Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem

29:02They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the temple. That's why Eric Weinstein goes to the Arch of Titus and gives it the finger and takes a picture. We don't think like that as Americans and white people. We don't think about the Roman Empire in 2000 years ago. They do. And I don't think that's me saying the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. I don't think that's me being hateful. I don't think that's me being collectivist. I think that's understanding that identity politics, whether you love it or hate it, whatever you feel about it, it's a reality that we live in a world of Jews and Christians, of whites and blacks.

29:36These identities mean something to us and they mean things to each other. And we can't sort of wish them away. And it feels like white people and Christians are the only ones to do that. Well, there's no question about that, your last point, for sure. One of the reasons they do that is because they've been taught to hate themselves, of course, since the Second World War. All right, that's what you might call a rich text. Yeah, sure. How do you read it? Well, I mean, you know, he's an extremely talented rhetorician and communicator, and he does a few things. He presents a vocabulary that does not sound shocking to people, that uses words and terminology that wouldn't frighten people.

30:14Sounds like a rational discussion of politics, rational comment on politics. And then weaved into this is all of the material of classic anti-Semitism. The Jews are an unassimilable group, self-interested, internationally organized very tightly and all talking to each other and kind of working as one mind, who don't have the interests of their host at heart, have their own interests at heart, and are animated by a deep hostility to the people that surround them, to the societies they find themselves, hatred towards Christians, towards white people, so on and so forth. That is classic antisemitism.

30:53But he keeps on saying things like, and that's a good thing or something like that, or it's not really, I'm not trying to be hateful. You know, he presents it as if he's having a discussion of politics like any other. And the other move in there, in addition to the Jews are obsessed with the Romans, which I have to say, I don't feel very obsessed by the Romans. I kind of like the Romans. But the other move in there, which you see a lot on the right, and a lot on the white identity, right, let's call it, is, look, the Jews are just practicing their identity politics. Right. don't we just have to practice ours?

31:33And that final move, which is the one where Tucker says, well, there's no doubt about that. We white Europeans, the heritage Americans, we're taught to hate ourselves. There's been no rational self-interest since World War II. That is, I think, a very fundamental move of Trumpism. That's the bridge of anti-Semitism to Trumpism. This MAGA right has spent years saying, look, the whole left-place identity politics, it's time for white people to stand up for themselves. you're getting all this anti-white racism. Yeah. And here it is, right? The Jews are the danger to that. If they're going to practice their politics, you have to practice yours.

32:09Yeah, precisely. I mean, look, at the core of the Nazi ideology is a social Darwinistic view of the world divided into almost different species of being who are engaged in an endless war with each other. And the Jews are a particularly important part of that worldview. They are the most threatening of these beings. And trying to launder what is a kind of biological essentialism about the nature of the political through what sounds like, well, normal interest group politics, of course. You know, in America, we have coalitions. We have representatives of different ethnic groups who advocate on each other's behalf.

32:52Well, you know, there's a congressional black caucus. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't white people do that? It is a different kind of politics. The idea is that this group is impossible to assimilate. And also, national unity, the success of the nation, its health, is impossible to accomplish without their expulsion. This is the view. And this is the view that Fuentes continually hammers on. So there is a lot here that's tricky to talk about because you're at this endless morass of the intersection of anti-Semitism and Israel. One move I'm seeing from a lot of people on the right at the moment is why should we be talking about what this rumble influencer thinks about the Jews when the left is electing Zoran Mamdani, right?

33:41When there's been these years of debate about anti-Semitism on the left. I'll say this super clearly. I've met Zoran Mamdani, voted for Zoran Mamdani. I don't think there's anything anti-Semitic about him at all. But I think you see in the way he has been treated, and then also what is happening on the right, a distinction that is worth understanding, a structural distinction. Anti-Zionism on the left often pushes towards what I would call liberalism, a belief that all people should have equal rights, that there should be universalism. There's a different version of it if you're more sort of socialist and Marxist.

34:15But the left tends to push towards a universalism. And a lot of the anger at Israel, which is, I think, much of it merited, is the way it betrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control. On the right, it's pushing towards ethnostate politics. Right. That the fundamental argument and a way in which Israel's tried, modern Israel's tried to create new coalitions is to say, hey, we're all ethnostates here. but once you buy into the ethno-state frame then the fact that you see jews as an ethnic other in your society pushes somewhere very different pushes towards ideas of expulsion pushes towards ideas that they're a fifth column within that they are leading your country to betray its actual interests in order to you know that they have dual loyalties right but there is this weird thing where there's been a rise of Jewish figures or Jewish-aligned figures who want to embrace ethnostate politics.

