America's Crazy Train

'The Groypers Have Taken Over. We Run This,' Boasts Nick Fuentes. He May Be Right

So, where are we in this dramatic week in American conservative politics? The last thing I saw before going to bed last night was this video from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation. Watch it; it’s important:

You might not realize this unless you are paying close attention to conservative politics, but this is a Very Big Deal. Kevin Roberts is a personal friend, a serious Catholic, and a very good man. But it’s hard for me to see this video in a positive light. I’ll let A.G. Hamilton break down the difficulty with this short address:

So here is what I will say as a long-time fan of Heritage: It’s understandable that an organization like this would want to focus on fighting the left and avoid what they view as infighting on the right. I personally think the right should police its own side, especially from malicious actors who seek to align with the left to destroy conservative institutions, alliances, and social structures... but it’s not mandatory for every group to do so. They can certainly just ignore the current fight.

But there are two very clearly incompatible ideas in this video. On the one hand, Kevin argues we should confront bad ideas instead of just “cancelling them”. Then, less than a minute later, he refers to people confronting the bad ideas of Tucker Carlson/Fuentes as a “venomous coalition” and accuses them of “sowing division.”

So, which is it? Should we confront Tucker and debate him/call out his lies or does doing so make us venomous and = “sowing division”?

More importantly, Tucker is causing the division. He has gone to war with people who disagree with him on the right and is actively allying with the far-left, racial supremacists, and pro-CCP propagandists (see his recent guest list), and many others that Heritage has spent years opposing, to do so. He spreads lies almost daily, not just about other countries, but also people on the right that disagree with him.

Insisting that no one is allowed to notice this or fight back is nonsense. No one forced Tucker down this path. He chose it. The people Tucker is at war with, including conservative Jews and Christian Zionists, have been some of Heritage’s biggest supporters over the years. They helped make Heritage into what it is today.

So I am fine if Heritage wants to focus on the left and stay out of the fight over the future of the right, but I have a serious problem with Heritage instead throwing those people under the bus for Tucker. Maybe that’s not what the below video meant to do, but it can certainly be read that way.

It can be. I hope that’s not the intent. I am not a regular viewer of Tucker’s show, or anybody’s for that matter, so I can neither agree nor disagree with A.G. Hamilton’s claim about Tucker’s guest list. I’m only concerned with him having Fuentes on for a softball interview. If Tucker had grilled him — and Tucker is so good at this that he could have reduced Fuentes to rubble — that would be a different thing.

Tucker said he hated people like me, Christian Zionists, more than anybody else on earth. So, right-wing Christians who criticized Tucker for the Fuentes interview are now part of the “venomous coalition”? Really? Is NETTR (“No Enemies To The Right”) the rule now?

I agree that it is perfectly understandable and justifiable for an institution like Heritage to ignore the fighting over the Tucker/Fuentes interview. But they’ve chosen to engage, and to do so in a way meant to anathematize critics of Tucker. I believe that all this is de facto normalizing Fuentes. Look at this (don’t play it in a place where people can hear it; Fuentes calls Adolf Hitler “really fuckin’ cool”):

There is NO context in which this evil fool can be normalized or granted credibility! Look what Fuentes is saying today. He knows how to read the room:

And here is Fuentes responding to Roberts’s statement in the video that he “abhors” Fuentes’s views:

“Our movement.” Not my movement, pal. Not now, not ever, not with you in it. Notice, though, how Fuentes is cleverly associating himself with Heritage (“our movement”), even though Roberts explicitly denounced him. Credibility! Groypers are now crawling en mass through the Overton Window, which our people have opened.

The Left has been dismantling its appeal with wokeness, and now is about to elect Zohran Mamdani, whose entire ideological position is completely antithetical to what most Americans believe in. There has never been a better opportunity for the Right to consolidate its gains and become the party for normal people. But no, we can’t do that — we have to find some way of coming to terms with white nationalists and Jew haters onside, because if we don’t, the radical Left will win. Right? Is that the thinking?

No. Never. This Groyper lie, in some version, might come to power, but not through me. Fight the Evil Left does not require a tactical alliance with the Evil Right.

