Yet the event didn’t bring the American Right together. Rather, it triggered infighting that persists to this day. To understand why, we have to be willing to honestly reassess the legacy left behind by the departed. We must even speak ill of the dead (for if we don’t, as Christopher Hitchens asked, who will?). The truth is, Charlie Kirk helped build up the culture of conspiracism that would come to haunt his own death.

Initially, Trump administration figures like Stephen Miller and JD Vance pledged vengeance against the hard-Left militancy that inspired the murder, as well as investigations into whether anyone else was behind the deed. Yet soon, a different narrative emerged on social media and in the podcast realm. The conspiracy theories suggested that perhaps Tyler Robinson, the young man accused of murdering Kirk over his political views, wasn’t the killer at all. Maybe it was the Israelis or the Egyptian security apparatus; or Kirk’s own organization, Turning Point USA; or Kirk’s widow, Erika, who in the eyes of her critics seemed a little too eager to seek the spotlight in the aftermath.

The divisions marred even Kirk’s memorial service, which brought a reported 90,000 attendees to the State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., and overflow venues in the area, on Sept. 21, 2025. Three speeches at the event captured a split that was already emerging on the Right.

First came Stephen Miller’s theme: vengeance. “You have no idea the dragon you have awakened,” the hard-line Trump consigliere thundered. “You have no idea how determined we will be to save this civilization.” Days later, Miller would vow to deploy all the resources of the federal government to go after the Left-wing networks he held responsible for Kirk’s death.

This was followed by the Christian message of forgiveness. Speaking through her tears, Erika announced that she forgave the young man who’d taken her husband’s life and left her children fatherless. It was a stirring piece of oratory, moving even to many nonbelievers and drawing a sharp contrast with Miller’s ferocious, almost-bloody rhetoric.

Finally, there was Tucker Carlson, who brought in the spirit of conspiracy. The former Fox News host eulogized Kirk by recounting the passion of Jesus. Carlson presented the biblical narrative as a story of powerful people in Jerusalem “sitting around eating hummus,” adding that “there’s always one guy with the bright idea, and I can just hear him say, ‘I’ve got an idea. Let me just kill him.’” 

While Carlson’s defenders tried to refute the notion that he was implying a Jewish hand in Kirk’s murder, even the arch-Groyper and unabashed Jew-hater Nick Fuentes was taken aback: “They say I’m the No. 1 antisemite. That was a little intense.” Carlson would, of course, go on to prove Fuentes correct and make a fool of his apologists, not for the first or last time.

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Over the following weeks and months, these three forces battled it out. Yet Miller’s promise to crack down on Left-wing activists was perhaps never realistic without evidence that Tyler Robinson had acted in concert with others — and no such evidence ever came to light. The only vengeance on offer was the firing of schoolteachers and grocery clerks for being disrespectful toward Kirk’s memory or insufficiently mournful over his death. As for forgiveness, it never really had a chance in today’s MAGA climate.

It was thus the conspiracy impulse that won the hearts and minds of Right-wing audiences. The day after Kirk’s memorial, podcast host Candace Owens opened her show by mocking Erika and declaring that her husband had been “betrayed” by some within TPUSA. Owens would soon release texts from Kirk complaining about pressure from Jewish donors. In February, Owens launched a docuseries titled Bride of Charlie, in which she questioned everything from Erika’s family background to her finances, and suggested she may have been involved in human trafficking. According to a Washington Examiner count, by April 2026, Owens had devoted no fewer than 84 podcast episodes to Kirk’s killing, weaving a web that included “‘German mystical Jews,’ the CIA and Mitt Romney, Egyptian planes, and, naturally, Jeffrey Epstein.”

Not to be outdone, Carlson declared in June that Kirk “was most likely murdered for his evolving views on Israel.” This came after months of Carlson’s platforming of people promoting similar ideas, including the anti-Semitic crank Ian Carroll.

Those who preferred vengeance came to express deep frustration about the turn toward conspiracy. In December, the conservative Media Research Center released a poll showing that only 24% of likely voters identified Kirk’s killer as Left-wing, a result attributable in part to public personalities like Owens and Carlson muddying the waters. 

Blake Neff, one of the current hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show, decried what was happening, charging figures like Owens with causing confusion about an issue that could have been a conservative slam-dunk. “They took something where a radical Leftist, for very legible, specific, Left-wing reasons, did something, and they have pivoted it to, ‘Actually, it was people in our own movement who did it, whom you should now distrust.’”

The far-Right writer and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as l0m3z, had high hopes that something productive might come out of the tragedy of Kirk’s murder. On the day after the killing, Keeperman called for the creation of a Charlie Kirk National Park and a “Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era (2012–2024).” In addition to these symbolic steps, he demanded a legal crackdown against the political enemies of MAGA: “Laws will be written. Extremist organizations will be dismantled. Assets will be seized. Individuals and institutions that cultivated the conditions for this climate of violence will face criminal liability. These are necessary measures of statecraft that will in large part determine whether we get another Red reign of terror, or whether we emerge from this with our nation intact.”

The sweeping crackdown Keeperman envisioned never materialized, even though Trump did launch a federal initiative aimed at investigating and disrupting Left-wing networks and their funders. Keeperman lost the argument and later went on to vent anger at the Kirk truthers. In December, the conservative writer Scott Greer likewise lamented that Kirk’s death had “offered the promise of unifying the Right in a common cause against the Left” — an opportunity wasted by infighting over whether Tyler Robinson was actually responsible for the killing. 

Why did the conspiracists win? Sadly, Kirk himself, it must finally be said, contributed not a little to the atmosphere of epistemic madness and institutional mistrust that now suffocates rational thinking on the Right.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.” 

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories. 

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Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

What are the broader lessons we can draw for the future of the conservative movement? The bad news is that the human-capital problem has gotten so serious, and the media environment so poisoned, that we can no longer expect a baseline of shared reality across the political spectrum. There will always be assassinations, wars, and shocking news events. And as with Covid, the 2020 election, the Ukraine war, and the death of Charlie Kirk, wide swaths of the Right — and, to be sure, some on the Left — will fall to conspiracism. 

But there is a silver lining. As figures like Greer and Keeperman have noticed, a more conspiratorial Right is a less effective one. Despite there never having been any evidence that Tyler Robinson was part of a wider network, there were demands from the moment of the shooting to indiscriminately round up Leftists, and there were certainly figures in the administration like Miller who seemed ready to implement such plans. Had the American Right remained united behind that project, the Kirk murder could have been the Trump administration’s opportunity to further turn the machinery of government against its enemies. Instead, the energy unleashed went into arguing about Egyptian planes flying around assassins. 

Still, the damage is extensive. For more than a decade, Kirk taught a young audience that institutions always lie, that the official story is a cover, and that anyone telling you to stop asking questions has something to hide — while making a special exception for Donald Trump. He was the filter between the leaders of MAGA and the movement’s raging id in cyberspace. Upon his death, the audience he had developed was still primed to suspect that it wasn’t being told the full truth, and hungry for a hidden explanation. 

The young activist’s very corpse became a prop that others in conservative media used in their fights to claim his audience. It’s a fitting postscript for the life of a man who helped make the Right safe for the very conspiracy theorists who would make a mockery of his death.

While much has been written about the rise of populism from the American perspective, what we are witnessing in the United States is part of a global phenomenon.

Just months before Americans first elected Trump, the British public voted to leave the European Union, a move that had practically no support among media, academic, and political elites. The Populism in Power database shows an approximately fivefold increase in the number of populist leaders and parties ruling over democracies between 1990 and 2019. 

An analysis of six major democracies — the UK, the US, Australia, Germany, France, and Canada — reveals a significant decline in support for traditional center-Left and center-Right parties, dropping from about three-quarters of the vote share in 2000 to just over half in 2024.

Latin America is also seeing one of its perennial populist waves, and populism is even making inroads into Asia. Ruling elites even in nondemocracies, such as Putin’s Russia, are adopting aspects of populist rhetoric as legitimization strategies. 

Beyond how we feel about any particular candidate or party, perhaps the political question of our time is whether we should embrace or reject this trend. Approaching this topic from a social science background, my inclination is to first look for data. Practically all of it points to the lesson that countries should avoid populist leaders if they want to maintain freedom and achieve economic growth. How do we know this? Ideally, you’d have randomized experiments where you assign some countries to be ruled by populists and others by normal leaders. 

Since we can’t do that, we have to go by theory and observation. When theory and observational outcomes point in the same direction, then we might think we know something about the world, though it depends on the plausibility of the theory and the strength of the relevant correlations. There have never been randomized controlled trials establishing that smoking causes lung cancer, but I would bet my life that it does. 

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Before we even begin on this topic, however, the first thing we have to do is ask: what even is populism? The political scientists Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser settle on the definition of “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.” This seems like it would lead to a lot of debates. Was President Barack Obama a populist because he talked about rich people and the working class? Did he present each class as “homogenous” enough and did he do enough to declare them “antagonistic”? Maybe you can make a case that every major politician this side of retired US Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) is populist according to this definition.

In practical terms, however, when scholars make lists of populist leaders, they basically agree on who qualifies, and examples come from the Right and the Left, which means we can’t tell a simple story of political bias. Trump, former Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and former Bolivian President Evo Morales all count, no matter who you ask. Standard definitions of populism are fuzzy and create edge cases, and often disagree with one another, but this is a common issue in politics, and one can say similar things about concepts like democracy and nationalism. 

“I know it when I see it” can be fine as a standard in social and political analysis. There is definitely an essence that Trump and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, currently in US custody, share, which former US President Joe Biden and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz do not. Since analysts agree on who populists are, we can undertake observational studies and see whether such leaders being in power is associated with worse outcomes. Perhaps the most comprehensive paper to do this is “Populist Leaders and the Economy”, published in the American Economic Review, arguably the most respected journal in economics. The authors found that between 1990 and 2020, a country being ruled by a populist is associated with a 10% lower GDP after 15 years relative to a reasonable counterfactual.

Left-wing populists do worse, which is not surprising, given that they have a deeply flawed understanding of economics. So ideology as traditionally understood matters a lot, but populist rule still has its own independent negative effect. 

What about non-economic indicators? Here the news seems to be even worse. In a report for the Tony Blair Institute, journalists Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk investigated the period from 1990 to 2018. Populists over that time degraded checks and balances, and were four times more likely than other leaders to preside over democratic backsliding. In fact, of the breakdowns of democracy that the world has seen since the end of the Cold War, excluding those involving foreign interference or in countries with a GDP per capita of less than $1,000 a year, two-thirds occurred under populist leaders. Such leaders were also bad for freedom of the press and civil liberties. Perhaps most remarkable of all: 40% of populist leaders ended up charged with corruption. This is despite the fact that they often try to stack institutions in their own favor. 

When The Economist made a list of countries with the highest ratio of negative to positive years of growth between 1950 and 2023, the top eight were Libya, Argentina, Syria, Iraq, Chad, Congo, Sudan, and Venezuela. As I’ve previously written, “This is not a list anyone wants to be on. That’s six countries in Africa and the Middle East that have experienced civil wars, and two Latin American nations that did it to themselves through Leftist economic policies.” Venezuela and Argentina have mostly been democratic throughout this time period, without suffering anything close to the level of intrastate violence seen in the other nations on that list. Interestingly, most communist countries have shown a better ability to correct their issues than Venezuela and Argentina. Populist democratic socialism seems to be an unusually good way to keep a country economically dysfunctional in the long term, since communist regimes usually end up collapsing like they did in Eastern Europe or reforming as China and Vietnam have. Of course, when they don’t do either of these things — think North Korea and Cuba — their outcomes are worse than what you get with any form of populism even in the long term. 

Another data point is what has happened in the UK since Brexit. Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom and his coauthors found that by 2025, simulations based on the performance of comparable countries indicate that GDP per capita was 6% to 8% lower in the UK than it would have otherwise been, with investment down 12% to 18%. Firms that were most exposed to European markets were hardest hit. The UK was at about the tenth percentile for growth among the 33 other countries analyzed since the second quarter of 2016. The authors note that their paper likely underestimates harms, since the countries they compare the UK to were themselves hit by Brexit, making the one that actually left the EU look better by comparison. Brexit did not involve the victory of a populist leader, but it was a shock that caused the enactment of a major populist policy, one that had practically no support among traditional elites. The results look similar in kind to what we get when publics elect populists into office.

