Weimar America Slouches Toward Birth

And: Karine Jean-Pierre As An Example Of Putting Loyalty Above Competence

There’s an argument going around that Tucker Carlson ought to have had Nick Fuentes on because Fuentes has a million followers, and somehow the more normal people on the Right need to figure out how to reach these people. A variation of this argument is that we cannot talk them out of their insane Jew hatred (and hatred of non-whites, of women, etc) if we don’t talk to them. A third version of this argument takes the line that attempts to curate the Narrative on the Right by deciding who can and cannot speak has been a disaster, so we shouldn’t do it.

All of these are wrong, and seriously wrong.

For one, everybody “no platforms,” in the sense of drawing hard lines about the kind of discourse they find permissible. You do it too. If you had a friend who, every time you invited him to a party, would not shut up about how black people are an inferior race, or that there’s nothing wrong with men beating their wives, etc., you would quit inviting him over, and you would probably even stop being his friend. It’s one thing if an otherwise intelligent or decent person has a particular prejudice or weakness that you can tolerate, if, say, he agreed not to talk about it around you.

We’ve all done that, and maybe people have given us that grace. There are no doubt liberal friends in my life who hate my politics, but who think me on the whole to be a good person, or at least someone worth maintaining a friendship with, so we don’t talk politics. I’m the same way with more than a few people. This is normal.

Andrew Sullivan, for example, strongly disapproves of my views on LGBT. The feeling is mutual. But I’ve read enough of him, and been around him often enough, to believe that he’s on balance a good person, and certainly someone I’m pleased to call a friend. I learn from him. When we see each other, we don’t talk about LGBT, unless he’s interviewing me about it on his show. He’s probably taken crap from his gay circles for having on a horrible Christian “bigot” like me. But for whatever reason, he judges me as someone who, however blind about homosexuality (in his view), has something worth hearing.

But there are gradations in this sort of thing. I’m thinking now of a conservative Christian with whom I used to be friends, who was a chore to be around. He was obnoxious and extreme. It got to the point where I started avoiding him, and finally we stopped being friends. He’s quite an intelligent man, but his views and his mannerisms are extremely off-putting. If I had a talk show, I wouldn’t even consider having him on, because he comes off as a hothead with nothing interesting to say, or at least anything interesting he has to say comes in such a thick layer of shock and self-aggrandizement that it’s tiresome to listen to.

Anyway, if you ran a bookstore or a talk show, you would have to decide which books to stock or not stock, and which guests to have on or not have on. Same with running a newspaper or TV network. For most of my career — I’ve been a professional journalist for 36 years now — I have complained about how incredibly narrow the media class is in what it permits to be said and thought. I totally stand by that. It was foolish, because at the very least, they misinformed themselves and their audience about what was actually going on in the country.

If you look at what’s happening in the UK right now — the accelerating destabilization of the country — it is mostly because both the Tories and Labour governed according to the beliefs and the taboos of the educated London class, and certainly the influential media there observed those same taboos. And now they’ve brought their country possibly to the brink of civil war. Same in France.

So the “conversation,” so to speak, always needed to be wider and more diverse. I suppose I don’t have to recount for your readers what the Great Awokening did to the consciousness of we who found ourselves on the wrong side of it. I had hoped that Trump, for all his flaws, would result in a correction, in a return to some kind of stable center — a center that would firm up after he left the scene, and his successor, likely J.D. Vance, took over.

For the first time, I’m starting to doubt that will happen. This is why the Fuentes-on-Tucker thing strikes me as such a Rubicon moment. I was talking today with a Christian I know who is a big player in conservative politics, and who is as appalled by it as I am. He tells me that what normie outsiders like me don’t know is that something like 30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers — that is, followers of Nick Fuentes.

Let that sink in.

I told my friend that this makes zero sense to me. I’ve watched about as much of Fuentes as I can stand in any one sitting, and he comes across as a runty incel pervert on coke who believes in nothing more than being outrageous. Here’s a video link to one of his most infamous moments, in a 2022 livestream with the left-wing podcaster Destiny. Transcript:

Destiny: “Children are hotter than adults.”

Nick Fuentes (laughing): “Based. Let’s f**king go. That’s why we love Destiny. That’s why we love this guy.”

I can hear the Groypers now: “But it’s performative! He doesn’t really mean it!” Well, he might mean it (see Chris Brunet’s collection of receipts about pederasty-normalizing among Groypers). But even if it’s just a transgressive joke, I don’t want people who make jokes about having sex with children within 100 miles of political power! This is the guy who just got normalized on Tucker’s show this week.