35:19I mean, you have Yoram Hazoni, Jewish, lives in Jerusalem, the founder of NatCon, going to the NatCon conference, which he started and saying, look, you don't have to like the Jews to be a national conservative. Nobody ever said, and this is for my Jewish friends, nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Israel. Nobody ever said that to be a good napkin, you had to love Jews. And so one point of anger I have that a lot of people on the right who I think have been playing footsie with this for a long time is that once you embrace the ethnostate concept, this is where that leads.

35:57Well, I certainly am of that opinion. I think, again, let's take this from another angle. Like the way you're talking is a little highbrow. It's in terms of intellectuals like Ramazoni. But let's look at this from the ground up. You have a conservative movement that is embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone, a tone of open bigotry in certain cases, right? And basically the deal that the pro-Israel right thought it could make is we can engage in a good deal of racist demagogy. We're okay with it, especially maybe directed at Muslims, Islam. But the line that we draw is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into antisemitism.

36:43That is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self-defeating position. So when I talk about gripe-ification, I don't mean to say it's only that people with these extremely specific views about Israel and Jews are taking over the right. It is more that there's a general atmosphere of moral anarchy, of acceptance of extremely hateful and divisive views. There's no immune system. There's no barrier to anti-Semitism. Well, that also goes to the energy that the modern right, MAGA, Trumpism, generates from transgression. Once you have begun to exhaust the energy of transgression about how you talk about immigrants, Trump comes down the escalator, says they're sending rapists and murderers over here, there's a big outrage.

37:34But now, being much more anti-immigrant on the right, I mean, that's de rigueur, who cares? Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, right? Once you have moved, you know, on traditional gender roles, right? This is the boss battle of Western speech taboos. Right, right, right. And you have seen, this didn't begin last week or two weeks ago. Yeah. You saw Elon Musk respond to somebody laying down a conspiracy that it's Jewish elites pushing immigrant voters to take over the country by saying, you've really spoken the truth here. You have a lot of the podcast bro faction that's turned more right, like Joe Rogan, bringing on revisionist historians who, you know, was Germany really the bad guys in World War II?

38:24What have we not been told about that? so you sort of bring these two things together that you want to build an ethnostate and you're ideologically opposed to there being anything you can't talk about and you make your money and your attention on these algorithms and it's almost a hydraulic process towards anti-Semitism yeah the thing about a kick getting excitement from it you know Sartre said it's amusing to be an anti-Semite Look, Mamdani, for example, who some people say is an anti-Semite because of his positions on Israel, he's very careful to say, I'm not an anti-Semite and to express sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

39:06And go to synagogues. And, I mean, Mamdani is a liberal. Okay. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But he also does not, whatever you think is at the heart of his politics, he does not jubate. He is not practicing politics that is based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews, in other words. And Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does to a more subtle extent. Candace Owen does. and that also attracts people because you know people who feel powerless are very attracted to it because you know you you know there's someone you can harass and pick on and it's part of their strategy to kind of take over the right in their direction is to do this in a way workplace harassment against their jewish allies to bait them to get them to overreact to unsettle them um the other thing you mentioned is that the taboos are breaking down because you know World War II and the Holocaust is a long time ago.

40:03And the generation that experiences is gone. And the politics that were created out of the consensus that it's created is disappearing. So some of it is just the passage of time. Again, this is tricky to talk about, but you can't get away here from how much Israel post-October 7th, the war in and the flattening of Gaza has destabilized politics around this everywhere. And again, I think the ways in which it has created tensions on the left have gotten most of the attention for the past couple of years. But in fact, it's cracking open the right. And you hear it in this Carlson Fuentes interview.

40:48You hear it in the questions getting asked of J.D. Vance at various events now. I'm a Christian man, and I'm just confused why there's this notion that we owe Israel something or that they're our greatest ally. I'm just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours. that MAGA on some level, it has really rooted itself in this semi-isolationist, very much America first position. Right. And this young, very online right, one, looks at what has happened in Gaza, and I think correctly sees it as immoral.

41:34Yeah. But two, asks, why are we involved here at a time when we're pushing Europe out on its own? Sure. When we are aggressively insisting that we have no stable alliances except what is directly in our self-interest at a given moment. There are ways, many, many, many ways to be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing never can be connected to anti-Semitism breaks apart. And I never quite know how to talk about this except that I feel like we're all living through it right now. Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult.

42:19I mean, to put my cards on the table, I'm, you know, I'm on the left side of the political spectrum, and I've been extremely critical of Israel and especially its conduct in the war, which I believe they probably committed to genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. but what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for anti-Semitic agitators and also a lot of people becoming curious about U.S. foreign policy history you know there is a certain extent to which they're grabbing a lot of people who otherwise would be getting involved in the political process in a really positive way they say why is American foreign policy like this should we be doing this what's the history behind all this?

