The Fight For Ownership Of Tomorrow

And: The Islamic Way Of War; Europe's Creative Sterility

The siren song of the Far Right, from ‘Cabaret’ (link)

I’ve been getting some kind emails and texts from people thanking me for my “courage” in standing up against this anti-Semitism monster threatening the GOP and the conservative movement. While I appreciate (seriously) the compliment, it says something about our current moment that it is considered courageous to take a stand against a neo-Nazi incel Holocaust denier and his enablers. But here we are.

NBC News yesterday released some new political polling, which frames this whole mess for Trump/Vance, and the GOP. From the poll:

This ought to scare the hell out of the White House. The Republicans are losing seriously to Democrats on bread-and-butter issues — even as (according to the poll) the public doesn’t like the Democratic Party! Trump is unpopular, and Vance is polling at 39% approval, 45% disapproval.

Appeasing the Groypers should be very far from a priority! It is very hard to see how handing the Democrats the gift albatross of a neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying incel to hang around the heads of the GOP is going to help them with normie voters who would like the administration and Congress to do something about the cost of living, eh? That we are even having this conversation tells me that the leadership is way, way too online.

Even though the Democrats are responsible for the government shutdown, the poll reveals that the public blames the Republicans!

Over the weekend, I watched again the 1972 movie musical Cabaret, which is set in 1931 Berlin. It’s fantastic, and you can see why Liza Minnelli, whose star long ago faded, was once a Very Big Deal. The film, based on a Broadway play, is set mostly in the Kit Kat Klub, a decadent Berlin cabaret of the late Weimar period, though there is personal drama off the cabaret stage, involving the jittery American expat cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Minnelli), who is so obsessed with pleasure, and becoming famous to show up her neglectful father, that she pays no attention to what is happening around her. The coming of the Nazi Party to power, I mean.

In fact, that’s the point of the whole film. While everyone was immersing themselves in distraction from their economic troubles, the Nazis slowly, steadily, brutally gained power with the German people. Watch this number from later in the film, and bear in mind that to this point, inside the cabaret, we have seen nothing but very clever, alluring celebrations of decadence, especially sexual decadence. But when two characters, the Englishman Brian and the German baron Maximilian, drive out in the countryside, they encounter this scene while drinking at a biergarten:

"Tomorrow belongs to me,” they all sing. And we, the viewers, know that it does. The Nazis promise a beautiful future of restored order and morality. Says Brian to the conservative baron at the end, “Still think you can control them?”

The viewer contrasts this scene — a wholesome, if sentimental, song, performed in the beautiful sunlight — with the decadent performances in the nighttime cabaret. As you watch the scene above, notice that by the end, all the people in the biergarten are singing the song. The Nazis are giving them a sense of hope, after years of terrible economic hardship and the breakdown of their society in the Weimar period. Of course it was a horrible lie — we know that now. But millions of exhausted and desperate Germans did not know it then. While all the sophisticates were enjoying the decadence of the Kit Kat Klub, ordinary Germans longed for what these National Socialist minstrels were hymning.

Nazism came from somewhere. This was one of the most important lessons the Allies learned from the mistakes of the First World War, and the way they dealt with defeated Germany. This is why the Marshall Plan was so important.

Nick Fuentes isn’t like the film’s handsome young Nazi minstrel. If anything, he has far more in common with the Kit Kat Klub decadents, though he’s far less interesting. Nevertheless, if someone were to come along today and offer something that struck people as life-giving, instead of childishly nihilistic, that person could go far in Weimar America.

I checked in yesterday with Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism to remind myself why she saw anti-Semitism as a precursor to totalitarianism. The basic argument Arendt makes is that anti-Semitism provides a scapegoat that can unite a badly fragmented society around a common enemy, even if it is detached from reality. Jews become the all-purpose enemy whose existence explains society’s troubles with deadly simplicity. The more popular it becomes, the more society becomes conditioned to think of individuals as faceless collective groups.

(Wokeness has already accomplished that from the Left in our society, note well. What’s more, remember that Arendt’s book takes on the roots of totalitarianism of both Left and Right.)

