American outcome.
Why He Matters Here
Per Iberian Vistas, Abbotoy’s 2023 First Things piece is the publication that broke the postwar taboo on positive Franco discourse in the mainstream conservative venue First Things. The argument’s structure:
“Is there any point to the dissident right’s speculations about Red Caesar, Protestant Franco, and Baptist Pinochet? Is it all just puerile escapism? No. It is basic realism that any thinking man should countenance. If the current trajectory holds, it is certainly possible that conditions will deteriorate until something like a Protestant Franco becomes inevitable. If that happens, the utopian grading rubric for our politics will vanish. When civil strife starts, you give up the more noble aims of politics and rush to the person who is least likely to kill your friends and family.”
Abbotoy’s framing is prudential rather than programmatic — he insists he does not desire the outcome — but the rhetorical effect is to legitimize Franco-style authoritarianism as a thinkable contingency in a way the postwar mainstream right had explicitly bracketed. The piece is the wiki’s marker for the moment Iberian-authoritarian discourse moved from Hard-Right blogs (Haywood, IM-1776) into mainstream-conservative print.
Abbotoy’s New Founding venture firm — explicitly Christian-nationalist, building parallel-economy infrastructure for Christian Right institutions — is itself wiki-relevant as an instance of the Hard-Right operational class’s growing institutional independence from legacy conservative finance.
Cross-References
Stub — to be expanded if a primary Abbotoy text is ingested.