All,
The following chilling and deeply disturbing discussion between Ezra Klein and John Ganz currently represents in my view the most intellectually and politically honest public discourse about what the content of the actual ideological and social relationship between the deadly hegemonic forces of white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny, and fascism really is, and means in American society, culture, and politics today and as such represents a genuine turning point in public facing social analysis of what the phenomenon of what is generally (and quite inaccurately and thus inadequately) referred to as “Trumpism” or “authoritarianism”
The strangest even bizarre aspect of this entire conversation is that just last month we were all exposed to the arrogantly patronizing, emptyheaded, hubris stuffed, and braindead cowardly gliberal nonsense of EZRA KLEIN (whose head and ass was deftly and definitively handed to him by Ta-Nehisi Coates who elegantly and decisively called Klein out for ignoring and thus openly excusing the utterly vile and vicious anti-black racist demagoguery of Charlie Kirk) and who now finally has enough sense at last (however still without fully acknowledging what Coates and so many others were telling him upfront all along) just to hand the public microphone over to the right-on-point, brilliant, and publicly fearless JOHN GANZ who lays out a crystal clear and precise analytical and critical perspective on how and why all of the presently recurring patterns and rapidly metatasizing dimensions of the nexus between the political economy and culture of fascism in the United States is now openly manifesting itself in the expressive, institutional, systemic, and structural realms of race, class, and gender dynamics within the deeply embedded conflicts led by the fascist American state sanctioned attacks on immigration, racial, social, and economic justice, as it simultaneously reinforces and supports the massive class inequality, oppression, and exploitation of corporate capitalism vis-a-vis labor, oligarchic elites, and gender/sexual relations
What the conversation between Klein and Ganz finally in fact presages is the coming societal, economic, and political battles over the very identity and destiny of the United States writ large. Stay tuned because the inevitable character of this epic struggle is just beginning to fully reveal itself. What is absolutely clear at this point is how no one is going to be exempt from what is coming and why no matter what anyone says or does otherwise in the interim.
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-john-ganz.html
Opinion
The Ezra Klein Show
The following chilling and deeply disturbing discussion between Ezra Klein and John Ganz currently represents in my view the most intellectually and politically honest public discourse about what the content of the actual ideological and social relationship between the deadly hegemonic forces of white supremacy, antisemitism, misogyny, and fascism really is, and means in American society, culture, and politics today and as such represents a genuine turning point in public facing social analysis of what the phenomenon of what is generally (and quite inaccurately and thus inadequately) referred to as “Trumpism” or “authoritarianism”
The strangest even bizarre aspect of this entire conversation is that just last month we were all exposed to the arrogantly patronizing, emptyheaded, hubris stuffed, and braindead cowardly gliberal nonsense of EZRA KLEIN (whose head and ass was deftly and definitively handed to him by Ta-Nehisi Coates who elegantly and decisively called Klein out for ignoring and thus openly excusing the utterly vile and vicious anti-black racist demagoguery of Charlie Kirk) and who now finally has enough sense at last (however still without fully acknowledging what Coates and so many others were telling him upfront all along) just to hand the public microphone over to the right-on-point, brilliant, and publicly fearless JOHN GANZ who lays out a crystal clear and precise analytical and critical perspective on how and why all of the presently recurring patterns and rapidly metatasizing dimensions of the nexus between the political economy and culture of fascism in the United States is now openly manifesting itself in the expressive, institutional, systemic, and structural realms of race, class, and gender dynamics within the deeply embedded conflicts led by the fascist American state sanctioned attacks on immigration, racial, social, and economic justice, as it simultaneously reinforces and supports the massive class inequality, oppression, and exploitation of corporate capitalism vis-a-vis labor, oligarchic elites, and gender/sexual relations
What the conversation between Klein and Ganz finally in fact presages is the coming societal, economic, and political battles over the very identity and destiny of the United States writ large. Stay tuned because the inevitable character of this epic struggle is just beginning to fully reveal itself. What is absolutely clear at this point is how no one is going to be exempt from what is coming and why no matter what anyone says or does otherwise in the interim.
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-john-ganz.html
Opinion
The Ezra Klein Show
The ‘Groyperfication’ of the G.O.P.
November 14, 2025
New York Times
by Ezra Klein
Produced by Jack McCordick
VIDEO:
November 14, 2025
New York Times
by Ezra Klein
Produced by Jack McCordick
VIDEO:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010506082/tucker-carlson-nick-fuentes-and-the-rights-groyper-problem.html
The political writer John Ganz dissects the Republican Party’s internal battle over antisemitism. Credit: Mark Peterson/Redux
The political writer John Ganz dissects the Republican Party’s internal battle over antisemitism. Credit: Mark Peterson/Redux
Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem
The political writer John Ganz dissects the Republican Party’s internal battle over antisemitism.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
If, by the stroke of good fortune or by just being a normal person, you had not heard of Nick Fuentes before this month, chances are you’ve heard of him now.
Archival clip of Ben Shapiro: Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable.
Archival clip of Bill Maher: He’s what I would call a racist’s racist. He’s just this troll.
Archival clip of Megyn Kelly: Nick Fuentes has said a long list of very vile things.
Archival clip of Hasan Piker: He’s a booger-eating white supremacist Holocaust denier.
The reason everybody is talking about Fuentes is because Tucker Carlson — arguably the most significant media figure on the American right at this point — hosted Fuentes, a person he has feuded with in the past, for a very friendly two-hour chat about the problem of Israel and the problem of American Jews: whether or not they fit in this country or if their loyalties belong elsewhere.
Archival clip:
Nick Fuentes: Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest — that’s absolutely the case, and that’s the only way the country is going to stay together.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly. That’s my concern.
Fuentes: And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America.
It was the kind of conversation you would not have heard among mainstream figures on the American right in recent decades. But something has changed.
What we are watching is a very old strain of the right vying for control of its future. This right goes back to Pat Buchanan and Charles Lindbergh and the idea that the right should be an ethnonationalist coalition that doesn’t have room for immigrants. That very much does not have room for Jews. That is really not comfortable with anyone who is not what they call a “Heritage American” — who doesn’t bow at the altar of the primacy of white Christians as the people controlling this country.
This has been a logic, an ideology, that Trump has broken into the mainstream, and that is now following itself to its full expression. If you buy into this, well, there is a place it goes — and now we are seeing more figures on the American right truly going there.
To talk about it, I wanted to bring back John Ganz. Ganz is sort of hard to describe. He has become a popular political theorist and historian. He writes the great Substack Unpopular Front. He wrote the book “When the Clock Broke,” about the politics of the 1990s and Pat Buchanan and David Duke and how they prefigure Trump.
But he’s also somebody who has been tracking very closely these ideas — where they come from in our country and the way they are taking hold on the right. So I wanted to hear what he thought now that they are breaking this far out into the open.
Ezra Klein: John Ganz, welcome back to the show.
John Ganz: Thanks so much for having me.
So let’s say that, blessedly, you’ve never heard of Nick Fuentes. Or maybe you’ve just heard of him in the last few weeks.
Who is Nick Fuentes?
Nick Fuentes, I would say, is the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America.
Expand.
By his own story, he comes from a middle-class background in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in political activism. He was a fervent Trump supporter. Then he ran afoul, according to him, of some gatekeepers in the conservative movement — namely Ben Shapiro, who accused him of antisemitism when he asked questions about U.S. policy toward Israel.
Over the years, Fuentes assembled a following of other disaffected young men. He launched two campaigns that he called the “groyper wars” to pressure mainstream conservative figures to move rightward on issues to do with race, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and Israel — the subtext there being the Jewish question. Jews.
He’s not that subtext oriented compared to some people in this movement. I mean, he’ll talk about an admiration for Adolf Hitler. He doesn’t just talk about Israel. He talks about “the Jews.”
There are figures here who it feels like they try to keep a mask on. He doesn’t.
He doesn’t. And I think that’s a key part of his appeal. I think that his viewers find that refreshing. They find it titillating, and they find it to be reflective of their politics.
You mentioned the groypers. What is a groyper?
Let me tell you a story of how I learned what groypers are.
I was writing a piece for The New Republic about five years ago about the right. I was learning about what young people on the right were thinking about: How did they respond to Trump, and what was the future of conservative media and elites in the Trump era? What was going to happen with the Never Trumpers? What would conservatism look like if Trump went away?
So I was looking at that, and in the course of this, I befriended some young right-wing guys, and they kept on talking about groypers.
I didn’t really know what it was, and then I realized that they were kind of a subculture of online trolls and marginal figures. They often had as their avatar or profile picture this kind of grotesque toad that looked like Pepe the Frog.
It’s my understanding that this subculture is larger than Nick Fuentes and not necessarily under his control or direction but that he speaks for them. He attempts to speak for them and to unite them into a political force.
What do the groypers believe? This is a very meme-heavy, online, trollish subculture that is endlessly dancing on the edge of: Oh, aren’t we just joking?
So pinning it down can be a little bit like trying to pin smoke. Because if you focus on a meme, it’s like: Oh, you have no sense of humor. But it’s a classic: First you’re making jokes about the gas chambers, then you’re thinking about sending your enemies to them.
It’s a little difficult for people to understand because we’re accustomed to thinking of politics coming from intellectuals, elites, media figures who disseminate ideas.
This kind of goes in the other direction. It bubbles up from message boards. It bubbles up from memes, jokes, ironic playfulness. But the text, not the subtext, of all of them is a constant barrage of propaganda that’s antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic — you name it. And also a lot of content that is conspiratorial, obviously, that sees shadowy actors running the government and is also deeply dissatisfied with the state of America and the prospects it has for people like them.
You wrote this piece — you’ve actually written a couple pieces — on the groyper-fication of the Republican Party. And you wrote:
Here’s the thing to understand: Every single person under, say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in Discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.
This point about the people under the age of 40, this idea that there is a pretty big difference in what the 20-somethings on the right are like and what the 50-somethings are like — I hear that from the right all the time.
So for people who do not have the texture of that cultural environment, what are you describing? What are they seeing? What does that culture, environment, look and feel like?
Well, just recently, there were a couple of leaks and political reports, one of them about group chats. It’s an environment where there’s a lot of sharing of memes and jokes — and repetition of memes and joking — about the Holocaust, joking about Hitler, joking about Black people and making jokes about slavery.
It’s just an anarchic indulgence of a sadistic id that usually involves the humiliation of minorities or women.
A lot of the energy of this, and a lot of the way it would get defended, is that the big enemy of the right in the late 2010s, early 2020s, was the woke mob, cancel culture, the thought police, the gatekeepers.
And you would hear this described — joking, but a provocation — as showing that you can say what the cultural enforcers don’t want you to say.
Richard Hanania, the dissident right figure and intellectual, describes it in “The Based Ritual”: People on the MAGA right get together and keep upping the ante to show that they’re not part of the establishment — they’re part of this counter-revolutionary force.
How do you think about the interplay between whatever that was — because there was a culture that emerged in response to censoriousness — and then its movement into actual belief?
I think that was a way that people could justify to themselves what they were seeing on an everyday level. Some people could say to themselves and to others that they were participating in a cultural revolt against the censorious state of affairs. And their interest was to tear down those norms and to open a space of freedom.
Freedom to do what? — is the question. Just to say and do racist things? I don’t know.
So I think it created a structure in which these memes spread rapidly and made it so people who may have been uncomfortable with it or may have found that at variance with the way they were raised to look the other way and say: We are, in a sense, playing around.
The first thing that does, it seems to me, is break down an immune system that people have. And you can’t extricate this from Trump.
If you have any hint left of that attachment to old norms and mores and courtesies, then you can’t be a true Trumpist. Because he doesn’t attach to any of that.
So you begin demonstrating a cultural affinity to that kind of politics of provocation and politics of no rules. Once you’ve done that, then you actually don’t have that immune system anymore.
So the question becomes: If you don’t believe in the establishment and you don’t believe in any norms, how do you decide what to believe? Because you’re breaking down the immune system that was supposed to protect against people like Donald Trump.
Yes, absolutely. I think your point about Trump being the originator of this is important.
When Trump appeared in 2015 — and people seem to forget this for some reason — there was a lot of talk about the “alt-right,” a term that’s not used very much anymore. But these people, who had previously been on the fringes of American politics, greeted the arrival of Trump with rapture.
Yes, ecstatically.
