JD Vance Is The Right's Only Hope
And: Tucker vs. Bonhoeffer; Young Hitler; Exiling The Sacred; Two Churches, More
I make my debut as a contributing writer to The Free Press today with this piece arguing that J.D. Vance is the only figure in this country who can keep the racist, Nazi-positive Groyper movement from taking over the Right. Excerpt:
No reasonable person thinks Donald Trump, with his Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, is an antisemite. But it’s also true that Trump, a 79-year-old lame duck, is in no position to stem the rising tide of Jew-hatred and radicalism among the young right. As Trump’s heir apparent, Vance is.
Vance also has the advantage of knowing that Fuentes despises him. Using a slur for people of Indian descent, Fuentes once mocked the vice president as “a fat race-mixer who’s married to a jeet.” On a recent livestream, Fuentes revels in his new, post-Tucker influence on the right. “J.D. Vance is getting squeezed, and he’s going to have to make a decision,” Fuentes said to his streaming audience. If Vance condemns the Groypers, Fuentes threatened, he would flood 2028 GOP primary states with his cult of followers to campaign against Vance. In right-wing parlance, the arrogant Fuentes is trying to cuck the vice president.
It’s hard to imagine that platoons of neo-Nazi incels knocking on doors and urging decent Iowa farmers to reject Vance is going to hurt the presumptive GOP presidential front-runner. But it might not look that way to Vance and his Washington advisers, including Kevin Roberts.
If you are constantly online, as everyone in politics and media is today, it is easy to overestimate the power of these trolls. But most Americans are not like that. They still don’t like Nazis. That said, Carlson’s audience is far, far larger, and more mainstream than Fuentes’. That’s why his soft rollout of Fuentes on his show was so disturbing. Groyperism is a threat, but it is a manageable one at this point. It won’t be forever, especially as the conditions Arendt saw favoring the rise of such figures remain in play.
What’s required is uncompromising moral and political leadership. Vance is the only Republican of his stature who can provide it. And as Trump’s natural successor in the MAGA movement, he must.
What would that look like?
For one, Vance should not try to reason with the Groypers, to talk them into the tent. They only want to mock, destroy, and humiliate. Aside from hating Jews, Israel, blacks, and women, they have no program or vision. The best way—the only way—to counter their malignant influence is to condemn them, straight up, but without dismissing the legitimacy of the despair that drives young men into their ranks.
Then, Vance and his team must develop concrete solutions to the economic precarity in which the Zoomers live. This will be extraordinarily difficult, but there is no alternative. Complicating the task is that he is tied to Trump’s economic agenda, which is unstable and increasingly unpopular. (An NBC News poll, released just before last week’s election, showed strong voter majorities disapproving of Trump’s handling of the economy.)
Third, Vance should lean hard into his Christian faith, which is deep and authentic. In public speeches, he should not hold back in distinguishing between real Christianity and the fraudulent, hate-filled counterfeit mouthed by Fuentes, the Father Charles Coughlin of the internet age. Both men are Catholics, but only one—the vice president—is faithful to the Church’s teachings.
The vice president could use some help from the nation’s conservative Christian priests and pastors, who need to wake up to what time it is. Never forget that Hitler and the Nazis despised Christianity, but were willing to mouth its pieties to win over middle-class churchgoers. It worked. Aside from a small network of young Calvinist types, who are as online as they are hard-line, there are no meaningful Groypers at prayer institutions. But there are countless clergy who would prefer to stay out of the fray. Sorry, pastors, but conscientious objection in this spiritual war is cowardice.
Finally, Vance’s biography is an asset that none of his would-be rivals has. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance acknowledges the political and structural economic changes that left working-class people behind. But he also highlights the role of asserting personal moral agency, particularly self-respect and self-discipline, in overcoming these challenges. It’s not “either-or,” but “both-and.”
Was Bonhoeffer A Bad Christian? Tucker Carlson Says So
So, here’s where we are today with Tucker Carlson. In his latest video, criticizing Jewish radio host Mark Levin for deploying the term “Nazi” too often, TC calls Bonhoeffer a bad Christian for trying to kill Hitler. Seriously, he does — I’ve cued the video to that point:
At just past the 36:50 point, he says that “nobody” is a Nazi today (“The Nazis have been gone for 80 years, sorry”), and that the reason some call others Nazis is to distract from the fact that Israel is bad for America. This current debate over Israel is destroying the Trump coalition, he says (37:40), implying that supporters of Israel and those who criticize him (TC) for giving a friendly platform to a punk who denies the Holocaust and who says “Hitler was f—king cool” are the real enemies of the Right.
For that to be true, you have to deny the evidence of your ears and eyes in this collection of Fuentes's greatest hits:
Nope, no Nazis here:
You can say, “But in that top photo, Fuentes was making the Nazi salute ironically, and you old people just don’t get Gen Z humor!” Yeah, right. Watch the clip above of him, over and over, praising Hitler. Here he is on a podcast denying the Holocaust.
If no Nazis exist today, then people criticizing TC for platforming and therefore mainstreaming an open admirer of Hitler with a softball interview are the real bad guys. That’s the logic here. Also, if you notice that some people among us are Nazis, and say so, then you are justifying murder, and tearing the American Right apart. And all this is somehow Israel’s fault — not Tucker’s, for giving a Hitler-lover and Holocaust denier a friendly platform to discuss his views.
I have no idea what the effect of the TC interview is on moving Fuentes towards the mainstream has been, but I can tell you that in the last 24 hours, I’ve heard from two alarmed friends back in the US who reported hearing middle-aged normies — the kind of men who would not go to Rumble to search out Fuentes’s show — saying that Nick Fuentes makes a lot of sense. Bet you they had no idea who Nick Fuentes was before they saw him fluffed by TC. And they still don’t really know who he is, unless they watch something like this montage clip of him praising Hitler, saying Jews will be killed when “we” come to power, and saying that lots of women want a man to rape them, to “beat the s**t out of them,” and bragging that his show is racist. (Don’t play that at work, btw).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was stripped naked and hanged in 1945 in a Nazi prison for his involvement in a plot to kill Hitler. Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer’s friend, quoted a witness to the murder:
I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.
Tucker Carlson calling this man a bad Christian for attempting to kill Hitler was not something I expected to wake up to today. But we live in interesting times. Pay attention, y’all. It’s getting very dark.
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