Moreover, anti-Semitism exploits the willingness of atomized people, devoid of meaning and structure, and their willingness to believe any fiction that restores purpose and order to their lives. And it justifies terror against the Other as a way of restoring the lost order for which people long.

It starts with the Jews, but won’t end there. This is why Jews are a canary in the civilizational coal mine. Re-reading Arendt, I am struck by how wokeness really has done yeoman’s work in all these ways, making white people, especially white men, into the universal scapegoat. I believe anti-Semitism first manifested in the contemporary American context on the Left because the Left already did the work of preparing its people to think in terms of simplistic identity politics, and blaming entire groups for their problems. When the Gaza issue came up, it was very easy for them to code the Jews as “white”; everything else followed.

But now we see it on the Right, as those most targeted as the Evil Other — young white males — revolt. Note well that Groyperism, as the idiot philosophy of Nick Fuentes is called (honestly, he makes Hitler sound like Hegel), doesn’t only focus on Jews, but on all non-whites as threats. Jews are simply the most evil, in his view. And, like the Nazis, he fuses race hatred with nationalism. It is not just one of those kooky things that Fuentes professes love for both Hitler and Stalin, both of whom were world-historical Jew haters.

And Tucker Carlson let him get away with it.

Understand me clearly: the point is not that the Israeli government is beyond criticism. Of course one should be able to criticize it. This is normal. The point is when that criticism goes far beyond what is rational, and metastasizes into a conspiracy theory in which The Jews control everything, and all the rest. Think about how we have all been subjected for years to left-wing elites in the Democratic Party and in liberal institutions accepting Critical Theory, and making whites the scapegoat for all the ills of non-whites. Hell, they’re still at it! Look at this from the other day: the black comedian Wanda Sykes, at a Hollywood awards ceremony, said that she will always hire women over men, and blacks over everybody else.

First, that’s illegal. Second, the fact that she felt able to make that kind of bigoted statement in front of a group of fellow show business elites, and know that they are still, in 2025, of her side, tells us something. And these idiots wonder where Nick Fuentes came from!

We can, and we must, fight this bigotry, but doing so does not require becoming the mirror image of them. Trump has been doing a good job so far of rolling back DEI, and he hasn’t done so by empowering right-wing identitarians; he has done so by standing for common sense, and basic American values of fairness.

I was thinking over the weekend about Hillbilly Elegy, and how in that great memoir, J.D. Vance wrote about the structural economic issues that have imperiled the working class — and in his case, the white working class (the book is about his own people, Appalachians). But what gave that book so much resonance is that he also spoke frankly about the personal moral faults of his people.

Early on, he talks about how when he would be home from college in the summers, he would work at a small manufacturer, making $24 and hour — really good money, especially back then. But he also observed how so few of his fellow working-class whites could hold on to those jobs. All you had to do was pass a drug test and show up regularly. The working-class whites, he said, had become so decadent that they couldn’t even do that. This is a big problem, he wrote.

It’s not either-or, but both-and. As I have written in this space, when I go back to Louisiana and talk to friends who are small business owners, especially in the restaurant business, they have told me for years that they struggle with hiring. People — black and white alike — just cannot be relied on to show up regularly for work. They don’t know why it’s this way, but the problem is real, and given that in my part of Louisiana, there are few if any Latin American migrants, you can’t scapegoat immigrants. In fact, according to my friends — all Trump-voting conservatives — they are actually relieved by the few Latin American migrants who do show up, because they know they have people who can be relied on to show up on time and work.

At the macro level, there is undoubtedly a problem with business undercutting American workers by hiring immigrant labor cheaply. I am telling you that this is not what is going on at the micro level, where I’m from. There aren’t enough migrants around to make a difference. You new readers will not know the story I told a few years ago about a doctor I know down there, who told me he was baffled by a new phenomenon: young white men from solid middle-class families whose parents were dragging them into his office, demanding that he “fix” their sons. Their sons were failing to thrive. They had had all the advantages of an intact family, a good education, all the things that go with being middle class. And yet, they didn’t want to do anything with their lives. Just sit around, smoking pot and playing video games.