Ecstatically. And they knew that this was their kind of guy. They knew that the things that he said would open a space for them. Even if he wasn’t precisely a perfect vehicle for their politics, it was a real big breakthrough. They saw it, and they said: OK, this is our chance.
Then we have a first wave just after Trump is elected, where you have these people crawling out of the woodwork. You have Richard Spencer, you have the Charlottesville, Va., riots.
Then there is kind of a backlash, and those people seem to get pushed out. There’s not that much talk about alt-nationalism and the alt-right anymore.
Trump also doesn’t really seem to be adopting some of their preferences in foreign policy. He makes some very tasteless remarks about Jews — but not the ideological antisemitism that the alt-right would want him to do.
So this thing kind of goes on the back burner, but it’s very much suffusing the culture of young right-wingers in the intermediate and lower ranks of the various bureaucracies, the various staffs of conservative institutions. It never really fully goes away.
But then something else happens. As weak as the gatekeepers are in this modern era, there are still people with keys to various gates. And by the end of Trump’s first term, Trump is banned on most of the major social media platforms. Certainly a lot of these figures are banned on them.
As Trump makes his return — and then, very specifically, when Elon Musk buys Twitter, renames it X and functionally takes off all of the guardrails — then the ability of all this to flood into the conservative nervous system really changes.
I want you to watch a clip from Tucker Carlson here that I think is interesting.
Archival clip of Carlson: Unfortunately, for the guardians of the old system, the old Republican Party, people have been allowed to describe it accurately. Mostly because Elon Musk opened up X. And when he did that, you get all kinds of filth and nonsense and lies, but you also get some truth. Actually, quite a bit of truth.
And one of the main things that people are telling the truth about that they didn’t tell the truth about before is that our foreign policy really doesn’t have much to do with what’s good for the United States. And once those words have been uttered, they can’t be taken back.
Carlson here is talking about Israel. Maybe he’s not entirely talking about Israel, but the dynamic he’s describing — of Musk taking over X as a hinge point — seems true to me. Does it track for you?
Absolutely. All of these figures re-emerged after they had been pushed out, and they created a media ecosystem that is suffused with these ideas.
First of all, a lot of people online are looking for information. They’re looking to understand an extremely complicated world, and they have a sense that perhaps the establishment views are either misinforming them or are just flat-out boring.
Then they discover a narrative about things that’s more appealing, simplifying, seems persuasive —
Exciting.
Exciting. And also it cannot be discounted that Fuentes, in particular, is extremely entertaining.
They gravitate toward these crackpot ideas.
Look, U.S. support of Israel is a perfectly legitimate topic to dispute and to have differing views about and to criticize. More and more people are coming around to that position. They saw what was happening in Gaza, and they were deeply upset by it. And they look for commentary and opinion on that.
And the commentary and opinion that they get is not what The New York Times is saying or what The New Yorker is saying or even left-wing outlets like The Nation. They get Nick Fuentes, they get Candace Owens, they get all these crackpot views about it that take that discussion about real-world issues — and a mixture of rational discussion and commentary that’s actually somewhat sophisticated, I would say in Fuentes’s case — and then channel that into propaganda for antisemitism.
I think it’s important to realize that not everyone is aware that they’re being propagandized. They are in an information environment where this is what they see, and it becomes normal. In a sense, they get captured.
People love to talk about the liberal elite bubble. There is an equivalent bubble of the hard right. So that brings this deformed diversion of the public sphere that Musk allowed to happen — and I think, one could argue, intentionally.
I want to get at a bit of back story here before we get into the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes interview. Because this is not the first time Nick Fuentes has broken through to the mainstream of conservatism.
There’s a very famous dinner at Mar-a-Lago, I believe, where Donald Trump is dining with Kanye West, a noted antisemite. And Kanye brings Nick Fuentes.
At the time, Trump looked like the past of the party. People think he’s on his way out — it’s going to be Ron DeSantis in 2024 or someone like that.
And I think they also buy the idea — which Trump says afterward — and I take as even plausible — that he doesn’t really know who Nick Fuentes is.
I think people buy that Trump talks to a lot of people. And one reason I think this is breaking through in the way it has been is twofold: You don’t have any of that deniability on Carlson’s side. And now, everybody understands that the future of Trumpism is up for grabs.
How would you describe the role Tucker Carlson plays on the right now?
I think that he strives to be a person of great influence in directing the policy, staffing, messaging of the Republican Party. To a certain extent he is. He has deep ties to people in the administration.
He helped get JD Vance named vice president.
Absolutely. He’s a figure. It is more helpful to interpret him as a politician.
I agree with this.
He understood the direction of the Republican Party and remade his entire image of himself to fit in with it. He has been very smart about that, and he realized the old institutions are not what they used to be. Does it really matter whether he’s on Fox anymore? Apparently, not very much.
His creation of a new persona really is the story of the transformation of the Republican Party.
At this point, how would you describe what Tucker Carlson’s politics are? What pole of right-wing ideology does he seem to represent?
He represents a tradition that’s sometimes called isolationist, which views America’s entanglement with foreign alliances and interventions in other countries to not necessarily be in our interest. Not necessarily dovish, but definitely: The United States should definitely apply force when it wants, when it needs to, in its own very direct self-interest.
I believe that he calls himself a Christian. I believe he represents a Christian nationalism, which is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Again, there are some roots in that of the old right, that go back prewar.
He is very hostile to immigration. He seems to have a very strong sense of white ethnic identity and believes that it’s a problem for the country if there are too many nonwhite immigrants.
Forgive me if I’m misremembering this: Didn’t you do an interview with the son of a Ku Klux Klan member?
Oh, my God. I’m so glad you brought that up. I was working on a piece in 2020 about the conservative movement, and Tucker was a big part of it — his transformation into a right-wing populist.
I got a remarkable quote from someone who was the child of Don Black, a Ku Klux Klan leader and a big figure in the white nationalist movement.
The person I got the quote from, just to be clear, left the movement and was highly critical of it.
Here’s what they told me:
From the perspective of my family, he’s making the same points they’ve been trying to make their entire lives, but much better; he’s found a wider audience, and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas. My father’s a little baffled still that it’s Tucker Carlson, someone who he always never liked because he saw him as a shill for the Bush administration and the Iraq war, that’s bringing white nationalist ideas to the Fox audience.
I was not a very experienced journalist at the time. This was the beginning of my career. I got this quote, and I brought this to my other sources for this story, who are young people on the right. I thought I had something dispositive — something that showed that Tucker Carlson is playing around with things that you really shouldn’t, that he’s moving in a very disturbing direction. They shrugged. They didn’t care.
I found that to be shocking and disturbing, and I think that anecdote says a lot.
I also think — and I think this is very important to understanding Tucker and the role he plays: He understands something Trump understands, but not everybody does, which is that the modern right is driven by attention even more than the modern left.
Trump has remade the modern right around an attentional economy. And there isn’t somebody behind Trump as good at attention as Trump is. JD Vance certainly isn’t.
You don’t have to be the president to be the leader of MAGA. It is very plausible to me that you would have a JD Vance nomination — but that actually the next leader of MAGA is Tucker Carlson.
I think Tucker Carlson is trying to be the authentic voice of MAGA, who, because he doesn’t have to do all the political coalition work, can be “purer” than someone like JD Vance, who I think fundamentally agrees with Carlson at this point but has to maintain, or attempt to maintain, viability in Michigan.
Absolutely. Here’s the thing: I think Carlson views himself in that role, for sure. Tucker Carlson was sort of the median conservative Republican to a certain degree. He toed the party line on most issues — Iraq, American foreign policy ——
He was on MSNBC.
He was on MSNBC. He also tried to present himself as a kind of reasonable conservative.
He was like a good-time, libertarian rich kid.
Yes, there’s that, too.
It’s interesting: There’s a degree that there are costume changes here. He takes the bow tie off. He now has this more folksy look: checked shirts, in this cabin, etc. He’s cultivating an image of himself as down to earth and folksy and not part of the establishment.
It’s hard to take when you realize he is the product of it.
But there’s something important to understand about Tucker Carlson’s turn to antisemitism, in particular. I believe that antisemitism functions as an epoxy for elites who don’t really want social changes that would affect their prominence and, in fact, who want to shore up their prominence and need mass support and need a target and need a story about economic dispossession, a world that doesn’t seem to make sense. That serves their interests.
You see this in a lot of different places.
You see it in Russia. The czarist regime invented antisemitism for this purpose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is created in this regime that’s feeling the pressure of a mass population that’s becoming dissatisfied with it, and it creates antisemitism as a way to rechannel that energy.
You see this in France, where you have an aristocracy and a clergy that is pushed into old institutions, sees its prominence in the society losing out. It’s losing its world, and then it needs to find a mass politics, a way to attack its enemies. Antisemitism becomes very useful for that.
So antisemitism always works to create a kind of coalition. There’s a street gutter, crackpot antisemitism. Then you have what you could call more respectable antisemites: Let’s say, Charles Lindbergh — a person who was highly respected, a great hero to many Americans, but who had a racial view of the world and found antisemitic ideas persuasive.
Henry Ford.
Henry Ford.
So you had these respectable antisemites and crackpot antisemites. And their coming together, I would say, is the creation of an actual antisemitic politics.
This interview between Fuentes and Carlson is almost textbook. You have the antisemitism of the gutter: Fuentes. And you have the antisemitism of a declining aristocracy: Tucker comes from this preppy background. His father was an ambassador, his stepmother is a Swanson heiress.
He sees an America that’s not the way he wants it to be. It’s declining, it doesn’t look the way he looks, it has norms that he doesn’t share. And you have Fuentes, who dropped out of college, comes from a modest background. He is dripping with resentment to a world that he feels doesn’t have a place for him.
A self-described “proud incel.”
Yes. It’s also very interesting that he does not try to hide or pretend that he is not socially maladjusted in some way. That lends him authenticity and makes people gravitate toward it.
This meeting between Tucker and Fuentes symbolizes the kind of recognition between these two groups. In that interview, in that moment, it is the most perfect encapsulation of antisemitic politics — declining aristocracy and a dissatisfied mob. Bring them together and you have a kind of coalition in itself.
Let’s get into that interview. I want to play a clip for you that almost felt, to me, like the heart of it.
Archival clip:
Fuentes: Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that, because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, there are significant numbers of Jews in Europe but also in the United States, and because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they’re stateless people, they’re unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years — and I think that’s a good thing.
I guess what I’m saying is that if you are a Jewish person in America, you’re — and again, it’s not because they’re born, but it’s sort of a rational self-interest politically to say: I’m a minority. I’m a religious ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel.
There’s a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel. And I would say on top of that, for the international Jewish community, they have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.
And there’s no other country that has a similar arrangement like that. No other country has a strong identity like that — this religious blood-and-soil conviction, this history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted.
And, in particular, the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They 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 2,000 years ago. They do.
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. These 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 that do that.
Carlson: 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.
How do you read it?
Well, Fuentes is an extremely talented rhetorician and communicator, and he does a few things. He presents a vocabulary that does not sound shocking to people. He uses words and terminology that wouldn’t frighten people — that sounds like a rational discussion of politics, a rational comment on politics.
And then woven into this is all of the material of classic antisemitism: The Jews are an unassimilable group, self-interested, internationally organized very tightly and all talking to each other and working as one mind, who don’t have the interest of their host at heart, have their own interests at heart and are animated by a deep hostility to the people who surround them, hatred toward Christians and white people, so on and so forth. That is classic antisemitism.
But he keeps on saying things like “That’s a good thing” or “I don’t think that’s me being hateful.” He presents it as if he’s having a discussion of politics like any other.
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 with the Romans.
I kind of like the Romans. [Laughs.]
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 — don’t we just have to practice ours?
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 antisemitism to Trumpism. The MAGA right has spent years saying that the whole left plays identity politics, and it’s time for white people to stand up for themselves: You’re getting all this anti-white racism, and the Jews are the danger to that. If they’re going to practice their politics, you have to practice yours.
Precisely. At the core of the Nazi ideology is a social Darwinistic view of the world divided into almost different species of beings who are engaged in an endless war with one another. The Jews are a particularly important part of that worldview. They are the most threatening of these beings.
And trying to launder biological essentialism about the nature of the political through what sounds like normal interest-group politics like: In America we have coalitions, we have representatives of different ethnic groups who advocate on each other’s behalf. Well, 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 that Fuentes continually hammers on.
There is a lot here that’s tricky to talk about because you’re at this endless morass of the intersection of antisemitism 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 Zohran Mamdani? When there has been these years of debate about antisemitism on the left?
