Reaching Weimar America's Lost Boys

And: Can Dems (And The GOP) Save Themselves?; Arctic Frost; Leah Libresco Sargeant

German Expressionist Nick Fuentes (Grok)

I can’t get this whole Nick Fuentes-Tucker Carlson thing out of my mind. Me being me, it seems to me that there’s some high-level spiritual warfare going on here. Wherever there is hatred of the Jews as Jews — understand the distinction I’m making here — I see the Evil One at work.

If you don’t know who Fuentes is, good for you, in a sense. He’s a horrible, evil person. If you doubt me, watch at least the first ten minutes of this monologue that Ben Shapiro gave yesterday, in which he quotes (by embedding Fuentes videos) some of the greatest hits of this little scumbag. It’s not just Jews; for example, there’s a clip of him saying that women want to be raped. There’s another, one that I hadn’t seen before, in which he denies the Holocaust. He’s a real winner, that Fuentes. If you don’t know anything, or much, about Fuentes, I recommend that you watch at least some of that presentation, so that you can have a clearer idea of what we are dealing with.

Understand too that the bigger problem here is Tucker Carlson greatly magnifying Fuentes’s presence and credibility with that two-hour, tongue-bath interview, which now has over five million views. Carlson is certainly capable of doing tough interviews. Had he done such an inquiry of Fuentes, we probably wouldn’t be at this moment of crisis for the Republican Party.

The good news is that many conservative voices, including party leaders, have been raised in condemnation of Fuentes and Carlson, and what they represent. David Frum is a Never Trumper, but he makes an important point here:

As I’ve said, and need to repeat: this clash was inevitable, and if it has to be had, now is a good time for it. The popularity of Fuentes is a symbol of something deeper. I’ve been writing in recent days about this meaning, including pointing out how Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 classic The Origins Of Totalitarianism, argued that anti-Semitism is an unfailing sign (among others, which I discuss in Live Not By Lies), that a people is being prepared to accept totalitarianism. I was talking yesterday with my literary agent in New York, about how I didn’t include anti-Semitism in my Arendt list in that book, which was completed in early 2010, because I didn’t see this wave of anti-Semitism on the Left and the Right alike coming.

“Nobody did,” he said. “It has come at us so fast.”

The insightful British commentator and podcaster Konstantin Kisin has a great piece analyzing all this. A lot of it is paywalled, unfortunately, but here are some excerpts:

I remember reading a theory of history a long time ago which gave a persuasive explanation for why human societies seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Every generation, it said, only really learns what to do, how to think and which pitfalls to avoid from the two preceding generations with which it has direct contact. We don’t learn lessons from history so much as we learn them from our parents and grandparents. For proof of this, if you’re a man my age, you are likely to know a fair bit about WW2 and almost nothing about WWI. No one reading this who is not explicitly a history nerd will know much more than the meaningless basics about the Napoleonic Wars.

In other words, if history “repeats itself” or at least “rhymes”, it is because we are repeating the mistakes of our great grandparents, i.e. people who lived 80-90 years ago and could not personally warn us. As the saying goes, those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it, and those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it.

This is why, I think, many people cannot see what is happening on the right following the split which began with the invasion of Ukraine and was wedged open by the Israel-Hamas war.

His point is that enough time has passed from the Second World War, and the Cold War, such that young people don’t have a feel for the lessons we learned about the evils of Nazism and Communism.

More:

The problem for [Heritage Foundation leader Kevin] Roberts is that this attempt to sit on two stools cannot work. This became clear in his interview with Dana Loesch. Throughout the interview Roberts repeatedly insisted that the answer to bad ideas is to engage them, while simultaneously saying that he would never host Fuentes at the Heritage Foundation or on his podcast. This is an obvious contradiction that even a slick political operator like Roberts cannot resolve. It’s not his fault that the generational and factional conflict within the right is coming to a head.

You cannot simultaneously appease people who believe in a fixed set of ideas and people who believe that the only ideas worth having are cynicism and revenge.

The BoomerCon establishment does not understand that Fuentes is not the problem, he is a symptom. And the reason they don’t understand that is that they don’t understand young men, who make up the overwhelming majority of his audience.

Kisin goes on to say that “This entire phenomenon is driven by a number of factors which are affecting young men.”

