Perhaps Mr Carlson needs to be reminded of his history. In fact, the United Kingdom was a senior convener and signatory of the Versailles Treaty, which was negotiated by her prime minister, David Lloyd George. The ethnolinguistic demarcation line between Poland and Russia was called the Curzon Line, after the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon who delineated it. And when it came to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain was intimately involved after her guarantee of Poland’s integrity on 31 March 1939.

This isn’t the first time Carlson has indulged Hitler apologism. Last September, he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who told him that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. A few weeks later, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the livestreamer who has described Hitler as “awesome”, “right” and “fucking cool”.

These commentators are not unhinged outliers; they are part of a larger movement of ultra-MAGA propagandists who want to rewrite the history of the Second World War, only with Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt as the villains, and with Hitler as a visionary but misunderstood leader who was merely trying to do the best for his people. They are helped by the sad fact that so much of the generation who remembered the war, and thus can give first-hand testimony to what ludicrous rot this all is, are naturally slowly succumbing to the inevitable passing of time. In Britain there are wannabe MAGA types, including “groypers”, “incels” and “chuds”, as well as devotees of the manosphere, who also circle around weird antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi-adjacent worldviews.

But when one examines “the actual facts”, one soon recognizes that it is Carlson himself who is indulging in “lies”. And Rees-Mogg who deserves high praise in batting back Carlson’s by turn faux naif, ignorant and fascist-adjacent statements and questions.

After all, if Hitler had merely been interested in overturning the Versailles Treaty, as he himself claimed and Carlson seems to believe, he would have stopped at Posen and the (previously German) Danzig Corridor, rather than occupying the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939. A month later, Hitler allowed the Russians to occupy the whole of eastern Poland, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had negotiated with the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in August.

As was clear to everyone at the time — and should be even clearer to Carlson today — Hitler’s plans ever since he wrote Mein Kampf in the early Twenties were to seize Lebensraum (“living space”) for his Aryan empire in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he had proven that overturning Versailles was not the limit of his territorial ambitions, when he invaded Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia, which had not been taken from Germany at Versailles.

If overturning Versailles had been Hitler’s aim, why, then, did he invade Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and then the following month attack neutral Holland and Luxembourg, which had not gained territory from Germany under the Versailles terms? The obvious answer, that the Fuhrer craved hegemony over Europe, seems to have been lost on Carlson. Whether out of contrarianism, naivety, or misplaced curiosity about alternatives to perceive Western weakness, Carlson and his fellow travelers are all too willing to explain away the terrible misdeeds of tyrants.

Just as Carlson denies that Hitler was unjustified in overturning an international treaty, he makes excuses for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. “I never cared, for the record,” Carlson told Rees-Mogg about Putin’s 2014 seizure of the Crimea, because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world”. He also denounced Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”, claimed that the USA “was not in a state of Total War” against Japan in 1945, and even asserted that “Russia has a much larger economy than Britain”. Flattering, but untrue. The UK has a GDP of $4.66 trillion according to the 2036 IMF predictions, against Russia’s $2.66 trillion, and Britain’s GDP per capita, at $61,000, is more than thrice that of Russia at $18,525. So sympathetic is Carlson to Putin that even the Russian president himself, reflecting on Carlson’s interview with him in 2024, remarked that it was softball.

That same instinct has caused Carlson to ignore some of the darkest acts in Western history. Carlson’s belief that Britain and America were no “better than the people you were fighting” in the Second World War ignores the fact that, by and large, the Allies observed the Geneva Convention, whereas the Nazis and Japanese routinely ignored its provisions. Germany allowed prisoners of war to starve to death while the Japanese brutalized captives.

Far from Britons having “lost your self respect” as a result of the Second World War, in fact it is a primary reason why we are rightly proud of our country. We were, along with the British Commonwealth, the only countries to fight the Axis throughout the war from start to finish, and therefore won untarnishable glory in standing against the most evil regime in history.

Carlson’s attempts to smear that record are unfounded and destructive. When Rees-Mogg correctly pointed out that if Hitler had won the war, Britons would today be speaking German, Carlson replied, “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, some 0.3% of residents of England and Wales cannot speak English at all, so once again Mr Carlson falls into the category of those who, in his own words, “know nothing of the actual facts”.

Nor is it true that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally wrong because, in Carlson’s words, Japan “was already a defeated nation”. When the nuclear bombs were dropped in August 1945, Japan still had 1.5 million men occupying the major urban, industrial, and coastal regions of eastern and northern China, as well as in Inner Mongolia and in Japan’s puppet state of Manchuria. Japanese submarines were still operating widely in the Pacific.

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Does Nick Fuentes have daddy issues?

By Kathleen Stock

In early August 1945, Japan occupied Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) and the whole Korean peninsula, and had forces in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea. It was furthermore preparing for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and considered itself far from being defeated. Indeed, its War Cabinet considered surrendering after the initial bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and formally decided not to. It took the attack on Nagasaki for Emperor Hirohito to declare that the war “had not necessarily gone to Japan’s advantage”.

We can be disgusted at the revisionist way that Mr Carlson twists history — he even considers Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, to be one of Britain’s “great war heroes” — but we should not be shocked. He has long had form for doing exactly that, and Rees-Mogg was correct in accusing Carlson of “verging on defending Hitler”, which is precisely what the remarks about the Versailles Treaty were intended to do.

We should be concerned, though, that Vice President JD Vance has not yet distanced himself from Carlson. Vance has a serious chance of becoming president of America, yet remains friends with a man who does not consider the Second World War to be a just war, one worth fighting.

Fortunately, the present ultra-MAGA movement centered around Carlson bases its entire argument regarding the Second World War on historical falsehoods that are relatively easily refuted. And their motivation is similarly easy to follow: in attempting to relativize the aggression and crimes of Adolf Hitler, while using antisemitic tropes to relativize the actions of the Nazis, they are trying to cast doubt on criticisms of Vladimir Putin. It is vital that these revisionists do not win the battle for the historical narrative, otherwise Hitler will posthumously win the peace in a way that he and his vile creed could thankfully not win the war.

It is all so transparent, and the best way to refute it is to do what Jacob Rees-Mogg did so admirably: stay calm, and recount the historical truth by way of factual evidence. As Sir Winston Churchill — who Carlson considers a “villain” — put it, “Study history, study history. For therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

Trump’s personalist rule over the MAGA GOP, meanwhile, is increasingly bound up with the pro-Israel cause. And indeed, it was just these two forces — MAGA and pro-Israel hard-liners — that came for Massie, a principled libertarian in the Ron and Rand Paul mold, who opposes the war with Iran and has called for cutting all foreign aid, including to the Jewish state.

The GOP under Trump has ideological underpinnings, but fealty to Trump comes first. That is the only tangible reality. As Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) put it on X, “This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party. The rest of us get the privilege of living in it.” Fine — who combines such utter servility to Trump with grossly anti-Muslim rhetoric (“the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one”) — fits in much better with the second Trump term than the independent-minded Massie ever could.

And Massie realized what he was up against. It wasn’t only that Ed Gallrein, a former Navy SEAL, was personally recruited by Trump to run against him. It was the money: more than $34 million poured into the primary, much of it funding anti-Massie attack ads by pro-Israel groups, making this the most expensive House primary in US history. Combined with Trump’s frothing opposition, and anti-Massie messaging from the likes of Pete Hegseth, it was enough to easily sink him.

Rarely has a House primary been about one person (rather than an opposition between two of them). Several months ago, Trump said publicly that he just wanted a “warm body to beat Massie.” Gallrein made it clear he would happily serve in that role, promising to back Trump 100% of the time. That was all there was to it. He granted almost no interviews, and declined numerous debate invitations from Massie. Here was a foot soldier for Trump, going against a Republican who was willing, time after time, to go his own way.

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The Zohran Mamdani I know

By ross barkan

Trump reviled the Kentucky libertarian for holding up a Covid relief bill in 2020; for voting against the “Big, Beautiful Bill” tax-and-spending package; and for leading the bipartisan fight to force the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. For Trump, that last was the point of no return. Massie would have to suffer for linking up with Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna of California in a bid to seek the truth about the late convicted sex offender.

If, for the president, Epstein was the breaking point, Massie’s greatest political challenge was defying the traditional American foreign-policy consensus. Unlike most Republican politicians, Massie was willing to be a principled isolationist. His conservatism on domestic matters translated to a deep skepticism of foreign entanglements, and he was the rare Republican to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu. He voted against a House resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel and also opposed Iron Dome funding. Hence why AIPAC and Republican Jewish groups made it their priority to wipe out Massie. AIPAC gloated over his defeat: “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!”

Why, exactly, were they so motivated? For Israel hawks, the Republican Party is their true last stand. The Democratic Party isn’t totally lost to them, but they can read enough polling data: in five or 10 years, there may not be any politicians like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer left: powerful Democrats who offer unstinting support for the Jewish state. Not very long ago, almost every top Democrat attended the AIPAC conference and delighted in landing a speaking slot. In 2016, when Bernie Sanders refused, his decision was considered mildly scandalous. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, had been a proud attendee.

Those days are over. Several potential presidential candidates have said already that they’d refuse AIPAC donations. Democrats have turned on the organization for its backing of Republicans and its willingness to bludgeon Democrats who deviate from the Netanyahu orthodoxy in any fashion and even to the mildest degree. Even more centrist-minded Democrats, like former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have called for limiting military aid; California Gov. Gavin Newsom described Israel as an apartheid state before walking it back (sort of).

Many Democrats, too, see the triumph of Zohran Mamdani, a pro-Palestine mayor who supports BDS, as a watershed moment, and evidence that it’s possible to win elections while defying the Israel lobby. Mamdani won in New York, the most Jewish city in America.

With Republicans under age 50 turning against the Jewish state, the possible proliferation of Massie-esque Republicans is an existential threat to the Israel hawks, and they will continue to pummel politicians to ensure the GOP will keep sounding like Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and Ted Cruz. The defeat of Massie promises, at the minimum, that Republicans will think twice before breaking with Israel in any fashion. It’s not that regular voters care all that much — it’s the money, so much of it, ready to deployed at a moment’s notice to annihilate any Republican who steps out of line.

How long that lasts is the real question. For now, Israel hawks unquestionably dominate the Republican Party. What about 2036? 2046?

The hawks have proved, in Kentucky, that they can overwhelm a House primary with unprecedented amounts of cash. But they haven’t yet shifted the attitudes of young conservatives, many of whom are either isolationist — they take the slogan “America First” seriously — or veer into anti-Semitism, like the Groypers who follow Nick Fuentes. Anti-Israel or Israel-skeptical conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Tucker Carlson are undoubtedly on the ascent, while traditional hawks like Ben Shapiro are seeing their enterprises shrink. The conservative grassroots, whether animated by old-fashioned hatred of Jews or straightforward opposition to foreign-policy entanglements, is not supporting the Shapiro-style Republican. If they still, largely, back Trump, they’re weary of the Iran war and don’t understand how America benefits.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s purity trap

By Sohrab Ahmari

It’s not obvious, yet, what the post-Trump Republican Party looks like. Neoconservatives and hawks have had a resurgence in Trump’s second term. Led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, they’ve emerged as true power brokers, while JD Vance, who used to represent the party’s isolationist wing, has been forced to accept a war in Iran he might not have backed were he president. Massie has, for the most part, been the outlier, playing the gadfly role occupied by the likes of Ron Paul in past decades.

But it’s Massie’s vision, as marginal as it is, that may point to the future of the Republican Party — or a future, at least. Not all GOP voters are as strongly libertarian as he is, but as the current cohort of Gen-Z ages, more will probably be receptive to his message in the coming years. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that while a vast majority of Republicans still back Trump, 37% want to see the party’s next nominee “move in a different direction.” Notably, 45% of Republicans believe “it is best for the United States to be active in world affairs to maintain security and prosperity,” while half say that “they want the country to pay less attention to problems overseas.”