That’s the empirical evidence. What about theory? It’s much easier to come up with a plausible story of why populism would be bad than one showing why it would be good. Let’s say you believe that elites have made a lot of mistakes. They are self-dealing and corrupt, the media is lazy and has a Left-wing bias, and intellectuals write to impress one another and are cut off from reality. That can all be true. The question is why anyone would think that a leader whose only claim to power is a direct connection to a mass audience would be better. Or that the kinds of people such a leader should be expected to mobilize would be preferable to old elites.

Experts who abuse their authority to push a political agenda should certainly be held to account. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that gatekeepers are usually right. There is a general tendency to focus too much on the man-bites-dog cases, such as claims made by credentialed elites that trans women have no advantage over biological women in athletic competitions, or that the US is a white supremacist nation. Most of the time, media and academic elites are gatekeeping views that are clearly false and often harmful. Among these, to take a handful of examples of beliefs promoted or given a respectful hearing on The Joe Rogan Experience, the most successful podcast in the country, are the following ideas: there is an ancient city beneath the Giza pyramids; HIV doesn’t cause AIDS; there were advanced human civilizations that predated those accepted by archaeologists and historians; 9/11 may have been a government operation; mind reading is real; Covid vaccines are more dangerous than the disease itself; and humans became more susceptible to polio due to vaccination. 

You might oppose elites on completely reasonable grounds, but creating a political culture in which expertise is rejected as a general matter leads to a decline in intellectual and moral standards, as we’ve seen happen in populist movements across the world. 

Sometimes, the elites of a country truly are bad enough to justify grabbing onto almost any alternative. We have seen this in the case of Argentina. It is the one nation that has such a deep history of populism that populists themselves became the establishment. And we have seen the results: a country that, in the early 20th century, was as wealthy as major European powers is now no longer even in the category of advanced nations. So President Javier Milei comes along as a populist with a libertarian agenda, and is probably worth supporting. Even though he is surrounded by the kinds of scandals that dog other populist leaders, the combination of his sensible economic views and the degree to which Argentine elites have failed makes this an unusual case. Populism usually being bad doesn’t mean it is always a negative, and we have to exercise judgment in individual cases. 

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More typical than Milei is someone like Trump, whose critique of the establishment of his country is that they are too pro-market and globalist. While Milei slashes tariffs, Trump enacts new ones and goes beyond any previous president in taking ownership stakes in major corporations. Even if Trump enacts more sensible economic policies than his opponents on average, that has to be balanced against the costs of higher levels of corruption and institutional decay, along with generally opening up the government to cranks, from anti-vaxxers to nativists who believe that America belongs to white Christians alone.

Populist movements don’t simply reduce the power of elites, but raise the status and influence of a new group of people. Ten years ago, it would have been rational to criticize The New York Times for getting things wrong and to not worry too much about what conspiracy theorist personalities were saying. Today, the Joe Rogan Experience and other low-quality sources of information have influence comparable to that of the mainstream media. Independent journalist Nick Shirley’s video on Somalis in Minnesota ended up having major policy consequences, leading the Trump administration to open investigations and begin a crackdown on illegal immigrants in Minneapolis. This made little sense as a policy matter, since Shirley’s shoddy reporting had nothing to do with the immigration status of people living in that state, and few Somalis are here illegally. But this is the kind of policy-by-word association you get under populist rule.

The fact that alternative media and influencers are increasingly powerful means that you now have to apply a more critical eye to their beliefs and behaviors. Is US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. more or less important than the American Medical Association? The latter might still matter more in the long run. But their power levels are at least in the same ballpark. Same thing if you are weighing the virtues and flaws of The Wall Street Journal versus political commentator Tucker Carlson, or Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel versus the American Civil Liberties Union. Conservatives could once laugh off these comparisons, adopting the argument that the establishment had more power so its flaws are the only ones that matter — ironic, given conservatives’ hatred of these types of arguments when made by postmodernists. One can imagine them adopting the mantra: “misinformation is poor journalism plus power.” But we’re not in that world anymore, and sometimes populism achieves so much success that its figures must be judged by the same standards we once applied to organic elites. 

We have now arrived at that moment. And the historical record is clear. Whatever problems your country is facing, populist parties and candidates are rarely the answer.

This essay was adapted from the author’s book, Kakistocracy: Why populism ends in disaster, published July 7 by Broadside Books.

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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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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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 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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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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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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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.

There is no greater purveyor of “actually” and its new meaning than Tucker Carlson. Tune into any one of his podcasts, interviews or speeches and the adverb’s all-encompassing power is on full display. “Damn you, actually”; “He is evil, actually”; “Who is actually for open borders?”; “If there’s one lesson in American politics, it’s that people in charge lie, actually, they do!”

People in charge do lie, actually. And for many years, Carlson made a career of holding these people to account. His incisive psycho-portrait of George W. Bush as a cavalier, even callous, governor raised early alarm bells about his presidency. His puckish profile of James Carville exposed the lavish lifestyle of a man who claimed to speak for America’s downtrodden. And even in his Fox News days, his grilling of Senator Lindsey Graham over US bomb strikes in Syria gave voice to Republicans and Democrats who were skeptical about further military intervention in the Middle East.

But since leaving Fox in 2023 and starting one of the world’s most popular podcasts, such interviews have grown few and far between. In their place has emerged a far more questionable roster of guests: from Vladimir Putin to a Nazi-curious Groyper, to a former crack addict claiming to have slept with Barack Obama. To Carlson’s supporters, these guests merely signal a willingness to go where others will not. For others, including his former friends and colleagues, it prompts a basic question: what the hell happened to Tucker?

A new book by New Yorker writer Jason Zengerle attempts to answer this question. The aptly named Hated by all the Right People is neither a hit piece nor a hagiography; it is a chronology of Carlson’s ascent and descent, drawing on interviews with those who knew or worked with him. It traces the transformation of a talented young writer into what Zengerle describes as a “noxious talking head”.

Once a fledgling journalist at The Weekly Standard, Carlson soon became CNN’s youngest-ever anchor, later hosting shows at MSNBC, co-founding the Right-leaning news site Daily Caller and rising to become the most-watched host in Fox News history. He has lived many lives and yet in each one, traces of the new Tucker can be found in the old: ideological flexibility, a penchant for provocative ideas, and, above all, a desire to entertain.

As a young writer, Carlson’s stories were eclectic: a weekend with spud gun aficionados, reflections on British colonial architecture, and a trip to war-ravaged Liberia with Cornel West and Al Sharpton. They were nearly all humorous and perceptive, so much so that even Christopher Hitchens was a fan. But compared with today’s darker, more conspiratorial output, they seem almost unrecognizable. In the past month, his podcast has published episodes such as “the demonic rituals to replicate God”, “Diddy, demons and the antichrist”, and “Why are you gay?” (also featuring demons).

How can we make sense of the spud-to-demon pivot? As the book intimates, part of the answer lies in Carlson’s transition from print journalism to broadcast in the early 2000s. In print, ambiguity was an asset: euphemism, color, and nuance were the alchemy of magazine writing. Broadcast punditry rewarded the opposite. “One benefit of hosting a talk show is that it forces you to take a position on virtually everything that happens in the news,” Carlson once said. “That’s also the downside… From ‘complicated’, it’s a short trip to ‘nuanced’. Nuance, needless to say, is the enemy of clear debate.”

He discovered this truth the hard way. Installed as the conservative foil on CNN’s political debate program Crossfire, he was paired with a liberal cohost, the two trading rehearsed blows on the controversies of the day. Then Jon Stewart came. Appearing as a guest in 2004, the Daily Show host humiliated Carlson and his cohost, claiming they were “hurting America”. Turning directly to Carlson, Stewart mocked his bow tie, called him a “dick”, and dismissed the show as performance politics masquerading as journalism. The encounter quickly went viral (by 2004 standards) and Crossfire was canceled soon after.

Although Carlson went on to host another show, this time at MSNBC, the Crossfire episode left its mark. The bow tie (eventually) disappeared and so did his television career, at least for a few years. What stung most, though, was not Stewart’s mockery, but the realization that he was right: Crossfire was combative by design, and it forced Carlson to defend conservative positions he didn’t necessarily agree with.

As Zengerle writes, Carlson’s conservative politics were a direct reaction to the “weird, wild, and woolly hyperliberalism of 1970s California” that he grew up in. But his conservatism was more instinctive than ideological or academic (he flunked most of his classes anyway). There were no Buckley-esque disquisitions on the collectivist nature of higher education or Charlie Kirk-style debating tours. Instead, he preferred to play the troll: when liberal students at Trinity College protested a CIA recruiting event, Carlson scrawled “WELCOME CIA” onto a bedsheet and hung it from his dorm-room window. When he was invited by the protesters to make the case for the CIA, he took to the stage and said: “I think you’re all a bunch of greasy chicken fuckers,” before walking off.

As Carlson confessed in 2011, he was never particularly ideological: “my politics are so complicated I don’t even understand my own politics a lot of the time” — a disposition that helps to explain why he ricocheted across nearly every corner of conservative thought over the past 25 years. When he joined the Weekly Standard in the late Nineties, he was a self-described “Episcopalian neocon”. Then, after the 2001 Iraq invasion, which Carlson initially supported, he moved in a libertarian direction (ably supplementing his income as a fellow at the Cato Institute). Now, he is the country’s foremost national-populist, criticizing America’s cultural decay, forever wars, and mass migration on his podcast.

In some ways, his evolution on these issues reflects the Right’s own realignment from Bush-era conservatism to Trumpian populism. In the early 2000s, the bow-tied Carlson was a cipher for the median Republican voter: an Iraq war-supporting WASP who largely believed in free trade, tax cuts and deregulation. But as the Right moved in a more populist direction under Trump, so did Carlson. In the online parlance, he became “red-pilled”. “He is now like a mini version of Steve Bannon,” a longtime acquaintance of Carlson’s told me. “He’s an ultra non-interventionist. He doesn’t want us involved in any foreign wars, including Venezuela and Greenland.”

According to Ross Douthat, Carlson developed a “deep distrust of all institutions” that was “a transformation of mentality as much as substance” — like many on the Right. Events such as Russiagate, Covid, and the border crisis cultivated a feeling in Carlson that the ruling class was not merely negligent or incompetent, but actively “evil”. This explains why, in a recent episode of his podcast with Matt Gaetz, he asserted with absolute conviction that soldiers were being deployed to the Middle East only to die for the US government and provoke a war on its behalf.

While Douthat’s theory of Carlson’s ideological evolution may be true, it overlooks baser considerations. Following the Crossfire humiliation, Carlson took a simpler lesson from his clash with Stewart: arguments matter less than popularity. In Carlson’s mind, Stewart only “won” their debate because he was more popular. “I didn’t lose that debate,” he later said. “I thought his argument was stupid, but the more popular guy wins… He won because he’s more popular than I am.”

But for Tucker to win, he had to be popular first. After a failed stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2006 (he was knocked out in the first round) and the founding of the Daily Caller, Carlson joined Fox News in 2009. Beginning as a substitute host for Bret Baier and Sean Hannity, he ended the 2010s as the network’s most popular news host in cable TV history. “Tucker covered some really weird shit at Fox,” one former colleague told me. “But his audience loved it, which meant Fox loved it.”

This “weird shit” included a documentary on testicle-tanning, a segment on the sex life of pandas, and a special on cattle mutilations. It also featured attacks on his own party alongside praise for liberals such as Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Tucker was his own island at Fox,” a former Fox employee told me. “He had his own team and they were very tight-lipped about what they were going to talk about on the show,” she said. “No one else at Fox would have any idea.” That culture of secrecy extended to fellow Fox hosts too, which occasionally resulted in clashes on air. When Carlson criticized then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for adding $13 billion to his fortune during Covid, Sean Hannity responded: “People can make money. They provide goods and services people want, need and desire. That’s America.”

These attacks helped to crystallize Carlson’s new persona: the preppy populist in a gingham shirt and repp tie, happily scolding elites on both sides of the aisle. But beneath the political posturing, he knew that his primary role was to entertain. Whether ululating in a high-pitched voice or staring at guests with bovine incomprehension, Carlson perfected what Charles Pierce called authentic artificiality, crafting a sarcastic, excitable persona.