I’ll say this superclearly: I’ve met Zohran. I voted for Zohran Mamdani. I don’t think there’s anything antisemitic 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 structural distinction that is worth understanding. Anti-Zionism on the left often pushes toward 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 socialist and Marxist. But the left tends to push toward universalism. And a lot of the anger at Israel, much of which I think is merited, is the way it portrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control.
On the right, it’s pushing toward ethnostate politics — that the fundamental argument and a way in which modern Israel has tried to create new coalitions is to say: Hey, we’re all ethnostates here. But once you buy into the ethnostate framework, then the fact that you see Jews as an ethnic other in your society pushes somewhere very different. It pushes toward ideas of expulsion, pushes toward ideas that they’re a fifth column within, that they are leading your country to portray its actual interests, that they have dual loyalties.
But there is this weird thing where there’s been a rise of Jewish figures who want to embrace ethnostate politics. You have Yoram Hazony, who is Jewish, lives in Jerusalem and is the founder of NatCon, going to the NatCon conference — which he started — saying: Look, you don’t have to like the Jews to be a national conservative.
Archival clip of Yoram Hazony: 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 NatCon, you had to love Jews.
One point of anger I have with a lot of people on the right who have been playing footsie with this for a long time is that once you embrace the ethnostate concept, this is where that leads.
Well, I certainly am of that opinion. Let’s take this from another angle. The way you’re talking is a little highbrow. It’s in terms of intellectuals like you or Hazony. But let’s look at this from the ground up.
You have a conservative movement that has embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone — a tone of open bigotry in certain cases. The deal that the pro-Israel right thought it could make is: We can engage in a good deal of racist demagogy. We’re OK with it, especially, maybe, directed at Islam. But the line that we draw is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into antisemitism.
That is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self-defeating position.
So when I talk about groyper-fication, 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. And, as we’ve discussed, there’s no immune system. There’s no barrier to antisemitism.
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 and says they’re sending rapists and murderers over here. There’s a big outrage. But now, being much more anti-immigrant on the right, that’s de rigueur: Who cares?
Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, once you have moved on traditional gender roles, this is the boss battle of Western speech taboos.
Right, right, right.
This didn’t begin last week or two weeks ago. 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 asking: Was Germany really the bad guy in World War II? What have we not been told about that?
You bring these things together — that you want to build an ethnostate, and you are ideologically opposed to there being anything you can’t talk about, and you make your money and your attention on these algorithms — it’s almost a hydraulic process toward antisemitism.
The thing about a kick, getting excitement from it: Sartre said it’s amusing to be an antisemite. Mamdani, for example — who some people say is an antisemite because of his positions on Israel — he’s very careful to say: I’m not an antisemite — and to express sensitivity to Jewish concerns.
And go to synagogues. I mean, Mamdani is a liberal.
OK. Yes, exactly. But whatever you think is at the heart of his politics, he does not Jew bait. He is not practicing in politics that are based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews, in other words.
Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does, to a more subtle extent. Candace Owens does. That also attracts people who feel powerless. They are very attracted to it because there’s someone you can harass and pick on. It’s part of their strategy to take over the right — to do this workplace harassment against their Jewish allies, to bait them, to get them to overreact, to unsettle them.
The other thing you mentioned is that the taboos are breaking down because World War II and the Holocaust is a long time ago, and the generation that experienced that is gone, and the politics that were created out of the consensus that it created is disappearing.
Some of it is just the passage of time.
Again, this is tricky to talk about, but you can’t get away from how much Israel post Oct. 7, and the war in and the flattening of Gaza, has destabilized politics around this everywhere.
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. You hear it in Carlson’s Fuentes interview. You hear it in the questions getting asked of JD Vance at various events now.
Archival clip of audience member: I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they are 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.
Now that MAGA, on some level, has really rooted itself in this semi-isolationist, very much “America First” position, this young, very online right, one, looks at what has happened in Gaza and, I think, correctly, sees it as immoral. But, two, asks: Why are we involved here at a time when we’re pushing Europe out on its own? When we are aggressively insisting that we have no stable alliances except for what is directly in our self-interest at a given moment.
There are ways — many, many, many ways — to be anti-Israel without being antisemitic. But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing can never be connected to antisemitism breaks apart.
I never quite know how to talk about this, except that I feel like we’re all living through it right now.
It’s very difficult. To put my cards on the table, 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. I believe they probably committed a genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. But what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for antisemitic agitators.
And also a lot of people are becoming curious about U.S. foreign policy, history. 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? Why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? They have legitimate and interesting questions, but instead 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.
Archival clip of Carlson: I’m not defending the war in any way, 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.
Archival clip of Carlson: 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.
That’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 toward human suffering you could imagine on his show, and then he gets very sentimental about this issue.
Archival clip of Fuentes: This is just a straight-up genocide. These people are starving. They’re literally dying. It would be formally called a famine, except that Israel will not let any international personnel inside the Strip to assess this, to make that declaration.
That is to drag in people to think: Well, 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.
In some ways, what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson-Fuentes interview:
Archival clip:
Fuentes: With OnlyFans, it’s like having a TikTok. It’s like: Here’s my Linktree, here’s my Instagram account, here’s my Facebook account, here’s my YouTube, and here’s my OnlyFans.
Carlson: Why would any of this be legal?
Fuentes: Well, like you indicated, maybe there’s an intelligence benefit to that.
Carlson: Yeah.
Fuentes: Maybe there’s a political benefit to that.
Carlson: Well, why wouldn’t you arrest the people who run something like that?
Fuentes: It should be if you had a Christian government.
Carlson: Or how about just a government who cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is OnlyFans? Iran’s not turning my daughters to prostitution.
To even parse this clip, you have to know that one of the big antisemitic conspiracies of this era is that Jews, in general, and maybe the Israeli government, in particular, is behind a lot of porn.
Archival clip of Fuentes: The reason the 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 just talked about this. David Duke has talked about this.
And here you have Fuentes and Carlson sort of gesturing at this: Maybe there’s an intelligence benefit to all this porn we’ve got out there. And: Now, if you had a real Christian government, we wouldn’t allow it.
That’s where, I think, you see something else is happening in the soil, as opposed to just old-school isolationism on American foreign policy.
Yes. 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 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. Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble — we’ll talk about it — for immediately coming out and defending Carlson.
But around the same time, he had Jonathan Haidt, the critic of the internet, at Heritage to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things.
Roberts sends out this tweet, saying:
Thank you, Jon 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.
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 C.E.O. of OnlyFans, named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics, the head of the Heritage Foundation, chooses these two people with the very Jewish names.
It was very hard for me not to read this as Roberts, or whoever’s writing for him, pointing toward some affinity with this part of the right subculture.
I think you’re absolutely right to pick up on that. Pat Buchanan used to do this. What they used to say about Pat Buchanan is he always talked about Goldman Sachs but not Morgan Stanley.
And Pat Buchanan always, when he was opposing some U.S. foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, would mention Kissinger, he would mention Richard Perle, he would mention those guys. Would he mention Jeane Kirkpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No. Somehow those names were not important.
So continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. 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 ask: Is this just the attentional side of the right? Is this just the people who were trying to create big events for the YouTube algorithm or for the X algorithm? Maybe it begins there, but then you see it jump these blinds.
You also have the Kevin Roberts response to the Carlson-Fuentes interview:
Archival clip of Kevin Roberts: 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. We 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.
Yes, he is. 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 the conservative movement and the right wing now, and wants to maintain a relationship with him, obviously.
The Heritage Foundation is essentially part of the nervous system of the conservative movement. It’s one of the important think tanks that comes up with policy, that supports the work of intellectuals and elites in the conservative movement.
Watching that 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 Hazony flew in from Israel to sort things over.
It was a very weird video, and it struck me as almost coming from sci-fi. I 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: There are no standards anymore. 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 fissures 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.
And what you hear Fuentes doing, what you hear these people coming up and asking JD Vance questions doing, what you hear Tucker doing, is really saying: That doesn’t make any sense.
Archival clip of Carlson: 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, because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.
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 the American past, because of Calvinist ideas, and American Christian Zionism going back to the founders. And there’s something to that.
But this emerged really as a mass phenomenon in the 1970s, where evangelical Christians are looking at what’s happening in Israel as signs of the coming apocalypse, and that becomes extremely popular. Israel is befriended, is cultivated, because they think it is about to bring about the rapture and so on and so forth.
I’m not sure how much of a hold dispensationalism has on younger evangelical Christians anymore. It seems to be something that’s, like a lot of the things we’re discussing, of older generations.
So I think 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 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.
Older staffers were furious at Roberts and were standing up in meetings, saying: Bill Buckley always knew that you had to eject the antisemites on the right.
I see you rolling your eyes.
Sorry.
It’s worth saying that the extent of Bill Buckley’s war against antisemitism has been overstated. Let’s put it that way.
But many of the younger Heritage Foundation staffers were standing up and saying: What did Kevin do wrong here? If there’s no room for what he said, is there no room for me?
I think this is getting at this very big thing, which is — and it’s what I sort of understood Roberts as 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, white nationalist energy.
I think that’s a good read on this situation. Rod Dreher — who is a person of the far right but is horrified by everything that’s going on — wrote recently that a friend of his who has connections to the Republican Party in the conservative movement estimated that some 30 or 40 percent of young staffers were groypers.
I would say that the other half maybe don’t go to the last taboo of antisemitism — but definitely don’t have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking nasty ideas about that. That’s my own commentary.
But I think that you’re absolutely right that there is a marked generation gap. The younger staff of the conservative movement are much more open to Fuentes’s ideas. 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 I think that they’re struggling with the fact that they’re probably going to have staffing issues. They already are.
And Trump has not criticized Fuentes.
No, he has not.
Trump can weigh in on things when he feels like it. He 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, there are a lot of reasons for that. I think that the main reason is: Look, Trump gets a lot of mileage out of seeming out to lunch or in his own world. The fact of the matter is: He’s a successful politician.
Yes.
He understands, and he has 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 from —
His administration is full of these people at this point.
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 that this is part of their coalition. They cannot afford to alienate them and attack them.
There have been conservative figures pushing back. Ben Shapiro has, particularly, I think, gone to war and has tried to call this out and really tried to play the old, at least mythological, William F. Buckley role, trying to say: No, we don’t do this. We don’t go to groypers, we don’t go to Nick Fuentes. There are lines in our movement.
What have you thought of Shapiro’s response and the reaction to it?
First of all, one of the other main figures on the antisemitic right is Candace Owens, who was birthed within the Shapiro organization. So think about that.
Well, hired by Shapiro’s organization.
Hired by Shapiro. Cultivated, turned into a star.
Yes. Part of their trying to skate to where the puck was going.
Right, to get a younger audience, to get a — in the sense of conservatives — a hipper audience. And Shapiro says: We’re going to draw the lines here.
And Mark Levin at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit says:
Archival clip of Mark Levin: What do you mean we don’t cancel people? We canceled David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobran. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time.
Hitler admirers, Stalin admirers, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters — you’re damn right we’re going to cancel them and deplatform them.
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 clearsighted about it went into the Never Trump movement, which was not politically viable. It’s a group of people whom I consider to have kind of preserved their honor but who don’t have a mass constituency. The party is 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.
And I 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.
Zohran Mamdani is a 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 antisemitism back to Zohran Mamdani. They’re trying to make him the hate figure.
Like: Can’t we all come together?
Yes. And so Ben Shapiro says: When has Tucker really criticized Zohran Mamdani?
Archival clip of Ben Shapiro: The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zohran Mamdani on his show since Oct. 5 is once, and it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zohran Mamdani.
Then Steve Bannon attacks Mark Levin. He says: These guys aren’t really MAGA.
And he has a point, because they weren’t with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani.
Archival clip of Steve Bannon: 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 Mamdani.
It directs this energy of racial hate that seeks to expel a racial other against the safer target. That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by saying: Be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want — but against designated enemies who are OK.
People ask a rational question: Why are those people off the table?
And then the answer comes back: Well, because Christianity, or because Israel represents Western civilization — or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say: That makes no sense to us.
And in a certain sense: Yes. 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?
As you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump. In 2016, Shapiro wrote:
Trumpism breeds conspiracism; conspiracism breeds antisemitism. Trump is happy to channel support of antisemites to his own ends.
OK, so Ben Shapiro — not a dumb guy.