Look, as I think I said here yesterday, I am told by someone in a position to know that something like 30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers. If so, that’s horrifying. But that only means that this has to be confronted, straight up, without compromise, and battled down. A conservative movement unwilling to or incapable of doing this is not one worth saving.

Read this:

A few years ago, I went to Auschwitz. Look at this:

Those are clothes that belonged to Jewish children. The Nazis took them off, gassed the children, and threw their little bodies into the ovens. “Fuckin’ cool,” right? So says Nick Fuentes and his followers, who now consider themselves to be within “our movement,” and “run[ning] this.”

Here are some of the ovens where those children, and six million other human beings, ended up:

Fuckin’ cool, are they? Empty cans of Zyklon B gas, used to exterminate six million human beings, most of them Jews:

Are you aware of what some of these Fuentes types are calling Generation Z?

That’s from a TikTok account claiming the name with transgressive pleasure. It’s all over the Internet. Look for yourself. You need to know this is what Fuentes is mainstreaming, and that more normal people within the conservative establishment have now stumbled into making more respectable, in the same way the normie liberals have sanctioned pure Jew hatred via the pro-Palestine movement.

The leadership class of the American Right is now having a “Man For All Seasons” moment. That is, they are going to have to ask themselves what they are willing to do and say, and to accept, for the sake of power. The famous perjury scene from the film version is here:

Our Revolutionary Moment

As you know, I frequently disagree with my friend David Brooks, even though I have a lot of respect for him as a thoroughly decent man. I just think he’s wrong about politics most of the time. But his column today is worth reading; I’ve unlocked it for you all. It’s about how the MAGA Right took up the strategies of the woke left. Excerpts:

Critical Theory. This intellectual hodgepodge that emerged from something called the Frankfurt School built on Marxism and influenced the New Left over the past two generations. One of its tenets is that the supposedly neutral institutions of society are simply shams that the elite use to mask their grip on power. Trump agrees. A neutral Justice Department? Gone. A neutral media? Gone. A neutral Constitution? Going. A neutral judiciary? Going. Free speech? Going.

We would not be where we are today if the Left had not given up on neutrality in all these areas. True neutrality is an impossible ideal, but it is at least an ideal worth aiming for, and it could be largely achievable in a society more cohesive than ours (see MacIntyre). But we on the Right sat back for a long time watching the Left bend these institutions to their ideology — and it accelerated massively around 2012. Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

My sense is that what David sees as “neutral” a lot of us would see as … not. At all. Or even trying to be. More Brooks:

Identity Politics. This is based, first, on the idea that your group identity explains your worldview more than your individual consciousness. It is based, second, on the idea that history is a struggle between oppressor and oppressed groups. It is based, third, on the idea that victimized groups are innocent and oppressor groups are evil. You are defined by how much your group is oppressed. Over the last few decades identity-based departments flourished in American universities — women’s studies, African American studies, etc.

Trump took this idea and flipped it on its head. Now cultural studies professors are the evil oppressors, and evangelical Christians are the persecuted oppressed. As so many have noted, MAGA is identity politics for white people. It turns out that identity politics is more effective when your group is in the majority.

OK, but still, white people, especially white Christians, and white Christian males most of all, are the only ones in America who were not allowed to identify with a group, and group interests. Consequently, they became demonized, and really did lose job opportunities, educational opportunities, and so forth. What interest do they have in maintaining an order that systematically demonized them? I cannot make it clearer how much I loathe Nick Fuentes … but he came from somewhere.

To be fair, Brooks says that the Left can’t let itself off the hook, because it started it, with Marx. He concludes:

If you want a one-sentence description of where politics is right now here’s my nominee: We now have a group of revolutionary rightists who have no constructive ideology confronting a group of progressives who let their movement be captured by a revolutionary left-wing ideology that failed.

Not too far from Weimar, honestly. After this week, I wonder if the crazy train that America is on can be stopped. Last word about Fuentes, who is, alas, genuinely popular. In the early 1930s, German conservative elites thought they could use Hitler against the Left, but control him. In Mein Kampf, Hitler said he would never let himself be controlled. We know who was right in the end. The elites on my side who are playing with Fuentes, Candace, and others better think hard about where this crazy train is likely to go on its right track. There is precedent.