When Trump exits the scene, those viewpoints will remain. Trump won his first election, after all, excoriating the Republicans who’d championed the Iraq War. If he broke his campaign promises, he still retained control of the base thanks to his magnetism. But future Republicans won’t have the same power. One day, a vacuum will open up. Unfortunately for Massie, that day isn’t here yet. It’s Trump’s Republican Party. MAGA apostates don’t have a place in it. For now.

I thrilled to that haunting, mechanical roar. As a boy, I had been promised a future of technological marvels; here was their fulfillment. I thrilled also to images of missile stockpiles exploding and of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters vanishing in plumes of bilious smoke. I was happy to hear of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise; and I enjoyed seeing the faces of  mullahs and Iranian military commanders crossed out by red Xs in US and Israeli online propaganda. 

There isn’t a little boy on the planet who doesn’t light up at the idea of killing the bad guys. Nor is there a man in whom something of that little boy — and his moral clarity — doesn’t live on. 

A vocal, politically diverse cohort of Americans, however, have betrayed that healthy impulse. When the ayatollah was killed, The New York Times wistfully played down his reign of terror, while the “globalize the intifada” crowd held vigils to mourn him. Rather than express relief at the regime’s decapitation, most elected Democrats have framed the joint Israeli-US campaign as an illegal, unprovoked act of aggression. Legacy media understated our successes and catastrophized missteps. The Economist, in an article headlined “Advantage Iran,” declares that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing.” Across social media, partisans of what Josh Hammer calls the “Retard Right” — dabblers in low-IQ anti-Semitic conspiracism, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes — reinforce this narrative. They boost pro-Iran propaganda that wildly overstates the success of Iranian missile attacks on American bases and Israeli cities, while minimizing the extent of the damage the campaign has wrought on Iran’s military.

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The terror of the aged woman

By Justin Lee

The prevailing tone has not been measured, morally serious criticism of our objectives (or lack thereof) or the means chosen to achieve them, but of glee at the prospect of Trump’s — and thus America’s — failure. For Democrats, that glee anticipates a bloodbath for the GOP in the November midterms, and a third round of impeachment theater in 2027. The Retard Right is eager to see the same thing, for a different reason: they want to punish Trump for being, in their fevered telling, Benjamin Netanyahu’s servant.

This trash discourse is stealing oxygen from the conversations that matter. 

I write this as a pacifist and a Christian, who has reluctantly come to adopt the theory of the just war — in a world sometimes so fallen that all of our options are tainted with evil, we must pursue what good we can, knowing that we will ask God’s forgiveness later. In such a situation, intransigent pacifism devolves into sentimental moralism. I believe this is where we find ourselves with Iran; as a consequence, my pacifism must yield to the calculus of just-war theory.

We’ve known for some time that Iran, if it so chooses, could in a few weeks enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 16 compact nuclear warheads. But the stakes have been much higher than the publicly known. Last week, when the IRGC launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that houses a joint US-UK military base, the world learned that Iran is capable of striking London. And setting aside the specter of nuclear weapons, as a modern, industrialized country, Iran also possesses enough cesium-137 and cobalt-60 to make any number of dirty bombs, which could be packaged into missiles capable of striking most European capitals. As an erratic regime sworn to destroy the West, this makes it an imminent threat to NATO.

To pass just-war muster, among other criteria, a war must be pursued as a last resort. But as the theologian Oliver O’Donovan explains in The Just War Revisited, “the ‘last’ resort is bounded by the last practicable moment for effective action.” On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that Tehran was in the process of acquiring supersonic anti-ship missiles from China. Had it done so before Israel and the United States attacked, the cost of engagement would have soared astronomically. Although the Trump administration has done a poor job communicating this to the American people, it does appear that we chose to strike just as the window for effective action was set to close. 

Thus far, our actions have been very effective. The war with Iran has been more one-sided than perhaps any large-scale conflict in history, with America and Israel inflicting losses on the enemy in wild disproportion to what we’ve suffered ourselves. Khamenei and more than 40 of Iran’s top-ranking officials have been killed in air strikes, as have most of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting his successor. By destroying Iran’s navy and neutralizing up to 90% of its ballistic capabilities, Washington has already ended Tehran’s ability to project power in the Middle East, and we’re on track to scuttle what remains of the country’s nuclear ambitions. 

What’s more, China and Russia had outfitted Iran with their most advanced defense technology, hoping that their Iranian proxy would keep Uncle Sam indefinitely bogged down in the Middle East, and thus ill-equipped to fight on other fronts. But this technology has proved utterly useless against the US military, both in Iran and Venezuela, signaling to Beijing that its ambitions in the South China Sea could be much costlier than anticipated.

These are substantive gains, and perhaps the Trump administration — notwithstanding its inconsistent messaging — will judge them sufficient. But a more decisive victory involving regime change (or at least regime moderation) is conceivable. Were that to occur, America would have direct influence over one-seventh of China’s oil imports and the ability to impede its Belt and Road Initiative, giving us plenty of leverage to dissuade it from invading Taiwan. 

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Iranian strategist: no ceasefire on our agenda

By Sohrab Ahmari

It is conceivable — yet the public discourse fails to conceive of it. We fail to celebrate our military victories; we show no pride for our military capacities; and we barely honor the fighting spirit of the men and women who serve. When the war began, the Twelver Shia death cult that controls Iran had just murdered thousands of its own citizens for protesting the regime’s abuses — yet many among us identify America as the bad guy. 

My feelings are the opposite: while I mourn the loss of innocent lives and remain wary of the war becoming protracted — especially as President Trump weighs the possibility of sending in ground troops to secure Iran’s uranium — I am also optimistic. After nearly five decades of indulging the Iranian regime’s mayhem, we have dealt it a measure of justice, and thwarted its apocalyptic aspirations. And the geopolitical scales are rebalancing in a way that may yet produce justice on an even grander scale.

A nation’s character is judged by whether it is willing to sacrifice for what it deems to be a greater good, and whether it can take pride in its own strength and do the work necessary to maintain it. There is nothing virtuous about a weak man who chooses not to fight. His choice hardly counts as one. But a strong man trained in combat who chooses peace has exercised judgment of real moral weight. These are the qualities that I hope we rediscover, and learn to nurture in the coming months. While it may be hard to see today, amid the hysteria of its opponents, Trump’s Iran war may just bring about such a transformation.

A war is being waged against the Jewish diaspora. It is being waged with bombs, shootings, harassment and intimidation. The attacks, and the fear of them, are a small side plot in a great Middle Eastern War. Those two men charged in London had a plan to attack a sister synagogue I sporadically attend. I feel this myself, as I push my son’s pram past the policemen at the temple gate. Yet more than fear, I feel disappointment. For if ever me and my son, or any of us who pray here, were butchered by a gunman shouting “Free Palestine”, many Western activists would equivocate, contextualize, or even say it served us right. Never mind that us diaspora Jews have no single agreed view on Gaza, the West Bank, or Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone Iran.

I am reflective of this myself. In a small synagogue, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the only person who’s had any connection to British government policymaking regarding the wars in the Middle East. As a special adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, I advised him to sanction Israeli ministers, supported his decision to recognize Palestine as a state, and was involved in a futile attempt to persuade Iran and America to make a deal.

But I am under no illusions: if my family had happened to pray at the Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, where Jihad al-Shamie killed two worshippers and injured three others on our holiest day of the year, and if I had been among the fallen, I would have been “contextualized” by people who call themselves anti-Zionist. The obvious distinction — that criticism of Israel’s occupation or military conduct is legitimate, indeed necessary, but holding all Jews worldwide accountable for Israel’s actions is antisemitic and targeting them nothing less than murderous — is clearly breaking down.

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The shattering of the Jewish world

By Ben Judah

A line had been crossed where prominent, highly influential X accounts were unable to say, unequivocally, that targeting Jewish children in provincial Michigan was simply terrorism and utterly reprehensible.

The internet is now a front in this war on the diaspora. It has been since October 7. Israel has wrought destruction in Gaza, and the images are truly horrific. There is no denying that, and anyone who does so is wrong. But around them, a viral campaign has arisen, one which has moved well beyond criticism of the IDF. It has moved beyond a push for sanctions, beyond the desire for a two- or even one-state solution for peace. It has moved into a kind of annihilationist anti-Zionism that wishes to hurt Israel’s supporters wherever it can find them. And the place where this is most easily done is in the diaspora.

If you have spent any time on social media in the last two-and-a-half years you know this. You know about the explosive viral fame of the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes. Such is Fuentes’ popularity that the arch-conservative Rod Dreher has warned that at least a third of Republicans under 30 in DC are in thrall to him. Then there are the Talmud blood libels of Candace Owens, with an audience of 24 million across platforms, or Tucker Carlson, whose influence on the Republican base is such that Vice President Vance cannot bring himself to disavow him, despite the conspiracy theories he pushes out about Jewish groups to his equally huge audience.

You will have noticed, if you live online, the now ubiquitous semi-ironic Nazi-like language, from “The Goyim know” to “Goy-slop”, going mainstream. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink use of the term “the Epstein Class” by congressmen. Or the sudden omnipresence of the idea that America is a “colony of Israel”, riffs on which are now being pushed from the likes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Slavoj Žižek into their fandoms. Now that antisemitism goes viral with ease, you can spend your day scrolling through, non-stop denigration of Jewish history, from posts calling Hebrew a “fake language” to the claim that, according to spurious DNA evidence, Ashkenazim are “fake Jews.”

This kind of antisemitism has slipped into and radicalized anti-Israel protest and political movements across the West, in an age where the membrane between online hatred and real world violence is permeable. The culture war around the pickets outside Gail’s is reflective of something bigger. Instead of picketing its owners, Bain Capital, or any major private equity firm invested in the Israeli arms industry — which would hardly be unreasonable — anti-Zionist protestors have chosen to picket a bakery known to have an Israeli founder and stock Jewish-style challah bread.

Many in this movement are no longer pursuing accountability and action against the state of Israel — a ceasefire, sanctions, the ICC — all of which are all perfectly legitimate to push for. Instead, they are prosecuting a war on association, where any link, any sympathy, any connection to Israel, be it a founder or a baked good, is presented as immoral, even demonic. As Susan Abulhawa, a leading anti-Zionist, whose language proved too much even for Zohran Mamdani, put it on X: “I don’t give a shit if people collapse the distinction between Zionists and Jews.”

By effectively demanding total disavowal of the world’s only Jewish state, this campaign has ceased to merely be a rally for a free Palestine. Rather, it has become an offensive against the diaspora, from the high street bakery to the House of Lords. This poisoned discourse reached its nadir on 12 March, when a gunman arrived at a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with the intention of massacring the 130 children there and at the school next door. But, I heard, the synagogue had the word “Israel” in its name. But the Jewish communal leadership had always supported Israel. But the Lebanese attacker — in fact known to be connected to Hezbollah — had lost family to Israeli bombs.

The Middle East war, of course, will end. Wars always do. The algorithm will move onto other things. And I do expect, when that happens, the intensity of the proxy diaspora war to slacken too. But I fear that now the seal has been broken. The effusion of Jew-hatred has reversed decades’ worth of declining antisemitism, as memories of the Holocaust fade, with large numbers of young Brits and Americans now dabbling in the taboo-busting “JQ.” This is online slang for asking the “Jewish Question” and exploring its florid antisemitic answers.

Their generation, then, is shaping up to be antisemitic. Over 25% of young Americans now hold unfavorable views of Jews; among older Americans, it’s just 5%. And in the UK, a fifth of students don’t want to houseshare with Jews.