• They are “the most fatherless generation in history,” having “less male guidance and direction than any group of men in American history, even the boys born after WW2, the most murderous war in human history which killed over 400,000 American men.”

• They have been raised in a time of economic stress and political instability.

• They were educated in a school and college system which is overwhelmingly female. Kisin says he doesn’t bring this up to criticize female teachers, but that “it’s just harder for women to teach boys how to be men.”

• The feminization of society and the absence of fathers meant that young men have not been taught to channel their natural masculine instincts, but rather to suppress them. This never works.

• As they have struggled, they’ve been raised in a left-wing popular culture that has blamed me, especially white men, for all the ills of the world.

Kisin goes on:

This perfect storm of alienation and the dearth of male guidance presents a lucrative opportunity for a new breed of influencer. Unlike fathers, uncles, male teachers, sports coaches and so on, Fuentes is not motivated by a desire to make a positive impact on the lives of the boys who listen to him. A father is incentivised to raise his sons in a way that makes them resist their worst instincts. As an influencer who makes money getting views online, Fuentes is incentivised to do the exact opposite.

He talks about the impact of the mores of contemporary society, and the lessons that young men have taken from it. Excerpt:

Another was the increased focus on compassion and inclusion. It’s baddies like Hitler that are obsessed with strength and purity, went the logic. Therefore, we must instead embrace empathy and diversity. This is what historian Tom Holland means when he says that we no longer ask “What would Jesus do?” and instead ask “What Would Hitler Do?” and then do the opposite.

These well-intended norms have now been taken to such extremes that they increasingly produce extreme results such as open borders, legalised crime, rampant homelessness and gender ideology.

The backlash against all of this was eminently predictable. So much so, that many of us have warned for many years that wokeness would produce an equal and opposite reaction on the right. How could it not? Did you really think that telling one group that they’re bad because of their sex and skin colour while celebrating and promoting other groups for the same traits would not produce an identitarian backlash?

In any case, “Groypers”, as Fuentes fans are known, are not conservatives. They are the voice of a generation which feels ignored, mistreated and unfairly maligned. They don’t want “small government”, they want revenge.

The bulwark against this voice of Cain was shot in the neck and killed on a college campus a few weeks ago. Charlie Kirk was single-handedly leading the Zoomer Right away from bitterness and resentment, towards God, family and service. How and whether the remaining principled conservatives try to resolve this attempt to take over their movement remains to be seen.

That last paragraph hit me like a punch in the gut. This is what that perverted, left-wing tranny-furry lover, Tyler Robinson, took from us when he murdered Charlie Kirk. People who are entertaining the thought that the Israelis killed Charlie should reflect on Kisin’s point. Charlie was the strongest bulwark against the spread of Groyperism among young conservative men — and this is a big reason that Fuentes constantly targeted Charlie, and has been trying to influence Turning Point USA. Fuentes understood that Charlie was his biggest enemy. And now Charlie is gone.

The pushback on the Right against Groyperism and Tucker Carlson for normalizing it is right and necessary. But if it is not accompanied by a serious attempt to understand why Fuentes’s ugly ideas — and he really doesn’t have any ideas other than tearing everything down, and hating Jews — are gaining traction, and to offer something substantive and hopeful to these alienated young men, this opposition will come to nothing.

The Nazis appealed to young people who had lost all trust in Weimar-era institutions, and all faith in their future. This is what the “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” song from the antifascist musical Cabaret means. As the great Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) says in the Cohen Brothers comedy The Big Lebowski said, “I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos.” But Fuentes doesn’t even offer that! It’s just trashmouth nihilism. But it’s landing. How come?

These young men have been told all their lives that their destiny in life is to be kulaks, to be dhimmis — second-class citizens. As a pro-Israel Catholic friend pointed out to me this morning, if you look at those New York Young Republican group chats that brought such condemnation (rightly!), if they had been Democrats saying the same things about whites, especially white men, and Christians, nobody in the media or anywhere else would have batted an eye. That kind of discourse about whites has been completely normalized over the past fifteen years in liberal circles. These young men see the hypocrisy, and draw conclusions.

One of Arendt’s lessons was that a pre-totalitarian society contains elites who are so caught up in the pleasure of transgression that they don’t care about tearing down the pillars of civilization. They are having too much fun watching people who had been kept out by gatekeepers rushing into forbidden spaces. This is Tucker Carlson, straight up, and Steve Bannon, and others.