If you go back and you actually read 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 with which they’re going to do that? They couldn’t stop Donald Trump. They tried. Many of them tried. Ben Shapiro was an opponent of Donald Trump. Mark Levin was an opponent of Donald Trump. So they’re going to finally discover some new secret weapon?
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. 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 last, best hope is that they don’t believe Trump himself is an antisemite. Their last hope is Trump himself. And I mean, they’ll say that. When I had Shapiro on the show, he was more or less saying that.
But they’re all much more afraid of what’s coming next — of JD Vance, in particular. I think the view many Republicans hold is that Vance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is, that Vance is groyper adjacent, let’s call it.
Yes. I think that’s right.
There is still an old-line Republican Party to some degree. You know, Ted Cruz.
Archival clip of 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.
Lindsey Graham.
Archival clip of Lindsey Graham: I just want to make it really clear: I’m in the “Hitler sucks” wing of their Republican Party. [Laughs.] What is this Hitler [expletive]? I don’t know.
But it is the older Republican Party.
I think that they made a deal with the devil, in a certain way, and now they’re paying the consequences.
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: This might be a politics that ends up, when it’s exposed to the public, being too weird and too fringe. It has some mass constituencies. Will it do well in a primary? Maybe, probably. Will it do well with the rest of the public? I don’t know.
Well, it has done well in primaries before. I think this actually gets to something important. 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 best-selling book on it, as you did: Who is Pat Buchanan?
Pat Buchanan is a major figure in the conservative movement. He was a member of the Nixon administration. He represented the ideological conservatives like the Buckley conservatives, the National Review crowd, within the Nixon administration.
He then went on to be a very important syndicated columnist and appeared on TV. He was a communications director for some time in the Reagan administration. An 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 a constituency for his type of politics.
He has also been probably the most notable antisemite in American politics for a very long time.
I always think this clip of Trump talking about Buchanan is worth revisiting.
Archival clip:
Jay Leno: Now how about Pat Buchanan? What do you think of that? Now he seems to be the guy you’d have to battle for.
Donald Trump: Well, that’s true. He’s antisemitic. He’s anti-Black. He obviously has been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler in some form. I just can’t imagine this guy —
Leno: But I don’t want you to hold back. Tell me how you feel now.
Trump: I mean, I can’t imagine that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate.
That’s an earlier Trump incarnation, right? Flirting with a third party run for president.
We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things, like trade, since the ’80s. But not on everything.
Archival clip of Trump: There was a man, Pat Buchanan — a good guy, a conservative guy. It’s not that we’re — you know Pat Buchanan. Look at that. Good guy. Wow. Young people, they know him.
Archival clip of Trump: 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.
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 rehabilitating Pat Buchanan.
I think the Republican Party used to pride itself on not going down Buchanan’s lane. It went down another lane instead — George H.W. Bush’s and then George W. Bush’s. 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.
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 have to be nice to Israel.
They’re like: OK, we can be the trade stuff, the immigration stuff. But in order to keep the coalition together, we’re going to keep in place this reflexive support of Israel — partly to do with Jewish Republicans and partly to do with Christian Evangelicals.
And then when this exploded, 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 just 80 percent of its logic but not 100 percent of its logic.
There’s this book Buchanan wrote years ago called “The Death of the West.” JD Vance said it is the first political book he ever read. How would you describe the thesis of “The Death of the West” 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, and that needs to be prevented by any means necessary. Essentially, it’s a work of polite white nationalism.
There’s a tremendous amount about fertility rates in it. Even reading it in the first Trump term, 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 so — for a long time.
But now, I think if you’re going to pick a founding text for MAGA — people talk about all kinds of different weird thinkers — but “The Death of the West” by Buchanan feels, to me, like a pretty fair center of the canon.
Critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to Western civilization.
In 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. It means a certain racial stock that makes up Western people.
And the division on the right, right now, is: Are Jews part of that Western white people?
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?
You’ve said: One could even say that the internet itself is antisemitic. Which also was a provocative line.
You’ve been writing more. You gave a speech at the University of Chicago where you talked about the modern version of fascism as a response to the way the internet has destabilized the way we communicate and the political sphere.
How much do you see what we’re in as a structural feature of the medium on which politics — certainly political communication — now primarily takes place? What follows from an analysis like that?
The comment about the internet being structurally antisemitic is a very speculative theory of mine that I cannot defend right now. [Laughs.]
But, obviously, the change in the way people consume media creates the possibility for new communities to form. People who would generally be cranks and fringe people with a few audience members find mass audiences. There’s a component of that.
The internet is almost like the birth of cities. The way I talk and think about it is almost like urbanization. It creates an enormous amount of what you might call sanitary problems. It creates an enormous amount of waste, pollution and stuff like this. And we haven’t come to a way of deciding how we govern this new city.
It’s very interesting, though: Where do people get into this stuff? You mentioned pornography. It comes from this really seedy underbelly of the internet, the chan message boards — 8chan and 4chan, etc.
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 the favorite ideology of the very people who sometimes have addictive relationships to those things and feel entirely disempowered to detach themselves from it.
They 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: All of the things that happened because of modernization or the creation of these new structures, we have the answer to fix them all.
Fuentes openly says he’s one of those guys. He’s like: I’m a loser and an incel, there are no women in my life, etc.
But 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. He makes fun of them. He teases them.
Archival clip of Fuentes: What do you mean, what do I think? That’s your question? Byron Donalds, some Black Republican benchwarmer gets up at the R.J.C. and says: I love Israel. I support immigration.
You say: What do you think about that?
What do I think about that? [Expletive], that’s your question? The show is like: We hate immigration, we’re against Israel. [Mocking voice.] Hey, so this guy says he likes immigration in Israel. What do you think about that?
That’s your question? What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that? You [expletive] idiot.
Because essentially that’s at the root of this. It’s about a certain type of powerlessness that comes to express itself in sadism.
There’s a degree of self-loathing among these people that also can’t be discounted. There’s a degree to which they have accepted their position as being outside of society, as being unrepresented, and they just want to burn it all down.
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.
I think that the left sort of had the wheel on Twitter 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.
I remember people on the left being terrified when Elon Musk bought it. But what I see is the right is becoming Twitter poisoned, X poisoned.
And that “guy in a basement making fun of his followers claiming to be an incel” politics — I’ve spent the last week immersed in prep for this, and you begin to think it’s the world.
Then you look up, and you kind of shake your head, and you remember it’s not, and most people don’t want this. The right seems so hooked into its own attentional drugs at the moment.
Yes.
JD Vance, who seems to want to be the future of the right, is very, very, very hooked into its weird subcultures, and he has said that himself.
One thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them is: This is going to be a loser. And I don’t think it’s specifically the antisemitism — though, that, too. But the whole gestalt of craziness — like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson — there’s just so much as they try to absorb this.
If I were to have some optimistic gloss on any of this — and I don’t feel great about it — it’s that’s a pretty weak politics, particularly after Trump, who has a showman’s capability and role in American culture.
I think on your point about Twitter being a mixed blessing — it’s extremely useful when you’re 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 is at.
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.
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 electorate is expressing issues with us. That gets metabolized in Twitter and creates all kinds of insane conspiracies and so on and so forth.
It definitely distorts what the notion of the right’s public is. That’s very dangerous because they’re living in another reality. But also, when they’re in a democratic society, it detaches them from the things that they could do to alter course.
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 is that a lot of young people grew up online — a lot of people are very online. It’s not that different from the norm.
I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically.
What I mean by this is: The 2024 election scared the hell out of Democrats about what was happening with Gen Z — and rightly so. Huge swing toward Trump.
So then when somebody like Nick Fuentes — self-described incel and brain-poisoned edgelord — comes up and says he’s speaking on behalf of these young men, there’s a tendency to say: Well, OK, I don’t understand these young men anymore — maybe he does.
If you look at who Trump has lost support among, it’s young people. He has cratered among young people. Look at how Zohran Mamdani did in the election among young men — incredibly well.
The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuentes is also wrong.
Totally wrong.
One thing you often see is that old people don’t understand young people, and so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituency, saying: I speak for the young now.
Young people care about the cost of living. They swing around based on that. 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.
Yes, 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.
It’s one of the big dangers with America’s two-party politics. If one of the two parties becomes extreme, then it doesn’t take that much for the extreme wing to come into power. 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 JD Vance loses in 2028, but then there’s a big recession, and Tucker Carlson runs in 2032 primaries — or somebody who’s Tucker-pilled or whatever it might be.
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 groyper extremists — you make a couple of political moves to the center and hide it a little bit during the election, and then you’re in real trouble.
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 comedy-style outcomes just keeps going up.
I agree with you. But, here’s the thing — 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.
Then another election happens. That narrative is forgotten, proven to be false very quickly.
We don’t really know what the electorate looks like until Election Day, so we’re always guessing and saying: Well, there are a lot of these kinds 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 watching Nick Fuentes — they were pissed about their groceries. They were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house.
I’m of two minds about it, too. I do believe that there is a weakening of the party’s mass appeal through its moving toward the other things. But my only worry about that is that 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 scared people. They know how to deliver this message in a way that’s palatable, or more palatable.
My 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 to 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. It’s a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we’re experiencing now.
And then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
OK. I’m going to recommend two recent books and an old book, and they’re about this subject. This is not reading for fun.
One is “Taking America Back” by David Austin Walsh, which is a history of the right’s halfhearted attempts to police antisemitism.
One is “Furious Minds.” It’s a new book by Laura K. Field that is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right, and how they justify, explain and rationalize things that are going on.
And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It’s called Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, and it’s by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. It’s an extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of antisemitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States.
John Ganz, thank you very much.
Thanks so much for having me, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
The political writer John Ganz dissects the Republican Party’s internal battle over antisemitism.
This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
If, by the stroke of good fortune or by just being a normal person, you had not heard of Nick Fuentes before this month, chances are you’ve heard of him now.
Archival clip of Ben Shapiro: Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable.
Archival clip of Bill Maher: He’s what I would call a racist’s racist. He’s just this troll.
Archival clip of Megyn Kelly: Nick Fuentes has said a long list of very vile things.
Archival clip of Hasan Piker: He’s a booger-eating white supremacist Holocaust denier.
The reason everybody is talking about Fuentes is because Tucker Carlson — arguably the most significant media figure on the American right at this point — hosted Fuentes, a person he has feuded with in the past, for a very friendly two-hour chat about the problem of Israel and the problem of American Jews: whether or not they fit in this country or if their loyalties belong elsewhere.
Archival clip:
Nick Fuentes: Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest — that’s absolutely the case, and that’s the only way the country is going to stay together.
Tucker Carlson: Exactly. That’s my concern.
Fuentes: And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America.
It was the kind of conversation you would not have heard among mainstream figures on the American right in recent decades. But something has changed.
What we are watching is a very old strain of the right vying for control of its future. This right goes back to Pat Buchanan and Charles Lindbergh and the idea that the right should be an ethnonationalist coalition that doesn’t have room for immigrants. That very much does not have room for Jews. That is really not comfortable with anyone who is not what they call a “Heritage American” — who doesn’t bow at the altar of the primacy of white Christians as the people controlling this country.
This has been a logic, an ideology, that Trump has broken into the mainstream, and that is now following itself to its full expression. If you buy into this, well, there is a place it goes — and now we are seeing more figures on the American right truly going there.
To talk about it, I wanted to bring back John Ganz. Ganz is sort of hard to describe. He has become a popular political theorist and historian. He writes the great Substack Unpopular Front. He wrote the book “When the Clock Broke,” about the politics of the 1990s and Pat Buchanan and David Duke and how they prefigure Trump.
But he’s also somebody who has been tracking very closely these ideas — where they come from in our country and the way they are taking hold on the right. So I wanted to hear what he thought now that they are breaking this far out into the open.
Ezra Klein: John Ganz, welcome back to the show.
John Ganz: Thanks so much for having me.
So let’s say that, blessedly, you’ve never heard of Nick Fuentes. Or maybe you’ve just heard of him in the last few weeks.
Who is Nick Fuentes?
Nick Fuentes, I would say, is the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America.
Expand.
By his own story, he comes from a middle-class background in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in political activism. He was a fervent Trump supporter. Then he ran afoul, according to him, of some gatekeepers in the conservative movement — namely Ben Shapiro, who accused him of antisemitism when he asked questions about U.S. policy toward Israel.