There is evidence to suggest that the intensity of this spike, especially in the case of outright Holocaust deniers like Fuentes, may be driven by foreign powers using bot farms to rip into American cohesion. The war against the Diaspora is a tool of hostile actors in their wars on the West. The king of the “Groypers”, as his fans are known, has enjoyed a dramatically higher rate of early retweets of his X posts — this being the key to viral takeoff — than even Elon Musk. Yet, according to a 2025 report, 90% of the accounts boosting Fuentes’s early retweeters were fully anonymous, with roughly half of his retweeters coming from Pakistan, Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia. The tide may well, when the Democrats return, subside. But the ubiquity of online antisemitism will not.

There are the obvious reasons why. The wars in the Middle East will go on. The diaspora desperately needs them to stop but is powerless to stop them. They are neither Israeli citizens, nor are they listened to — with the exception of a few individuals. The bitter truth is that communities like mine are scorned by Netanyahu, who sees us as weaklings that he can ignore, destined to assimilate away. While at the same time, our lives will always be too connected to Israeli society, be it through family and spiritual ties, to ever be seen as not guilty in a radicalized anti-Zionist movement’s eyes.

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History has caught up with British Jews

By Tanya Gold

That won’t change, but the places where the Jewish diaspora lives have already done so. Cities like New York, London and Paris now have more Muslims, more Hispanics, fewer old men like Joe Biden with a war-era fondness for Jews. In both Europe and the United States, these growing minorities are more antisemitic. They are also younger, more likely to get their news online and watch foreign TV, be it Televisa or Al Jazeera. This is the mechanism by which imported prejudice gets stirred by the footage these wars export.

But a subtler change has taken place too. Every time our civilization evolves, antisemitism, like a mutating virus, changes with it: from a religious hatred in a world of faith to an ethnic hatred in a world of nation states. Each era seems to decide anew what it cannot abide about the Jews and what respect it will accord them. And every rupture in how we communicate, from the coming of the printing press to the dawn of the radio, seems to see society’s antibodies to this virus weaken.

Suspect for being too rootless and transnational in the twentieth century; now Jews are suspect for being too rooted and tribal in the twenty-first. The truth is that we no longer really live in what you could call Western civilization: an order based around historic nations, a culture based around print, a way of life still furrowed by the old faith, with a clearly defined attitude towards Jews.

Its successor is a globalized internet civilization that plays out in viral clips and has become unmoored from old certainties. This is a world where X mega-influencers like Iain Miles Cheong and Sneako are as much players as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Everything is being relitigated. This new civilization, since its litigation is occurring via ephemeral, emotive social media posts rather than by works of sustained thought, has an oral culture rather than a literary culture. By its nature, this culture rewards hatred and anger. Which, I fear as I push my pram, will not prove kind to the Jews.

Galloway — investor, entrepreneur, blogger, professor, public intellectual — is as inescapable now as Peterson was in his heyday. The Washington Post bills him as one of the people shaping American society in 2026. He rears his bald head often on Instagram and TikTok; his voice is a mainstay on the podcast circuit. “I’m good at being right”, he tells Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom; “I’m not good at being effective”. Galloway was first propelled into the spotlight back when he used to teach a brand strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business; to become more effective, he has created a brand of his own.

Brand Galloway promises to make young men fitter, happier, more attractive to women. Indeed, his advice is markedly similar to Peterson’s: show up early, have good manners, be a protector. Rather, the difference between Peterson’s “clean up your room, bucko” and Galloway’s “get your shit together”, is one of tone, not substance. The difference reveals something interesting about the two sides of the American culture war: conservatives want their gurus to dress up their life advice in Jungian psychoanalysis and confused allusions to the Book of Genesis; liberals want theirs to be sweary management professors who speak in the language of McKinsey slides — hardly the stuff to keep kids flocking back over the long term.

Before Galloway was a lifestyle guru, he was a finance guru — and reviewing his career, one might reasonably ask why his advice now ought to carry much weight. After all, his knack for bad analysis once caused him to become the butt of the joke. A few years ago, some finance wags came up with the Anti-Galloway Index, allowing punters to earn their fortune by betting against Galloway’s predictions. Since October 2019, the Index tells us, “tech companies that the Professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P 500 and seen a whopping 61.48% return”. The greater part of this was due to the continued growth of Tesla, on which Galloway’s powers of prediction are clouded by personal animus. Galloway believes, incidentally, that Elon Musk has locked him out of X.

Galloway has long presented himself as the enemy of Musk and his ilk. In The Four, published in 2017, he made the case for breaking up Big Tech. Today he speaks with revulsion about those Silicon Valley CEOs who’ve prostrated themselves before the Trump administration, and has launched a campaign against them, called “Resist and Unsubscribe”. Recently, he seriously weighed up running for the presidency.

Life advice is the continuation of politics by other means. Galloway’s tips are spliced with political calls to action — for free education, housing reform, even national service along the lines of the IDF. These are tucked away in his books, hidden beneath a pile of snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom. His works of self-help have big font on small pages; the chapter headings often take the form of equations, like “Credentials + Zip Code = Money”, or “Car < Lion” (which means that you should invest in experiences over things). According to Galloway arithmetic, “1 + 1 > 2”. Instead of just using the English language to tell young men to drink less, we get a picture of a martini = sad face emoji. Perhaps this helps the message stick in the minds of his audience. Peterson, it must be said, always expected slightly more from his readers.

Why, then, is Galloway so popular? Why, given he once said that “taking life advice from a depressed and insane professor may not make sense”, does he get feted by liberal stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic? The answer is simple: for all the mockery he gets from himself and from others, in truth he is one of life’s winners. He looks and sounds the part. He’s six-foot-two, well-dressed and well-spoken. He has that air of competence. Plenty of his business ventures have failed, but enough of them have succeeded. He owns a townhouse in London by Regent’s Park, a home in Florida, and a sumptuous Manhattan apartment. He reckons his lifestyle costs him $350,000 to $425,000 a month.

Peterson’s earthly successes occurred after his pivot from academia to self-help; Galloway’s were present before. The point of Peterson’s “12 rules for life” was not that young men might, by adhering to them, become more like him (and, certainly, Peterson nowadays seldom takes heed of his tenth rule: “Be precise in your speech”). With Galloway, it’s different. His breezy references to his own personal shortcomings are part of that air of humility which successful people are expected to cultivate. He knows that young men would quite like to enjoy a lifestyle that costs $350,000 to $425,000 a month. The object of Brand Galloway is to mentor young men into becoming more like Scott Galloway. In this respect, his way of keeping his audience captivated has more in common with Andrew Tate than Jordan Peterson: he is selling them his own story, a story of success with money and with women.

His story is much enhanced by its rags-to-riches element. His parents got divorced and his mum was poor; he talked his way into UCLA, despite bad grades, where he smoked weed, memorized every line of Planet of the Apes, and “majored and minored in horniness”. When he speaks of his success, he is always careful to underscore — herein his woke credentials — that he won the lottery by being born a white heterosexual male in California, and that this allowed him, along with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, to climb up the ladder. He doesn’t drop his guard on matters intersectional: when expressing concerns about the plight of young men, he is eager to add that the issues and challenges that they face are “especially acute among young men of color”. He doesn’t believe in God, and therefore hasn’t followed Peterson down the torturous path of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Still, he prays as a mark of gratitude, especially for his mother and family. “The reason I am wealthy”, he recently told Esquire, “can be distilled down to one word: women“.

Galloway has thought hard about how his own successes can be translated into general life lessons. Everything in the Galloway universe exists to impart lessons; life is one grand preparation for that job interview where you’re asked about what challenges you’ve overcome. He pays his children to do chores, to instill them with a hunger for work; and then sometimes he mugs them on the way back to their room, “as that, too, is a life lesson”. Everybody in the Galloway universe speaks the way he does, in a series of catchy and obnoxious made-up names for complex human experiences. During the breakdown of his first marriage, he visited a counselor, who asked him: “What city do you want to live in, Marrytown or Singletown?”. This sparked an epiphany. He had already set up shop in Singletown.

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A tough-love tone permeates Galloway’s latest meditation on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man. “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach”, he declares, “big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory”. Peterson, of course, was never quite so crude. But more than that, Galloway’s point is undercut by a certain mawkishness: for it appears that one can grow one’s big-dick energy, according to Galloway, by being kind. Masculinity, moreover, is perfectly compatible with vulnerability. Like Peterson, and like much pop culture directed at young men in the last decade, Galloway is a passionate evangelist for crying. Unlike Peterson, however, he knows to hold himself together in public. It is hard, in fact, to imagine him crying, even though he says he does so often. It is so incongruous with what is ultimately a conventional, alpha persona.

And yet, despite the macho self-presentation, the title on the front cover of Notes on Being a Man appears in a noticeably feminine hand, with rounded curves and flowing loops. Here, perhaps, a clue as to how its publishers have imagined its typical buyer. “My biggest fans are young men”, Galloway tells Triggernometry; “my biggest supporters are mothers”.

The problem for Brand Galloway is this: young men do not want to read things their moms approve of. They would want to read Page 3 or Nuts Magazine, if only they still existed; nowadays they seem to content themselves with Clavicular, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker — and Andrew Tate, who Galloway so tentatively tried to mimic. Jordan Peterson could compete, for a time, but only because he was supposed to be subversive. It never mattered that he was telling young men what their moms were telling them already — clean up your room!; he was popular, in the end, because he was “controversial”, went against the current on trans and gender issues, and totally OWNED Cathy Newman. There was a certain frisson to Peterson at his peak, a frisson which Galloway is unlikely to match — whatever his current popularity with the Guardian or the The Washington Post. The lady in Adolescence was never going to direct the boy in her charge to 12 Rules for Life, but it’s easy to imagine her enthusing about Notes on Being a Man. Much of Galloway’s advice for young men is right, but, in the spirit of the Anti-Galloway Index, you should bet against it being effective. The liberal Jordan Peterson eluded us for so long because it was always a contradiction in terms. 

Three decades on, Nick Fuentes — a 27-year-old livestreamer who has praised Adolf Hitler, dined with a president, and attracted what one conservative columnist estimates to be between 30% and 40% of Republican staffers under the age of 30 as covert sympathizers — is broadcasting to millions on Rumble and X (formerly Twitter), and provoking a civil war inside the Heritage Foundation. The gatekeepers are gone. The gates went with them.

To understand why Francis matters today, one must understand what he was actually advocating. The surface-level story — that he descended into explicit white nationalism and was rightly shown the door — is true but incomplete. Beneath it lies a more durable intellectual structure that has outlasted every attempt at suppression.

Samuel T. Francis was born in Tennessee in 1947, attended Johns Hopkins, and earned a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina. Rather than pursue an academic career, he took up politics and journalism. He was a staffer at the Heritage Foundation and then served as a staffer for a trio of conservative senators — John East, Jesse Helms, and Jeremiah Denton — before turning fully to journalism. He joined the hyper-conservative Washington Times in 1986, moving further to the Right, becoming a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publishing at Right-wing outlets such as Modern Age and Chronicles. He embraced the “paleoconservative” label and, by the 1990s, threw his lot with overtly white-nationalist organizations and outlets. 

Francis built his framework on the foundation of James Burnham’s thought. Burnham, the ex-Trotskyist-turned-National Review editor, argued that modern societies were increasingly governed by a technocratic administrative class, rather than by either capital or democratic will. Drawing on these ideas, Francis developed an analysis of what he called Middle American Radicals, or MARs.

He defined MARs as a class of white, non-college-educated workers whose defining political conviction was, as he put it, that “the rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” They were not a purely economic category or a conventional interest group, but a civilizational constituency — people who felt that the culture, institutions, and country they had inherited were being deliberately dismantled above their heads.

In his 1994 collection, Beautiful Losers, Francis delivered his verdict on the mainstream conservative movement: “American conservatism is a failure. Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost.” The culprit, he argued, was not liberalism, but conservatism’s own capitulation — its willingness to fight on terrain defined by its enemies, using arguments its enemies had already won.