The thing about Fuentes is that there’s rarely anything serious there at all, nothing you can argue with, or think about. Even when he makes substantive claims, they aren’t informed by much of anything (he’s only 26, and uneducated). Plus, the guy praises Hitler and Stalin both. What the hell are we supposed to make of that? What is the appeal?

My conservative friend, a political professional, said the answer is actually pretty simple, though hard for people my age to understand. Fuentes is funny, charismatic, and willing to be transgressive as a finger in the face of propriety. He’s just one Midwestern guy who the whole System tried to break — they put him on a no-fly list, banned him from social media, and so forth — and he ended up becoming the hero to a huge number of right-wing Zoomers.

Again, my friend is not a Groyper, and is as anxious about this as I, but he’s far, far closer to the power dynamics in Washington than I am. He said that the thing people of my generation don’t get about Fuentes is that what he actually believes doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he’s giving the finger to the System — and he keeps winning over the hearts and minds of Zoomers.

When he told me that, my mind went back to August 2015, when I was sitting at my father’s deathbed, literally. He had the TV on at his feet, watching Fox, as one does in the final week of one’s life. Suddenly Fox cut to the Trump campaign rally in Mobile. My then-wife and I didn’t have cable or network TV, so we hadn’t seen any of Trump’s campaign speeches till then. We only remembered him as a buffoonish figure from our years in New York.

Trump got going, and he … was Trump. Rambling rant about rapey immigrants, the usual — stuff that’s so common now that nobody bats an eye, but it was fresh then. My wife and I kept exchanging eyerolls — we couldn’t believe that this was real. An actual presidential candidate, saying these things, and saying them in such a crazy way?

Then, my dying father murmured, “That fellow makes sense.”

My mom: “Sure does.”

At that moment, I realized that we lived in the same square mile of country land in south Louisiana, but in different worlds. I later came to better understand Trump’s appeal after reading this great early 2016 essay by Tucker Carlson, in which he blamed the institutional GOP for making way for Trump because of their own many failures. If you haven’t read it (I’ve linked it here many times before) please do. The essential appeal of Trump, I learned, is not so much from his policy proposals (there weren’t many), but because he was a big fat finger in the face of a corrupt Republican establishment.

I didn’t vote that fall, because I couldn’t stomach Trump, I would never have voted for Hillary, and my vote didn’t matter in Louisiana anyway, as it was destined to go to Trump in the electoral college. But watching how the Left went into manic overdrive to destroy him and everything related to him changed me. The Kavanaugh hearings in 2018 broke me. I realized that as bad as Trump was on so much, he was the only thing standing between Us and Them. I voted for him in 2020, and though I wasn’t in the US in 2024, I openly supported him then. The Biden administration showed us what wokeness in power would and could do. I had no qualms at all about supporting Trump 2024, even though his personal character flaws are all too clear, still.

Now it seems that Fuentes is having the same kind of appeal to Zoomers as Trump did for Boomers and others a decade ago. Compared to Fuentes, though, Trump comes off as Marcus Aurelius. The Fuentes you see on the Tucker interview is not at all the Fuentes of his livestreams.

I simply cannot understand the logic behind treating Fuentes as a normal political actor — even if he has a relatively big following. He is a deeply bad man, with no redeeming qualities. If his mode of discourse, and beliefs, become part of the mainstream of conservatism, we’re done, and we will deserve it. To normalize Fuentes is to move the Overton Window where it must not go. It’s like saying, “Well, I personally disapprove of sniffing glue, and I think it’s bad for us, but if we are going to stop people from glue-sniffing, we need to listen to them to see why they take pleasure in sniffing glue.”

Look at what happened to the Left once they started giving respect and attention to the radical Left. We got the Great Awokening, in which it was considered perfectly legitimate to attack white people as evil because of the color of their skin, and to cancel people for simply dissenting from whatever new radical thing they demanded we all accept as truth. Now they’re about to elect an actual old-Zoomer Islamic race communist as mayor of the most important city in America. Zohran Mamdani is a million times more charismatic than Nick Fuentes, but I see them as part of the same trajectory of American politics.

A conservative friend texted me today to say he went into his local gun shop this week, and the normie hunter dudes were talking about how the Israelis probably killed Charlie Kirk. We know that Kirk was actually murdered by a radical left-wing lover of a young man transitioning to female. The guy confessed! Yet these normal conservative hunters in normal conservative America think that the Jews did it, because Candace told them so.

I’ve used the term “Weimar America” from time to time, but now, it be gettin’ real.