Behind the easygoing façade, however, Carlson was monomaniacally focused on ratings. Unlike other cable news networks, Fox tracked viewership minute by minute, allowing hosts to see precisely how each guest or segment performed — a system he monitored closely. If a segment performed poorly or a guest overstayed their welcome, he would bristle with anger. In 2017, after learning that a guest had run long, Carlson screamed “Fuck!” in front of a visiting New Yorker writer. “Ratings at Fox are everything,” said the insider. “He would have felt that.”

That obsession didn’t end when he left Fox. If anything, it has grown stronger. Running his own podcast, unconstrained by network guardrails, and knowing what feeds the beast, Carlson burrows ever deeper into rabbit holes about who did 9/11, whether Brigitte Macron is a man, and the rise of globalist death cults — all the while raking in millions of views and lucrative sponsorships, from MyPillow to telemedicine services for pets. At the same time, he became a staunch critic of Israel (and a big fan of Qatar), flitting between legitimate criticisms of the Jewish state to more unsettling rhetoric. As well as welcoming a Holocaust denier on the show, Carlson references men “eating hummus”, Putin “kicking money changers out of the temple”, and professes a greater hatred for Christian Zionists than Nazis and jihadists.

None of these remarks individually meet the threshold of antisemitism, but each one nudges closer to the precipice. Just this week, for example, Carlson claimed that there has never been a real antisemitic movement in America — a plainly ahistorical statement that ignores events like Charlottesville in 2017, when demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us!” as well as the existence of groups like the National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and the KKK in the 20th century.

To his fans, Carlson is “just asking questions”, but this framing masks the cumulative effect of his commentary. By repeatedly raising topics related to Israel and, by extension, the Jews, his questions take on a rhetorical weight that goes beyond curiosity. Indeed, this was precisely what he criticised Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative founder of the American Conservative magazine, for. “It’s this kind of relentless bringing up of topics related to Judaism,” Carlson noted in 1999: “I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah!”

Unlike Buchanan, Carlson has — at least publicly — not expressed an interest in running for office. If he did, there is every chance that he would perform well. All the raw materials are there: high name recognition, a huge platform, and a keen understanding of how Washington works. “If he wanted to, Tucker could easily scoop the GOP nomination in ’28,” said one acquaintance. “The base loves him.” What kind of candidate might emerge then? A MAGA-style isolationist or something new? For the first time in his life, he would be responsible for answering the very questions he has spent his career asking. That might be the most dangerous proposition yet, actually.

“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.

The TPUSA conference in Phoenix, which continues through Saturday, was the first since Kirk’s assassination, and easily the biggest in its history. The corridors and escalators were packed like a subway at rush hour. As befit the campus-based organization, there were zoomers everywhere, but there were also middle-aged moms and dads and seniors wearing hearing aids. The crowd of about 30,000 was way too large for the main event space, so thousands of people stood and sat on the floor of the exhibit hall watching the speeches on a Jumbotron.

As Erika’s speech anticipated, infighting took the front stage almost at once, reflecting what is commonly described on the Right as a burgeoning “civil war” in the conservative movement over America’s relationship with Israel. The two sides of that war are personified by two personalities, both of whom spoke at the event: Carlson and Ben Shapiro.

Shapiro followed Kirk on stage. The biggest threat to the Right, he told the audience, is not just the Left, but “charlatans”, “frauds”, and “grifters” within the conservative movement. He wasn’t coy about who he was talking about. The first of these “grifters” was his former colleague at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens. Owens’s contract with the outlet was terminated in March 2024 after she stridently criticized Israel for its war in Gaza and made remarks Shapiro and groups like the Anti-Defamation League deemed to be antisemitic. Owens was close friends with Kirk, and since his assassination she has devoted her extremely popular podcast to questioning the FBI’s account of the crime. With scant evidence to offer, she has wondered if, among other things, the Israeli government was behind it.

In his speech, Shapiro condemned not just Owens, but also those on the Right who have refused to criticize her. He named Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson.

Jonathan Choe, a reporter with TPUSA’s news division, Frontlines, was having dinner with his team while all this was going on. “As we’re ordering tacos, we’re glued to our phones,” he told me. “Half the table was shocked and angry, not so much by the content of what Ben Shapiro said, but how divisive it was.” Choe said he was expecting the speakers to focus on Kirk’s legacy, in order to build a base of unity upon which to move forward. Shapiro had done the opposite.

“Ben Shapiro is among the most annoying human beings on the face of the planet,” Joe Allen, who co-hosts the War Room podcast with Bannon and who attended the conference, told me. “He has the gall to gaslight anyone who points out his obvious, self-serving agenda.”

Just over an hour after Shapiro’s speech, Carlson came out on stage. “To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event,” he cackled, “I’m like what?”

Shapiro has railed against Left-wing “cancel culture” for years. But recently he has been calling for Carlson to be exiled from the conservative movement over his political beliefs and over his relatively friendly interview with the openly racist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. At a speech at the Heritage Foundation a few days ago, he referred to it as “ideological border control”. Carlson equated the tactic to leftists calling everyone they disagree with bigots. “‘Shut up Nazi’ is the same as ‘shut up racist’,” he told the TPUSA crowd.

Carlson also told the audience that political machinations were behind the civil war on the Right, a split he believes is “fake”. Shapiro has openly questioned the wisdom of nominating JD Vance to inherit the MAGA movement, whose purported values are more closely aligned with the Carlson faction than his own. “A lot of people don’t want JD Vance,” Carlson said. “They’re stirring things up to push him out. Why? Because he’s America First.”

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The phrase “America First” has been under strain in the MAGA movement for the past two years. Since Israel began its war in Gaza, there has been simmering discontent within the Right-wing nationalist movement about the degree of Israel’s influence over the United States and the brutality of Israel’s military campaign. Carlson, Owens and congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have spoken about it openly. Some spectators at the Turning Point conference agreed.

“I’ve been to Israel and to Palestine,” said Joe Allen. “I don’t have a dog in that fight. But the Israel lobby forces me to address it. What I see in Israel is a sophisticated, technically advanced nation exhibiting extraordinary cruelty to its less advanced and developed neighbor. I don’t want a dollar of my taxes going to fund it.”

When Shapiro took aim at Carlson, Ricardo Taqueno, a 47-year-old father who lives near Portland, Oregon, yelled “Get off the stage, Ben!”. Taqueno, by his own admission, is no expert on Israel. But recently, he told me, he has begun noticing how much power the country exerts over the United States. He was once a Shapiro fan, but now believes he has become a tool for a foreign interest. He doesn’t rule out Owens’s theory that Israel may have been behind Kirk’s murder.

Noah Sanders, a high-school senior in Tennessee, told me he grew up in a conservative Christian household, and was taught from childhood to revere Israel. Now, he said, some young Christian conservatives are seeing the country differently.

Another young man who wouldn’t reveal his name told me that skepticism about Israel has become a consensus opinion among American zoomers. Young people have watched the carnage of the war on TikTok and Instagram, whereas older generations have seen a more sanitized version of it. He compared it to young people in the Sixties watching the Vietnam War unfold on TV. “We’re seeing the horrors in Gaza,” he said. “We’re seeing people talk so highly of another nation, a nation that may be carrying out horrific war crimes, while we’re supposed to be America First.”

Carlson resonates with these young conservatives. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he told the crowd, “… and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.” He told the audience that he regularly reads the Beatitudes, from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. “And killing tens of thousands of children, and then making excuses for it on behalf of a foreign government is not in there. It’s antithetical to that.”

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On the second day of the convention, Bannon and Kelly each took the stage and threw barbs at Shapiro. “I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a willful blindness about his position in it,” Kelly said.

Carlson described the split in the conservative movement as “jockeying for position” for who will replace Trump, and, accordingly, which faction will hold sway over the next Republican White House. And it’s certainly that, but it’s also a more substantive split. In a breakout session at the conference on Generation Z, one of the panelists told the audience that, after watching members of the Millennial and Gen X generations die in Iraq for nothing, “we don’t want to fight in foreign wars that the American people don’t have a stake in.” He was stating what was, until just a few months ago, a core value of America First, but which has now, with war with Venezuela on the horizon, been swept under the carpet.

Trump himself has almost entirely abandoned the America First agenda. Instead of waging economic war on China, he is overriding national security concerns by expediting sales of American microchips to Chinese companies. Instead of creating a human-centered industrial policy, he is returning to free-market orthodoxy, championing the complete deregulation of Artificial Intelligence. And instead of keeping the United States out of foreign entanglements and focusing on problems at home, he’s trying to provoke a new regime-change war. The only major plank he has stuck with is immigration, so he’s supercharging it by stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship so he has something to show his base. At this moment, Trump’s priorities look more like those of Ben Shapiro than those of Tucker Carlson. No wonder Shapiro wants to prevent the larger debate from happening.

 A cynical interpretation might be that, with President Trump and MAGA in power, various foreign influence operations are in overdrive, trying to recruit homegrown American allies close to power. A less conspiratorial read is that these days, some degree of “globalism” is impossible to avoid for influencers and intellectuals — even hard-core nationalist ones.

 The crisscrossing lines of tension — between the various factions and their beloved foreign lands — became starkly visible this week during the annual Doha Forum. The Qatari state sponsors the annual gabfest to promote “Diplomacy, Dialogue, Diversity.” Tucker Carlson, a leading spokesman for the Israel-critical faction of MAGA, spoke at the forum, and was pictured on the sidelines flipping off the camera while holding a cocktail; in another photo, he was seen standing next to Donald Trump, Jr. (a reminder of the Trump dynasty’s general Qatar-friendliness).

But Carlson didn’t just speak in Qatar. He staked a personal claim in the tiny emirate, telling the country’s prime minister and foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, “I am . . . tomorrow buying a place in Qatar…. I’m doing that because I like the city. I think it’s beautiful.”

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He was joined by Rob Smith, described by Fox News as a “black gay conservative influencer,” who gushed on X about the “INCREDIBLE time to be a FREE AMERICAN and visit the AMAZING Doha, Qatar! Can’t wait to return!”

To each his own, I suppose. I’ve only transited through the Doha airport, and couldn’t get out fast enough, what with the gaudy atmosphere, the tacky design, the dry duty-free shops — all upheld by an army of South Asian and Southeast Asian workers who showed the foreign sahib such extreme obeisance, it made me wonder if they were forced into it or kept in line with corporal punishment (human- and labor-rights groups allege widespread worker abuse, including in the construction of the airport).

Neil Patel, a longtime Carlson collaborator and his co-founder at both The Daily Caller and the Tucker Carlson Network, seemed to trollishly revel in just this impression, taunting opponents with a Doha Forum greeting posted from “​​the booodthirsty [sic], terror-supporting slave state of Qatar,” as he put it.

At his best, Carlson speaks for the Jeffersonian ideal of a modestly propertied, competent, and free republican citizenry. Qatar is very, very far from the vision. So why is he love-bombing the Doha sheikhs? It’s because they represent a counterpole to another foreign state, Israel, which Carlson blames for playing a destructive role in the Middle East and a distortive one in domestic US politics. Lately, the pro-Israel community has been accusing many of the Jewish state’s critics of being on the Qatari payroll. Carlson’s newfound admiration for the slave state — unlike Patel, I mean that unironically — probably has less to do with Qatar as such than poking his factional enemies in the eyes.

Which brings us to Israel, a site of deep libidinal investment for a different populist faction — and not just populists, but also classical liberals, neoconservatives, and hard-core evangelical Zionists, among others — and for a much longer span than the Right has been interested in charming Qatar.

For Americans of a certain vintage (me included), support for Israel has been an extension of our faith in Western democracy, and an expression of our solicitude for the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Zionism predates the industrial slaughter of Jews in World War II, but that event added urgency to it. In my case, part of my political maturation involved the conclusion that, for so long as the world is divided into nation-states, the Jews are entitled to one of their own.

Yet lately, Israel’s American reception has dramatically changed. The Jewish state’s popularity is underwater with nearly all demographic groups save for Republicans over the age of 50. This owes to a number of factors. One is fatigue with the Mideast wars and, relatedly, strategic divergence between Jerusalem and Washington (the United States wants to leave the region; Israel keeps goading Washington back in, most recently by explicitly demanding American intervention in its 12-Day War with Iran).