He was anti-interventionist in foreign policy, fiercely hostile to mass immigration, contemptuous of free-trade orthodoxy, and equally contemptuous of movement conservatism’s alliance with corporate capital. Sound familiar? 

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He believed neoconservatism was a mirror-image liberalism wearing a different badge. He became increasingly convinced that culture — and behind culture, ethnicity — was the decisive terrain of political life. This last conviction led him, by the mid-1990s, to positions that cost him his career, but not his influence.

At the 1994 American Renaissance conference, Francis called on those present to “reassert our identity and our solidarity … in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites.” He said the quiet stuff out loud. No dog whistle. The Washington Times moved against him shortly after. He was pushed out, socially and professionally. The establishment declared the matter closed.

The matter, however, was not closed. Francis’s 1996 essay in Chronicles magazine, “From Household to Nation,” articulated virtually the entire Trump playbook more than two decades before Trump descended the golden escalator. He had privately advised Pat Buchanan to stop calling himself a conservative: “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Buchanan largely ignored the advice. That advice seemed to skip time. Trump seemed to receive the message. 

When First Things revisited Francis’s Chronicles essay in 2019, the conclusion was that it read like a manifesto written for the recently inaugurated President Donald Trump. Francis had been dead for 14 years. His ideas had been in office for two. 

Nick Fuentes was born in 1998, seven years before Francis died. He has, to the best of public knowledge, never cited Francis directly. He does not need to. The intellectual inheritance is structural, not bibliographic.

Consider the parallels. Fuentes positions his movement — America First — as a rejection of mainstream conservatism on the grounds that mainstream conservatism has been captured by globalists indifferent to ordinary Americans. He is explicitly anti-interventionist, virulently anti-immigration, contemptuous of free-market dogma, and convinced that culture, civilization, and above all race are the true stakes of political life. He loathes the Republican donor class precisely as Francis loathed it: as a cosmopolitan elite willing to sacrifice the nation’s particular character on the altar of capital. Even the Catholic traditionalism through which Fuentes frames his civilizational politics echoes Francis’s conviction about the decline of the West — though Francis himself, in his later years, explicitly attacked Christianity as an obstacle to white racial consciousness. 

Where Francis wrote dense analytical columns for a Washington audience steeped in the National Review, Fuentes livestreams nightly to young men on Rumble, performing a mixture of political sermon, ironic provocation, and adolescent theatrics that Francis would likely have found vulgar. The medium has changed almost beyond recognition. The message has not.

Fuentes has also adopted precisely the long-march strategy, borrowed from the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, that Francis commended to the right: infiltrating institutions from below rather than confronting them from without. He instructs his followers not to identify themselves publicly as Groypers, but to join local Republican committees, become precinct officials, and embed themselves in party infrastructure — shaping candidate selection and platform language from within. Whether or not this is succeeding electorally, it is undeniably shaping the cultural atmosphere of conservatism’s activist base.

When the conservative establishment marginalized Francis, it could do so because it controlled the infrastructure of conservative opinion. The flagship magazines, the think tanks, the television bookings, the donor networks: all of these gave gatekeepers genuine leverage. A writer expelled from that world was expelled into real obscurity.

That world is gone. The institutions that once enforced ideological discipline — the likes of National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the American Enterprise Institute — have either collapsed in influence, been ideologically conquered by the populist tendency they once policed, or rendered irrelevant by the collapse of the media economy that sustained them. Talk radio gave way to podcasting. Cable gave way to streaming. Elon Musk’s purchase of X restored to the far right a megaphone that deplatforming had partially silenced.

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The numbers tell their own story. Fuentes’s Rumble livestreams now attract around a million views per episode. His October 2025 Tucker Carlson interview — a sympathetic two-hour conversation in which Carlson did not challenge a single position — was watched by more than 6.5 million people. When Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation responded to the subsequent controversy by attacking Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition of the globalist class” — a phrase widely understood as antisemitic code — the episode illustrated not merely Fuentes’s reach but the degree to which the institutional right no longer possesses the will, let alone the capacity, to enforce its own limits.

There is also a deeper sociological reason why the 1994 playbook cannot be replayed. When the Republican establishment marginalized Francis, it could rely on a substantial constituency within the party — moderate Republicans, old-fashioned Eisenhower conservatives, country-club traditionalists for whom explicit racialism was genuinely beyond the pale — to ratify the exclusion. That constituency has largely departed the GOP, or been reduced to irrelevance within it. The party Francis spent his career analyzing has become, in its composition and instinct, closer to the constituency he imagined than to the one that rejected him.

Francis spent his career insisting that the conservative movement was too compromised and too timid to fight the battles that actually mattered. He was pushed out. His framework stayed. His 1996 analysis — arguing that nationalism and populism, not free-market orthodoxy, represented the Republican party’s authentic future — has since become received wisdom across the MAGA movement.

Fuentes is not Francis. He is cruder, more theatrical, less analytically rigorous, and more explicitly antisemitic in ways that Francis — for all the darkness of his later positions — generally avoided in print. He is also digitally native and operating in an environment where the concept of a career that can be ended by institutional disapproval has largely ceased to apply. When there are no institutions left with the authority to excommunicate you, excommunication becomes impossible.

Francis died in 2005, the year YouTube was founded. He never saw the internet’s capacity to route around editorial gatekeepers — the technology that would have given him, in a different world, a platform of precisely the kind his ideas now reach through other mouths. There is a grim irony in the fact that the man who most accurately diagnosed the conditions that would produce Trumpism paid the conventional price for saying so and did not live to see his analysis vindicated.

That his ideas lived on without him is, in the end, the most telling verdict on the strategy of exclusion: it silenced the man and amplified everything he stood for. Sam Francis was pushed to the margins. Nick Fuentes inherited the center.

In the following hours, Clavicular took to X to gleefully celebrate. One post of his reads, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” It features an AI-generated image of him running over a tatted-up black man in his Cybertruck (in real life, the man was indeed black — this matters, given Clavicular’s musings about racial IQ and his liberal use of the N-word). The first comment beneath his post asserts, “unfathomably based.” James Fishback, the ascendant and Groyper-esque Republican contender for Florida governor, tweeted, and Clavicular reposted: “@Clavicular0 did nothing wrong.” 

The stalker had apparently previously harassed Clavicular, and he’s alive and expected to survive. The streamer was also reportedly taken in for questioning by Miami Police, who did not press charges. Whether or not Clavicular hitting a man clobbering on his windshield legitimately falls under self-defense is beside the point. Normal people simply don’t shamelessly advertise that they drove over a fellow human being. (There has also been speculation that the entire affair was staged, which is a real possibility with internet personalities, but which is perhaps even worse.)  

Then again, Clavicular is hardly a normal person. He initially gained notoriety in November for injecting fat-dissolving peptides into the cheek of his 17-year-old then-girlfriend. He engages in bone-smashing, pounding himself in the face either with his bare fist or with a hammer, a practice he endorses as promoting muscular jaw growth. He takes crystal meth to stay lean. According to fellow online-Right provocateur Nick Fuentes, Clavicular is a “chad” (an attractive and confident man, in contrast to an involuntary celibate) and a “WANGHF” — “white-ass n—r going hard as fuck.” “I’m like Nietzsche … I heralded the coming of the overman,” says Fuentes, implying that he was a harbinger for Clavicular. 

On Kick, the streaming platform that is a major competitor to Twitch, Clavicular boasts 97,800 followers as of this writing. Tune in, and you might see him at a club, approaching girls, microphone-on-chest. An hour into the new year and freshly unbanned from the platform, he was on Kick, interacting with two girls in a manner bordering on coercion, pressing them to pose for him to take a photo. On the chat, multiple users were suggesting, “run over George Floyd.” After around two minutes, the connection was “lost,” I surmise because the approach did not go as anticipated.

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Clavicular may seem to be an extreme case and an outlier — demented, pathetic, and dangerous in equal measures — but unfortunately for society, and especially for conservatives, he seems to have a project and a somewhat coherent set of beliefs. These were on useful display three days after the Cybertruck incident, when Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles released a  two-hour-long interview with the streamer — the first collision between Clavicular and mainstream conservatism. 

It would be hard for anyone over the age of 40, much less someone unacquainted with the lingo of the chronically online Right, to follow their conversation. Knowles — one of the more traditionalist conservatives out there — began by acknowledging the profoundly absurd nature of their rendezvous: “I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with people from a wide variety of backgrounds: priests, exorcists, scientists, refugees. Never before, though, have I sat down with a looksmaxxed, meth-head, livestream-cel.” The same week the episode was released, Knowles had also interviewed the Catholic bishop Robert Barron. 

Knowles repeatedly attempted to persuade Clavicular of his worldview: a concern for electoral politics, society at large, and faith and family. The Catholic commentator advocated for “spirituality-maxxing.” Knowles wondered if looksmaxxing for its own sake amounts to mere vanity. “In a lot of regards, it could be perceived that way,” replied Clavicular serenely. 

Here, in stark contrast, are the two grand Right-wing persuasions of the internet. Both spring from Gen Z’s concern with the direction of society and its crisis of meaning, as well as Zoomers’ very real material concerns. The first emphasizes strong communities, religiosity, and public policy in pursuit of the common good. That’s largely the conservatism of YouTube video essays, podcasts, and youth organizing. The latter, epitomized by figures such as Clavicular and Andrew Tate, says something like this: Society is decadent, morals are gone, and so I — the radically atomized individual — am going to do absolutely everything that I can to succeed. The proposition that “God is dead, and we have killed him” is the so-called conservatism of Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.

A viral segment of the interview had Knowles and Clavicular clashing on transgenderism. Knowles contended that it’s in the public interest to maintain societal order and prevent degeneracy and the mutilation of fellow citizens. Clavicular was unmoved: “The way I see trannies is that’s one more person to mog,” meaning to outshine. “Go descend yourself, that’s fine with me.” (“Ascending” is the online Right term for attaining higher status.) 

On the likely presidential matchup between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom, Clavicular argued, “JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.” I suppose most Americans agree that Newsom is conventionally better looking than the vice president. But that Vance’s looks constitute him being “subhuman”? “How are you fat and expect to lead a country?” quipped Clavicular. Clavicular agreed with Knowles’s assessment of the California governor as a “liar” and “degenerate.” Nonetheless, he’d vote for him “100 times over” merely because of physical looks.

Those still wondering if there can be good-faith overlap in agenda between figures like Clavicular and traditional conservatism should retire their hopes. Knowles was desperate to find areas of agreement with Clavicular (successfully), and to persuade him to use his powers for the good of his community, his nation, and others (unsuccessfully). Clavicular shut it all down by simply not caring. Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of Michel Foucault springs to mind: “I had never seen such an amoral — not immoral, amoral — person in my life.” 

Ironically, Clavicular’s individualism-maxxing is far more at odds with today’s conservatism than would have been the case 10 years ago. In the Right’s more libertarian days, from the 1980s to some point in the early part of this decade, the individual was the foremost unit of political emphasis. The predominant view was that people made decisions and were wholly responsible for them, and that the government had little role — if any — in making itself a vehicle for the country’s improvement. 

Trump changed this view, breaking with long-held conservative fetishizations of the free market, small government, and neoliberalism. Yet the paradox is that with Trump, young men had someone to look up to who disregarded norms, proudly belittled others, and knew how to win. Instead of asking what the winning was for, substantively speaking, a good chunk of the Gen-Z Right took to idolizing the hyper-atomized individual who could do anything alone.  

And so today, we find some of the newest members of the Right celebrating and defending a streamer who injects a cocktail of drugs into himself every day, who smashes his skull, and who got expelled from college in three weeks for hiding testosterone in his dorm room — a concoction he has been, at first secretly and now openly, injecting since he was 14 years old.