What we mean when we talk about “Weimar Germany” is that time in Germany between the end of the First World War and Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, when Germany’s democracy wobbled under the pressure of economic collapse, and the falling-apart of all institutions, including parties of the center. Moral norms evaporated, especially around sexuality. Real power in the streets shifted to extremes of Left and Right. According to Grokipedia (which is far more reliable, I’m finding, than Wikipedia, though in its entry on me, it still gets some basic biographical facts wrong):

This chronic volatility, where neither left nor right accepted republican norms, instilled a pervasive sense of impermanence that conditioned cultural expressions toward irony, fatalism, and detachment from state legitimacy.

Read that Grokipedia entry — it’s very thorough and detailed. It also talks about growing class estrangement in Weimar Germany, widespread drug use, a sharp drop in the fertility rate, a huge rise in divorces, massive political polarization, an exodus from the countryside to the cities (which created a large urban working class detached from traditions), and an atmosphere of general decadence. The fact that so many of the leaders in the artistic avant-garde and in social progressivism were Jewish helped fuel anti-Semitism.

Sound familiar? Once again, from Live Not By Lies, here’s what Hannah Arendt found in her 1951 study of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, are the key factors making way for totalitarianism:

• Loneliness and Social Atomization

• Losing Faith In Hierarchies And Institutions

• The Desire To Transgress and Destroy (Arendt: “The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.”)

• Propaganda And The Willingness To Believe Useful Lies (Arendt, quoted in my book: In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”)

• A Mania For Ideology (that is, the subjection of all of life to an ideological system that simplifies actual complexities)

• A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise (We see this in left-wing institutions that promote people because of DEI reasons, and in right-wing institutions, like the first Trump administration, that favor people loyal to Trump over those capable of professional excellence)

Arendt also mentioned in The Origins Of Totalitarianism the presence of anti-Semitism as a causal factor, because it gave would-be totalitarians a scapegoat. I didn’t include it in Live Not By Lies, because the eruption of anti-Semitism on the Left and the Right was hard to conceive back in early 2020, when I handed in the manuscript. A new version would absolutely include this.

Anyway, look at the Fuentes phenomenon. To paraphrase Arendt, the people who follow Nick Fuentes do not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past force their way into it.

Look at the power the deranged conspiracy theorist Candace Owens has over millions. In a pre-totalitarian society, people cease to care about Truth, and instead take as truth what makes them feel good inside.

I could go on. I have been writing about these things on the Left for years. Now it’s here on the Right, in a very big way. This past spring, at a screening of the LNBL documentary in Nashville, a woman in the audience asked if I thought the danger of “soft totalitarianism” had passed because Trump was in office again, and the woke were on the defense.

No, I said, because all the conditions that Arendt identified as present in a society ready for totalitarianism are still with us. I don’t want to live in a right-wing society like that any more than I want to live in a left-wing one. With Fuentes coming in hot now, and his power accelerating, I can see more clearly how a right-wing version would take shape.

If you, fellow normie, don’t see this, your kids — especially your younger sons — probably do. You need to make yourself aware, and do something. Do what? Read Live Not By Lies, and learn from the stories of the Christian dissidents the qualities one needs to have to resist this stuff. The most important are the courage to stand up, and the willingness to suffer for the truth.

Pastors, priests — wake up! This is a five-alarm fire. Pretending that it doesn’t exist — on the Left AND the Right — or thinking that good ol’ winsomeness is going to be enough? That’s hopeless. We all need to understand WHY young people are attracted to people like Fuentes, and how we can offer them something real and true and better.

Hear me clearly: I’m not saying that we should not talk to people who hold radical views, on our side or the other side. Charlie Kirk was great because he believed in dialogue. I became friends with a younger academic who is a straight-up Marxist because he’s a great guy, and we were almost the only people at this liberal intellectual conference who questioned the institutionalist left-liberal gospel. I love getting to know people like that, and trading ideas. No, I’m saying that a line must be drawn between us and the likes of Fuentes (and his doppelgängers on the Left), because they cannot be reasoned with, don’t want to reason with anybody, and are driven by nothing but the pleasure of hating and transgressing. They will poison anything they touch.

I might have mentioned it yesterday, but somebody in Florida said to me, and I paraphrase, “The Left keeps saying that Trump is Hitler, but that’s not true. If anything, Trump is Hindenburg.” Paul von Hindenburg was the feeble German president who appointed Hitler as chancellor in 1933, to placate the Right. Hitler consolidated power immediately, and before long, no more Hindenburg.

I asked my working-class conservative son back in the US what he thought of Nick Fuentes. My son, coming up on 22, had no idea who the guy is. “I’m working too hard to pay attention to any of that,” he said. Good, I told him — stay away from that guy, he’s bad news. I would suppose that most young men in the US don’t. But we know very well from the history of the Nazi rise and the Bolshevik Revolution that it takes only a dedicated radical minority to change history.