43:07Like, why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? They have legitimate and interesting questions. But instead, that curiosity, that legitimate curiosity is being picked up by people who have another motivation here. I don't think that Tucker Carlson lost much sleep over the Arabs who died in Iraq. You know, I'm not defending the war in anyway, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks. And I don't really believe it when he now gets very sentimental about people in Gaza. One of the reasons that I'm mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children.

43:56That's not a Western view. That's an Eastern view. That's a non-Christian that's totally incompatible with Christianity. And so I hate that attitude. It's genocidal. I think it's highly cynical. I think when Fuentes expresses some of the most spiteful, dismissive attitudes towards human suffering you can imagine on a show, and then he gets very sentimental about this issue. This is just a straight up genocide. These people are starving. They're literally dying. It would be formally called the famine, except that Israel will not let any international personnel inside the Strip to assess this, to make that declaration.

44:38And, you know, that is to drag people in and to think, well, you know, these people have a heart and they're interested in the same topic as I'm interested in. I think it's highly cynical. I think one way you can tell if these views are motivated by impartial analyses of American foreign policy or much more partial views about the Jews is whether or not they tend to coexist with unrelated anti-Jewish conspiracies. Right. So in some ways, what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson Fuentes interview. With OnlyFans, it's like having a TikTok. It's like, here's my link tree. Here's my Instagram account.

45:19Here's my Facebook account. Here's my YouTube. And here's my OnlyFans. Why would any of this be legal? Well, there's like you indicated, maybe there's an intelligence benefit to that. Yeah. Maybe there's a political benefit to that. I think that - Why wouldn't you arrest the people who run something like that? They should be. If you had a Christian government. Or how about just a government that cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is OnlyFans? And so Iran's not turning my daughters to prostitution. So to even parse this clip, you have to know that one of the big anti-Semitic conspiracies of this era is that Jews in general and maybe the Israeli government in particular is behind a lot of porn.

46:02The reason that Jews run the porn industry, I think, is because they're not Christian. And not only are they not Christian, but they're against Christianity. and the people that were the pioneers of porn, they are quoted as saying, this is like a middle finger to God. Kanye West has talked about this. David Duke has talked about this. And here you have Fontys and Carlson sort of gesturing at this. Maybe there's an intelligence benefit to all this porn we've got out there now. If you had a real Christian government, we wouldn't allow it. Right. And that's where I think you see something else is happening in the soil here, as opposed to just old school isolationism on American foreign policy.

46:44Yeah, I mean, it's every dissatisfaction with the modern world, every social problem, you relate back to that issue. That's the explanation for it. It simplifies every single social issue. And it makes a recognizable enemy responsible for it. That's not new. You know, you have that same thing going back in European antisemitism, blaming every single social problem back to the Jews. I think one of the things that has unnerved me most in the last few weeks was a tweet from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025. And Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble.

47:20We'll talk about it for immediately coming in and defending Carlson. But around the same time, he had had Jonathan Haidt, the sort of critic of the internet, at Heritage to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things. And he sends out this tweet. He says, thank you, Atjon Haidt, for reminding everyone at Heritage yesterday that tech tycoons like Leonid Radvinsky and Solomon Friedman are profiting to the tune of millions by preying on America's young men and women. We are proud to be in this fight with you. It is time to arrest, prosecute, and convict the sick perverts behind OnlyFans and Pornhub.

47:52Right. And the key thing about this tweet is you could have chosen to single out no one. Or if you're going to single out only two people, there are a lot of people you might choose. Like the CEO of OnlyFans is named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics, the head of the Archivitation, he chooses these two people with very Jewish names. It was very hard for me not to read this. as Roberts, whoever's writing for him, is pointing towards some affinity with this part of right subculture. I think you're absolutely right to pick up on that. I mean, Pat Buchanan used to do this.

48:31What they used to say about Pat Buchanan is he always talks about Goldman Sachs, but not Morgan Stanley. And Pat Buchanan always would say when he was opposing some U.S. foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, he would mention Kissinger, He would mention Richard Perle. He would mention those guys. Would he mention Gene Kirkpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No. Some of those names, not important. So yeah, continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. I mean, it's the center of their politics. But it just struck me, and this is true for Roberts and the way he responds to a lot that's happening, where you might think, oh, is this just the attentional side of the right?

49:12Is this just the people who are trying to create big events for the YouTube algorithm or for the X algorithm. And maybe it begins there. But when you see it jump these lines, I mean, you then also have the Kevin Roberts response to the Carlson Fuentes interview. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn't, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.