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All this — even down to the testosterone — is bizarrely similar to the mistakes the young Left made a decade ago, when the common good took a backseat to hyper-individualism in the realms of sex, gender, and lifestyle. The Left’s flagship movement, of course, was trans. We saw self-proclaimed champions of rationality and of working-class politics promoting the notion that any small boy could become a girl — that he wasn’t really a boy at all. This opened the door for corporations to market Pride and “diversity,” appealing not to a collective American identity, but to boutique groups, and their supposedly morally superior particularistic inclinations. We got “Somaliweek presented by Amazon,” never mind the company’s egregious labor violations. 

The Left’s historic antiwar stance, too, was jettisoned somewhere in the apparent need to promote American-style liberal democracy abroad, justifying an ever-expanding slate of foreign wars precisely on individualistic grounds (cue “human rights”). Somewhere along the line, between watching Don Lemon on CNN and grabbing $6 iced matcha lattes, Leftist youth forgot that the advancement of our society as a whole belonged in their calculations.

Thus, Clavicular can be seen as the Right-wing embodiment of the transgender craze; the eternal pursuit of physical “betterment” that leads to nothing much, and in all likelihood to nothing better. And the tragedy is that this Right hyper-individualism, just like the Left variety, is deeply intoxicating to young minds. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts — almost certainly run by Gen Z interns and staffers — clearly recognize the power of “mogging.” In October, DHS released a reel showcasing “Life after all criminal aliens are deported” (since deleted from their official X page due to copyright issues). Spliced between images of Trump in his heyday and clips from 1980s films, appears a pale-white, freckled Gio Scotti, the Italian model and e-girl lauded by the online Right for her “genetic superiority.” Newsom, the liberal who stands for nothing more than vibes and electoral success, has realized the efficiency of “mogging,” too. In the aftermath of Clavicular’s disparaging comments about Vance, Newsom’s Press Office tweeted out an old, particularly unflattering image of Vance. Clavicular quote-tweeted, “Huge impact moment.”

The young Right would be wise to learn from the young Left’s mistakes. Or suffer the same fate in a few years, as the nation turns away, exhausted, from the politics of incomprehensible jargon, antics, and tantrums. 

“Antisemitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred,” he says, “have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting.” If that were the end of it, Vance would be a typical politician of an earlier age, and we likely wouldn’t be sitting down for an interview in his library at the Naval Observatory in Washington.

Vance isn’t typical. About to take off for the Christmas vacation, America’s first millennial veep is dressed in a crisp button-down and fleece vest with dark denim. His getup strikes a sharp contrast with his old-timey surroundings, lined with leather-bound books by and about vice presidents. His own memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, is among the newer additions; a medieval-style painted crucifix stands out from the shelves.

More to the point, Vance is acutely sensitive to subterranean political and cultural shifts which until recently only registered on the seismometer known as the internet, but which are starting to remake the world aboveground. Fuentes — who has called Second Lady Usha Vance a “jeet” and labeled the vice president a race-traitor for marrying her — is but one jagged spike on the seismic wave. And to Vance, not even an especially pronounced one.

Says Vance: “I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated, and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel.” That is, the Hitler-praising Groyper king functions as a useful foil for pro-Israel hard-liners in the Right’s raucous internal debate over America’s alliance with the Jewish state.

The debate descended into out and out civil war last week at a gathering of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk, with Ben Shapiro denouncing the podcaster and Vance ally Tucker Carlson — and being denounced, in turn, by Steve Bannon and Megyn Kelly, representing the insurgent Israel-critical camp. The vice president tells me he hasn’t yet watched the dueling speeches but thinks it’s healthy for the debate to continue. In his own address to TPUSA Sunday, Vance glossed over the controversy, rejecting “purity tests.”

Tucker Carlson, for example, gets a robust defense from Vance. “Tucker’s a friend of mine,” he tells me. “And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

He goes on: “The idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

What’s really afoot, he thinks, is “gatekeeping”, and people are “trying to settle their own ideological scores” — especially with respect to Washington’s policies in the Middle East.

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“I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, and that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on,” Vance says. “But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes.”  

Fuentes thus refracts — and, with his noxious rhetoric, distorts — a legitimate discontent. Says Vance: “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we ought to have that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans are not antisemitic, they’re never going to be antisemitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate.”

What about Fuentes’s promotion of an overt white racial politics, complete with liberal use of the N-word? Is Vance worried by that stuff? Yes — but he believes there have been far worse offenders who got away with racial politics in recent years, because their version of it was aligned with elite prerogatives and progressive moral hierarchies.

“Let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity,” he later adds. “Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family” — not least, Mrs Vance. “Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the past five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good.”

He goes on: “If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.”

Then, too, Right-wing racialism is, in large part, a reaction against bipartisan elites who for decades maintained a porous border, with the flow of newcomers surging to a flood under the Biden administration. “That necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love,” he says. “Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence.”

But wouldn’t Vance’s own children — Ewan, Vivek, and Mirabel — be treated with contempt in the Groypers’ ideal America? The difference, for Vance, is once more about possession of actual power to effectuate policy. “If you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power.”

Calling out some of his likely opponents in the 2028 contest, he adds, “It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids ‘jeet,’ and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.” (Khanna, the Indian-American California lawmaker, has said he’d be “fine” with his kids being disadvantaged by race-based affirmative action.)

All of this raises a deeper question: who counts as a “true” American? For many on the hard Right, the fashionable answer is “Heritage Americans”. That category excludes anyone who arrived after the initial wave of Anglo settlement, sometimes defined as narrowly as the Mayflower and its descendants. This treats as lesser citizens not just recent arrivals from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but also Ellis Islanders like Italians and Jews, possibly even the Scotch-Irish.

What does Vance make of Heritage Americanism? He worries it poses more questions than it answers. “Is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century?,” the vice president asks. He tries to strike a balance between credal nationalism — Americans are people who believe in American ideals like liberty and equal justice — and thicker notions of belonging, emphasizing shared language, culture, and history. Both, he says, have something to them.

The Heritage Americanists, he argues, grant too little to the credal aspect. “We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project,” he says, “a project that is very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being.”

Pure credal nationalists, meanwhile, forget that people are more than their abstract commitments: “Do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for 10 generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it.”

Contra the Heritage Americanists, Vance believes that culture and identity are transmissible over time. “The racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants — what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendants of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s not consistent with American practice, either.”

I ask him if he’d countenance differing legal treatment for the Mayflower descendant versus the person who received his passport 15 minutes ago. “No, no!” he replies. “Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally.”

But: “I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants — even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people — you do change the country in some profound way. . . . The problem with American immigration over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”

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For a much longer span, of course, it was religion that defined Western identity, with Christendom encompassing a patchwork of nations otherwise at each other’s throats. Can faith still serve as a sort of moral glue today, in societies that are fast descending into what used to be called the “Blade Runner scenario”, after director Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi dystopia that portrays 21st-century Los Angeles as a city divided among polyglot ethnic formations arrayed tensely against each other?

“When I talk about America having some common culture,” Vance says, “I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians. . . . There’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity.”

And yet, religion often clashes with contemporary politics. Vance’s own spiritual leader as a Roman Catholic, Pope Leo XIV, takes a much more universalist approach to questions of immigration and assimilation, and has reportedly deputized the US bishops to counter the Trump administration’s hawkish border policies. How does Vance reconcile his religious leader with his political positions?

While he welcomes the Vatican’s voice in international affairs, he thinks of its counsels as one moral lens that must be applied alongside other perspectives. The Bishop of Rome “is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on.” The “dignity” of would-be migrants is part of it. So are “the wages of workers” and “the social cohesion of the United States of America.”

“Balkanization and ethnic hatred,” reflected in the rise of the likes of Fuentes & Co., are thus mostly symptoms, to Vance’s mind. Moralizing denunciation, in his telling, will do little to address the underlying disease. Critics will no doubt see his reluctance to draw brighter red lines as a political strategy: taking care of his Right flank ahead of a 2028 presidential campaign. 

He is certainly careful about whom to denounce and on which grounds. Still, I walk away from JD Vance’s home concluding that the position he espouses — the need to renegotiate questions of immigration and belonging to avoid a descent into even worse ethnic strife — is a sincerely held expression of his worldview. Whether it can be translated into a responsible politics will be the big test of the next few years.

UnHerd subscribers can read the full transcript of Sohrab Ahmari’s interview with JD Vance here.

 JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

First, though, I should probably declare an interest. At least twice in the past I have traveled to London, been put up in a hotel, got out of bed at some ungodly hour, and then been plonked on the breakfast TV sofa in front of Piers Morgan. Each time he shouted over me and the other hapless guest for approximately three minutes, before we were both dismissed. Suffice to say, then, that on hearing about this interview I was not entirely convinced of the man’s suitability to handle as tricky and multi-faceted a guest as Fuentes: a character both apparently vulnerable and intensely steely, as if the Diary of a Wimpy Kid character had got his hands on Mein Kampf.

Still, Morgan has his own channel now, I reasoned, and a one-to-one conversation rather than a chaotic multiplayer shouting match might be worth a watch. Though politically very different, in other ways Fuentes resembles a mini-Morgan, and for that reason alone, the meeting held interest. Each has a huge internet audience; each exerts tight control over his own channel; each trades on outrage to get clicks. They both seem misanthropic and easily wounded. I’ve already listened to the Red Scare ladies adopt a big sisterly tone towards Fuentes in order to coax out confidences, and watched Tucker Carlson do his kindly father impression. Might Morgan’s sterner parental stance uncover further aspects?

No, of course it didn’t — although it did underline the futility of the hairdryer format with someone who won’t play the game. The entire interview was an extended struggle session, apparently aimed at making Fuentes recant his past statements, or else break down in remorse. Accusations were repeated more and more vociferously by Morgan, until they had nowhere left to go; at which point the host would simply move robotically to the next charge on the autocue. By the middle of the proceedings, Fuentes looked incredulous. By the end, he looked totally bored.

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Morgan’s clunking setups could be detected from space. “At some stage in your family, there were immigrants who came to the US, is that correct?” was an early example, and you’re never going to guess where he was going with that one. When he eventually got to the point, Fuentes batted the move off easily enough: these days there is a different kind of immigrant arriving, and the US is a different kind of country. As usual, his interrogator had no real follow up.

At other times, Morgan managed to swerve open goalmouths in favor of pointlessly elaborate back-and-forths. “Just to be clear, you don’t like black people who play the victim and are rude. Is that your position?” he accurately summarized at one point. Clearly anticipating that his interviewer was about to make a “physician, heal thyself” kind of move, the notoriously rude white-victimhood-enjoyer laughed it off in advance: “I see where you are going with this.” But no; the actual bear trap being laboriously constructed for Fuentes was that he had been insufficiently rigorous in applying this principle to his friend Kanye West. “Your choice of friend is Ye, who is probably the number one black victimhood narcissist in America … do you understand the problem?” Morgan thundered. There then followed a bafflingly tangential discussion of whether West, in particular, was a nice person or not.

Morgan’s main weapon, though, was shame. It failed utterly. The tape would roll, and Fuentes would be shown footage of himself in the past saying some outrageous taboo-busting thing or other. Cut back to the present, and his English daddy would sternly ask him if he stood by it. Every single time, Fuentes simply asserted with a grin that he did. Did he really have an “opposition to world Jewry”? He did. Did he still think, as he once said, that “Hitler was kind of fucking cool?” “Yes, I do,” Fuentes replied. “And I’m tired of pretending he’s not, to be honest.”

The nadir of this approach came during a bonkers segment where Lord Finkelstein unexpectedly made an appearance on screen, introduced as Morgan’s friend. He was there to describe how his mother and numerous other close relatives had suffered terrible fates under Hitler and Stalin, and to ask Fuentes whether he would “rather be on team Mum than team Hitler”. Completely unsurprisingly, Fuentes openly mocked this appeal to his finer sensibilities from an unknown old British gent sitting in his large kitchen in a quarter-zip, lecturing a younger American generation about events they had been told about thousands of times already. “My generation is done with the pearl-clutching… I don’t even know who this person is, why is this person talking to me,” Fuentes said. He went on: “We’re tired of hearing about slavery, and the Holocaust, and Jim Crow, we are done hearing about that.”