If you ever wondered what you would have done if you have been alive in Germany in the early 1930s, or Russia in the early 1910s, well, you might be about to have a chance to learn.

Last word: I have zero sympathy for people on the Left in all this. They chose not only to platform, but to bring into policymaking people every bit as radical as Nick Fuentes, only more educated, and better able to negotiate institutional culture. For at least twenty years, I have been publicly saying to liberals that if you embrace and advocate for identity politics of the Left, you are going to call up the very same thing from the Right one of these days. For example, in 2017, I began to criticize Tommy Curry, a black leftist philosophy professor at Texas A&M, whose rhetoric about white people, and especially white women, was utterly vile. The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote a long piece about it, presenting Curry as the victim of a shit-slinging right-wing journalist (me). These people were completely unwilling or unable to grasp what their valorizing anti-white bigotry was laying the groundwork for.

Many, many such cases. So here we are. I hate it. I’m afraid of it. I’ve lost subscribers today, and Tucker Carlson wrote privately to denounce me. I guess we aren’t friends anymore. That’s a shame — it really is, because he’s basically a good man who has in the past done a lot of good, and whose company I have enjoyed — but I know history, and I know what my God expects of me when put to the test. I’m not denouncing Tucker as a person or anything like that, but I do think he made a massive, massive mistake here, one that will have awful political consequences.

I’m not saying that one should never have a maniacal bigot on one’s show, but if you do, then you need to press them hard on why they believe the things they do, and hold them to account for the more outrageous things they have said or done. Otherwise you shouldn’t blame others for getting the impression that you don’t really dissent all that much.

Dinesh D’Souza pointed out this week that none other than Charlie Kirk privately criticized him for giving legitimacy to Fuentes by debating him live on Alex Jones’s show. D’Souza defended himself by saying he laid into Fuentes hard on that show, to reveal the vapidity of his worldview. Nobody could watch any part of that debate and think that D’Souza had any respect for Groyperism. I kept waiting for Tucker to hit Fuentes hard with some basic critical questions. They never came. I can only guess as to why they never came, but the fact is, they didn’t. Draw your own conclusions.

Let me say to you, whether you are on the Left or the Right (and I do have some left-wing readers): if you don’t have a Bright Red Line for the kind of radicalism you are willing to tolerate in public, you had better lay one down, because you are going to be tested. New York City is about to elect a cheerful young Muslim who pointedly refuses to distance himself from the phrase “globalize the intifada.” And he’s running with the support of most of the Democratic establishment in New York, including Jewish office holders.

Eli Lake on how the Democratic Socialists of America, Mamdani’s party, is very different from the DSA founded two generations ago by Michael Harrington. Excerpt:

Today the DSA is run by activists enamored with the authoritarian left. Its comrades attend talks at the Cuban mission to the United Nations to hear from the regime’s deputy foreign minister. Its national program calls for a new constitution that replaces the House and Senate with a single federal legislature and places “workers in charge of the government.” The DSA supports prison abolition and police defunding. The DSA’s international committee has taken a neutral stance on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling on Russian troops to leave while opposing any U.S. or NATO aid to Ukraine. Last year, the DSA signed on to an open letter respecting the rigged election in Venezuela, even after several independent observers and Latin American governments said its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, had stolen it.

“It’s very clear that these Trotskyist groups, these Marxist-Leninist groups, these Maoist groups, they’re a voting bloc in the national organization,” historian and former DSA member Jake Altman told me when I interviewed him for the latest episode of Breaking History. “They control a majority of the votes and so there’s this real tension between the people who have more pragmatic means and the people who are these purists who believe that they’re going to start a vanguard party and have a revolution.”

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for state Attorney General is running merely a few points behind the GOP incumbent — this, despite the release of the Dem’s texts expressing pleasure in the potential murder of a state Republican politicians, and the slaying of the man’s children. That should have been utterly disqualifying, but it hasn’t been. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, consistently refused to denounce Jay Jones; she is comfortably ahead of her GOP opponent, Winsome Earle-Sears, in the polls.

All this, not two months after a young man was assassinated on a college campus by a leftist, pro-trans radical who didn’t like him to exercise his right to free speech, and the practice of dialoguing with opponents.

Weimar America. If, God forbid, there is a high-profile political assassination, or a severe economic downturn, we are going to be in very, very bad trouble. You all know I’m a blackpill kind of guy, but it seems that reality is catching up to my doomerism.