Another is the brutality of Israel’s operations in Gaza — and the growing power of an Israeli hard Right that makes the country hard to swallow for liberal-minded Americans, not least many younger American Jews. 

Amid these troubles, Israel has become a Right-wing-influencer destination (even as others take the opposite journey to Qatar). For hard-line populists drawn to it — figures like Laura Loomer and Tommy Robinson — support for Israel is less about postwar liberal ideals and more about the Jewish state as a smiter of Muslims and a place that is increasingly and unabashedly ethno-nationalist, a transformation they wish more Western democracies would emulate.

The pundit junkets to Israel continue — I’ve taken several under the auspices of mainstream Jewish groups and Christian ones — but they have a different tenor now, and attract a different type of commentator.

Other MAGA trips have similar domestic valences. Hungary is seen as a successful nationalist model that combines an unapologetic cultural conservatism and border restrictionism with Christian-democratic, pro-family welfarism (though many Anglo-American admirers neglect to notice, much less try to reproduce, that last aspect). Russia is, for some, a “based” avatar of Christian civilization (notwithstanding its high rates of alcoholism and low birth rates); others rally to its cause because they oppose NATO interventionism and NATO values (“globo-homo”).

Here’s the thing, though: as an American and a Republican, you can simply favor a more restrained foreign policy without falling in love with any foreign state, whether a fortress-outpost of Jabotinskyism or a decadent, slave-owning sheikhdom. Indeed, the modal attitude among the MAGA base is probably something like: to hell with all of them!

There is an interesting material explanation for America First factions’ investment in exotic lands. To wit, intellectuals and pundits are part of the hyper-mobile professional class, even the ones who outwardly reject transnational mobility. 

We’re hyper-online, have the means to travel, and attend schools, seminars, and shindigs that put us in touch with opinion elites from around the world. Moreover, the human mind, if we are to believe the Greek sages and Saint Paul in Romans, tends to seek universal models and rationalities. Pure MAGA-ism, for the chattering class, is almost impossible. We’ll always have Paris — or beautiful Doha.

One of her essays for the publication, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” published in December 2016, detonated at precisely the right instant and launched her near-overnight transformation from a pop-culture writer into the #Resistance’s 25-year-old mascot. But the woman whom The New Yorker once crowned the “Millennial feminist warrior queen of social media” is feeling ambivalent about this week’s news that publishing giant Condé Nast is folding Teen Vogue into its flagship website, laying off 70% of its staff, and dissolving its politics desk.

Looking back, the now 34-year-old Duca sees her Teen Vogue persona as, well, kind of an asshole.  She left the magazine in mid-2018 and spent most of the last six years very offline after experiencing a New Age come-to-Jesus moment (that was also an actual come-to-Jesus moment) on psychedelics.

“I was Little Miss Resistance, an image supported by the mainstream media,” she tells me on Thursday. “I was so young and completely emotionally immature and just obsessed with screaming my opinions at the top of my lungs and thinking that that was, like, helping democracy.” She adds: “sometimes it feels like that whole period was a blackout.”

For many of those who came of age during the late-2010s media-politics cyclone, it’s hard to look back with clarity. The immediate present might feel politically alive, what with the earthquake-like election of Zohran Mandami and the daily disruptions of Trump II. Still, it’s eerily muted compared to the years following Trump’s descent from the golden escalator. From 2016 to 2022, politics — thanks to the omnipresence of social media — felt like electricity running through every surface.

The political theorist Anton Jäger coined a label for it: hyperpolitics, the fusion of celebrity, entertainment, and politics, in which breathless outrage and the expression of your personal and political identity online become a kind of civic participation.

In the era of hyperpolitics, it only seemed strange at first when Teen Vogue went woke. The publication began life in 2003 as a spinoff of Vogue, aimed at teenage fashion consumers under the Condé Nast umbrella. In the wake of Trump’s rise, the magazine that once printed stories such as “Ten Ways to Slay at Prom” was suddenly publishing op-eds on climate justice and white supremacy under headlines such as “9 Climate Activists of Color You Should Know.” Executives at Condé Nast were happy with their brush with relevance among young women, even as critics sneered. But the shift made sense.

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Teen Vogue was actually just one of a new wave of websites — Jezebel, Mic, Refinery29 — that served the same restless demographic, who, ironically, weren’t actually teenagers at all but mostly 20- and 30-something women. According to a Washington Examiner report, just 1.7% of Teen Vogue’s May 2018 audience was 17 or younger, and slightly more, 2%, were 18 to 24 years old.

More specifically, the Teen Vogue audience was the kind of economically and culturally ascendant urban, single Millennials soon to become both the Democrats’ most loyal bloc and the Right’s favorite scapegoat. Teen Vogue readers, editors boasted, were no longer just consumers, but now “considered themselves activists.”

Duca did not simply join that moment of hyperpolitics — she was that moment.

Before her viral stardom, Duca was a pop-culture writer, specializing in celebrity profiles and reality-TV analysis. She knew Donald Trump not as a political figure, but a reality-TV character — not that there was much of a difference: Trump accelerated the merging of social media, reality TV, and politics. “I felt qualified to write about [Trump] because he was, in a way, an entertainment product,” Duca says.

What happened after the “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” essay has now become media lore. The piece went viral, drawing millions of views and overwhelming Condé Nast’s servers. Duca was told that Anna Wintour nearly fainted on a train, shocked by both the article and the response to it. Overnight, a magazine built to sell eyeliner became a hub for #Resistance politics; its 25-year-old writer got half a million Twitter followers; and cable-news hosts came calling (she became MSNBC’s Millennial whisperer).

Her subsequent showdown with Tucker Carlson remains one of the strangest artifacts of that era. Carlson had invited Duca on his Fox News show to discuss her tweets about Ivanka Trump. Duca barely knew what Fox News was, and even less about the channel’s fiery prime-time pundit.

“I just thought he was that guy with the bowtie,” she recalls. The conversation quickly imploded into mutual contempt — Carlson sneering that she should stick to writing about Ariana Grande’s “thigh-high boots,” Duca rolling her eyes. As her microphone faded out, she mouthed the words “You’re a sexist pig.”

Duca recalls: “my kind of fundamental reaction was, like, is this middle-aged man bullying me on TV? I was just like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” The debate went viral instantly, and within hours, the clip had been viewed millions of times.

Duca felt like she had to keep riding the wave of fame before it crashed, even as spending up to 15 hours a day glued to screens and political narratives was sending her to a darker place: “it wasn’t just your average internet addiction, because I would fire off a hot take, and then a car would come and pick me up and drive me to MSNBC. Like, it was farm-to-table hot takes. And my tweets would be the news for a not insignificant period of time. It was horrible.”

Soon after the Tucker interview, she launched a new column for Teen Vogue called “Thigh-High Politics.” Simon & Schuster signed her to write a book titled How To Start a Revolution: Young People And The Future of Politics — ambitious stuff for someone who, a year earlier, was still writing celebrity-obsessed stories like “Debby Ryan Just Dyed Her Hair Rose Gold.”

That book, published in 2019, now reads like a time capsule of Millennial liberalism: half manifesto, half motivational poster. The title promised radical transformation; the text offered empowerment slogans and civics lessons written in the language of self-care. The idea that posting, educating, and “raising awareness” could amount to transformational change of national politics was the central illusion of the era — and Duca, like her publication, embodied it at the time.

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She also paid the price for it. In 2019, the same attention economy that had made her a celebrity turned cannibal. BuzzFeed News published a lengthy and relatively catty exposé about her short-lived teaching gig at New York University. It described her as “both a feminist icon of her generation and a phony quasi-journalist who has taken advantage of a few lucky moments in her life.” Duca was portrayed as self-absorbed, erratic, and obsessed with her own brand. The piece was brutal, and Duca’s name became a punchline in the same corners of the internet that had once celebrated.

But she quietly cheered on her cancellation in a twisted way, she said, even as her personal life collapsed along with her reputation. “I took down the old Lauren completely, you know? This person, essentially my avatar, was floating through hyperspace without my input, and I just didn’t really bother defending her anymore,” she said.

The next half-decade of Duca’s life was a total deconstruction of her old self. She got divorced, became a lesbian, briefly joined a psychedelics cult in South America, suffered “ego death,” almost died, found Jesus, moved from New York to Tucson, Ariz., and, of course‚ logged off the endless scroll. And if that sounds like a comedy bit, well, it kind of is. She’s turned it into a one-woman show about her life, How Embarrassing is Jesus?, playing off Broadway. 

Duca in 2025 is an inversion of her old ethos: the once-loud, self-assured political avatar has turned quiet mystic, talking about God, energy, and healing. “I did believe that political action was the driver of a good life,” she tells me. “I had this insatiable energy to be the Millennial feminist warrior queen, and then I didn’t have the energy anymore.”

In many ways, Duca’s decade-long trajectory is an extreme version of the story of the larger Millennial Teen Vogue generation: the first raised entirely online, who experienced politics as a series of viral flashpoints since Trump’s first election in 2016: Bernie rallies, women’s marches, pussy hats, and fist-raising #BLM Instagram graphics. It was addictive, intoxicating, and unsustainable.

Duca once wrote that Trump’s election “made the country spark like an aurora borealis of lightbulb moments.” Even then, she was describing politics as energy rather than institution-building — something to be felt rather than built. Almost a decade later, many who once flooded the streets are now raising children, paying mortgages, practicing mindfulness, or, in Duca’s unusual case, finding Jesus in the form of a praying mantis under the influence of psychedelics.

Teen Vogue is gone. The Lauren Duca who embodied its political moment is gone, too. 

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.

Yeah, no. That would go over about as well as calling for 35% tariffs on Canada. The year is 2014, remember? There’s a reason Pat Buchanan didn’t get an invite to the event, and the staunchly isolationist libertarian Ron Paul was mocked as a crank during the keynote. You’d probably already be in the parking lot — or a shouting match — by the time your tablemates tucked into their slices of mediocre cheesecake.

The quips you made at the table are real quotes, however. They come directly from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s X account this summer, as the Gaza war approaches its two-year mark and “food supplies in Gaza have dwindled,” per a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Greene, one of President Trump’s staunchest supporters in Congress, shattered another GOP taboo last week by describing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a “genocide.”

A similar trend is afoot on the Left, meaning that Israel now faces a bipartisan pincer movement of disapproval and alienation.

Greene is far from alone on the Right. Steve Bannon, the former Trump political consigliere and one of the most popular Right-wing podcast hosts in America, recently argued, “Netanyahu’s government is out of control.” On Bannon’s show, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince accused the Israeli military of intentionally targeting a Catholic church in Gaza and declared: “The time of subsidizing the IDF as the American taxpayer must end.”

After that church was hit, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles addressed the Israelis in lament: “You’re losing me. You’re losing me, when you strike churches, the only church in Gaza, even if accidentally, but especially if not accidentally, you’re losing me.” At Turning Point USA’s summer student conference, the group hosted a debate on the subject between comedian Dave Smith and columnist Josh Hammer that exposed the movement’s divide. Smith, who’s called Ron Paul “the greatest living American hero,” was greeted with cheers from many attendees for criticisms of the Jewish state that would have fallen on deaf ears — if not hostile ears — before Oct. 7. 

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Florida’s Rep. Randy Fine — perhaps Israel’s most vociferous defender in the House of Representatives, who even earned a rebuke from the American Jewish Committee over his enthusiasm for starving Gaza — has a GOP primary challenger in Aaron Baker. “I do NOT support starving children,” Baker posted recently, adding: “I do NOT support punishing [Gazan] citizens for having the worst government in existence.” 

Tucker Carlson, another of the country’s most popular broadcasters, released an episode of his podcast on Wednesday with University of Chicago scholar John Mearsheimer, titled “The Palestinian Genocide and How the West Has Been Deceived Into Supporting It.” Carlson and his guests have been consistently critical of Netanyahu’s government for months. That isn’t even to address the outright anti-Semitism of other fringe voices with significant social-media followings. 

Of course, the horror in Gaza now is not an apples-to-apples comparison with the 2014 clash between Israel and Hamas. But that’s kind of the point. The war since Oct. 7 has claimed the lives of at least 18,500 children, according to a new Washington Post analysis of the Gaza Health Ministry figures. According to the Post, that means “Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war.” The deaths included 953 babies who never made it to their first birthday; another 943 never made it to their second; 972 never made it to their third.