49:58We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail. He's in a bit of hot water for that now. Yeah, he is. Yeah. But that was his first instinct. Yes, I think that's his first instinct. He wanted to defend Tucker, who I think he views as an extremely important part of conservative movement or the right wing now and wants to maintain a relationship with him, obviously.

50:37But yeah, you know, the Heritage Foundation is essentially part of the nervous system of the conservative movement. It's one of the, you know, important think tanks that comes up with policy, that supports the work of intellectuals and elites in the conservative movement. And yeah, watching that being and watching the institution seem to break in that direction was remarkable. and that caused a firestorm. He has apologized. He has walked it back. His friend Yoram Hazoni flew in from Israel to try to sort things over. Yeah, it was a very weird video and it struck me as almost coming from sci-fi.

51:14I was so taken aback by it. And then he falls back on, what they all fall back on now is anti-cancel culture, anti-wokeness, which means like, okay, there's no standards anymore. You know, we don't cancel people. But there's another interesting part of this when he says, my loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. One of the things that you see when you begin diving into the Fishers on the right about this is for some time, there's been a fairly close embrace between evangelical Christianity and Israel. And that has in some ways solved this coalitional problem on the right.

51:53And what you hear Fuente's doing, what you hear people coming up and asking J.D. Vance questions doing, what you hear in some ways Tucker doing, is really saying that doesn't make any sense. And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists. Like, what is that? Right. And I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody. You know, because like, what? Because it's Christian heresy, and I'm offended by that as a Christian. I mean, look, the attachment of evangelicals to Israel is a particular current in evangelical Christianity, dispensationalism. It's one that some argue has very deep roots in American past because of Calvinist ideas and American Christian Zionism going back to the founders.

52:43And there's something to that. But this emerges really as a mass phenomenon kind of in the 1970s, right? Where evangelical Christians are looking at what's happening in Israel as kind of signs of the coming apocalypse. And that becomes extremely popular. And Israel is befriended, is cultivated because they think it is about to bring about the rapture and so on and so forth. Now, it's true. I think I mean, younger Christians, younger evangelical Christians even, I'm not sure how much of a whole dispensationalism has anymore. It seems to be something that's of like a lot of the things we're discussing of older generations.

53:23So I think that that appears to be changing. I agree with you. But this goes to what you're talking about with Roberts. He did have to walk this back. He's apologized. He said he let Heritage down. This has led to a bunch of interesting reporting on what's been going on inside the Heritage Foundation. And one thing you hear in that reporting is that there's a big generational split where older staffers were furious at Roberts and are standing up in meetings saying, you know, the right, you know, Bill Buckley always knew that you had to eject the anti-Semites on the right. I see you rolling your eyes.

53:54It's worth saying that Bill Buckley's, the extent of his war against anti-Semitism has been overstated. Let's put it that way. But the younger, many of the younger Heritage Foundation staffers are standing up and saying, what did Kevin do wrong here? Right. If there's not room for what he said, there's not room for me. And I think this is getting at just this very big thing, which is, and it's what I sort of understood Roberts is doing, that you have a lot of people on the MAGA right trying to skate to where they think the puck is going. And what they see among their young, among their staffers, among the people they interact with on social media, is that where it's going is around this much more, I would call it like white nationalist energy.

54:37Yeah, I think that's a good read on this situation. I think Rod Dreher, who is a person of the far right, but is horrified by everything that's going on. He wrote recently that a friend of his, you know, who has connections to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, estimated that some 30 or 40 percent of young staffers were groipers. And I would say to that, well, the other half are, you know, maybe don't go to the last taboo of anti-Semitism, but definitely don't have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking and nasty ideas about that. That's my own commentary. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right.

55:14I think that there is a market generation gap that the younger staff of the conservative movement are much more open to Fuentes' ideas. And they've also come up in a situation they've been, since their introduction to politics, they've been suffused. They've come up in an environment that's filled with this. They don't know a world before it. It's their common sense in a way. So, yeah, I think that they are struggling with the fact that they're probably going to have staffing issues. And they already are. And Trump has not criticized. No, he's not. Like, Trump can weigh in on things when he feels like it.

55:51He called Carlson crazy when Carlson criticized him for the Iran bombing. Trump has notably not weighed in on this. Vance has only said he doesn't like the infighting. Well, I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I think that the main reason is, look, Trump gets a lot of mileage about seeming out to lunch or in his own world. The fact of the matter is he's a successful politician. He understands and he's always understood from the beginning that this extreme right is a constituency that he can't really afford to alienate, that he has to court. I think his administration knows that they can't totally distance him.

56:25He's never completely distanced. Also, his administration is full of these people. Well, yes, that's true. But maybe it was not as true in the first term. No. And I think they're very interested in what this section of the right has to say. And they realize, you know, this is part of our coalition. We cannot afford to alienate them and attack them.