The doctor told me there was no medical answer to this, but the parents were desperate to think that there must be a pill or something their boys could take to get back on track.

I’m sure part of this is the demoralization of growing up in a popular culture that tells you that you, as a white male, are what’s wrong with the world. But note well: that is NOT the local culture, in my hometown. There’s something else going on. I recall that Barack Obama, when he first took office, gave a speech telling black folks to stop blaming others for all their problems, and to sort their own lives out morally. He gave that one speech, and then never went back to the theme, instead implementing a philosophy of government that institutionalized woke blame-whitey ideas.

Nobody who reads me believes that I believe any of this is justified. Nobody who reads me can possibly believe that the answer to what causes white males to suffer is simply a matter of bootstrapping one’s way to the cure. But personal moral responsibility and discipline has to be a big part of it. The solution has to involve both structural economic change and government policies, and dedication to personal self-discipline and integrity.

Of course it’s easier to blame whitey for all one’s problems (from the Left), or the Jews and the blacks and so forth, from the Right. But that gets us nowhere good. In his book, J.D. writes about how getting out of town and joining the US Marines, and learning just what he could accomplish through learning the value of hard work and self-discipline, turned his life around.

As always, I think about my dad, born in 1934, into an America that was suffering through the Great Depression. There were massive structural economic changes that needed to happen to break the impoverishment of the working class and the poor — and FDR made them happen. In Louisiana, Huey P. Long, a populist demagogue, really did help the working class through his policies (this is why my father, though a lifelong conservative, had affection for Long; he told me once that without Huey, people like his family would have been much worse off). But nobody back then thought that they could get away without hard work and self-discipline in the face of these challenges.

I don’t want to paint a rosy picture of those days. In the South, segregationists used blacks as a scapegoat. The story of how US Sen. Leroy Percy (Walker’s uncle) of Mississippi went down to defeat at the hands of a rabble-rousing segregationist undermines any simple story about the virtues of the white working class. Nevertheless, my point is that there is no substitute for self-discipline and hard work. An unjust social and economic order is one in which men and women who are willing to live lives of self-discipline, hard work, and moral integrity still can’t prosper. The answer has to involve government policies that create such conditions. But no government has the power to create prosperity and stability by policy alone.

We have lived through at least a decade and a half in which the sturdy values that built America were discarded by the Left in favor of racial and sexual scapegoating. Yes, the liberal postwar order is over, and it’s not coming back. Still, I believe that most Americans are decent people who just want a fair shot at building a stable life for themselves and their kids. The Republicans, under J.D. Vance, could become their advocates — but not if they surrender to the scapegoaters and haters like Nick Fuentes and his enabler Tucker Carlson.

Last point: as you longtime readers will recall, back in the year 2000, I was in the Holy Land covering Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage there. Walking the road to Bethlehem the day before the Pope’s arrival there, I met and fell into conversation with an American priest who served a Palestinian parish. I asked him about his life there.

One of the things he told me has always stayed with me. He said that the culture of his people in the parish was totally given over to conspiracy theory (this, if you don’t know, is endemic in the Arab world). Yasser Arafat and his gang got away with robbing the ordinary people blind by preying on their susceptibility to believing that all their problems were the fault of the Israelis. The priest wasn’t saying that the Israelis were faultless. But he was saying that the Arab Christians he served were so quick to believe that any suffering in their lives were the fault of a Jewish conspiracy against them, that they refused moral agency, or to do anything to hold their leadership accountable for their dire state.

He told me that after mass one recent day, the men of the parish were talking about how Arafat, with whom they were angry over something, was really a Jew. The American priest told them that’s absurd — but they looked at him like he was naive. The priest said that give them a week or two, and they will believe the opposite, and if you point out to them what they had just been saying, they’ll look at you like you are the problem, not them.

As Arendt said, anti-Semitism is the template. It starts with the Jews, but never ends there.

Having said all that, this tweet over the weekend by someone named Jason Howerton bears serious consideration:

The fascination with Nick Fuentes seems pretty obvious to me.