That, then, is the nub of the matter. Fuentes and his feral supporters online simply don’t care. They weren’t there, they aren’t responsible for any of it anyway, and they are more concerned about other things. The more that their elders amp up their incredulity and disgust at this lack of compassion and decency, etc. etc., the more disassociated they get, and the more funny they think it all is. They have already seen the documentaries, been to the memorial sites, listened to the lectures, had their heartstrings plucked to breaking point.

Any parent has surely been in this position at least once: adopting a stern face, insisting this is extremely serious, why are you laughing, stop it at once! But the kids are not going to stop; they revel in their herd immunity to the socially prescribed response. Every trick you pull to pile on the emotional pressure will only be met with derision and increased resolve.

Since the interview aired, there have been various responses, and many of them seem to me to be wishful thinking. Aaron Bastani has said that, faced with Morgan’s ham-fisted probing, Fuentes “falls to pieces … He looks incredibly vulnerable.” I saw no such thing. Writing in the Times, Rob Henderson has argued that Fuentes’ appeal rests on constantly cycling through personas: sometimes ironic and jokey, sometimes serious, without people being able to pin him down. But in longer inquisitorial formats such as Morgan’s, he writes, “the contradictions pile up — and the audience he has cultivated will finally see what has been in plain sight all along”.

Yet the idea that Fuentes’ groyper following is going to be put off by some inconsistency in his various statements seems to me totally naïve. On the contrary, I think they will applaud him for his trickster slipperiness. I assume they are very much over playing the game according to the conventions of rational inquiry. Why should they follow them, when their opponents do not? With their recent race-based crusades, many supposed liberals threw the principles of truth, fairness, and interpretative charity out of the window. In that respect, Fuentes is just following their lead.

Ultimately, the most that Morgan’s encounter with Fuentes shows us is that the comforting ideal of a Big Television Interview, definitively sorting the good guys from the bad guys, is now impotent in a time of streaming. We can no longer console ourselves with the idea of an implacable inquisitor in a suit, calling some public figure to account on behalf of the imaginary Reasonable Viewer. The whole idea of an implicit Reasonable Viewer was based on an underlying consensus about basic values, which no longer exists. Instead, we have lots of groups of loyal partisans, and their pet figures getting rich off their clicks.

Equally, no interviewer has sufficient control over the means of visual production, and many guests have bigger reaches than their hosts. The discussion can never definitively end, because there is always the chance of another spicy comeback. Last time I looked, Morgan and Fuentes were trading post-interview blows on X. Fuentes was proclaiming “TOTAL GROYPER VICTORY” and Morgan was telling Fuentes that he really should get laid. David Frost must be turning in his grave.

So yes, everything is debatable, as Fuentes says; but nobody is actually debating. There can’t be debates where neither side is willing to play by the rules. I am afraid I have no quick answer as to how to make Fuentes’ white nationalism less appealing to masses of young men, but Morgan has shown us that old-school tactics have absolutely had their day.

For example, Nick Fuentes, the perma-smirking king of the racial Right, describes Usha Vance as a “foreigner” and a “jeet,” mocks her name (“what the fuck is that?”), and blames her husband for “race-mixing.” Fuentes, who boasts a million followers on X, is having a something of a moment, with Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, going to bat for him (before apologizing some half a dozen times). But many lesser e-pundits share Fuentes’s views; even a Department of Government Efficiency staffer has called for normalizing “Indian hate.” 

At the intersection of these crosswinds stands Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin. The scion of one of America’s most prominent Indian families, he has shot to online fame in recent months, after he went public with his religious conversion (to Catholicism) and let loose his political opinions — ones that often clash with his family’s.

For one thing, Haley isn’t shy about venting his weariness of immigration of all kinds, not least from India. When Vivek Ramaswamy called for an “end [to] identity politics” this week, Haley replied, “End H1-B visas,” the program used by firms, especially in tech, to import latter-day indentured servants, more than 70% of whom are Indian.

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“We don’t just stop illegal immigration,” Haley tells me by Zoom on Tuesday. “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” With green eyes, impossibly white teeth, and six-pack abs, he cuts a striking figure. He is well-versed in meme warfare and knows just how to “ratio” accounts much bigger than his own — that is, garner more “likes” for his replies than the original poster. Like that of the British-born progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan, with whom he’s repeatedly tussled. 

When I mention his demand that Hasan be “denaturalized,” he interrupts: “and deported.” Tongue in cheek, surely? “No, I quite literally mean that. I’m often sarcastic, but not in this case. I mean, he hates America. If you hate America, you shouldn’t be in America. … Everyone wants to make it so complicated. That’s the thing with the past generation. They always talk about the rules, regulations, process. No, it’s simple. If you don’t like America, get out.”

That’s not how American naturalization works legally, and the e-Right’s calls to denaturalize and deport any immigrant who says the “wrong” thing clashes sharply with both constitutional writ and the spirit of the American tradition. And if that sort of thing were all that Nalin Haley stood for, he could easily be dismissed as just another online loudmouth (albeit, one who puts his name and face to his fulminations). 

Yet behind his bravado is a serious-minded 24-year-old recent graduate emerging from the political shadow cast by his mother. Nikki Haley served as a lawmaker in South Carolina, became the state’s governor, and was tapped as UN ambassador by Donald Trump in his first term before unsuccessfully challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Her son’s rage — and that of his Gen-Z-male cohort — is a predictable consequence of policies promoted by that older generation of conservatives, who prized cheap labor and free-market dogma far above America’s internal stability and cohesion. 

Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”

These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.”

Statistics bear this out: in September, the share of the long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of the job market for more than six months, hit 26%, according to The New York Times, much of it driven by recent graduates. The jobs that are available for recent grads are often precarious or temporary. “So when you see a bunch of foreigners coming over here to take jobs that [my friends] wanted,” Haley says, “they have every right to be pissed, and I’m pissed for them.”

It isn’t about jobs alone. “I look at the housing market,” he says, “and I don’t see how I’m ever going to own a house. And I do very well for someone my age” — he works in finance on the South Carolina side of Charlotte — “and I still don’t see it.” Again, the generational discontent: “My parents bought their first house for $90,000. I mean, that house probably now is worth $400,000. How can we compete?”

Then there’s the rising crime and disorder. “I live in what is known as a very safe area,” he explains. “Yet someone got shot and killed outside my apartment complex a couple months ago. . .  Outside my apartment in that same couple months, someone got jumped for a bad drug deal. And I’m tired of having to go to CVS to push a button for an employee to come unlock the toothpaste for me. Like, that’s ridiculous.”

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Overall, the effect is akin to “living in some fake world, some fake TV show,” he says. “We are the United States of America, we don’t do this. Things should be safe. Things should work. People should have jobs. Houses should be affordable.” If the son of Nikki Haley feels this way, it’s not hard to imagine the depths of anger and despair among less privileged Zoomers, a reality that probably explains, at least in part, the cohort’s often-brutal political rhetoric.

Nalin Haley was four years old when his mother was elected to the state House of Representatives. But things really changed when she was first elected governor, in 2010. Nalin and his sister, Rena, he recalls, “didn’t know that we had to live in this big house that’s also a museum” — the governor’s mansion.

When they arrived, the main housekeeper asked the two children what they wanted to eat. “And you know, we were very simple. We were like, ‘Well, what do you have?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ We, having grown up very simple, we just asked for grilled cheese.” By his own account, Nalin’s parents — the governor and her husband, the businessman and military officer Michael Haley — kept him humble. All through childhood, including the years spent in the governor’s mansion, he had to do chores and was expected to work summer jobs.

On matters religious, however, Nalin Haley had to carve his own path. Beginning when he was in fourth grade, his maternal grandparents, Indian-born Sikhs, lived with the family and served almost as surrogate parents amid the political storms of those years. “I had my parents being [Protestant] Christian, and my grandparents being Sikh. As a result, I was very confused.” Which of these faith teachings was true?

To answer that question for himself, Haley absorbed books on world religions when other kids were reading about cars and dinosaurs. Eventually, thanks in part to a spiritual experience he’s reluctant to divulge, he concluded that Christianity is the true faith. He would go on to attend Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia. Yet it wasn’t until after graduation that he was received into full communion with the Roman church.

“I needed to research my own faith better in terms of the history, the early beliefs, the Church Fathers,” he says. “When I did that, I felt as though anyone who does that kind of research will walk away a Catholic.” In his choice of denomination, too, Haley is representative of his generational cohort of Gen-Z men, an influential subset of whom is turning to Christianity — and specifically, to liturgically traditional communions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

In parallel to his spiritual conversion, he also began to develop his own distinct political ideas — not always the case in other political families like, say, the Cheneys. “I was not just going to have the same political views as my parents,” he says. Yes, he supported his mother in the 2024 Republican primary, but he did this, he insists, mostly to be a “good son.” All along, “I didn’t and was never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.” He repeats this point several times, almost like a mantra — a loyal son, but not a political disciple.

Yet when it comes to his views on immigration, critics from both the Left and the Right insist on seeing him as something other than his own man. He’s received his share of racist abuse from the toxic sewers of the online Right, notwithstanding his Christian faith and hard-line restrictionist views on immigration. “I just don’t let it bother me,” he says. “The internet’s not a real place necessarily. It is in some sense, but it’s also not. … I know who I am.”

As for one of the main sources of the racist sludge, Fuentes, Haley insists he’s barely watched the former’s show and doesn’t know his views. “I have no idea what to say about him or what to think about him,” Haley says. “And none of my friends really know about him, either.” I find that hard to believe, given Fuentes’s enormous influence among Zoomers. Still, it’s a relief to hear Haley add that racial animosity is out of the question for him: “As a Christian, I can’t have that. As a Christian, Jesus told me to love everybody, including groups of people who I don’t agree with.”

He goes on: “I get it from both sides. Someone who is biracial, only someone who is biracial can understand the feeling that … You can never feel one way or the other, because one way or the other, those two groups will never fully see you as them.” Christianity, it seems to me, serves as the bridge between these social realms for him — and could do so in an increasingly fractured American polity, if we’re lucky. 

The Left, meanwhile, reproaches him for backing an immigration policy that, if it had been in effect when his grandparents immigrated from India, would have barred them from entry — thus, in a sense, foreclosing his own existence. That line, too, leaves him unfazed. “It’s not 1969,” he shrugs. “It’s just not. We have a different country. We have a different set of circumstances.” It’s reasonable, then, to “adapt” and to “have different policies.”

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In 2025, “we have lawlessness, we have crime, we have unemployment. We have all these issues. So my first thought isn’t, ‘Well, what happened in the past, and how could we have changed the past?’ Because we’re not living in the past. We’re living right now. And so my thought is, ‘What can we do to stop the lawlessness, the unemployment, the housing crisis?’ ”

The 21st-century economy, he worries, won’t produce enough of the kind of high-wage jobs that defined middle-class prosperity in his parents’ and grandparents’ time. If the future is scarce service-sector jobs, why import more unskilled labor to undercut already low wages for such work among native-born workers? “A lot of people are just going to lose their jobs. They’re just going to be sitting around without jobs. And the next thing you know, you’re going to have people saying, ‘We need UBI,’” or universal basic income.

The economic pressure on his generation, he fears, will compound existing trends toward loneliness and alienation, especially between Gen-Z men and women.

“The future of division in America,” he speculates, “is not going to be about race. It’s probably not going to be about income, although that is a big disparity. It’s going to be about gender. It’s going to be men on one side, women on the other. If you look at someone’s” — algorithmically curated — “‘For You’ page on TikTok or on Instagram, for a young man it’s going to be completely different from a young woman’s.”