Over the years, Fuentes assembled a following of other disaffected young men. He launched two campaigns that he called the “groyper wars” to pressure mainstream conservative figures to move rightward on issues to do with race, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and Israel — the subtext there being the Jewish question. Jews.
He’s not that subtext oriented compared to some people in this movement. I mean, he’ll talk about an admiration for Adolf Hitler. He doesn’t just talk about Israel. He talks about “the Jews.”
- Archival clip of Fuentes: We have to go a little bit further than to say something’s up with the Zionists or Israel. It’s not Israel. It is the Jews.
- Archival clip of Fuentes: Once again, remember who is responsible for it all: the Jews. They are responsible for every war in the world. It’s not even debatable at this point.
- Archival clip of Fuentes: Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan. Well, he was also really [expletive] cool.
There are figures here who it feels like they try to keep a mask on. He doesn’t.
He doesn’t. And I think that’s a key part of his appeal. I think that his viewers find that refreshing. They find it titillating, and they find it to be reflective of their politics.
You mentioned the groypers. What is a groyper?
Let me tell you a story of how I learned what groypers are.
I was writing a piece for The New Republic about five years ago about the right. I was learning about what young people on the right were thinking about: How did they respond to Trump, and what was the future of conservative media and elites in the Trump era? What was going to happen with the Never Trumpers? What would conservatism look like if Trump went away?
So I was looking at that, and in the course of this, I befriended some young right-wing guys, and they kept on talking about groypers.
I didn’t really know what it was, and then I realized that they were kind of a subculture of online trolls and marginal figures. They often had as their avatar or profile picture this kind of grotesque toad that looked like Pepe the Frog.
It’s my understanding that this subculture is larger than Nick Fuentes and not necessarily under his control or direction but that he speaks for them. He attempts to speak for them and to unite them into a political force.
What do the groypers believe? This is a very meme-heavy, online, trollish subculture that is endlessly dancing on the edge of: Oh, aren’t we just joking?
So pinning it down can be a little bit like trying to pin smoke. Because if you focus on a meme, it’s like: Oh, you have no sense of humor. But it’s a classic: First you’re making jokes about the gas chambers, then you’re thinking about sending your enemies to them.
It’s a little difficult for people to understand because we’re accustomed to thinking of politics coming from intellectuals, elites, media figures who disseminate ideas.
This kind of goes in the other direction. It bubbles up from message boards. It bubbles up from memes, jokes, ironic playfulness. But the text, not the subtext, of all of them is a constant barrage of propaganda that’s antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic — you name it. And also a lot of content that is conspiratorial, obviously, that sees shadowy actors running the government and is also deeply dissatisfied with the state of America and the prospects it has for people like them.
You wrote this piece — you’ve actually written a couple pieces — on the groyper-fication of the Republican Party. And you wrote:
Here’s the thing to understand: Every single person under, say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in Discord chats, etc. Groyperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right.
This point about the people under the age of 40, this idea that there is a pretty big difference in what the 20-somethings on the right are like and what the 50-somethings are like — I hear that from the right all the time.
So for people who do not have the texture of that cultural environment, what are you describing? What are they seeing? What does that culture, environment, look and feel like?
Well, just recently, there were a couple of leaks and political reports, one of them about group chats. It’s an environment where there’s a lot of sharing of memes and jokes — and repetition of memes and joking — about the Holocaust, joking about Hitler, joking about Black people and making jokes about slavery.
It’s just an anarchic indulgence of a sadistic id that usually involves the humiliation of minorities or women.
A lot of the energy of this, and a lot of the way it would get defended, is that the big enemy of the right in the late 2010s, early 2020s, was the woke mob, cancel culture, the thought police, the gatekeepers.
And you would hear this described — joking, but a provocation — as showing that you can say what the cultural enforcers don’t want you to say.
Richard Hanania, the dissident right figure and intellectual, describes it in “The Based Ritual”: People on the MAGA right get together and keep upping the ante to show that they’re not part of the establishment — they’re part of this counter-revolutionary force.
How do you think about the interplay between whatever that was — because there was a culture that emerged in response to censoriousness — and then its movement into actual belief?
I think that was a way that people could justify to themselves what they were seeing on an everyday level. Some people could say to themselves and to others that they were participating in a cultural revolt against the censorious state of affairs. And their interest was to tear down those norms and to open a space of freedom.
Freedom to do what? — is the question. Just to say and do racist things? I don’t know.
So I think it created a structure in which these memes spread rapidly and made it so people who may have been uncomfortable with it or may have found that at variance with the way they were raised to look the other way and say: We are, in a sense, playing around.
The first thing that does, it seems to me, is break down an immune system that people have. And you can’t extricate this from Trump.
If you have any hint left of that attachment to old norms and mores and courtesies, then you can’t be a true Trumpist. Because he doesn’t attach to any of that.
So you begin demonstrating a cultural affinity to that kind of politics of provocation and politics of no rules. Once you’ve done that, then you actually don’t have that immune system anymore.
So the question becomes: If you don’t believe in the establishment and you don’t believe in any norms, how do you decide what to believe? Because you’re breaking down the immune system that was supposed to protect against people like Donald Trump.
Yes, absolutely. I think your point about Trump being the originator of this is important.
When Trump appeared in 2015 — and people seem to forget this for some reason — there was a lot of talk about the “alt-right,” a term that’s not used very much anymore. But these people, who had previously been on the fringes of American politics, greeted the arrival of Trump with rapture.
Yes, ecstatically.
Ecstatically. And they knew that this was their kind of guy. They knew that the things that he said would open a space for them. Even if he wasn’t precisely a perfect vehicle for their politics, it was a real big breakthrough. They saw it, and they said: OK, this is our chance.
Then we have a first wave just after Trump is elected, where you have these people crawling out of the woodwork. You have Richard Spencer, you have the Charlottesville, Va., riots.
Then there is kind of a backlash, and those people seem to get pushed out. There’s not that much talk about alt-nationalism and the alt-right anymore.
Trump also doesn’t really seem to be adopting some of their preferences in foreign policy. He makes some very tasteless remarks about Jews — but not the ideological antisemitism that the alt-right would want him to do.
So this thing kind of goes on the back burner, but it’s very much suffusing the culture of young right-wingers in the intermediate and lower ranks of the various bureaucracies, the various staffs of conservative institutions. It never really fully goes away.
But then something else happens. As weak as the gatekeepers are in this modern era, there are still people with keys to various gates. And by the end of Trump’s first term, Trump is banned on most of the major social media platforms. Certainly a lot of these figures are banned on them.
As Trump makes his return — and then, very specifically, when Elon Musk buys Twitter, renames it X and functionally takes off all of the guardrails — then the ability of all this to flood into the conservative nervous system really changes.
I want you to watch a clip from Tucker Carlson here that I think is interesting.
Archival clip of Carlson: Unfortunately, for the guardians of the old system, the old Republican Party, people have been allowed to describe it accurately. Mostly because Elon Musk opened up X. And when he did that, you get all kinds of filth and nonsense and lies, but you also get some truth. Actually, quite a bit of truth.
And one of the main things that people are telling the truth about that they didn’t tell the truth about before is that our foreign policy really doesn’t have much to do with what’s good for the United States. And once those words have been uttered, they can’t be taken back.
Carlson here is talking about Israel. Maybe he’s not entirely talking about Israel, but the dynamic he’s describing — of Musk taking over X as a hinge point — seems true to me. Does it track for you?
Absolutely. All of these figures re-emerged after they had been pushed out, and they created a media ecosystem that is suffused with these ideas.
First of all, a lot of people online are looking for information. They’re looking to understand an extremely complicated world, and they have a sense that perhaps the establishment views are either misinforming them or are just flat-out boring.
Then they discover a narrative about things that’s more appealing, simplifying, seems persuasive —
Exciting.
Exciting. And also it cannot be discounted that Fuentes, in particular, is extremely entertaining.
They gravitate toward these crackpot ideas.
Look, U.S. support of Israel is a perfectly legitimate topic to dispute and to have differing views about and to criticize. More and more people are coming around to that position. They saw what was happening in Gaza, and they were deeply upset by it. And they look for commentary and opinion on that.
And the commentary and opinion that they get is not what The New York Times is saying or what The New Yorker is saying or even left-wing outlets like The Nation. They get Nick Fuentes, they get Candace Owens, they get all these crackpot views about it that take that discussion about real-world issues — and a mixture of rational discussion and commentary that’s actually somewhat sophisticated, I would say in Fuentes’s case — and then channel that into propaganda for antisemitism.
I think it’s important to realize that not everyone is aware that they’re being propagandized. They are in an information environment where this is what they see, and it becomes normal. In a sense, they get captured.
People love to talk about the liberal elite bubble. There is an equivalent bubble of the hard right. So that brings this deformed diversion of the public sphere that Musk allowed to happen — and I think, one could argue, intentionally.
I want to get at a bit of back story here before we get into the Tucker Carlson-Nick Fuentes interview. Because this is not the first time Nick Fuentes has broken through to the mainstream of conservatism.
There’s a very famous dinner at Mar-a-Lago, I believe, where Donald Trump is dining with Kanye West, a noted antisemite. And Kanye brings Nick Fuentes.
At the time, Trump looked like the past of the party. People think he’s on his way out — it’s going to be Ron DeSantis in 2024 or someone like that.
And I think they also buy the idea — which Trump says afterward — and I take as even plausible — that he doesn’t really know who Nick Fuentes is.
I think people buy that Trump talks to a lot of people. And one reason I think this is breaking through in the way it has been is twofold: You don’t have any of that deniability on Carlson’s side. And now, everybody understands that the future of Trumpism is up for grabs.
How would you describe the role Tucker Carlson plays on the right now?
I think that he strives to be a person of great influence in directing the policy, staffing, messaging of the Republican Party. To a certain extent he is. He has deep ties to people in the administration.
He helped get JD Vance named vice president.
Absolutely. He’s a figure. It is more helpful to interpret him as a politician.
I agree with this.
He understood the direction of the Republican Party and remade his entire image of himself to fit in with it. He has been very smart about that, and he realized the old institutions are not what they used to be. Does it really matter whether he’s on Fox anymore? Apparently, not very much.
His creation of a new persona really is the story of the transformation of the Republican Party.
At this point, how would you describe what Tucker Carlson’s politics are? What pole of right-wing ideology does he seem to represent?
He represents a tradition that’s sometimes called isolationist, which views America’s entanglement with foreign alliances and interventions in other countries to not necessarily be in our interest. Not necessarily dovish, but definitely: The United States should definitely apply force when it wants, when it needs to, in its own very direct self-interest.
I believe that he calls himself a Christian. I believe he represents a Christian nationalism, which is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Again, there are some roots in that of the old right, that go back prewar.
He is very hostile to immigration. He seems to have a very strong sense of white ethnic identity and believes that it’s a problem for the country if there are too many nonwhite immigrants.
Forgive me if I’m misremembering this: Didn’t you do an interview with the son of a Ku Klux Klan member?
Oh, my God. I’m so glad you brought that up. I was working on a piece in 2020 about the conservative movement, and Tucker was a big part of it — his transformation into a right-wing populist.
I got a remarkable quote from someone who was the child of Don Black, a Ku Klux Klan leader and a big figure in the white nationalist movement.
The person I got the quote from, just to be clear, left the movement and was highly critical of it.
Here’s what they told me:
From the perspective of my family, he’s making the same points they’ve been trying to make their entire lives, but much better; he’s found a wider audience, and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas. My father’s a little baffled still that it’s Tucker Carlson, someone who he always never liked because he saw him as a shill for the Bush administration and the Iraq war, that’s bringing white nationalist ideas to the Fox audience.
I was not a very experienced journalist at the time. This was the beginning of my career. I got this quote, and I brought this to my other sources for this story, who are young people on the right. I thought I had something dispositive — something that showed that Tucker Carlson is playing around with things that you really shouldn’t, that he’s moving in a very disturbing direction. They shrugged. They didn’t care.
I found that to be shocking and disturbing, and I think that anecdote says a lot.
I also think — and I think this is very important to understanding Tucker and the role he plays: He understands something Trump understands, but not everybody does, which is that the modern right is driven by attention even more than the modern left.
Trump has remade the modern right around an attentional economy. And there isn’t somebody behind Trump as good at attention as Trump is. JD Vance certainly isn’t.
You don’t have to be the president to be the leader of MAGA. It is very plausible to me that you would have a JD Vance nomination — but that actually the next leader of MAGA is Tucker Carlson.