I need to write about this in a longer essay. This morning I’m thinking about the lady in Nashville who, in a Q&A earlier this year after a screening of an episode of the Live Not By Lies movie, asked me if I thought that the threat of totalitarianism was fading now that Trump is in power and has wokeness on the retreat. No, I said, because all of the factors that Arendt identified as pre-totalitarian — e.g., the atomization and loneliness of people, the replacement of Truth with a desire to believe whatever makes one feel good, etc. — are still very much with us. It could easily overtake the Right, I said.

And here we are today.

As David Frum points out, at least the Right is acknowledging the problem within its ranks, and struggling to deal with it. This is not happening among the Democrats. They’re about to make Zohran Mamdani, a young socialist Islamic politician of little experience, who has centered his activism around the Palestinian cause, mayor of America’s most important city. The exhaustion of the contemporary Democratic Party, as represented by the desiccated Andrew Cuomo, has created this opening. Now the Democrats are trying to harness the “exciting new energy” that Mamdani brings to the party.

Mamdani has downplayed his pro-Hamas activism, as he has tried to win votes in the heavily Jewish city. It should not be forgotten that he once voiced support for the “Holy Land Five,” convicted in a Dallas trial for conspiracy to aid Hamas, a certified terrorist organization. Hamas, recall, in its charter describes itself as “the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.” In a piece some years ago, I quoted one of the documents the FBI recovered in a raid on the Holy Land Foundation, and introduced into evidence at the trial. It was a memo that the “Ikhwan” (Muslim Brotherhood) wrote as part of its long-term plan for America. The Holy Land Five’s defense did not deny the authenticity of the document, but only said it was old, and didn’t apply. Right. From the document:

The process of settlement [of Islam in the United States] is a “Civilization-Jihadist” process with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that all their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” their miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who choose to slack.

These are the people whom Zohran Mamdani, in 2017, praised. As far as I know, he has never repudiated them. What does this tell you?

So the Democrats have a problem, and they aren’t dealing with it. But they are not the responsibility of conservatives. Fuentes and his fellow travelers are. My Catholic friend, who identifies as a Zionist, had some wise words in his texts to me this morning:

I would urge Zionists of any flavor to recognize is that the youth bloc writ large has been radicalized fast at the high and low culture levels, something that will be demonstrated tomorrow with the coronation of King Mamdani. A big part of what fuels the resentment is that Mamdani’s views are more or less on par with what Tucker has expressed, yet he gets a pass in a way that Tucker never will (not defending Tucker, to be clear) and that in turn fuels the resentment and makes the argument that it’s all about power.

You can ostracize Tucker but every single opinion survey indicates these views are widespread at the youth level within our society and sooner or later that does manifest in politics, the donor reaction of threatening to throw in with Ted Cruz is a Bourbon level idiocy that shows they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing regarding how they got to this point

You have to demonstrate through leadership and argument where these positions are wrong and expose their errors, as opposed to stigmatize and purge. That is simply where the culture is today and is something that I think a lot of people are very loathe to admit because so many of these circles still want to LARP like it is still the 1990s to early 2000s regarding the state of the culture.

My friend cited as an example of leadership Donald Trump being the first major GOP candidate to denounce the Iraq War — which he did, to an audience full of conservatives at the South Carolina GOP primary debate in 2016. The audience booed him, but Trump was right — and became president later that year.

I deeply believe that J.D. Vance has it in him to provide that kind of leadership, and to do so credibly. We will see if he rises to the occasion.

Last night at Hillsdale, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation gave a speech in which he admitted that his initial handling of all this was a “mistake.” I know Kevin somewhat, and believe he is a good man. I think we should give him grace here. He is not an anti-Semite, not in the least, and has committed Heritage to fighting anti-Semitism. I think he was caught off-guard, and handled it very poorly. We need to give him a chance to recover. That said, he also knows that he is a senior leader in a conservative movement that contains a rising number of young men seduced by the siren song of the nihlistic Fuentes — and that we cannot simply denounce them and move on.