The sheer scale of the misery, as Israel now controls a wide swath of Gaza and starvation mounts, challenges modern definitions of proportionality — even as Americans are horrified by the evil tactics of Hamas and continue to sympathize deeply with hostage families. Recent attacks on Christian communities in Gaza and the West Bank are further incensing many in the United States.

Speaking of 2014, the Obama administration veterans at Pod Save America are issuing their own mea culpas from the Left. “Barack Obama signed a 10-year [Memorandum of Understanding] for $3.3 billion a year. So we are part of the problem here. Let’s correct it,” said co-host Tommy Vietor this week. Vietor, who served under Obama as a spokesman for the National Security Council, added, “When the war ends, we are not going back to the pre-October 7 status quo.”

Challenged on X by a critic who accused him of exacting a grudge against Netanyahu from the Obama years, Vietor replied, “Or … stay with me here … the entire world is horrified by what we’re witnessing in Gaza, which is why this conversation is happening now and not back in 2015.”

There’s little insight about the Right to be gleaned from Pod Save America. But in this case, Vietor is correct that revulsion at the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is no longer limited to progressives. This nationwide movement is so sweeping that it’s dragging people on the Right away from Israel, even as some conservatives triple down on support for the war. 

What’s eroded on the Right, above all, is the stigma that used to surround criticism of Israel. Gallup has been tracking public opinion on the Gaza war since its earliest weeks. On Tuesday, the firm released stark new findings. “American approval of Israel’s military action in Gaza has fallen 10 percentage points since the prior measurement in September, and it is now at 32%, the lowest reading since Gallup first asked the question in November 2023,” read the report. “Disapproval of the military action has now reached 60%.”

To be sure, Gallup’s survey found a stunning gulf between Democrats and Independents on one side and Republicans on the other. 71% of Republicans still approve of Israel’s military action in Gaza, but that number is only 25% among Independents and 8% among Democrats. For what it’s worth, that same poll found Trump’s approval rating has declined 17 points among Independents since the start of his second term, and only 27% approve of his handling of the conflict.

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While that number means less to Republicans in red states and primary elections, in swing districts, battleground states, and nationwide races, it’s enormously significant. Independents split evenly between Trump and Kamala Harris last November, but that was itself a gain for Trump, because he erased Democrats’ nine-point advantage from the 2020 election. Back in 2022, before the war, Independents fell at 71% when it came to favorability for Israel, squarely between Republicans at 81% and Democrats at 63%.

It’s true that even in 2024, Israel ranked low among voters’ priorities when choosing between candidates, but it’s also true that Republicans counted for years on reflexive support for the Israeli government from moderates and the party faithful. Now the incentive structure has been transformed. 

And for the GOP, that fissure looks poised to get much worse. A Pew survey this spring found that “Republicans under 50 are now about as likely to have a negative view of Israel as a positive one (50% versus 48%). In 2022, they were much more likely to see Israel positively than negatively (63% and 35%, respectively).” That’s a shocking change, especially as younger generations begin to comprise more of the electorate. 

Bannon himself put it best when he told Politico this week, “It seems that for the under-30-year-old MAGA base, Israel has almost no support.” Bannon further believes it’s not just Young MAGA but that “Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older MAGA diehards.” It’s precisely the Israeli hard-liners’ awareness of this generational problem that impels them to act in a maximalist fashion in Gaza and beyond. Better to strike big now, the thinking goes, before the generational turnover empowers Israel-skeptics on both sides.

The problem for Jerusalem is that the harder they go, the more they intensify the sense of alienation in America, the one country whose public sentiments are downright existential for the Jewish state.

He had also consolidated full control of the Republican Party, imposing his own brand of nationalism and isolationism on the rank-and-file — or at least changing how they talk about policy. His long-running obsession with tariffs and protectionism was, over time, embraced by enough Republican elites, regardless of his subsequent rolling back of economy-destabilizing global tariffs. And his promise to end foreign conflicts — both in Ukraine and the Middle East — resonated with broad swathes of the public, showing, at least temporarily, that the old neoconservative wing of the Republican Party was in retreat.

But Trump’s decision to enlist the United States in Israel’s war with Iran has exposed genuine fault lines within the MAGA movement. It has shown too that, within the Republican establishment, hunger for war has not abated. Neoconservatives aren’t quite beat.

True America First— the isolationism that shares some characteristics with the American anti-war Left — can be hard to find in Congress. The vast majority of Republicans backed the recent Iran strikes and only one, a libertarian in the House of Representatives, joined Democrats in trying to constrain Trump’s war powers.

Even if younger Republicans, as well as a number of MAGA politicians and pundits such as Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Tucker Carlson, do not want war with Iran, the older senators and congressmen do. Caught in the middle are those like Vice President J.D. Vance who maintain close ties to war skeptical MAGA leaders but are also resolutely pro-Israel. Vance has stood behind Trump and offered no criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu. A devout Catholic, he has often framed his support of Israel in religious terms, appealing to the Republican Party’s evangelical wing.

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If Trump is able to be swayed by traditional foreign policy voices within the Republican Party, like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, then what is MAGA? The same can be asked on domestic policy, with Republicans in Congress struggling to pass omnibus legislation that would accomplish prototypical GOP goals, like slashing Medicaid (the healthcare program for poor Americans) and cutting taxes on the rich.

This is not to say Trump or MAGA didn’t alter the Republican Party — it’s more that most revolutions aren’t total, and there’s a great deal of traditional Republican muscle memory that won’t be neatly eradicated. With Iran, one can see the Trumpists twisting themselves into knots to justify a bombing campaign within an America First, pro-peace framework.  “We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance said on Sunday to NBC’s “Meet the Press”. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth mirrored him at a news conference in the bombing’s aftermath: “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program… this mission was not, has not been about regime change.”

Rhetorically, at least, this is still not the 2003 Republican Party. The George W. Bush administration gladly talked up regime change. They believed it would be easy. These days, there is more caution, relatively speaking, from the Trump White House. But it’s important to remember there is a reason that media celebrities like Carlson are so anti-Iran War now: they know the pulse of the Republican base. They know, generally, where voters are. They hear from viewers and commenters.

Of course, Trump himself is truly a wild card. On 22 June, he posted on social media that “It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’ but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”

If the average Republican politician is gleeful that Trump bombed Iran, the average Republican voter is not. This is the problem for MAGA: a promise really was broken. This is a new war. Foreign policy conflicts have a way of damaging presidencies quickly. Joe Biden has ever really recovered from the well-intentioned but chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Any protracted conflict with Iran will not help Trump, who has already seen his approval ratings slide from January. Politically, there is virtually no upside. A segment of foreign policy hawks, Orthodox Jews, and evangelical Christians might be heartened, but collectively they represent a very small slice of America.

This is the challenge for MAGA. Trump, as long as he is President, can maintain order, but infighting is inevitable and the course to be charted after Trump is not obvious. It’s hard to know, even, where someone like Carlson will land. How genuine are his commitments to the anti-war position? Easy enough to flay someone like Cruz in a clip that goes viral — Cruz could not say, with any certainty, how many people live in Iran — but far harder to challenge Trump directly. All factions of the Republican Party, from neoconservative to isolationist, are kept in line. Even vocal anti-war voices like Greene are resolutely pro-Trump.

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The greater question is what comes next, especially in the later years of the Trump presidency. Trump will be a lame duck, barred from running for a third term. He has flirted openly with defying the US Constitution and that threat should not be taken lightly. But the logistics of a president who would turn 82 in 2028 successfully seizing the nomination and beating a standard Democrat— unlike 2024, Democrats will conduct an open primary, and the best candidate will win it — are far more difficult than they may seem right now. Or, if Trump doesn’t win and claims the election was stolen (again), he’d have to illegally seize power while subduing the armed forces, FBI, and CIA and forcibly lock out the new Democratic president duly sworn in on January 20th, 2029. The reality of Trump is that, given his age and lack of competency, he probably doesn’t have such a coup in him.

MAGA, then, will have to fight it out with Trump fading from view. They will have to decide what they are really about. It’s still a movement that’s more wrapped up in Trump’s whims than anything else, with some intellectualism and high politics grafted on to it. Think tanks have sprung up to try to lend MAGA a more cerebral sheen, but the reality of it all is that Trump has no obvious heir. Yes, Vance is the anointed one as Vice President, but he lacks the raw talent and native charisma to corral such an unruly movement. He is not a star. He is an underperforming one-term senator who got the chance of a lifetime to run on Trump’s ticket. His luck, great so far, could easily run out.

What this all means, ultimately, is that life for the chest-thumping MAGA devotee will only get less peachy from here. Storm clouds are building. The war with Iran is going to go over poorly with the American public, even as Republicans are in lockstep behind it.

It should be remembered that the aforementioned Bush, the President who launched two Middle Eastern wars, was once enormously popular. He won a re-election with a popular vote victory and seemed poised for four years of dominance. Democrats appeared moribund. Instead, he struggled mightily through his second term, voters soured on his wars, and Barack Obama shot to the presidency as a direct rebuke of all that came before. Patience with MAGA is wearing thin. Housing and food still costs too much, the economy isn’t roaring, and now American lives might be at risk overseas. America certainly isn’t being made great again.

No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.” But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and tastes in cuisine.

As more countries become melting pots, thanks to the combination of immigration with assimilation, more nations like the United States will be made up of people who share a common culture, but not common ancestors or a common resemblance.

“Nation” and “state” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they must be different things, otherwise the term “nation-state” would be redundant, like nation-nation or state-state. “State” refers to an organized, independent territorial political community. “Nation” refers to a social community, defined by nonpolitical markers of some kind.

In nation-states, the national community and the political citizenry overlap, though not completely. But in addition to nation-states, there are multinational states with two or more nationalities — Anglophones and Francophones in Canada, Flemings and Walloons in Belgium. And there are stateless nations, like the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Whether you belong to a particular state’s citizenry or a particular national community is an objective question. It is sometimes said that to be an American is to believe in liberal democracy. No “American-ness” (extra-political cultural identity) exists, we are told, only “Americanism” (devotion to a particular political creed). But this gets both the American state and the American nation wrong.

There are three ways to become a citizen of the American state: to be born to one or more parents who are citizens; to become a naturalized citizen after a lengthy process of legal immigration; or to be born on US territory (according to a contested Supreme Court decision). A foreign national who tells a US custom agent, “I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” isn’t immediately granted citizenship.

Nor is there any ideological or credal test in the oath that immigrants must swear to become US citizens; it is a loyalty oath to the government, the state half of the nation-state compound, not a confession of a secular creed: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

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Can Trump make McKinley great again?

By Michael Lind

Is there an American “nationality”, a cultural majority, distinct from the US citizenry? For all of the talk about “American exceptionalism”, the relationship between state and nation in the United States isn’t different in kind from that in other modern countries.

Contemporary countries are shaped by what might be called the Three D’s: decolonization, disestablishment, and desegregation. Most of the countries represented in the United Nations today, including the United States, were created from the partition of a few multinational empires — overseas colonial empires, like the British and French empires, and overland dynastic empires, like those ruled by the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs, whose domains were held together under new communist management until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The newly independent fragments usually have been more ethnically homogeneous than the multinational empire from which they were carved. In most post-imperial states, the numerically largest community — European settlers in the Americas and Australia and New Zealand, the largest tribe in the former dynastic empire — has lent its language to the successor state, and sometimes its name. Poland is the land of the ethnic Poles.

All contemporary nation-states have ethnic minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Not all citizens of Poland are ethnic Poles. The disestablishment and privatization of religion and the abolition of formal racial or ethnic segregation guarantee national minorities civil and political rights equal to those of members of the national cultural majority — in theory, if not always in practice.

The result in modern nation-states is the replacement of a “thick” conception of national identity — uniting language, culture, religion, and biological race — with a thinner but genuine national identity defined chiefly by a shared language and a few customs and cultural references that are shared by most citizens, notwithstanding their religious beliefs and ancestry.

This emphasis on language and customs in defining national identity is a return to the historic norm. For most of human history, settled populations were similar in appearance and ancestry to their nearest neighbors, who were sometimes their greatest enemies. You couldn’t tell which tribe people belonged to merely by looking at them. But whether they spoke your language, and whether they spoke it with an accent or not, could tell you whether they belonged to your community or were outsiders.