57:03so there have been conservative figures pushing back sure ben shapiro has particularly i think gone to war yeah and has tried to call this out and and really try to play the old at least mythological william f buckley role right trying to say no we don't do this yeah we don't go to groypers we don't go to nick fuentes like there are lines in our movement what have you thought of shapiro's response the reaction to it first of all the thing to remember about one of the other main figures on the anti-Semitic right is Candace Owens, right? Who was birthed within the Shapiro organization. So think about that.

57:39Well, hired by the Shapiro organization. Hired by the Upshira. Cultivated and turned into a star. Yes. Part of them trying to skate to where the puck was going. Right. To get a younger audience, to get a hipper, in the sense of conservatives, a hipper audience. And Shapiro says, like, we're going to draw the lines here. And Mark Levin at the Republican Jewish conference says. What do you mean we don't cancel people? We cancel David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobrin. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time.

58:22Hitler admires, Stalin admires, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters. You're damn right we're going to cancel them and de-platform them. I mean, it's too little too late. In my view, the opportunity has passed. Most of the people who saw where the Republican Party was going and didn't like it and were clear-sighted about it went into the Never Trump movement, which was not politically viable, right? It's a group of people who I consider to have kind of preserved their honor, but don't have a mass constituency. The party's not there. These people stayed with MAGA. And everything it represented, the destruction of all these norms and institutions that would prevent something like this.

59:05So I just am also extremely angry and frustrated with the pro-Israel and neoconservative right for looking the other way when it came to the racist takeover of the right. Zoran Mamdani, perfect example of this. what has happened in the wake of the giant controversies that exploded about Fuentes going on Tucker, the leaks of the chats. You have major figures on the right who are trying to redirect the conversation about anti-Semitism back to Zoran Mamdani. They're trying to make him the hate figure. And to - Can't we all come together? Yes. And so Ben Shapiro says, when has Tucker really criticized Zoran Mamdani, right?

59:51The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zoran Mamdani since October 5th on his show is once. And it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zoran Mamdani. And then Steve Bannon goes, he attacks Mark Levin. He says these guys aren't really MAGA. And he has a point because they weren't back then. They weren't with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani. Mark Levin, instead of running your mouth, what are you doing in New York City? I tell you what we're doing. We're going to denaturalize Mandami. So it directs this energy, this energy of racial hate, really, that seeks to expel a racial other against a safer target, right?

1:00:31That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by being like, look, just be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want. But it's against, it's designated enemies that are okay. You know, people ask a rational question. Well, why are these people off the table? And then, you know, the answer comes back. It's like, well, because Christianity or because Israel represents Western civilization or some kind of rationalization like that. And the anti-Semites say that makes no sense to us. And in a certain sense, yeah, why not? If the world is divided into these racial groups and this is the way you are and we practice the politics that's based on that, why make an exception?

1:01:12I mean, as you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump in 2016. Shapiro said, Trumpism breeds conspiracism. Conspiracism breeds anti-Semitism. Trump is happy to channel support of anti-Semites to his own ends. Okay, so Ben Shapiro, not a dumb guy at that time. If you go back and you read actually a bunch of what he said back then, it's very, very, very prescient. The other thing is, what's the superpower they're going to suddenly discover that they're going to do that. They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They tried. Many of them tried. Ben Shapiro was an opponent of Donald Trump.

1:01:49Mark Levin was an opponent of Donald Trump. So they're going to finally discover some new secret weapon in this battle. In 2024, I don't know where Levin was, but there was clearly an effort from Shapiro and others to make DeSantis the future. Sure, sure. And yeah, so I don't understand where they suddenly think they're going to find the weapons or the army that's going to support them in this war. Well, this is what I think is frightening when you look at their situation kind of coldly. Their kind of last best hope is that they don't believe Trump himself is an anti-Semite. Their last hope is Trump himself.

1:02:23And I mean, they'll say that. But when I had to appear on the show, he was more or less saying that. But they're all much more afraid of what's coming next, of J.D. Vance in particular, where I think the view many Republicans hold is that Vance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is. that Vance is Kroyper adjacent, let's call it. Yeah, I think that's right. And there is still an old line Republican party to some degree, you know, Ted Cruz. If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.

1:03:06Lindsey Graham. I just want to make it really clear. I'm in the Hitler sucks wing of the Republican Party. What is this Hitler shit? I don't know. Anyway. But it is the older Republican Party. Right. I think that they made a deal with the devil in a certain way, and now they're paying for the consequences. Now, another way to read this, obviously, it's all very scary, and these are bad things, and the transformation of the Republican Party into this stuff is not good. It wasn't great before, in my opinion, but now it's really something else. The other thing is, it's like, this might be a politics that ends up, when it's exposed to the public, being too weird and too fringe.