Gen-Z women are veering sharply to the Left: an overwhelming majority just voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Meanwhile, Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right that sometimes plays out as crass misogyny online, thus deepening the mutual alienation of the sexes. Yet, Haley wonders, it might not be as hopeless as all that, because both parties are responding to the same set of frustrations: “They’re tired of modernity. They’re tired of technology. All of this modernity is not natural to them.”

What both sexes desperately need, he says, is time together — in person. “They’re being more anti-social,” he observes of his cohort. “Their attention spans are getting shorter. So they only see what’s on the phone. That means that in terms of race, if all you see about a certain race is what you see on your phone, you’re going to have that view of them. If all you see about a certain gender is on your phone, you’re going to think that about them.”

He adds: “But make no mistake, the future of Gen Z, regardless of its men or women, is nationalist.” When I ask him whom he prefers among the suspected contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, he suggests that JD Vance comes closest but says the vice president needs to “somehow work on his charisma, aura, and likability.” And if the immediate slate of political contenders on the Right aren’t up to the task, Nalin Haley is prepared to enter the arena himself.

“I want someone to fight for me,” he says. “And if no one’s fighting for me, then I’m going to fight for myself and those around me who are suffering.” His anger is often palpable. At times, it’s discomfiting. It’s also, I must admit, at least partly justified. Mere hectoring moralism, without more, will do little to assuage it. Reforming the material substrate beneath that generational rage should be the foremost task of both parties. 

Now, the most storied think tank in the history of modern conservatism has fallen.

On Thursday, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, took the side of Tucker Carlson in a dispute over the former Fox News host conducting an interview with Fuentes. Roberts declared, “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda” and vowed that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Those criticizing Carlson’s interview with Fuentes were part of a “venomous coalition,” Roberts said, that is “sowing division.” While denouncing anti-Semitism and disavowing some of the things Fuentes has said, Roberts argued that he shouldn’t be canceled, but debated.

This was widely seen as a capitulation to the Groypers, coming down on their side over and against those who criticized Tucker’s interview and his more general descent into conspiratorial anti-Semitism. For his part, Fuentes applauded Roberts’s “courage in standing up for open discourse and defending Tucker against the Israel First Woke Right.”

For readers unfamiliar with the term, “Groyper” refers to the loose network of mostly young, male, hard-Right types who orbit around Fuentes, a live-streamer and social-media personality from suburban Chicago. Fuentes built his following through hours-long webcasts mixing irony and an ideology that is a combination of racial nationalism, Christian theocracy, and hostility toward feminism and immigration.

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His supporters call themselves “America First” and have traditionally been Donald Trump supporters. Yet the movement takes cues, above all, from Fuentes himself, who has regularly expressed contempt for JD Vance based on the fact that the vice president and MAGA heir apparent is married to a non-Christian brown woman. At one point, Fuentes asked, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” He’s also taken a liking, ironically, to Gavin Newsom, seeing the “beautiful genetics” of the Democratic California governor and his family of four white children as more worthy of praise than Vance’s mixed-race progeny. Fuentes is also known for insights such as the idea that sleeping with women is gay.

This may all seem too absurd to take seriously. Some young people, it will be tempting to tell ourselves, cycle through nutty politics before burning out or settling into grownup conservative or liberal worldviews; there will always be a fringe. But Fuentes has a substantial following, 1 million and growing on X (formerly Twitter), and he increasingly sets the tone for the entire conservative media ecosystem.

One way to see the radicalization of the likes of Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly is that they are adopting Fuentes-Lite positions on issues like immigration and vaccines. Fuentes has spin-offs and haters throughout the Right-wing influencer ecosystem, including British and Portuguese imitators. There are X personalities whose entire claim to fame revolves around hating him. Watch any event with a prominent conservative speaker these days, and you’ll find Groyper or Groyper-adjacent young men asking the questions that end up going viral on social media. It was indeed this kind of in-person pressure that, as Fuentes has bragged, got Kirk to turn against even legal immigration.

The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated. It has led me to conclude that I’ve underestimated not only the pace and extent of the Groyperization of the Right, but also its potential to have a large and lasting effect on our political culture.

The comparison has been made to wokeness taking over the Left beginning in the mid-2010s, through many of the same mechanisms, primarily social-media mobbing of mainstream figures and institutions. But we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society.

The Roberts statement was prompted by Fuentes sitting down for a friendly chat with Tucker Carlson. Previously, Carlson had expressed contempt for Fuentes, calling him a “weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago.” But then Fuentes appeared on a few other podcasts, and it became safe for Carlson to have him on. Carlson predictably forgot all other principles and objections as he did what comes naturally to him: chasing an audience. That’s how you become the top news podcaster in the country, which Carlson is, at least according to Spotify rankings.

If all you see of Carlson these days is a few clips of him saying outlandish things — like that he was attacked by a literal demon — you might think that he, too, has turned into some kind of fringe figure. On the contrary, there are few who are more mainstream within the MAGA movement. Days after Kirk was assassinated, Carlson was speaking with JD Vance about his legacy. He then went on to insinuate, at Kirk’s memorial, that the Jews may have killed him — just as people “eating hummus” in Jerusalem did to another hero 2,000 years ago — while attempting to maintain plausible deniability. Fuentes hilariously mocked the attempted spin, cutting through any supposedly non-invidious interpretation of Tucker’s words (Yes, Fuentes is very funny — unlike Tucker, who switches between brooding and manic laughter directed at things no one else finds funny.)

Tucker matters, perhaps more so than any other media personality on the right, with the possible exception of Fuentes himself. And after attacking Fuentes repeatedly, he deigned to invite him to his show. But how? How can Carlson call someone a gay federal infiltrator one minute and schmooze with him the next? The thing to understand with these people is that it’s all a show. They hit each other over the head with chairs one week, and then the next week team up together. The ultimate thing the audience wants, of course, is for their influencers to encourage people to vote for their kind of Republican — anti-immigration and aligned with MAGA views and aesthetics — even as they enjoy feuds and eccentricities outside of election season.

The same goes for the Vance-Fuentes relationship. I had also assumed that it would be going too far to expect that Fuentes would endorse Vance after attacking his wife on account of her race and religion. Now that seems silly. Of course, he will likely endorse Vance, or at least not go full Newsom. It’s fun for Groypers in 2025 to gush about Newsom’s beautiful white family and hint that they’re going to jump ship at the prospect of an Indian First Lady. But that’s just an angle to create a new storyline and keep the show exciting. Raise tensions, rant about how much Vance sucks, and then perhaps make a big show of allying when he denounces Indian immigration strongly enough in time for the 2028 primaries.

To wit, Vance was recently grilled at the University of Mississippi by a Groyper type about having a non-Christian wife. Already, the vice president feels the need to reassure his supporters that his wife wasn’t raised in a religious household, contrary to what she herself has previously said. While once talking positively about being in an interfaith marriage, he now knows that there is a not insubstantial portion of his base that finds Hinduism strange, if not downright demonic, and his wife has become a political liability.

The only thing that might stand in the way of Vance and Fuentes being on the same side in 2028 is Fuentes’s own cantankerousness. He has an independent streak — in October 2024 he said he wouldn’t vote for Trump — while Vance would abandon almost any previously cherished principle if it raised his chances of being president by a few percentage points on Polymarket.

We’re at the start of something, not the end of it. This is more like wokeness in 2014 than wokeness in 2022. And to make a comparison to wokeness might be underselling it. I would point to three factors that potentially make Groyperism stronger.

First, the appeal of wokeness was always largely astroturfed. The woke relied on censorship and nonstop propaganda from elite institutions. Relatively few Americans bought into the craziest ideas about race and gender. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility may have sold more than a million copies, but Carlson has nearly five million subscribers on YouTube. I asked ChatGPT how many podcast downloads he gets per episode, and it came up with a figure somewhere in the range of 4 million to 8 million (8 million to 15 million, if you include video). Candace Owens is in the same ballpark. And these are actual fans, not people encouraged to buy a book for a class or h.r. seminar.

We’ve never seen numbers like this for anything affiliated with wokeness, which was a hysteria driven by individuals in the rarefied fields of journalism, academia, and activism. They were always outnumbered in the rest of the country, and relied on being able to control powerful institutions and the informational ecosystem.

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The second point is related: namely, that Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. From a historical perspective, large numbers of young people wanting to experiment with a different gender is quite odd. Usually, males and females seek to portray and cultivate traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. Members of a majority group supporting discrimination against themselves is likewise unnatural, but this has always been core to DEI and the ideology of white guilt. One of the reasons that cancel culture was so intense was that proponents were always pushing against people’s preexisting inclinations; we were bound for a correction.

But racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a Groyper worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.

Finally, the Right lacks the institutional guardrails to contain Groyperization. The culture of the Left is shaped by elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits. During the Great Awokening, these institutions were often taken over by aggressive upstarts speaking the language of academic seminars, and their leaders would repeat the magic words demanded by identity-focused activists. At the same time, the institutional framework in which these battles took place allowed for pushback from within. The New York Times editorial board is capable, for example, of gently shifting away from trans extremism. Universities can adopt free-speech policies, as many have done, in response to both internal and external pressure.

In contrast, it is unclear in what format moderates on the right would take on the fringes. Individuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson — in addition to countless lesser influencers — get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians. There is no Groyper faculty senate where people can get together and vote to condemn anti-Semitism in the same way that leaders of the University of Michigan decided to take a step back from DEI. Robin DiAngelo is no longer cited in the media, and Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist center was closed down. Without institutional support, their power and influence have waned. By contrast, the podcaster who reflects and shapes the minds of the most engaged GOP voters can’t in a similar way lose his place at the center of political discourse.

Could the Republican voter ultimately be a check on all this? Doubtful. Right-wing media’s political atmosphere should generally be taken as predictive of what the Right-wing electorate will do. The Republican base loves Trump and flocks to news sources like Owens, Carlson, and an increasingly conspiratorial and demon-obsessed Megyn Kelly. Thus, there is little reason to think the party’s core electorate will act as much of a moderating force.

One factor working in the opposite direction is that Groyperization has occurred among the relatively weak and disempowered. One could therefore argue that Left-wing identitarianism is naturally more influential. The truth of this consolation, however, has diminished over the last several years. Radicalized Republicans are appointing similarly radical people to top positions, and there’s relatively little educated elites can do about it.

Nonetheless, the ongoing elite status of the Left suggests that at least when Republicans don’t control the federal government, Groyperization will be less powerful. We won’t see something like Trump’s first term, in which the president was Right-wing but the political Left was so mobilized that the culture moved in the opposite direction from the one that the government was pushing. I have been accurately foreseeing the Groyperization of the Right for a while now, and when I have been wrong, it’s always been in the direction of underestimating how much the conservative coalition has changed, and how quickly things are shifting towards conspiratorial ethno-populism. At points, I assumed that there was still a Republican establishment that could exercise a positive influence on Trump and Trumpians — hence, my endorsement of him last year — and it turned out that this largely wasn’t the case.

If there is any hope of effective resistance against the direction of travel, it needs to come from a powerfully influential individual leader. It can’t be Trump, as it is as difficult to imagine him making coherent arguments as it is to imagine him taking a stand against his base for the greater good. By contrast, Vance, as the presumptive heir, is articulate and has been viciously attacked by the Groypers.

While he has denounced Fuentes in passing, the vice president is capable of making a much more passionate case against those he considers political enemies when motivated to do so. What is needed is something like a speech denouncing Groyperism, rather than a quick criticism followed by a pivot towards attacking the Left or the media. Up to this point, the vice president has never found it in his political interest to go after any substantial part of the conservative coalition. While he would clearly much rather avoid the energetic wrath of the Groypers, if things continue on their current path, they might leave him with no other choice.