I think Tucker Carlson is trying to be the authentic voice of MAGA, who, because he doesn’t have to do all the political coalition work, can be “purer” than someone like JD Vance, who I think fundamentally agrees with Carlson at this point but has to maintain, or attempt to maintain, viability in Michigan.
Absolutely. Here’s the thing: I think Carlson views himself in that role, for sure. Tucker Carlson was sort of the median conservative Republican to a certain degree. He toed the party line on most issues — Iraq, American foreign policy ——
He was on MSNBC.
He was on MSNBC. He also tried to present himself as a kind of reasonable conservative.
He was like a good-time, libertarian rich kid.
Yes, there’s that, too.
It’s interesting: There’s a degree that there are costume changes here. He takes the bow tie off. He now has this more folksy look: checked shirts, in this cabin, etc. He’s cultivating an image of himself as down to earth and folksy and not part of the establishment.
It’s hard to take when you realize he is the product of it.
But there’s something important to understand about Tucker Carlson’s turn to antisemitism, in particular. I believe that antisemitism functions as an epoxy for elites who don’t really want social changes that would affect their prominence and, in fact, who want to shore up their prominence and need mass support and need a target and need a story about economic dispossession, a world that doesn’t seem to make sense. That serves their interests.
You see this in a lot of different places.
You see it in Russia. The czarist regime invented antisemitism for this purpose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is created in this regime that’s feeling the pressure of a mass population that’s becoming dissatisfied with it, and it creates antisemitism as a way to rechannel that energy.
You see this in France, where you have an aristocracy and a clergy that is pushed into old institutions, sees its prominence in the society losing out. It’s losing its world, and then it needs to find a mass politics, a way to attack its enemies. Antisemitism becomes very useful for that.
So antisemitism always works to create a kind of coalition. There’s a street gutter, crackpot antisemitism. Then you have what you could call more respectable antisemites: Let’s say, Charles Lindbergh — a person who was highly respected, a great hero to many Americans, but who had a racial view of the world and found antisemitic ideas persuasive.
Henry Ford.
Henry Ford.
So you had these respectable antisemites and crackpot antisemites. And their coming together, I would say, is the creation of an actual antisemitic politics.
This interview between Fuentes and Carlson is almost textbook. You have the antisemitism of the gutter: Fuentes. And you have the antisemitism of a declining aristocracy: Tucker comes from this preppy background. His father was an ambassador, his stepmother is a Swanson heiress.
He sees an America that’s not the way he wants it to be. It’s declining, it doesn’t look the way he looks, it has norms that he doesn’t share. And you have Fuentes, who dropped out of college, comes from a modest background. He is dripping with resentment to a world that he feels doesn’t have a place for him.
A self-described “proud incel.”
Yes. It’s also very interesting that he does not try to hide or pretend that he is not socially maladjusted in some way. That lends him authenticity and makes people gravitate toward it.
This meeting between Tucker and Fuentes symbolizes the kind of recognition between these two groups. In that interview, in that moment, it is the most perfect encapsulation of antisemitic politics — declining aristocracy and a dissatisfied mob. Bring them together and you have a kind of coalition in itself.
Let’s get into that interview. I want to play a clip for you that almost felt, to me, like the heart of it.
Archival clip:
Fuentes: Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that, because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, there are significant numbers of Jews in Europe but also in the United States, and because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they’re stateless people, they’re unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years — and I think that’s a good thing.
I guess what I’m saying is that if you are a Jewish person in America, you’re — and again, it’s not because they’re born, but it’s sort of a rational self-interest politically to say: I’m a minority. I’m a religious ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel.
There’s a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel. And I would say on top of that, for the international Jewish community, they have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country.
And there’s no other country that has a similar arrangement like that. No other country has a strong identity like that — this religious blood-and-soil conviction, this history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted.
And, in particular, the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They 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 2,000 years ago. They do.
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. These 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 that do that.
Carlson: 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.
How do you read it?
Well, Fuentes is an extremely talented rhetorician and communicator, and he does a few things. He presents a vocabulary that does not sound shocking to people. He uses words and terminology that wouldn’t frighten people — that sounds like a rational discussion of politics, a rational comment on politics.
And then woven into this is all of the material of classic antisemitism: The Jews are an unassimilable group, self-interested, internationally organized very tightly and all talking to each other and working as one mind, who don’t have the interest of their host at heart, have their own interests at heart and are animated by a deep hostility to the people who surround them, hatred toward Christians and white people, so on and so forth. That is classic antisemitism.
But he keeps on saying things like “That’s a good thing” or “I don’t think that’s me being hateful.” He presents it as if he’s having a discussion of politics like any other.
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 with the Romans.
I kind of like the Romans. [Laughs.]
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 — don’t we just have to practice ours?
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 antisemitism to Trumpism. The MAGA right has spent years saying that the whole left plays identity politics, and it’s time for white people to stand up for themselves: You’re getting all this anti-white racism, and the Jews are the danger to that. If they’re going to practice their politics, you have to practice yours.
Precisely. At the core of the Nazi ideology is a social Darwinistic view of the world divided into almost different species of beings who are engaged in an endless war with one another. The Jews are a particularly important part of that worldview. They are the most threatening of these beings.
And trying to launder biological essentialism about the nature of the political through what sounds like normal interest-group politics like: In America we have coalitions, we have representatives of different ethnic groups who advocate on each other’s behalf. Well, 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 that Fuentes continually hammers on.
There is a lot here that’s tricky to talk about because you’re at this endless morass of the intersection of antisemitism 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 Zohran Mamdani? When there has been these years of debate about antisemitism on the left?
I’ll say this superclearly: I’ve met Zohran. I voted for Zohran Mamdani. I don’t think there’s anything antisemitic 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 structural distinction that is worth understanding. Anti-Zionism on the left often pushes toward 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 socialist and Marxist. But the left tends to push toward universalism. And a lot of the anger at Israel, much of which I think is merited, is the way it portrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control.
On the right, it’s pushing toward ethnostate politics — that the fundamental argument and a way in which modern Israel has tried to create new coalitions is to say: Hey, we’re all ethnostates here. But once you buy into the ethnostate framework, then the fact that you see Jews as an ethnic other in your society pushes somewhere very different. It pushes toward ideas of expulsion, pushes toward ideas that they’re a fifth column within, that they are leading your country to portray its actual interests, that they have dual loyalties.
But there is this weird thing where there’s been a rise of Jewish figures who want to embrace ethnostate politics. You have Yoram Hazony, who is Jewish, lives in Jerusalem and is the founder of NatCon, going to the NatCon conference — which he started — saying: Look, you don’t have to like the Jews to be a national conservative.
Archival clip of Yoram Hazony: 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 NatCon, you had to love Jews.
One point of anger I have with a lot of people on the right who have been playing footsie with this for a long time is that once you embrace the ethnostate concept, this is where that leads.
Well, I certainly am of that opinion. Let’s take this from another angle. The way you’re talking is a little highbrow. It’s in terms of intellectuals like you or Hazony. But let’s look at this from the ground up.
You have a conservative movement that has embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone — a tone of open bigotry in certain cases. The deal that the pro-Israel right thought it could make is: We can engage in a good deal of racist demagogy. We’re OK with it, especially, maybe, directed at Islam. But the line that we draw is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into antisemitism.
That is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self-defeating position.
So when I talk about groyper-fication, 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. And, as we’ve discussed, there’s no immune system. There’s no barrier to antisemitism.
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 and says they’re sending rapists and murderers over here. There’s a big outrage. But now, being much more anti-immigrant on the right, that’s de rigueur: Who cares?
Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, once you have moved on traditional gender roles, this is the boss battle of Western speech taboos.
Right, right, right.
This didn’t begin last week or two weeks ago. 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 asking: Was Germany really the bad guy in World War II? What have we not been told about that?
You bring these things together — that you want to build an ethnostate, and you are ideologically opposed to there being anything you can’t talk about, and you make your money and your attention on these algorithms — it’s almost a hydraulic process toward antisemitism.
The thing about a kick, getting excitement from it: Sartre said it’s amusing to be an antisemite. Mamdani, for example — who some people say is an antisemite because of his positions on Israel — he’s very careful to say: I’m not an antisemite — and to express sensitivity to Jewish concerns.
And go to synagogues. I mean, Mamdani is a liberal.
OK. Yes, exactly. But whatever you think is at the heart of his politics, he does not Jew bait. He is not practicing in politics that are based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews, in other words.
Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does, to a more subtle extent. Candace Owens does. That also attracts people who feel powerless. They are very attracted to it because there’s someone you can harass and pick on. It’s part of their strategy to take over the right — to do this workplace harassment against their Jewish allies, to bait them, to get them to overreact, to unsettle them.
The other thing you mentioned is that the taboos are breaking down because World War II and the Holocaust is a long time ago, and the generation that experienced that is gone, and the politics that were created out of the consensus that it created is disappearing.
Some of it is just the passage of time.
Again, this is tricky to talk about, but you can’t get away from how much Israel post Oct. 7, and the war in and the flattening of Gaza, has destabilized politics around this everywhere.
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. You hear it in Carlson’s Fuentes interview. You hear it in the questions getting asked of JD Vance at various events now.
Archival clip of audience member: I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused why there’s this notion that we might owe Israel something or that they are 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.
Now that MAGA, on some level, has really rooted itself in this semi-isolationist, very much “America First” position, this young, very online right, one, looks at what has happened in Gaza and, I think, correctly, sees it as immoral. But, two, asks: Why are we involved here at a time when we’re pushing Europe out on its own? When we are aggressively insisting that we have no stable alliances except for what is directly in our self-interest at a given moment.
There are ways — many, many, many ways — to be anti-Israel without being antisemitic. But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing can never be connected to antisemitism breaks apart.
I never quite know how to talk about this, except that I feel like we’re all living through it right now.
It’s very difficult. To put my cards on the table, 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. I believe they probably committed a genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. But what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for antisemitic agitators.
And also a lot of people are becoming curious about U.S. foreign policy, history. 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? Why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? They have legitimate and interesting questions, but instead 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.
Archival clip of Carlson: I’m not defending the war in any way, 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.
Archival clip of Carlson: 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.
That’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 toward human suffering you could imagine on his show, and then he gets very sentimental about this issue.
Archival clip of Fuentes: This is just a straight-up genocide. These people are starving. They’re literally dying. It would be formally called a famine, except that Israel will not let any international personnel inside the Strip to assess this, to make that declaration.
That is to drag in people to think: Well, 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.
In some ways, what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson-Fuentes interview:
Archival clip:
Fuentes: With OnlyFans, it’s like having a TikTok. It’s like: Here’s my Linktree, here’s my Instagram account, here’s my Facebook account, here’s my YouTube, and here’s my OnlyFans.
Carlson: Why would any of this be legal?
Fuentes: Well, like you indicated, maybe there’s an intelligence benefit to that.
Carlson: Yeah.
Fuentes: Maybe there’s a political benefit to that.
Carlson: Well, why wouldn’t you arrest the people who run something like that?
Fuentes: It should be if you had a Christian government.
Carlson: Or how about just a government who cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is OnlyFans? Iran’s not turning my daughters to prostitution.
To even parse this clip, you have to know that one of the big antisemitic conspiracies of this era is that Jews, in general, and maybe the Israeli government, in particular, is behind a lot of porn.
Archival clip of Fuentes: The reason the 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 just talked about this. David Duke has talked about this.
And here you have Fuentes and Carlson sort of gesturing at this: Maybe there’s an intelligence benefit to all this porn we’ve got out there. And: Now, if you had a real Christian government, we wouldn’t allow it.
That’s where, I think, you see something else is happening in the soil, as opposed to just old-school isolationism on American foreign policy.
Yes. 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 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. Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble — we’ll talk about it — for immediately coming out and defending Carlson.
But around the same time, he had Jonathan Haidt, the critic of the internet, at Heritage to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things.
Roberts sends out this tweet, saying:
Thank you, Jon 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.
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 C.E.O. of OnlyFans, named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics, the head of the Heritage Foundation, chooses these two people with the very Jewish names.
It was very hard for me not to read this as Roberts, or whoever’s writing for him, pointing toward some affinity with this part of the right subculture.
I think you’re absolutely right to pick up on that. Pat Buchanan used to do this. What they used to say about Pat Buchanan is he always talked about Goldman Sachs but not Morgan Stanley.