In the biblical Book of Judges, the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by forcing suspects to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (an ear of wheat or rye), which the Ephraimites mispronounced as “siboleth”. Hence, the term “shibboleth” for a marker of group identity.

Membership in the cultural nation is defined not only by the language you speak, but also by the language in which you think, the Muttersprache (mother tongue), acquired in most cases in childhood.  Most citizens in a nation-state are members of the linguistic and cultural majority, but belonging to it isn’t and shouldn’t be a condition of citizenship. It is no insult to say that the immigrants Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, and Albert Einstein became great US citizens while remaining cultural Germans.

Of course, outsiders who look no different from insiders can learn to talk like insiders as well. For this reason, in the past, ethnic boundaries among tribes of similar appearance were sometimes reinforced by physical alterations like circumcision, in the case of Jewish men and boys, or by distinctive clothing, ornaments, or hairstyles.

In many premodern Muslim and Christian societies, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars or other badges, turbans or conical hats, or other distinguishing apparel. The Manchu conquerors of Qing China forced men who belonged to the subjugated Han Chinese majority to identify themselves by wearing “queues” or pigtails, on penalty of being beheaded if they refused. Among other things, the end of invidious religious and ethnic discrimination in modern nation-states means that all citizens are free to dress alike and wear the same hairstyles, if they choose.

The lands of European settlement, from the time of Columbus onward, have been exceptions to the historic rule that the cultural nations in a particular region tend to be similar in appearance and ancestry. The Americas from the beginning have been radically diverse, with European colonists living alongside Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and, in some places, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other non-European contract laborers.

The independence of former European colonies in the Western Hemisphere — beginning with the secession of the United States from the British empire in 1776, and followed by the independence of Latin-American countries from Spain and Portugal — initially produced Herrenvolk (master-race) regimes, majoritarian or authoritarian. The descendants of European settlers lorded it over Native Americans, people of African and Asian descent, and mixed-race populations.

In the New World, racial classifications have reflected ruling-class strategies, not anthropological realities. For example, where European settler populations were outnumbered, as in some Caribbean islands, settler elites sometimes pursued a divide-and-rule strategy in which non-European populations were split up into multiple categories, like “mulatto,” “octaroon,” and “quadroon,” which distinguished varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry.

In the Old South, however, all states, save for South Carolina and Mississippi, had white majorities. For strategic reasons, the Southern planter class adopted a strict binary black-white binary based on the “one-drop” rule: anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how minor, was defined as “negro” or “black.”

This definition benefited the planter elite in two ways. First, the one-drop rule maximized the number of unfree workers defined as slaves and, later, as blacks under segregation, by including many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been considered black, and might even have been considered white, in other Western Hemisphere countries like Brazil. At the same time, the fear on the part of poor Southern whites of being defined as black, losing their status and even their freedom, gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of white supremacy, which the Southern ruling class invoked to avert populist uprisings and democratic agitation by non-elite whites.

To be consistent, the US government should have stopped classifying Americans using the arbitrary categories of 19th-century racists at the same time in the 1960s that racial discrimination was outlawed. Tragically, most though not all black American leaders since the 1960s have rejected the idea of colorblind law in favor of a system of “affirmative action” or racial preferences, which can’t work unless all Americans were assigned to one of a few arbitrary “races”: black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American (the precise list has varied with each census since the 1970s).

Since the 1970s, the proponents of “race-conscious remedies” to the legacies of historic American racism have found allies among American corporations, which can use racial tokenism to divert attention from their mistreatment of all workers, and American universities, which similarly have used racial quotas to divert attention from favoritism in admission for “legacies” (children of alumni, particularly big donors).

The premise of the existing system of racial classifications in the United States is that the races, or pseudo-races, are permanent. But in reality, the white-only “melting pot” that blended Anglo-American Protestant settlers with later waves of European “white ethnics” into a single generic white population has become a transracial melting pot, creating a mixed-race American majority with a common language and culture.

Today, 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958, and attitudes are now the same in the South as in the rest of the nation. Interracial marriage rose to 11% in 2020, from 3% five decades earlier, when the US Supreme Court struck down laws against it; among cohabiting (as opposed to married) couples, the figure is 1 in 5.

Among younger Americans, the ratio is greater. Nearly 1 in 3 “Asian” and “Hispanic” newlyweds, and 1 in 5 “black” newlyweds, has married someone of another “race.” The number is lowest among so-called non-Hispanic whites, around 15%, simply because this group remains the largest. One in 10 children born in the United States has parents of different officially defined “races.” Old-fashioned “race” thinkers like Ibram Kendi may insist that the “colorblind” ideal is itself a form of white supremacy. But for growing numbers of Americans, both native and immigrant, love is colorblind.

Progress, right? The problem is that the United States, like all other contemporary democratic nation-states, has below-replacement fertility, meaning its population will shrink without immigration. The combination of large-scale immigration with low native fertility means that in the United States, as in Europe, the share of the population made up of recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants balloons rapidly.

This wouldn’t necessarily seem to threaten the cultural majority, if immigrants assimilated quickly and painlessly to the language and culture of their new country. But it is a problem if large numbers of immigrants choose not to assimilate, or if they are discouraged from doing so. Assimilation does take time. And as the 1990s US Commission on Immigration Reform led by civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan noted, America’s engine of assimilation begins to break down when newcomers are piled on too rapidly.

At the same time, too many on the American Right underestimate the power of assimilation. From the 18^th century to the 21^st, anxieties that immigrant groups would never assimilate to the mainstream in America have been overblown. Irish-Catholic immigrants didn’t overthrow American democracy on behalf of the Bishop of Rome and his Jesuits. Today’s Mexican-American immigrants are assimilating to the mainstream at the same rate over several generations as did the European immigrants of the past, making a mockery of fears that they will turn the American Southwest into a Spanish-speaking Quebec.

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The only ethnic diasporas that have maintained their identities over time in the United States have been self-segregating sectarian communities, like the Amish and the Hasidim. Their numbers are so small that their self-segregation hasn’t caused significant problems, of the kind that would arise if a large share of the US citizenry formed a separatist religious enclave.

Then there are legal obstacles to assimilation. For most of American history, immigrants were assigned a race on coming to the United States. Scandinavian immigrants were assigned to white America; Haitian immigrants were assigned to black America. The combination of racial classifications with state laws against interracial marriage meant that “white” Italian Americans could marry “white” Polish Americans, but not black Americans.

The pan-racial categories of the US Census continue to be used to classify immigrants as well as natives. The results are frequently absurd. On arrival in the United States, immigrants from Denmark and Greece are assigned to the “non-Hispanic white” category, while immigrants from India, China, and the Philippines find themselves assigned to a fictitious “Asian and Pacific Islander” pseudo-race. Arab-Americans are treated as “non-Hispanic whites”, but some support the creation of a new, equally nonsensical category: Middle Eastern and North African, a fake official nationality that would include Arabs, Persians, and (to be consistent) Jews.

Proponents of affirmative action or “equity” or “DEI” want it to be legal to discriminate in college admissions and hiring against non-Hispanic whites, no matter how poor, in favor of “blacks” and “Hispanics”, no matter how rich. The beneficiaries of racial quotas, in addition to elite black and Hispanic Americans, include wealthy and well-educated immigrants — affluent professionals from West Africa, for example, or upper-class South Americans.

Unfortunately, the toxic interaction of America’s legacy racial categories with mass immigration promotes the idea that the important divide is not between Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races), but between so-called whites, blacks, so-called Hispanics, and so-called Asians. Like pan-Aryanism and pan-Africanism, these spurious racial categories never corresponded to any actual communities in the United States or anywhere else. Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.

The equation of race and nation by Right-wing racists and Left-wing multiculturalists is increasingly at odds with social reality. National identity in the future for the most part will be like national identity in the past — but with a post-racial twist. In the past, the members of a tribe usually sounded the same and looked alike. In today’s melting-pot nations, modified by waves of immigration, the members of the majority tribe will sound the same, even if they look different.

Back home, Tucker had some good things to say about Putin, as well as some bad things. But it was the streets and shops of Moscow that really “radicalised” him. The West likes to paint Russia as poor, miserable and oppressed, but Tucker described a perfectly ordinary modern society. The discrepancy between what Tucker had been taught to expect and what he actually saw in Russia didn’t just unnerve him — it made him angry.

Of course, one might point out that Moscow and St Petersburg are Potemkin villages of sorts, covering up the reality of deep poverty in much of the rest of the country. But none of this is ultimately a matter of facts. The conflict between the West and Russia today is now seen as ideological and existential, just as the conflict between communism and capitalism once was. To say something nice about the Russian enemy is to take his side; to say something nice about him that also happens to be true is seen as even more treasonous. Communist Russia was rife with stories about American workers being treated like dirt, toiling under truly awful living standards. After all, America was capitalist, and a capitalist society could never be a good place for a worker to live.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the epic tension that had built up over the decades between the US and Russia fell apart rapidly. Russians queued up to eat at McDonald’s or to buy blue jeans, and they also emigrated to America in droves. Some of them wanted a more stable place to raise their children than the dystopian nightmare that was Nineties Russia, others saw in America a more agreeable form of culture and ideology, and others still just wanted to make money. In 1980, the number of foreign-born Russian speakers in the US numbered less than 200,000. In 2011, that number had hit 900,000.

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Since then, however, things have changed a great deal. The US is no longer the Mecca of foreign talent it once was, as it dives deeper into a geopolitical showdown with Russia, China, and the Brics more generally. The West is faltering both militarily and economically; the US empire is overstretched, practically insolvent, and facing growing exhaustion and disillusionment at home. To complicate this, the West’s own ideological tenets about freedom of speech and respect for human rights ring increasingly hollow. Even Westerners are losing faith in the American project.

While Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia was a one-off, there has been a small but growing trickle of news stories in Western media featuring Americans deciding to brave the Iron Curtain in the other direction. The reasons they give are eerily similar to the ones heard from dissidents in the past: the political system in the West is broken and the politicians have lost the plot; the ruling ideology is out of touch with ordinary people; the standard of living is falling and the cost of living too high. Mostly, the reasons given today have to do with politics rather than economics: in this telling the West is just too “woke”, too materialist, and too sclerotic. Russia, for its part, seems eager to offer “political asylum” to any Westerner with a big enough bone to pick with their home country.

It’s easy to dismiss what’s going on here as an irrelevant fringe phenomenon, but that might turn out to be a very grave mistake in the decade ahead. The ideological angle to these stories — that Russia is engaged in some fanciful or vain project of sheltering the “unwoke” out of some kind of humanitarian concern — is nothing but a fable. It is a velvet glove, hiding a far more calculating economic fist.

The truth of the matter is that Russia — like many other Brics countries now preparing their collective challenge to the West — has been struggling with the question of immigration for quite a long time now. After slowly recovering from the runaway brain-drain that hit it in the Nineties, the Russian state has cautiously moved to reform and rationalise its immigration system, particularly with an eye towards streamlining new channels for highly-skilled migrants. In other words, just the kind of migrants who tend to be in short supply and high demand worldwide. The fact that the Russians are entering into this competition decades late is certainly not lost upon them. During the unipolar moment, the West monopolised the pool of skilled migrants available, while also retaining all the high-value labour created at home. In the dawning multipolar world, however, the West appears not just as a competitor to be bested, but also as a potential goldmine from which an increasing number of migrants can be sourced.

It is only when one understands that the West could potentially become a victim, rather than a beneficiary of future brain drain that recent policy changes within Russia can begin to make sense. To wit, Russia recently announced that anyone living in a Western country “opposed to Russia” shall have access to a special, expedited visa process, exempt from all ordinary immigration requirements. There are no quotas for this kind of immigration, no tests on language skills or knowledge of Russian law, and all the other aspects of this visa process are tailored to be as generous as possible. Applicants only have to demonstrate that they wish to move to Russia due to a disagreement with their home country’s policies that contradict “traditional” Western or Russian values. Even if you’re not interested in Russia, Russia is now interested in you.

Law and consultancy firms that offer help to clients looking to move to Russia aren’t exactly new, and there are a decent number to choose from. This new push toward “Shared Values Visas” from the Russian state, however, is notable in that it coincides with far more sleek and ideologically savvy new ventures into the market. A good example of this trend is “ArkVostok”, the company behind the website movetorussia.com. With the founders having mostly Western educational backgrounds as well as experience working inside Western consultancy firms, the pitch offered here is clearly tailored to appeal precisely to the sort of feelings that Tucker Carlson has recently given voice to. Tired of culture war and DEI? Worried about national debt and unsustainable pension funds? Paranoid about bugs in your burger and GMO-food slowly poisoning your body? Whatever you’re in the market to buy, Russia is in the market to sell.