The hardcore Groypers are irredeemable, but the greater number of people who are drawn to their ideas are not. There are also almost certainly a lot of young men who don’t really know who the Groypers are — yet — but who are susceptible to their poison. They are redeemable, but they are not going to align with a GOP establishment who has never shown the slightest interest in responding to their very serious and legitimate concerns. I quoted yesterday NBC News polling showing that the GOP is seriously underwater with the American people on bread-and-butter economic issues. What concrete proposals do the Republicans have for addressing the precarity of the Zoomers? A bottom-scraper like Nick Fuentes has nothing to offer them but hatred and scapegoating — but he is at least connecting with their deep alienation.

This thing could go any way now on the Right. It depends on real leadership within conservatism. Again, Groyperism should be unequivocally denounced, but if it is not met with a serious, positive set of policies, proposals and preaching to give these young men a reason to turn away from Fuentes and to embrace something real and positive for their future, it will have been in vain.

I’m thinking about the young people who followed Charlie’s positive vision, and also the young people I met on the Chartres pilgrimage. The Chartres pilgrims (average age: 19) understood perfectly well that their society had failed them. They told me they were looking for roots, for community, for meaning — and ultimately, of course, for God. This is the way. American young people are looking for the same thing, for the same reasons.

An interesting distinction between the French Catholic pilgrims and their American co-generationalists is that at this point, the French don’t have much political hope. French politics have been so secular for so long that there’s nobody in French politics to speak for them. Marine Le Pen is an avowed secularist, and thought her party surely draws a lot of Christian votes, not one French Catholic to whom I’ve spoken about this — and I’ve talked to a lot of them — believe that she is a Christian, or offers anything substantively Christian. This is just how it is in French politics.

America is different. Christianity is still a force in our politics — a diminished one, but still strong. You cannot listen to Fuentes at any length and believe that he is a Christian, despite his labeling himself a Catholic (e.g., in one of the clips cited by Ben Shapiro, Fuentes says America is Jesus’s country, and that’s why Jews and others will get “the death penalty … when we come to power.” This is a lot like what Hitler did in the beginning: he hated Christianity, but used the language of Christianity early on to deceive normie Germans about his real intentions.

My point is that unlike in France, it is still possible in the US to articulate a credible Christian vision of politics, joined to the positive, life-giving teachings of Christ, as opposed to whatever fraudulent filth Nick Fuentes passes off as Christian. I believe the young Christian politician J.D. Vance has it in him to chart that difficult path. Pray for him! If he’s not the one, then who? Ted Cruz? Come on. As grateful as I am for Cruz’s strong repudiation of anti-Semitism, he and those like him are not the ones who can provide the leadership the Right, or America, needs in these conditions.

J.D. is. Again: pray for him. I believe there is a massive spiritual battle going on right now in high places, and that he is almost certainly at or near the center of it. Washington is not the Vatican, but the evil ones are drawn to places of power.

You’ll remember the bizarre thing that happened to me in Rome on the morning of Pope Benedict XVI’s funeral, when the desk chair in my hotel room inexplicably collapsed, with a bang, into a tangle of metal piping, though nothing was on the chair. Later that day, having lunch with two Vatican journalist friends, and puzzling over why Pope Francis had given such a weirdly disrespectful funeral homily, I got around to telling them what happened in my hotel room that morning. As I finished the story, the unoccupied fourth chair at the table, in the middle of the restaurant inside Vatican City, flipped over backwards. Everybody grew quiet.

I texted my Vatican exorcist friend to ask him what he made of it all. He told me that the Enemy knows I’m on his territory, and he wants me to know that he’s watching.

Last point: Brandon Showalter has an interesting X thread on how great and brave Tucker Carlson used to be on Fox, talking about things nobody else would touch. So when did he go dark, and start to promote anti-Semitism? I checked the timeline, and it’s around the time he claims he was assaulted physically in his bed by a demon, who left bloody scratch marks on his body. Remember, he told me about this personally a year before he went public with it. He was concerned enough that he agreed to communicate with an exorcist friend of mine, but ultimately turned away the exorcist’s assistance. This would have been sometime in April or May of 2023.

In June 2023, after he launched his new online show, he began going hard on anti-Semitic tropes, which only intensified.

This doesn’t prove anything, but it’s an interesting coincidence. I don’t believe that the Tucker we see today is the same man so many of us came to like and admire from his previous broadcasting. I would like to know what happened.

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