1:03:47It has some mass constituency. Will it do well in a primary? Yeah, maybe, probably. Will it do well with the rest of the public? I don't know. Well, it's done well in primaries before. I think this actually gets to something important. So your book is very much about Pat Buchanan and earlier strains of this. For those who didn't grow up in the politics of the 1980s and 1990s or didn't write a bestselling book on it, as you did, who's Pat Buchanan? Pat Buchanan is a major figure in the conservative movement. He was a member of the Nixon administration. He kind of represented the ideological conservatives, like the Buckley conservatives, the National Review crowd, within the Nixon administration.

1:04:29He then went on to be a very important syndicated columnist, appeared on TV. He was a communications director for some time in the Reagan administration. Important, loud voice on the right. He ran two primary campaigns for the Republican Party. One in 1992, which my book focuses on, which wounded George H.W. Bush's candidacy. So there was kind of a constituency-first type of politics. He is also probably the person who expressed anti-Semitic views in public, the most notable anti-Semitic in American politics for a very long time. I always think of this clip of Trump talking about Buchanan as worth revisiting.

1:05:11Now, how about Pat Buchanan? What do you think of that? He seems to be the guy you'd have to battle. Well, that's true. He's anti-Semitic. He's anti-Black. He obviously has been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler in some form. And I just can't imagine this guy. I don't want you to hold back. Give me how you feel now. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate. So that's an earlier Trump incarnation. Right. Flirting with a third party run for president. Yeah. We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things like trade since the 80s, but not on everything.

1:05:43You know, there was a man, Pat Buchanan, a good guy, conservative guy. And, you know, it's not that we're, you know, Pat Buchanan, look at that. Good, good guy. Wow. Young people, they know. Pat Buchanan, right? We know Pat Buchanan. He came in second in the New Hampshire primary. And for 45 years, he made an unbelievable career of it. He was a hot item. He was on every show. And it's been interesting watching so many of these figures, Nick Fuentes being one of them, but not by any means alone. Kevin Roberts, all of them, really rehabilitate Pat Buchanan. I think the Republican Party used to pride itself and not going down Buchanan's lane.

1:06:22It went down another lane instead, George H.W. Bush and then George W. Bush. But it seems like now Buchananism is winning. That's the thesis of all the work I've been doing for the past decade in my book. Yes, I think that's true. And actually, it was interesting at the beginning of this presidency, I thought, oh man, I got something a little bit wrong. It's Pat Buchanan plus you gotta be nice to Israel, right? So they're like, okay, we can be the trade stuff, the immigration stuff, that, but we're going to keep in place in order to keep the coalition together, you know, this reflexive support of Israel, partly to do with Jewish Republicans and partly to do with Christian evangelicals.

1:07:05And then when this explodes, I was like, oh, well, I guess that never fully went away and it wasn't totally submerged and this coalition wasn't that stable. Well, also it gets to this point that Buchananism has an internal logic. And when you embrace it, it becomes hard to embrace 80 % of its logic, but not 100 % of its logic. You know, so there's this book Buchanan wrote years ago called The Death of the West. J.D. Vance has said it is the first political book he ever read. How would you describe the Death of the West thesis and how it relates to modern Republican Party politics? It basically describes a world where the white race is submerged by the invasion of brown peoples.

1:07:46and that needs to be prevented by any means necessary, essentially. It's a work of polite white nationalism. And there's a tremendous amount about fertility rates in it. I mean, even in the first Trump term reading it, it was striking to me how much the modern right had fully absorbed this book by this guy who was pushed out to the margins or it seemed to be for a long time. But I mean, now I think if you're going to pick a founding text for MAGA, You know, people talk about all kinds of different weird thinkers, but Death of the West by Buchanan feels to me like a pretty fair center of the canon.

1:08:25Yeah, I mean, look, critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to Western civilization. And the way Buchanan used it, it's not a subtext. It's what Western civilization means. It means white people. It doesn't mean Homer and Dante and Plato and so on and so forth are an ideas. It means a certain racial stock that makes up Western people. And basically the division on the right right now is, are Jews part of that Western white people? So I guess one thing that part of this conversation then reflects is, how much of this is all the internet and attentional dynamics? and as such, we are moving into this structurally and there aren't very good political answers to it.