Yet this particular animus — hostility to Indians and Indian-Americans — isn’t “just” an online shitposting phenomenon. It reflects the Right’s shifting reception of South Asians: from an affluent, hard-working minority to a group that takes your jobs and despoils your neighborhoods.

Conservative influencers and politicians have decided that Indian immigration is a problem. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show to say that too many Indians coming in as H-1Bs is a reason to be against the program. Ingraham herself warns that “any trade deal with India will require us to give them more visas.” Steve Bannon has similarly called for a complete halt to the H-1B program, saying “instead of stapling a green card to their diploma, staple an exit visa.” 

This is a strange development. Conservatives have long recited a litany of complaints about immigration, and none of them appears to apply to Indians. Conservatives worry about illegal immigration showing contempt for the law, or low-skilled new arrivals committing crimes or becoming dependent on welfare. There are often complaints about a failure of assimilation or the threat of terrorism from Muslim arrivals. But Indians are among the highest earning ethnic groups in the country. According to one study, they make up less than 2% of the population, but pay 5% to 6% of all federal income taxes. Their crime rate is negligible, and there is no history of them committing terrorist attacks or contributing to anti-Semitism. 

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This leaves the wages argument, which rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The idea that wages need to be protected from competition rests on what economists call the “lump-of-labor” fallacy, which assumes that there is only a set amount of work to be done. On the contrary, economists have found that new arrivals increase jobs by boosting aggregate demand, and can contribute to the expansion of an industry.

It is common for people to fall for economic fallacies, and this doesn’t always involve them having racist motivations. Yet the way this one is selectively applied to Indians suggests that the roots of such views lie elsewhere. For example, even if conservatives believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy, why do they then spend their time complaining about migrants who don’t work? 

Imagine someone waved a magic wand and a large share of the Latino immigrants whom conservatives have traditionally opposed suddenly started getting higher standardized test scores and became tech workers. Wouldn’t everyone agree that this is a desirable outcome? Conservatives are having it both ways: people who don’t work or are in low-wage jobs are harming the country because they use welfare; people in white-collar professions are harming Americans because they compete in the labor market. This is broadly an anti-human way of looking at the world, one which would suggest that public policy should be aimed at shrinking the population, and that there is basically no way any group of newcomers could ever make a contribution to the country. Heads we win, tails they lose.

Yet conservatives are usually not zero-sum thinkers in other contexts. They are mostly for higher birth rates, free markets, and economic growth. How to explain this discrepancy? What we are witnessing is the Groyperification of the GOP: its spiritual takeover by the followers of the admittedly racist and anti-Semitic online personality Nick Fuentes, who wields a vast influence on Zoomer men, especially. 

Anyone who has spent any time engaging in Right-wing circles online knows that there is a fanatical hatred of Indians, which erupted around Christmas in a long-running argument on H-1B immigration between Elon Musk and X personalities who had previously been in his camp. Memes about “street shitters” — the notion that Indians defecate in public — are a dime a dozen, and garner hundreds and sometimes thousands of likes. 

Due to this energy, mainstream-media figures, activists, and politicians on the Right are going where the most excited portion of the base is. Laura Ingraham wants viewers; Bannon is reportedly gearing up for his own presidential run; and Ron DeSantis wants to be covered favorably by figures like Ingraham when he runs for president again. The online Groyper in the comments section is at the bottom of this pyramid. His arguments might have to crawl out the gutter and be made presentable before they’re ready for Fox News or a presidential debate stage. But in the end, he gets what he wants. 

As someone who grew up familiar with the leading lights of the American conservative movement, it was particularly striking for me to hear people like Senator Eric Schmitt discussing immigration as a threat to future generations of Americans, for no other reason than that they compete for jobs. One of my first exposures to economics was reading the books of Thomas Sowell, the celebrated conservative intellectual, who eviscerated the anti-human philosophy of famed environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, a zero-sum thinker known for population-control arguments based on ecological considerations. Still today, tributes to Sowell and dunks on Ehrlich are regularly seen on X. Yet now, conservatives regularly reach for Ehrlich-type arguments to argue against Indian immigration. 

The best way to understand the development of anti-Indian attitudes is as part of the broader trend in which small but highly motivated extremist factions online end up shaping the conservative discourse. Groypers in particular are a relatively small group of activists, but they’ve proved capable of pushing around major figures in the movement.  

The New York Times just profiled Fuentes, noting that officials and advisers to the administration “would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers.” There is a common understanding that this is where the energy of the party is, and anyone who is not a Groyper or white nationalist must tread carefully when discussing the movement. While open racial hate is still taboo in Republican circles, nobody with national ambitions can take a position in favor of high-skilled immigration at odds with the views of white nationalists.

This dynamic is crucial to understanding why Indians have become a target. The typical normie Republican doesn’t particularly dislike Indians. But the online Right does, and it produces an endless stream of propaganda reframing anti-Indian sentiment as economic populism — talking about wages and corporate power instead of openly expressing racial animus in the style of Fuentes and other white nationalist influencers. Regular Republicans encounter these ideas in Fox News clips or election-season talking points, without ever realizing their origins in online subcultures. 

The story of how opposition to Indian immigration became standard in Republican discourse is a microcosm of what has happened to the right more generally. 

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More typical GOP voters  may still think of themselves as simply conservative, patriotic, or skeptical of elites. But they are operating in a discourse increasingly structured by online extremists. The same way Ron Paul’s internet following fed into the Tea Party, how birtherism and fear of demographic change fed into Trumpism, or how conspiratorial thinking about Epstein and QAnon narratives bled into the GOP mainstream, the anti-Indian rhetoric reflects a fringe obsession metastasizing into national politics. Similarly, while the Covid vaccines were once championed by every major Republican politician and supported by the majority of the public, no ambitious Republican would dare say a positive word about them today.  

The process works because there simply isn’t much of an audience pushing in the other direction. The largest Right-wing influencers display some combination of adherence to the Trump Cult, hostility to outsiders that has roots in white-nationalist sympathies, and proneness towards conspiratorial thinking. Intellectuals and influencers partial to classical liberalism, technocracy, or old-school conservative principles have much less power. In the end, it’s all about the audience. The Right, increasingly the home of the distrustful, paranoid and less educated, without serious newspapers or intellectual influences, is drawn to racist and conspiratorial thinking, which is constantly being laundered through new arguments into the Republican mainstream.

Opposition to Indian immigration is a clarifying issue. When it comes to Chinese arrivals, there is at least a national-security concern one can point to which, if sometimes pretextual, isn’t completely devoid of reason and contrary to supposed conservative principles. With Indians, however, we confront a perfect group for testing whether conservative opposition to immigration has a rational basis or is ultimately rooted in the lowest forms of bigotry. 

If you think that Republican politics will go back to something close to normal after Trump, this issue also serves as a wakeup call. Pay attention to what goes on in the comments section on X, and what gets discussed on Nick Fuentes’s livestream. If you do, you’ll get a glimpse of the future of conservatism, and the kinds of rhetoric and policies Republican normies will be supporting before long. 

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election.” And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right.”

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

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The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

It is, of course, difficult to have a sense of humour about the topics one takes most seriously, even for those who generally enjoy making hamburgers of other people’s sacred cows. I was recently reminded of the 1999 Onion article titled, “That’s not funny, my brother died that way,” in which an aggrieved writer takes issue with a scene in the Police Academy movie where a motorcyclist gets his head stuck in a horse’s rear end. (“His life-insurance policy didn’t cover equine-anal suffocations. So now you might understand why I don’t think it’s funny to see that sort of thing played for laughs.”) That this essay is, in itself, funny, speaks to the unfortunate truth that also animates the “your body my choice” brand of trolling: the we-are-not-amused disapproval of another person can be pretty funny, especially when that person has been attempting to scold you into compliance with their preferred political agenda for years on end. It is no coincidence that this anti-feminist edgelording comes hard on the heels of a campaign cycle in which one side’s rhetoric was almost pathologically alienating to men: the more shrill the calls for conformity, the more naughty fun there is to be had in refusing to read the room.

This was easy enough for liberals to understand when we were the architects of an intentionally edgy counter-culture, whose pleasures derived in no small part from making self-serious moral authoritarians clutch their pearls and scream. Punk rock and heavy metal, Marilyn Manson and Damien Hirst, Saturday Night Live and South Park: if we loved these things on their own merits, we loved equally as much how they scandalised the prudes. Indeed, the Left’s conception of itself as the scrappy underdog poking fun at The Man was powerful enough that a decisive victory in the culture wars hardly put a dent in it; even after the legalisation of gay marriage, the passage of the Hate Crimes Act, and the annual rainbowification of every American city during Pride Month, there’s just no joy quite as potent as triggering the cons. That memes invariably provoke outraged reactions from people who don’t (or won’t) get the joke is the entire point. What can we say? You’re just so funny when you’re mad.

Alas, we are now discovering the same unfortunate truth as generations of edgelords before us: that you either die a provocateur, or live long enough to see yourself become the Church Lady.

“Posting now creates political reality”, Tolentino writes, by way of insisting on taking dead seriously what the “your body my choice” memesters evidently find hilarious. “There are parents all over social media reporting that their kids are hearing the phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it, and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.”

Perhaps, needless to say, I remain unconvinced that the inane (and yes, often intentionally offensive) banter of teenage boys represents “political reality”, let alone a material threat — but convincing oneself otherwise is both a hallmark and privilege of middle age, and one you will pry from our cold dead hands. The therapist who openly frets that a frat boy yelled bad words at a party without being called out is clearly resonating at the same emotional pitch as the teacher who, circa 1994, made a panicked call to my parents after I doodled a pentagram in the margin of a biology test. Then, as now, the suggestion that she might be overreacting only exacerbated her outrage. What did they mean, I was probably just joking around? Satanism was no laughing matter!

If there’s one big difference between the moral majoritarians of decades past and the social justice warriors of the digital age, it’s that the former group was unapologetic in their authoritarianism. Today’s progressive scolds don’t like to think of themselves as such; instead, they finger-wag with one hand while still clinging to the mantle of the countercultural cool kid with the other. At one point in the essay, Tolentino describes being unsettled by the appearance of a “VOTE RED… LOL” graffiti in her deep blue Brooklyn neighbourhood; it is, she says, “one more reminder that we are typically closer to people who find us laughable and repulsive than we think”. It’s a new riff on that churlish Pauline Kael quip about the 1972 election — “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him” — in this case reinforced by years of near-total Left-wing hegemony in America’s culture-making institutions, from media to museums to Hollywood and beyond. Amid a sea of narratives that only ever validate her place among the heroes on the right side of history, of course a Brooklyn-dwelling New Yorker columnist is stunned to realise that some of her neighbours think she’s ridiculous — to the point where she can’t conceive of it without suggesting that their mockery must mean they’ve been literally poisoned. Her Trump-voting neighbours, meanwhile, have surely never not known what she thinks of them.

But for as long as the Left still prefers to think of itself as powerless and persecuted by conservative oppressors, the insouciant trolling of Trumpian youths must be interpreted as something sinister and serious. As the meme goes, are we out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong… or aspiring rapists, as the case may be.

The irony — of the literary rather than poisonous variety — is that “your body my choice”, like any offensive joke, only achieved its current foothold in the discourse through amplification by the people who take it too seriously.

And could this stop? Sure, if somebody just blinks first. But just as with the bickering Max and Valerie, the fact that neither party is making different choices suggests that the current dynamic serves them both. In this case, the peacocking insensitivity of the MAGA bro fuels not just outraged op-eds by feminist media critics, but endless, tearful TikTok videos by the women of Gen Z, which in turn fuels more mockery, and in turn, still more tears. It’s too late, now: “Your body my choice”; has achieved velocity from the viral outrage cycle and into the echelons of the attention economy, where it will live on indefinitely in a toxic, self-sustaining symbiosis with its equally attention-seeking haters… at least until someday, inevitably, it is replaced by something even worse.