And Pat Buchanan always, when he was opposing some U.S. foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, would mention Kissinger, he would mention Richard Perle, he would mention those guys. Would he mention Jeane Kirkpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No. Somehow those names were not important.
So continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. 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 ask: Is this just the attentional side of the right? Is this just the people who were trying to create big events for the YouTube algorithm or for the X algorithm? Maybe it begins there, but then you see it jump these blinds.
You also have the Kevin Roberts response to the Carlson-Fuentes interview:
Archival clip of Kevin Roberts: 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. We 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.
Yes, he is. 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 the conservative movement and the right wing now, and wants to maintain a relationship with him, obviously.
The Heritage Foundation is essentially part of the nervous system of the conservative movement. It’s one of the important think tanks that comes up with policy, that supports the work of intellectuals and elites in the conservative movement.
Watching that 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 Hazony flew in from Israel to sort things over.
It was a very weird video, and it struck me as almost coming from sci-fi. I 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: There are no standards anymore. 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 fissures 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.
And what you hear Fuentes doing, what you hear these people coming up and asking JD Vance questions doing, what you hear Tucker doing, is really saying: That doesn’t make any sense.
Archival clip of Carlson: 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, because it’s Christian heresy, and I’m offended by that as a Christian.
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 the American past, because of Calvinist ideas, and American Christian Zionism going back to the founders. And there’s something to that.
But this emerged really as a mass phenomenon in the 1970s, where evangelical Christians are looking at what’s happening in Israel as signs of the coming apocalypse, and that becomes extremely popular. Israel is befriended, is cultivated, because they think it is about to bring about the rapture and so on and so forth.
I’m not sure how much of a hold dispensationalism has on younger evangelical Christians anymore. It seems to be something that’s, like a lot of the things we’re discussing, of older generations.
So I think 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 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.
Older staffers were furious at Roberts and were standing up in meetings, saying: Bill Buckley always knew that you had to eject the antisemites on the right.
I see you rolling your eyes.
Sorry.
It’s worth saying that the extent of Bill Buckley’s war against antisemitism has been overstated. Let’s put it that way.
But many of the younger Heritage Foundation staffers were standing up and saying: What did Kevin do wrong here? If there’s no room for what he said, is there no room for me?
I think this is getting at this very big thing, which is — and it’s what I sort of understood Roberts as 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, white nationalist energy.
I think that’s a good read on this situation. Rod Dreher — who is a person of the far right but is horrified by everything that’s going on — wrote recently that a friend of his who has connections to the Republican Party in the conservative movement estimated that some 30 or 40 percent of young staffers were groypers.
I would say that the other half maybe don’t go to the last taboo of antisemitism — but definitely don’t have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking nasty ideas about that. That’s my own commentary.
But I think that you’re absolutely right that there is a marked generation gap. The younger staff of the conservative movement are much more open to Fuentes’s ideas. 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 I think that they’re struggling with the fact that they’re probably going to have staffing issues. They already are.
And Trump has not criticized Fuentes.
No, he has not.
Trump can weigh in on things when he feels like it. He 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, there are a lot of reasons for that. I think that the main reason is: Look, Trump gets a lot of mileage out of seeming out to lunch or in his own world. The fact of the matter is: He’s a successful politician.
Yes.
He understands, and he has 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 from —
His administration is full of these people at this point.
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 that this is part of their coalition. They cannot afford to alienate them and attack them.
There have been conservative figures pushing back. Ben Shapiro has, particularly, I think, gone to war and has tried to call this out and really tried to play the old, at least mythological, William F. Buckley role, trying to say: No, we don’t do this. We don’t go to groypers, we don’t go to Nick Fuentes. There are lines in our movement.
What have you thought of Shapiro’s response and the reaction to it?
First of all, one of the other main figures on the antisemitic right is Candace Owens, who was birthed within the Shapiro organization. So think about that.
Well, hired by Shapiro’s organization.
Hired by Shapiro. Cultivated, turned into a star.
Yes. Part of their trying to skate to where the puck was going.
Right, to get a younger audience, to get a — in the sense of conservatives — a hipper audience. And Shapiro says: We’re going to draw the lines here.
And Mark Levin at the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Summit says:
Archival clip of Mark Levin: What do you mean we don’t cancel people? We canceled David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobran. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time.
Hitler admirers, Stalin admirers, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters — you’re damn right we’re going to cancel them and deplatform them.
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 clearsighted about it went into the Never Trump movement, which was not politically viable. It’s a group of people whom I consider to have kind of preserved their honor but who don’t have a mass constituency. The party is 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.
And I 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.
Zohran Mamdani is a 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 antisemitism back to Zohran Mamdani. They’re trying to make him the hate figure.
Like: Can’t we all come together?
Yes. And so Ben Shapiro says: When has Tucker really criticized Zohran Mamdani?
Archival clip of Ben Shapiro: The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zohran Mamdani on his show since Oct. 5 is once, and it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zohran Mamdani.
Then Steve Bannon attacks Mark Levin. He says: These guys aren’t really MAGA.
And he has a point, because they weren’t with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani.
Archival clip of Steve Bannon: 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 Mamdani.
It directs this energy of racial hate that seeks to expel a racial other against the safer target. That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by saying: Be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want — but against designated enemies who are OK.
People ask a rational question: Why are those people off the table?
And then the answer comes back: Well, because Christianity, or because Israel represents Western civilization — or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say: That makes no sense to us.
And in a certain sense: Yes. 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?
As you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump. In 2016, Shapiro wrote:
Trumpism breeds conspiracism; conspiracism breeds antisemitism. Trump is happy to channel support of antisemites to his own ends.
OK, so Ben Shapiro — not a dumb guy.
If you go back and you actually read 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 with which they’re going to do that? They couldn’t stop Donald Trump. They tried. Many of them tried. Ben Shapiro was an opponent of Donald Trump. Mark Levin was an opponent of Donald Trump. So they’re going to finally discover some new secret weapon?
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. 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 last, best hope is that they don’t believe Trump himself is an antisemite. Their last hope is Trump himself. And I mean, they’ll say that. When I had Shapiro on the show, he was more or less saying that.
But they’re all much more afraid of what’s coming next — of JD Vance, in particular. I think the view many Republicans hold is that Vance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is, that Vance is groyper adjacent, let’s call it.
Yes. I think that’s right.
There is still an old-line Republican Party to some degree. You know, Ted Cruz.
Archival clip of 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.
Lindsey Graham.
Archival clip of Lindsey Graham: I just want to make it really clear: I’m in the “Hitler sucks” wing of their Republican Party. [Laughs.] What is this Hitler [expletive]? I don’t know.
But it is the older Republican Party.
I think that they made a deal with the devil, in a certain way, and now they’re paying the consequences.
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: This might be a politics that ends up, when it’s exposed to the public, being too weird and too fringe. It has some mass constituencies. Will it do well in a primary? Maybe, probably. Will it do well with the rest of the public? I don’t know.
Well, it has done well in primaries before. I think this actually gets to something important. 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 best-selling book on it, as you did: Who is Pat Buchanan?
Pat Buchanan is a major figure in the conservative movement. He was a member of the Nixon administration. He represented the ideological conservatives like the Buckley conservatives, the National Review crowd, within the Nixon administration.
He then went on to be a very important syndicated columnist and appeared on TV. He was a communications director for some time in the Reagan administration. An 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 a constituency for his type of politics.
He has also been probably the most notable antisemite in American politics for a very long time.
I always think this clip of Trump talking about Buchanan is worth revisiting.
Archival clip:
Jay Leno: Now how about Pat Buchanan? What do you think of that? Now he seems to be the guy you’d have to battle for.
Donald Trump: Well, that’s true. He’s antisemitic. He’s anti-Black. He obviously has been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler in some form. I just can’t imagine this guy —
Leno: But I don’t want you to hold back. Tell me how you feel now.
Trump: I mean, I can’t imagine that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate.
That’s an earlier Trump incarnation, right? Flirting with a third party run for president.
We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things, like trade, since the ’80s. But not on everything.
Archival clip of Trump: There was a man, Pat Buchanan — a good guy, a conservative guy. It’s not that we’re — you know Pat Buchanan. Look at that. Good guy. Wow. Young people, they know him.
Archival clip of Trump: 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.
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 rehabilitating Pat Buchanan.
I think the Republican Party used to pride itself on not going down Buchanan’s lane. It went down another lane instead — George H.W. Bush’s and then George W. Bush’s. 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.
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 have to be nice to Israel.
They’re like: OK, we can be the trade stuff, the immigration stuff. But in order to keep the coalition together, we’re going to keep in place this reflexive support of Israel — partly to do with Jewish Republicans and partly to do with Christian Evangelicals.
And then when this exploded, 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 just 80 percent of its logic but not 100 percent of its logic.
There’s this book Buchanan wrote years ago called “The Death of the West.” JD Vance said it is the first political book he ever read. How would you describe the thesis of “The Death of the West” 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, and that needs to be prevented by any means necessary. Essentially, it’s a work of polite white nationalism.
There’s a tremendous amount about fertility rates in it. Even reading it in the first Trump term, 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 so — for a long time.
But now, I think if you’re going to pick a founding text for MAGA — people talk about all kinds of different weird thinkers — but “The Death of the West” by Buchanan feels, to me, like a pretty fair center of the canon.
Critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to Western civilization.
In 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. It means a certain racial stock that makes up Western people.
And the division on the right, right now, is: Are Jews part of that Western white people?
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?
You’ve said: One could even say that the internet itself is antisemitic. Which also was a provocative line.
You’ve been writing more. You gave a speech at the University of Chicago where you talked about the modern version of fascism as a response to the way the internet has destabilized the way we communicate and the political sphere.
How much do you see what we’re in as a structural feature of the medium on which politics — certainly political communication — now primarily takes place? What follows from an analysis like that?
The comment about the internet being structurally antisemitic is a very speculative theory of mine that I cannot defend right now. [Laughs.]
But, obviously, the change in the way people consume media creates the possibility for new communities to form. People who would generally be cranks and fringe people with a few audience members find mass audiences. There’s a component of that.
The internet is almost like the birth of cities. The way I talk and think about it is almost like urbanization. It creates an enormous amount of what you might call sanitary problems. It creates an enormous amount of waste, pollution and stuff like this. And we haven’t come to a way of deciding how we govern this new city.
It’s very interesting, though: Where do people get into this stuff? You mentioned pornography. It comes from this really seedy underbelly of the internet, the chan message boards — 8chan and 4chan, etc.
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 the favorite ideology of the very people who sometimes have addictive relationships to those things and feel entirely disempowered to detach themselves from it.
They 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: All of the things that happened because of modernization or the creation of these new structures, we have the answer to fix them all.
Fuentes openly says he’s one of those guys. He’s like: I’m a loser and an incel, there are no women in my life, etc.
But 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. He makes fun of them. He teases them.
Archival clip of Fuentes: What do you mean, what do I think? That’s your question? Byron Donalds, some Black Republican benchwarmer gets up at the R.J.C. and says: I love Israel. I support immigration.
You say: What do you think about that?
What do I think about that? [Expletive], that’s your question? The show is like: We hate immigration, we’re against Israel. [Mocking voice.] Hey, so this guy says he likes immigration in Israel. What do you think about that?
That’s your question? What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that? You [expletive] idiot.
Because essentially that’s at the root of this. It’s about a certain type of powerlessness that comes to express itself in sadism.
There’s a degree of self-loathing among these people that also can’t be discounted. There’s a degree to which they have accepted their position as being outside of society, as being unrepresented, and they just want to burn it all down.
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.
I think that the left sort of had the wheel on Twitter 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.
I remember people on the left being terrified when Elon Musk bought it. But what I see is the right is becoming Twitter poisoned, X poisoned.
And that “guy in a basement making fun of his followers claiming to be an incel” politics — I’ve spent the last week immersed in prep for this, and you begin to think it’s the world.
Then you look up, and you kind of shake your head, and you remember it’s not, and most people don’t want this. The right seems so hooked into its own attentional drugs at the moment.
Yes.
JD Vance, who seems to want to be the future of the right, is very, very, very hooked into its weird subcultures, and he has said that himself.
One thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them is: This is going to be a loser. And I don’t think it’s specifically the antisemitism — though, that, too. But the whole gestalt of craziness — like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson — there’s just so much as they try to absorb this.