1:09:14I mean, you had this line that one could even say that the internet itself is anti-Semitic, which also is a kind of provocative line. But I'm curious because you've been writing more, you gave the speech at UChicago where you're talking about the sort of modern version of fascism as a response to the way the internet has destabilized the way we communicate in the sort of political sphere. how much do you see what we're in as a structural feature of the medium on which politics now primarily certainly political communication primarily takes place like what follows from an analysis like that well i mean the comment about the internet being structurally anti-semitic very speculative theory of mine that i i cannot defend right now but um yeah obviously the change in the way people consume media creates the possibility for new communities to form, right?

1:10:04People who would generally be cranks and fringe people with a few audience members find mass audiences, right? So there's a component of that. There's also the fact that the internet, it's almost like the birth of cities is the way I think about it. It's almost like urbanization. It creates an enormous amount of what you might call sanitary problems. Like it creates an enormous amount of waste, pollution and stuff like this. And we haven't come to a way of being like, okay, well, we're going to decide how we govern this new city. It's very interesting though, you know, like where do people get into this stuff?

1:10:43You know, you mentioned pornography, right? It comes from this really seedy underbelly of the internet. The Chan bulletin boards or message boards, 8chan, 4chan, et cetera, like that. It comes from a community that consumes porn, very edgy porn, sometimes illicit porn. It came from the same underbelly, the sewage of the internet from the gutter. It is, you know, the favorite ideology of the very people who, you know, sometimes have addictive relationships to those things and feel entirely disempowered to detach themselves from it. Feel like they have no lives or future. the internet is their only life and future but it also presents itself as a politics that would solve those problems right you know all of the things that happen because of modernization and the creation of this new of these new structures we we have the answer to fix them all um it's interesting you know fuentes openly says like i'm one of those guys right and he's like i'm kind of a loser, an incel, there's no women in my life, et cetera, et cetera.

1:11:54But the way he does that and the way he attracts an audience and the way he entertains his audiences, when he has their questions come on, he sadistically attacks them, right? He makes fun of them. He teases them. What do you mean, what do I think? That's your question? So Byron Donald, some like black Republican benchwarmer, gets up at the RJC and says, I love Israel. I support immigration. You say, what do you think about that? What do you think I think about that dipshit? That's your question. The show is like, we hate immigration. We're against Israel. Hey, so this guy says he likes immigration in Israel.

1:12:30What do you think about that? That's your question. What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that? You fucking idiot. Because essentially like that's at the root of this. It's about a certain type of powerlessness that comes to express itself in sadism. There is a degree of self-loathing among these people that it can't also be discounted. There's a degree to which they have accepted their position as being kind of outside of society, as being unrepresented, and they just want to burn it all down. I think I have this theory about Twitter, which is that whichever political coalition is in control of it at a given moment is going to pay dearly for that.

1:13:17The left sort of had the wheel on Twitter, you know, around 2020 and by 2024, a lot of the positions that got taken for that reason, a lot of the culture that emerged on it ended up proving a profound political loser. And I remember people being terrified on the left when Elon Musk bought it. But what I see is the right is becoming Twitter poisoned, ex-poisoned. And, you know, that guy in a basement making fun of his followers claiming to be an incel politics right i mean i've spent the last week like immersed in prep for this yeah you begin to think it's the world and then you like look up and you like kind of shake your head and you remember it's not no and the right seems so hooked in to its own attentional drugs at the moment yeah and jd vance seems to want to be the future of the right is very, very, very hooked in to its weird subcultures.

1:14:15He has said that himself. That, I mean, one thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them, it's like, this is going to be a loser. And I don't think it's specifically the anti-Semitism, though, that too. But the whole gestalt of craziness, like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens. And I mean, there's just so much as they try to absorb this in and Tucker Carlson. And if I were to have some optimistic loss on any of this, and I don't feel great about it, it's that that's a pretty weak politics, particularly after Trump, who has a very particular showman's capability and, you know, role in American culture.

1:14:53No, I think your point about Twitter being a kind of mixed blessing or it's extremely useful when you're kind of putting together the campaign and the coalition and about to launch an attack. And when you're in power, you need to have normal democratic tools to understand where the electorate's at. And the types of explanations, ideas, memes on Twitter are a different reality. And it interprets what's going on in the rest of the world in a very distorted way, right? So an election happens, there's a negative result for your party, a normal political mind would say, maybe some of our messaging is bad, our policies are bad, the elector is expressing issues with us.

1:15:36That gets metabolized on Twitter and all kinds of insane conspiracies and so on and so forth. So it definitely distorts what the notion of the rights public is. Now, that's very dangerous because they're living in kind of another reality. But it also, when they're in a democratic society, yeah, it detaches them from the things that they could do to alter course. And yeah, I think that it's still true that a lot of the things that we're talking about are, as they say, very online and attract a kind of subculture. My only warning about that is like I think that, you know, a lot of young people grew up online.