It is tempting to dismiss this out of hand. What kind of traitor would ever contemplate leaving our glorious Free World ™ to shack up with the enemy, all for the worldly promise of a flat 13% tax rate? Unfortunately, the answer to that question, as history has borne out time and time again, is almost always “more people than you’d think”. While ideology and righteousness are always comforting things to have, consider this quote from Tucker Carlson himself on his experience inside that Moscow supermarket: “Everybody [in the film crew] is from the United States … and we didn’t pay any attention to cost, we just put in the cart what we would actually eat over a week. We all [guessed] around $400 bucks. It was $104 U.S. here. And that’s when you start to realise that ideology doesn’t matter as much as you thought.”

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By Ian Garner

One can say that you can’t put a price on freedom, or morality; that the privilege of living in a free society cannot be measured in something so vulgar as dollars and cents. That’s a nice sentiment, but the reality of the human condition is that these things do have a price. Moreover, this price is often much lower than most of us would like to admit. Communists in the USSR, lest we forget, used to think that no human being would ever abandon socialism just for a pair of blue jeans. If we in the West want to ignore recent history and instead cling to the hope that nobody will ever switch sides just because someone floats an offer of better schools, safer streets, cheaper apartments, and lower taxes, we do so at our own peril.

Besides, to try to minimise the danger presented here by criticising Russia or attacking Putin is to catastrophically miss the point. Though the Shared Values Visa programme tries to present itself as a fairly niche culture war phenomenon, its true nature is not cultural or ideological. It is driven by a ruthless economic logic that is much bigger than Russia itself. Even if Russia’s various attempts at wooing Westerners end up being unsuccessful, it is merely the first vulture to start circling overhead. Many more scavengers are likely to appear before long, each one with a bewitching song of higher real wages, cheaper groceries, and lower taxes.

There are at least two big economic reasons that force this development. First, skilled immigration is simply a good deal. If you can poach a highly educated person of prime working age without paying for his education, you have secured a very expensive and limited resource without having to pay any of the costs involved in training, childcare, and healthcare. This is the main reason that brain drain as a phenomenon has been consistently popular inside the West, even as it has long been hated everywhere else: one side pays all the costs, the other side reaps all the benefits.

The economic logic behind the Shared Values Visa is more ominous, however. It’s often said that Russia has terrible demographics, and in many ways, this is true. Russia’s total fertility rate is around 1.4 children per woman, which is far lower than the replacement rate. Unfortunately, this is actually a completely normal fertility rate in 2024. Very few countries in the EU have fertility rates that are much better than this, and a good number of them are significantly worse. This is not an unknown problem in the West, and the hoped-for solution has long been immigration, preferably of the more highly-skilled kind. Without sufficient immigration, European social welfare systems risk collapsing under the weight of too many old people dependent on taxes levied onto too few young workers.

All this means that Europe is highly vulnerable to the poaching of workers. And indeed, because of how our welfare systems are set up, any outmigration cannot help but trigger a very destructive chain reaction: as people migrate due to high taxes, there’s less workers, meaning taxes will get higher, meaning the push factors to emigrate become even stronger. In this environment of stagnation, an extremely vicious game of musical chairs is likely to dominate, as all countries face the pressure to steal workers from somewhere else, in order to ease the tax burden on the workers that already have citizenship. With an extremely low public debt of around $300 billion and an income tax rate that tops out at 15%, Russia is far better prepared for this kind of competition than most people seem willing to admit. For comparison, America pays three times that amount in annual interest on its whopping $35 trillion debt.

This threat is real, and it is much closer than many think. In fact, the UK in particular is already in a slow-rolling brain-drain crisis. Education is getting increasingly expensive, the population is ageing, and real wages are no longer keeping up with inflation. For now, the main actors trying to poach talent are other countries inside the Western bloc, with America as the principal looter-in-chief. That order of affairs might not last for much longer, however, and America might find itself vulnerable to the same kind of asset-stripping before long. It’s hard to see how brain drain can possibly work out as a net benefit to the West in the years and decades ahead: the great majority of Western countries are now stuck in the same sort of malaise as the UK, with economies entering what now looks like a phase of almost permanent stagnation due to the energy crisis. There is no light at the end of the tunnel: opinion polls instead show an increasingly catastrophic loss of faith among the public in their parties and political institutions.

Brain drain often has ruinous effects on the countries that fall victim to it, even in cases where there’s not a looming demographic crisis threatening to upturn all welfare systems. Russia might be using honeyed words as it tempts people with family values and GMO-free burgers, but those Westerners who now glibly mock the velvet glove might end up bitterly regretting not taking the iron gauntlet hidden underneath more seriously. All of this is strictly business: it is the groundwork being laid in order to loot the West of talent the moment a crisis or moment of weakness strikes, leaving hollowed-out economies and dying communities in its wake. After all, the Russians probably figure, it’s only fair: we did the exact same thing to them.

This is the Republican message of 2024. And it is best articulated by the most important man in the conservative movement, after Donald Trump: Tucker Carlson. Over the past month, Carlson has been travelling America on a speaking tour, visiting 16 different cities with guests including Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Kid Rock, and Russell Brand. The shows have not toured the liberal bastions like New York City or Los Angeles, but cities where the Trumpian message of decline is not only seen and heard, but felt, too.

I see him in Reading, one of the most dangerous cities in Pennsylvania, where violent crime is significantly above the national average and rising. Its school system is failing and buildings are collapsing. At the 7,000 capacity Santander Arena, unhappy residents cram in for Tucker: if there’s a uniform, it’s MAGA regalia, camo vests and Infowars Ts. One member of the faithful tells me that he had already been to three of his shows. “He just understands us,” Chris, clutching two beers, says. “He’s not a politician.”

Tucker isn’t in a t-shirt. He stands out in his own uniform: blazer, chequered shirt, beige chinos and loafers. But he speaks for the crowd. “A leader’s only job is to take care of the people he leads,” he declares. “It’s not to defeat climate change or to defeat Vladimir Putin — or anybody else.” The audience is enthralled, buttressing Carlson’s comments with chants of “USA!” and “Survive till ‘25!”.

His rhetoric is earthy and vulgar, describing the state’s governor and former V-P contender, Josh Shapiro, as “evil”, “creepy” and a “ghoul”. Comparing the governor with a father who abandoned his family, Carlson doubles down on the character assassination. “I don’t care what story he tells you about himself,” he says, “he is a bad father and a bad man.” He’s appalled by a picture of Shapiro signing an artillery shell bound for Ukraine with Zelensky at hand.

Ukraine is a Carlson fixation — representing, as it does, his metamorphosis from Iraq-war supporting neocon to isolationist firebrand. It mirrors a similar evolution on the New Right. Disturbed by the Iraq war and its fallout, Carlson and the new Right became foreign policy radicals, with their outlook defined more by alienation than patriotism. Carlson describes a visit he made to Iraq that precipitated this change of heart. It is also why so many Trump voters in Pennsylvania voted for Obama in 2008, before switching. They did not like Obama per se; they just hated George W. Bush and his foreign-policy adventurism more.

At his best, Carlson is a tribune for the disenfranchised and disaffected, criticising elites for neglecting the interests of their own population in service of the military-industrial complex and other targets like Big Pharma and the banks. At his worst, he is bitter, vindictive and more interested in owning the libs than telling the truth. As Andrew Ferguson described of his days on Fox: “You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump is Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for 10 minutes.”

His gift for oratory, however, is undeniable. In Reading, Carlson speaks for 25 minutes without notes, playing several different characters at once: the nation’s healer (“I’m trying to cool the temperature”), the patriot (“American citizens are your brothers and sisters”), the flame-throwing populist (“our leaders hate you”), the Republican surrogate (“Biden voters have no skills”) and the family man (“a father’s job is to watch over his family”). He works the crowd into a frenzy, creating a carnival atmosphere. “He speaks from the heart,” one raved. “He was talking about this stuff way before anyone else did.”

Carlson never graduated with a diploma or college degree, admitting that he was a straight-D student, which might explain his militant non-conformity. He did, however, love to read, becoming something of an autodidact. But the problem with autodidacts is that they don’t have anyone to tell them when they’re wrong. Perhaps this is why, since losing the institutional guardrails of Fox News last year, Carlson’s interviews have taken on a more conspiratorial flavour, featuring Second World War revisionist historians, gay crackheads claiming to have had sex with Barack Obama, and, of course, Alex Jones.

Jones joined Carlson in Reading this week. During a live show, you don’t watch Jones — you experience him. He marches onto the stage like a WWE wrestler, grabbing the microphone and speaking into the camera as if he was about to challenge John Cena for the world heavyweight title. “When we get President Trump elected,” he booms, “all of us are going to lift the curse off of this country and we’re gonna send the globalists to prison!”

This is not politics. It’s performance art. And watching through this lens, Carlson’s soft-ball questions begin to make more sense. Rather than challenge Jones on his Sandy Hook denialism, for which the talk show host must pay $1 billion to the parents of the shooter’s victims, Carlson instead plays the role of fluffer. “What is it like to always be right?”, “How does it feel to be totally vindicated?” and “I would make fun of you but every word you said is true” are his most common refrains. That is because Carlson understands something about this audience that his liberal critics don’t: they don’t come for a Crossfire interview, they come for entertainment.

Despite liberals’ best hopes, Carlson is not “fading away”. If anything, his influence has grown. His new podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, has had 26 million downloads since its December launch and regularly features in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings (sometimes even beating The Joe Rogan Experience). He is one of the few men to have Donald Trump’s ear, having persuaded the former president to secure RFK Jr’s endorsement, and pushed him to nominate JD Vance as his running mate.

Such is Carlson’s power in conservative circles that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the dog is wagging the tail or the other way around. On Vance’s last visit to Pennsylvania in late August, he attracted a few hundred people to a rally in Erie. Yet during his appearance with Carlson in Hershey last week, he spoke to thousands. And much of what Vance talks about on the trail — deindustrialisation, drug deaths, immigration and opposition to foreign wars — Carlson has been saying for years.

So why doesn’t Carlson run for office himself? Despite being one of the most popular conservatives in America, he has explained that he is just “a talk show host”. Yet to be so closely involved in GOP power politics and have no ambition to enter the fray stretches belief. This man is touring the nation and meeting world leaders — it certainly looks like a dress rehearsal.

The White House would be quite the final destination for Carlson in light of his journey over the past 20 years: from bow-tied geek on CNN, to Rachel Maddow mentor on MSNBC, to uninhibited populist on Fox, and now the truth-seeking conspiracist on his own podcast.

As he gazed out into the Reading crowd, there was a glint in Carlson’s eye that suggested that he had a taste for this. The chanting, the applause, the attention. This is a man, after all, whose whole modus operandi is attention, doing whatever he can to provoke, excite and anger. Wouldn’t the White House be the perfect venue from which to mastermind all those things?

Whether Carlson makes this face strategically is hard to say; it’s certainly a fortuitous way for someone in this line of work to look, but is it also just how he looks, generally. He got a lot of mileage out of it when he was the primetime poster boy at Fox News, monologuing on such matters of national importance as the gender identity of the green M&M. And he’s working it to great effect in his new interview with Larry Sinclair, a man who has spent the past 15 years alleging that he once engaged in a drug-fuelled homosexual liaison, in a Comfort Inn, with the then-not-yet-President Barack Obama.

“What was Obama like on crack?” Carlson asks, and then pulls the trademark face while Sinclair meanders through an answer. It’s a neat trick. The pundit’s new self-produced show on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, is a lower-budget affair than the Fox News position from which he was fired in April; it doesn’t allow for such technical flourishes as a chyron. But he doesn’t need one: Carlson’s expression alone creates the impression of a subtextual thought bubble floating invisibly somewhere above his head: Do you believe this shit?