If I were to have some optimistic gloss on any of this — and I don’t feel great about it — it’s that’s a pretty weak politics, particularly after Trump, who has a showman’s capability and role in American culture.
I think on your point about Twitter being a mixed blessing — it’s extremely useful when you’re 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 is at.
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.
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 electorate is expressing issues with us. That gets metabolized in Twitter and creates all kinds of insane conspiracies and so on and so forth.
It definitely distorts what the notion of the right’s public is. That’s very dangerous because they’re living in another reality. But also, when they’re in a democratic society, it detaches them from the things that they could do to alter course.
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 is that a lot of young people grew up online — a lot of people are very online. It’s not that different from the norm.
I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically.
What I mean by this is: The 2024 election scared the hell out of Democrats about what was happening with Gen Z — and rightly so. Huge swing toward Trump.
So then when somebody like Nick Fuentes — self-described incel and brain-poisoned edgelord — comes up and says he’s speaking on behalf of these young men, there’s a tendency to say: Well, OK, I don’t understand these young men anymore — maybe he does.
If you look at who Trump has lost support among, it’s young people. He has cratered among young people. Look at how Zohran Mamdani did in the election among young men — incredibly well.
The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuentes is also wrong.
Totally wrong.
One thing you often see is that old people don’t understand young people, and so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituency, saying: I speak for the young now.
Young people care about the cost of living. They swing around based on that. 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.
Yes, 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.
It’s one of the big dangers with America’s two-party politics. If one of the two parties becomes extreme, then it doesn’t take that much for the extreme wing to come into power. 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 JD Vance loses in 2028, but then there’s a big recession, and Tucker Carlson runs in 2032 primaries — or somebody who’s Tucker-pilled or whatever it might be.
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 groyper extremists — you make a couple of political moves to the center and hide it a little bit during the election, and then you’re in real trouble.
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 comedy-style outcomes just keeps going up.
I agree with you. But, here’s the thing — 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.
Then another election happens. That narrative is forgotten, proven to be false very quickly.
We don’t really know what the electorate looks like until Election Day, so we’re always guessing and saying: Well, there are a lot of these kinds 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 watching Nick Fuentes — they were pissed about their groceries. They were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house.
I’m of two minds about it, too. I do believe that there is a weakening of the party’s mass appeal through its moving toward the other things. But my only worry about that is that 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 scared people. They know how to deliver this message in a way that’s palatable, or more palatable.
My 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 to 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. It’s a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we’re experiencing now.
And then, always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
OK. I’m going to recommend two recent books and an old book, and they’re about this subject. This is not reading for fun.
One is “Taking America Back” by David Austin Walsh, which is a history of the right’s halfhearted attempts to police antisemitism.
One is “Furious Minds.” It’s a new book by Laura K. Field that is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right, and how they justify, explain and rationalize things that are going on.
And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It’s called Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, and it’s by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. It’s an extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of antisemitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States.
John Ganz, thank you very much.
Thanks so much for having me, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
ABOUT THE PRODUCER/HOST:
Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” and the author of “Why We’re Polarized” and, with Derek Thompson, “Abundance.” Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox. Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 16, 2025, Section SR, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Is Nick Fuentes the Future of MAGA?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
by John Ganz
Farrar, Strous, Giroux, 2024
[Publication date: June 18, 2024]
- ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2024
- One of The New York Times's 100 Notable Books of 2024
- Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award
- AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Indie Bestseller
- One of Publishers Weekly's ten best books of 2024
"Terrific . . . Vibrant . . . When the Clock Broke is one of those rarest of books: unflaggingly entertaining while never losing sight of its moral core." ―Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (Editors' Choice)
"John Ganz is a fantastic writer . . . [When the Clock Broke] is phenomenal . . . truly, truly great." ―Chris Hayes, Why Is This Happening? podcast
"When the Clock Broke is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly." ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
A revelatory look back at the convulsions at the end of the Reagan era―and their dark legacy today.
With the Soviet Union extinct, Saddam Hussein defeated, and U.S. power at its zenith, the early 1990s promised a “kinder, gentler America.” Instead, it was a period of rising anger and domestic turmoil, anticipating the polarization and resurgent extremism we know today.
In When the Clock Broke, the acclaimed political writer John Ganz tells the story of America’s late-century discontents. Ranging from upheavals in Crown Heights and Los Angeles to the advent of David Duke and the heartland survivalists, the broadcasts of Rush Limbaugh, and the bitter disputes between neoconservatives and the “paleo-con” right, Ganz immerses us in a time when what Philip Roth called the “indigenous American berserk” took new and ever-wilder forms. In the 1992 campaign, Pat Buchanan's and Ross Perot’s insurgent populist bids upended the political establishment, all while Americans struggled through recession, alarm about racial and social change, the specter of a new power in Asia, and the end of Cold War–era political norms. Conspiracy theories surged, and intellectuals and activists strove to understand the “Middle American Radicals” whose alienation fueled new causes. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton appeared to forge a new, vital center, though it would not hold for long.
In a rollicking, eye-opening book, Ganz narrates the fall of the Reagan order and the rise of a new and more turbulent America.
REVIEWS:
"[A] terrific new book . . . Vibrant . . . [Ganz] has the skills of a gifted storyteller―one with excellent comedic timing, too―slipping in the most absurd and telling details . . . Urgent and illuminating . . . Like the cultural moment he covers, Ganz gets energized by mixing high and low. When the Clock Broke is one of those rarest of books: unflaggingly entertaining while never losing sight of its moral core." ―Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"[A] wry and engaging account . . . [Ganz] turns his hand to character studies that double as deft exercises in political critique . . . When the Clock Broke is leagues more insightful on the subject of Trump’s ascent than most writing that purports to address the issue directly." ―Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
"John Ganz is a fantastic writer . . . [When the Clock Broke] is phenomenal . . . truly, truly great." ―Chris Hayes, Why Is This Happening? podcast
"Lively and kaleidoscopic." ―Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
"Masterly . . . Ganz spotlights the rage and rancour that spread beneath the surface of American life in a period now remembered for its peace and prosperity." ―Kyle Burke, Times Literary Supplement
"[A] great book." ―Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times
"We should [. . .] pay greater heed to the ghosts of battles lost. That is the premise―and brilliant insight―of John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke . . . Among its virtues, the greatest value of Ganz’s book is that it delivers history in its richest context." ―Edward Luce, Financial Times
"[An] accomplished debut . . . It showcases sophisticated political argumentation, erudite prose, enviable rigor, and a depth of knowledge . . . It’s to Ganz’s great credit that he is able to write about both wider historical trends and idiosyncratic biographical details while also keeping his story lively and amusing." ―David Klion, The Nation
"Like other great works of historical revision and reclamation, When the Clock Broke delivers an account of the past that topples confident certainties of phony consensus, while rendering the signal political battles of the present in an entirely new light." ―Chris Lehmann, The Baffler
"Sharp and engaging . . . deeply researched and beautifully written . . . When the Clock Broke is the story of how America turned cynical at the very moment when its ideals seemed to be in the ascendant. Instead of the end of history, we got the beginning of an ugly epoch we’ve yet to recover from." ―Matt McManus, Commonweal
"Important and engaging . . . Through a nuanced exploration of the chaotic and contentious political landscape of the early ’90s, Ganz provides something of a prehistory of Trumpism . . . The result is a smart, insightful, and original look at US political culture in an era of perpetual crisis and uncertainty." ―Paul M. Renfro, Jacobin
“Superb . . . When the Clock Broke offers a compelling examination of a neglected and revealing period in American history . . . It is also one of the most entertaining history books I have read in years. Ganz has a novelist’s skill at managing character, pacing, and plot, as well as a great eye for details that are telling, bizarre, and hilarious.” ―Daniel Geary, The Irish Times
"By far the most readable, entertaining, and genuinely enlightening of the glut of books promising to “explain” [Trump's] rise . . . The writing is both fleet and rigorous, sweeping and exacting, funny and deadly serious." ―Derek Robertson, Washington Examiner
"Vergil-like, Ganz guides us through some of the period’s most dramatic episodes: the Gulf War, the L.A. riots, the Gotti trial, Ruby Ridge . . . His characterizations of the emerging culture are sweeping and thought-provoking . . . [This is] witty and entertaining narrative history." ―Jack Butler, National Review
"[A] sparkling new history of the 1990s . . . When the Clock Broke offers a starkly different interpretation of the decade, arguing that it is really the origin point for our present 'politics of national despair' . . . The real insight of When the Clock Broke is the way it names a break in the conservative tradition." ―Kim Phillips-Fein, The Chronicle of Higher Education
"Ganz has distinguished himself through his ability to uncover the often-unnoticed origins of far-right politics. [When the Clock Broke] confirms his reputation as one of America’s most astute observers of the Right and allows readers to see the 1990s with new eyes." ―Tristan Hughes, Jacobin
"Lively . . . [Ganz] argues with disarming vim . . . When the Clock Broke is a vivid tour of the time [. . .] before the storm." ―Chris Vognar, The Boston Globe
"[When the Clock Broke] systematically dismantles the comforting notion that the current civic emergency is some unprecedented break with history . . . Ganz tells his story with sly timing and an appreciation of the absurd." ―Tom Scocca, Air Mail
"[A] fascinating shadow story of the 1990s." ―Ezra Klein, The Ezra Klein Show
"The book that impressed me most this year is When the Clock Broke . . . Precise, astute and historically sound, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the history and appeal of Trumpism." ―Hartmut Rosa, Suddeutsche Zeitung
"Ganz takes us beneath the triumphal surface [of the 1990s] to the gritty and granular political and cultural trends that were gathering under and, with startling frequency, erupting from it . . . Hindsight can always find analogies and precursors for current events. But Ganz is after more than startled recognition. He offers an account of deep continuities in American political and cultural life." ―Benjamin J. Dueholm, The Christian Century
"Lucid and propulsive . . . [When the Clock Broke is] woven throughout with astute analysis of the period’s political commentary . . . Ganz's dry wit is ever-present . . . This is a revelation." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[An] educational and entertaining work of political history . . . Trump, Ganz demonstrates, is a walking embodiment of early-'90s right-wing talk radio." ―Brian Doherty, Reason
"A searching history of a time, not so long ago, when the social contract went out the window and Hobbesian war beset America . . . Ganz makes a convincing, well-documented case that everything old is indeed new again. A significant, provocative work." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Ganz presents a comprehensive intellectual history . . . This distinctive history documents a potpourri of disparate ideas and events in a country on the verge of great change without knowing where it is going . . . A tour de force . . . A must read for every American wondering how we got here." ―Booklist
"John Ganz is the most important young political writer of his generation―just the one our dark moment needs." ―Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland and Reaganland
"With his combination of immense erudition, independence of mind, clarity of expression, and honesty in reckoning with the terrifying weight of history, John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct. To place him in his proper category, you have to rope in James Baldwin, Garry Wills, and Joan Didion. When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that help us uncover the true history of our times." ―Jeet Heer, national affairs correspondent for The Nation
"When the Clock Broke locates the origins of our strange political age in the crack-up of conventional wisdom at the end of the Reagan era and the Cold War. Ganz's clock sounds the alarm on some of the most ominous and entrenched aspects of the American political condition. Unlike many observers these days, he also finds absurdity and humor in our national pageant. Sometimes we need to laugh as well as cry―Ganz's book helps us do both." ―Beverly Gage, Gaddis Professor of History at Yale University and author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century
"I spend my waking hours reading and thinking about the American right, and there is no writer laboring in this field who surprises, provokes, and informs me as much as John Ganz. His work helps readers see further, and more clearly, than the host of tracts by Trump-era peddlers of doom. While Ganz writes with moral urgency, he offers revelatory history rather than cheap conspiracies, and theoretical sophistication, not cable-news cartoons. If you read one book on the pre-history to our calamitous present, make it When the Clock Broke." ―Matthew Sitman, cohost of the Know Your Enemy podcast and contributor to Dissent magazine
"If, like me, you’ve spent the better part of the past decade trying to figure out what the hell’s happened to American politics since 2016, John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke will come as a godsend. Ganz gives us a wildly illuminating (and often darkly hilarious) pre-history of the present, tracing the many cultural, economic, and political threads tying that time to our own. You’ll never look at our nation, or our dangerously faltering democracy, in the quite same way again." ―Damon Linker, senior lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Theocons and the Substack Notes from the Middleground
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Ganz writes the widely acclaimed Unpopular Front newsletter for Substack. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.