1:16:10A lot of people are very online. It's not that different from the norm. But what I would say is that I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically. And what I mean by this is the 2024 election scared the hell out of Democrats about what was happening with Gen Z. Rightly so. Right. Huge swing towards Trump. And so then when somebody like Nick Fuentes, self-described, you know, incel and brain-poisoned edgelord comes up and says, I am speaking on behalf of these young men. He has a tendency to say, well, okay, like I don't understand these young men anymore.

1:16:43Maybe he is. Right. And then I look around, if you look at who Trump has lost support among, it's young people. He has cratered among young people. You look at how Zoran Mamdani did in the election among young men, like incredibly well. The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuentes is also wrong. It's totally wrong. And I think it's a weird way. One thing you often see, I think, is that old people don't understand young people. Right. And so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituency saying, I speak for the young now. And, you know, people care about the cost of living, right?

1:17:23They swing around based on that. There seems to me to be something here that even, I don't think the Republican Party has the pulse of the young. It's that it has the pulse of its online young. And that is a very malformed sense of even the young public. Yeah, I think there's a lot to that. I think there's a lot to that. I do think, though, it must be admitted that this is a party with mass support, and it increasingly has tailored a message to try to get people who feel disaffected with the way things are going. So if there are a lot of other shocks and there isn't some way in which the country gets on a footing where people feel like they can be prosperous, where they can have decent lives, and these pathologies continue, that politics is going to get an additional purchase.

1:18:12I mean, it's one of the big dangers with America's two-party politics. Right. if one of the two parties becomes extreme, then it doesn't take that much for the extreme wing to come into power, right? You can take over a party with a fairly narrow part of that party being well-organized. Different candidates split support in the primaries and all of a sudden you have Trump in 2016 or maybe J.D. Vance loses in 2028, but then there's a big recession and Tucker Carlson runs in the 2032 primaries or somebody who's, you know, Tucker-pilled or whatever it might be. And the issue you have there is that if the Democratic Party, for one reason or another, becomes unacceptable to people, then the fact that the Republican Party is run by Grover extremists, you make a couple political moves to the center and hide it a little bit during the election, then you're in real trouble.

1:19:06I mean, my sense of our politics now is that on the one hand, the Republican Party is weakening itself, and on the other hand, the possibility of 20th century calamity-style outcomes just keeps going up. Yeah, I agree with you. But, you know, like, here's the thing about every single election happens and Americans say, this proves our theory of the case. The country has fundamentally changed. Here are the people who are important. Here are the people who are not important. This party has shown itself to be totally out of touch with the American people. This party is the wave of the future. And then another election happens.

1:19:39That narrative is forgotten. era proven to be false very quickly. We don't really know what the electorate looks like until election day. So we're always kind of guessing and saying, oh, well, there's a lot of these kind of people, a lot of this kind of people. We don't know what messages are going to be successful. Things come out of nowhere. Things disappear. Coalitions are never permanent. They're very fragile in American politics. They fall apart quickly. As you mentioned, the loss of young people, the loss of independents who weren't, you know, watching Nick Fuentes. They were pissed about their groceries.

1:20:14They were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house. So I don't think, I'm of two minds of it too. I do believe that there is a weakening of the party's mass appeal through its moving towards the other things. But my only worry about that is like these things have sophisticated techniques of propaganda to get mass support. And Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are exhibiting those things. They know what they're doing. They are not the Nazis of yesteryear who were skinheads and put swastikas everywhere and scare people. They know how to deliver this message in a way that's palatable or more palatable.

1:20:58My sense of things in America is that if a message comes along that is, yes, there are problems with the establishment, but we need to make some changes to the way our economy works. And I don't particularly hate or want to kill or harm anybody. That message is going to be a lot more successful with people because I think most Americans are not obsessed with sadistic fantasies of harming each other. So I don't think it's an inevitability that those politics will take over. But I do believe there are conditions under which they become more appealing and stronger. And it's, you know, a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we're experiencing now.

1:21:42And then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay, so I'm going to recommend two recent books and an old book. And they're about this subject. This is not for reading for fun. One is Taking America Back by David Austin Walsh, which is a kind of history of the rights, half-hearted, let's say, attempts to police anti-Semitism. One is Furious Minds. It's a new book by Laura K. Field, which is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right, and how they justify, explain, rationalize the things that are going on. Give arguments for it. And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten.

1:22:19It's called Prophets of Deceit, Techniques of the American Agitator, and it's by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. And it's an extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of anti-Semitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States. John Gans, thank you very much. Thanks so much for having me, Ezra.

1:22:49Thank you.

1:23:19Original music by Carol Saburo, Amin Zahota, and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samalewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Roestrasser.