1. He is undeniably talented as a broadcaster

2. He is a mirror to the hopelessness/anger felt by young men in our political and economic systems.

A lot of the young dudes I meet are pretty jaded. They think they’ll never be able to afford a home or find a good woman to marry/start a family. They have been discipled away from marriage and the sexes are largely at odds ideologically, with young women going far-left and young men going right. So they are embracing a type of sort of nihilism fueled by frustration and resentment.

They believe the system is broken (maybe rightfully so) and when hope is lost, you don’t build, you tear down. They’ve been lied to, told they are lazy and entitled, and no one has shown them an appealing path to manhood that makes sense to them. In fact, society has been discipling men into a more feminine posture for decades, even many “conservatives.”

It’s a rebellion against wokeness, feminism, and a corrupt political system that will leave their generation holding the bag -- all at the same time. Feels kind of like a chickens coming home to roost moment.

We have not been good stewards of this country or culture for quite some time. Many of his views and statements are abhorrent and I get why people react to him as they do. But simply “cancelling” Nick Fuentes does nothing to address the underlying issues fueling his rise.

He is a symptom. We need a better cure.

There can be no reasoning with Nick Fuentes, as you’ll know if you spend even just five minutes watching him online. He is a Joker figure, a pure provocateur. Normalizing him can never be the answer. Seriously, what is to be gained by debating a man who claims the Holocaust didn’t happen, and that Hitler is “f—king cool”?

But his popularity comes from somewhere. Nick Fuentes is not and can never be the answer. But he exists for a reason, and his existence raises real questions that the Right had better take seriously.

Finally on this subject, check out Eli Lake’s piece in The Free Press about the battle within the Heritage Foundation over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. Lake judges that the whole thing is about Fear Of Tucker Carlson. There was no obvious reason at all for Heritage’s Kevin Roberts, who honestly is a good man, to come to Carlson’s defense in that controversial video. Why drag Heritage into it, and criticize as “venomous” we on the Right who called out Carson for his tongue bath of an avowed Hitler lover?

A conservative friend over the weekend texted to chastise me for criticizing Tucker over the Fuentes interview without checking in with Tucker first (interestingly, this is exactly what Tucker said to me in his text denouncing me). I don’t get this at all. I don’t make a point of jumping on people with whom I am personally friendly or ideologically aligned — and when I do engage their ideas critically, I try to make it clear (as in the case of David Brooks) that I am criticizing their ideas, not attacking their integrity as a person. It’s weird how so many people can’t make that distinction these days. I don’t expect friends of mine to check in with me before they criticize something I’ve written, nor do I generally take that criticism as a sign of disloyalty. Come on, man, we are journalists! We sharpen ourselves through critical engagement.

But there is a way of thinking in political circles, on both Left and Right, that says free thinking and free speech should be subordinated out of loyalty to the Cause. Back in 2002, when I first wrote the National Review cover story that led to my book Crunchy Cons, one of my NR colleagues tried to get the story spiked because, he said, it could cause the Left to think that the Right was divided. Wait … what?! Since when is a magazine of ideas expected to be a secular version of L’Osservatore Romano? Fortunately, his silly argument didn’t prevail.

I’ve refrained from criticizing Tucker Carlson because he has been generous to me in the past, and I’ve long admired his work. He’s gone down a morally and spiritually dark path, though, for reasons I cannot fathom, but I’ve still not been moved to say anything, out of personal loyalty. As his strength has grown, post-Fox, and he has become more willing to platform really dark people — and not for the sake of subjecting their ideas to critical interrogation, which would be understandable, of course — I concluded that sooner or later, I would have to say something, even at the risk of being branded disloyal. I decided that point would be if he platformed Nick Fuentes in a friendly way.

He did. I said something. Now I’m an ex-friend, by his choice. So it goes. Of what use are public intellectuals, especially journalists, who act like they are popes or emperors, above criticism? Frankly, I’d love the old Tucker back: sharp, funny, unpredictable, and a slayer of sacred cows rather than a herdsman of his own.