Full disclosure: I, for one, do not believe this shit. It’s not just Sinclair’s less-than-credible history, which includes multiple convictions for fraud and forgery, or the lie detector test he voluntarily took and summarily failed back in 2008 when he first levelled his allegations. It’s that the substance of Sinclair’s claims is wildly out of keeping with virtually everything we know about Obama, if not in terms of moral goodness, then certainly in terms of his ambition. Even Obama’s fiercest critics would surely concede that a man who structured his entire personal and professional life around making himself electable was unlikely, as a married state senator at the very start of a long-desired and painstakingly planned-for political career, to risk it all for the sake of $250 worth of cocaine and a blowjob.

But more importantly, does Tucker Carlson believe it? It’s not unreasonable to be a little bit cynical on this front. There is, arguably, a burgeoning effort afoot by certain members of the media to take Barack Obama down a peg, retroactively tarnishing his presidential legacy as well as his reputation for being a paragon of moral uprightness. Obama’s continued presence in Washington has been raising eyebrows among conservatives from basically the moment he left office, and some have begun to openly speculate that he’s acting as a sort of puppet master to the addled senior citizen currently occupying the White House.

And of course, there’s the matter of Carlson’s own integrity. Like many American media personalities, he does not necessarily believe all the words that come out of his mouth on camera. Among the revelations that preceded his ousting from Fox were text messages in which he privately contradicted his on-camera stances on Donald Trump and the 2020 election, which he publicly described as a “scam”. “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted a producer in the days after the election had been called for Biden. “I hate him passionately.”

In this case, though, there’s a peculiar twist. Carlson has chosen to platform Sinclair’s allegations, which he describes as “obviously true” — but his ultimate contention is that the substance of the allegations doesn’t even matter.

“You know, in 2008 it became really clear that Barack Obama had been having sex with men, and smoking crack,” Carlson told podcast host Adam Carolla on a recent episode of his eponymous show. “It’s not gonna change the world that Barack Obama likes dudes… I’m just saying, the amount of lying in the media about it was unbelievable. People knew this was true! And it was quite obviously true at the time, and people who covered the campaign didn’t say anything about it because they didn’t want to lose access to the campaign.”

It’s intriguing to realise that as far as Carlson is concerned, the real story — and the most interesting thing about this sordid tale of crack-smoking and secret gay sex — is what it reveals about the relationship between media and government. What’s also intriguing is that this is the one area in which Carlson has something that sort of resembles a point.

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Unlike the #MeToo-era allegations that sank the Senate candidacy of Roy Moore (or, for that matter, the ones that could have caused considerable trouble for Joe Biden in his run for president), Sinclair’s story does not appear to have ever been rigorously investigated by the media. The few stories to even mention Sinclair’s existence also summarily dismissed him as a kook and a criminal — and while journalists’ incuriosity at the time may be understandable (not least because Sinclair is, in fact, a kook and a criminal), it has also ironically created the sense that there might be something there. Conspiracy theories flourish in the dark, which is why even the most ludicrous ones (like, say, the notion that Obama looked on while his personal chef drowned in Martha’s Vineyard) are often worth taking the time to debunk. If journalists had seriously looked into this story back in 2008, and exposed it for the flimsy pile of nonsense it surely is, there would be no intrigue or mystery still swirling around it today.

Alas, there is — and Tucker Carlson knows it. For him, the salacious content of Sinclair’s allegations is essentially irrelevant; if anything, it’s just icing on the cake, a good old-fashioned sex scandal to titillate the senses and besmirch the character of an especially revered elder statesman. The real story, the one that Carlson is not only offering this week but has also been selling in various forms for a decade, is that a cabal of elite power brokers have conspired for 15 years to deprive you — yes, you — of the knowledge that these allegations even exist. It’s the cultivation of what Matthew Teague calls “a conspiracy of knowing”, the sense of being offered a glimpse of the secrets that a faceless, nameless They aren’t telling you.

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Even if Carlson doesn’t believe Sinclair, he does seem to believe this: that the allure of forbidden knowledge is so exciting that it renders moot any question of whether that knowledge is true. This is what Carlson’s critics miss when they condemn him for giving airtime to such a sordid, unverified story (even Elon Musk had doubts as to the newsworthiness of the interview), or point to it as further evidence of how far Tucker has fallen since his days at Fox. Carlson’s transformation from hacky pundit to tabloid bottom-feeder is a salacious bit of gossip in its own right, but is it the real story? Or is it about something bigger: power, and the question of who is in thrall to whom?

With the imprimatur of a Fox News primetime spot, Carlson could claim to be a bold truth-teller, the rare insider who would give it to you straight and make you feel lucky to get it. Without it, he’s just another guy trying to spin — and sell — a story. It’s a tale of audience capture as old as time; one minute you’re riding high as a media industry insider, the next you’re hawking virility supplements and shouting about gay frogs. Carlson isn’t quite there yet, but the altered symbiosis between him and his audience makes it all but inevitable. He isn’t doing this because it’s what he wants. He’s doing it because it’s what you want.

And in this, he’s not alone. In a world where a subscription-based model of journalism blurs the line between consumer and customer, entertainment takes precedence over information more often than not, and journalism evolves from a truth-seeking enterprise into a bias-stroking device. And as long as people believe that the news should make them feel good, and their enemies look bad — and as long as any attempt to inject truth or nuance is met with threats of revolt — we have a future full of many, many more Larry Sinclairs to look forward to.

He had started his Washington career working for the Right-leaning Weekly Standard magazine. In a town of grey suits and cement blocks, he wrote with cleverness and style. I covered local crime for a small newspaper in Alabama. But I wanted to write like he did, so I asked: to work for the Weekly Standard, did I need to buy into a whole ideology? Or could I write for the Left-leaning New Republic, too? I wanted to tell all kinds of stories.

I’ve returned to his answer many times since. “Just pick a side,” he said.

In the years that followed, Carlson rose, then fell, then rose higher again, and often I wondered how he did it. I believe among the millions of words he employed — the thundering waterfall of words; the warring, imprecatory, wheedling words — only one mattered most: “you”.

This was his great insight. Instead of describing events from around the globe with detachment, he invited viewers into a conspiracy of knowing. It was a modern Gnosticism, a rebellion outside the gates of information. And his audience — an ageing, shrinking middle class — found that call irresistible. It was ingenious television.

Never mind that he was one of the most influential figures in the ruling party. Never mind that the most powerful news network paid him $20 million per year for that influence, on the highest-rated cable news show in history. It wasn’t about him. The mobs are coming for you.

Then, a few months ago, Carlson suddenly lost his lofty seat. In a book published today, he claims Fox News fired him as part of a $787.5 million deal with Dominion Voting Systems, after the network broadcast Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud. “They agreed to take me off the air, my show off the air, as a condition of the Dominion settlement,” Carlson says in Tucker, a biography by Chadwick Moore. “They had to settle this.” (Dominion’s lawyers flatly deny this: “Dominion made no requests or demands whatsoever regarding Mr Carlson’s employment with Fox.”)

In the days after his downfall, Carlson posted a video to social media in which he described how most of it — the whole televised political battle — was a sham, but that he would soon reveal the truth. And he concluded with a final, second-person invitation: “See you soon.”

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Now Carlson truly does find himself cast outside the gates, maybe for the first time. He’s been an insider since his magazine stories turned into occasional television appearances, which became regular guest spots on CNN, then a hosting job on the show Crossfire, which pitted him against the liberal commentator Paul Begala. Carlson’s most famous moment on that show was a catastrophic encounter in 2004 with the comedian Jon Stewart, who accused Carlson and Begala of faking their outrage. “You’re partisan — what do you call it? — hacks,” Stewart said. He had drawn back a curtain to reveal the machinery of television debate, and the show never recovered. CNN soon cancelled it.

Carlson moved to MSNBC, where he hosted a show called Tucker. It never really caught on, and after its cancellation Carlson retreated to start a website called The Daily Caller, a conservative tabloid that gained popularity but never much respect as a real source of news. Then, in 2013, Carlson began his true upward trajectory, joining Fox News to co-host the chatty Fox & Friends. In 2016, he took over his own primetime show.

His timing was serendipitous, coming in the churn of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. But Carlson didn’t win an audience of millions by accident; he was exceptionally effective at the job, in ways small and large. His pacing, for instance, is impeccable. Speaking on television is hard — too slow and you’re plodding, too fast and you seem nervous — but Carlson had perfect timing. More importantly, he understood historical timing; as white Americans shifted from majority towards minority, many hardened into a political bloc and eyed institutions with distrust. Carlson recognised the power in their grievance and made a shift alongside them, casting himself as a populist voice for the forgotten and downtrodden.

It was a deft dance with his audience. It required them to forget that he rose to prominence wearing a bow tie, an affectation he began at preparatory school; that he lunched at The Palm on DuPont Circle in Washington, deep inside the Beltway; that he embodied the very Republican establishment against which he raged. It required him to rage for you.

Carlson and his producers pioneered a new style of commentary. Instead of bowing to Jon Stewart’s accusations of manufactured outrage, they built a full-scale factory. It worked like this: producers would scour the American landscape for someone — anyone — behaving in outlandish ways. Hyper-wokeness worked best, but sheer nuttiness served at a pinch. Then they presented this fringe behaviour as central, as representative of them, the un-Americans who would supplant you.

It started with mere exaggeration about issues that genuinely, legitimately, do matter to Americans. Immigration, for instance. In 2017 in Pennsylvania, a Roma refugee child couldn’t make it to a bathroom on time, pulled down his pants, and defecated outside. By the time Carlson injected the story into the national consciousness, “gypsies” had overrun the town and left “streets covered — pardon us now, but it’s true — with human faeces”.

Viewers reacted with anger and fear. And soon Carlson’s show grew so big it competed less against other news programmes than the internet itself. But rage is a market with inflation. By the end of his tenure at Fox, Carlson railed against candy: “Woke M&Ms have returned. The green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe?”

For a time, a conscientious viewer could overlook the widgets tumbling from Carlson’s outrage assembly line because they mattered so little. “You know the official story about pandas. They’re cute but adorably helpless, which is why they’re almost extinct,” he told viewers in 2018. “But like a lot of what we hear that’s a lie.”

Then, in 2020, the country suffered a presidential election so fractious it tore at the fabric of American society. The author Mark Bowden and I wrote a book about the effort to overturn that election, and much of our attention went to the literal machinery of democracy: the vote tabulators made by Dominion and Smartmatic. As we pieced together accounts from county-level election officials — themselves almost all conservative Republicans — reality diverged ever-further from the version put forward by Carlson and his colleagues on Fox News. And we wondered: how are they getting away with this?

Carlson had retooled the factory, and instead of cranking out horny pandas and woke M&Ms, the show offered viewers conspiracies about matters of life and actual death. The apparatus of democracy. The January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The war in Ukraine.

Segments from Tucker Carlson Tonight started appearing in Russia’s internal propaganda. And suddenly he wasn’t getting away with it. Dominion weighed in with a gargantuan defamation lawsuit against Fox News, a suit so strong that Fox scrambled to apologise, repeatedly and in prime time. Then, thanks to the suit, the private text messages of Fox’s biggest stars went public, revealing that they didn’t believe the lies from Trump’s team. “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote of Trump’s lawyer, to a colleague. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.” Carlson didn’t believe any of it. But he had picked a side.

Uglier, if less consequential, revelations followed. The day after the January 6 attacks, for instance, Carlson had sent the following text to a producer:

“A couple of weeks ago, I was watching a video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight.”

All of it — the Dominion reporting, the hypocrisy about Trump, the racist messages — led Fox News in April to pull their highest-rated host from the air. In Tucker, Carlson’s biographer describes Carlson’s downfall not as the consequence of his own actions, but instead, naturally, as the result of a conspiracy with foreboding consequences for the reader: “What’s most stunning was the brazenness. A major network had caved to political and regulatory pressures, and the leftists behind it didn’t even feel the need to pretend otherwise. This is the way healthy societies die.”

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Carlson remains under contract with Fox — still receiving a paycheck according to the new book — although he has created a showdown with the network since then by broadcasting on Twitter (since renamed “X”). The videos portray Carlson in exile, and there’s an element of truth to it. He’s still fabulously wealthy and famous, but he no longer sits on the Fox News throne. Instead, he broadcasts from a less polished set, where he uses his hand to scroll his own teleprompter, and his shows feel like an attempt to grab a piece of a younger, online zeitgeist. Take the two-and-a-half-hour interview with “alpha male” influencer Andrew Tate, which Carlson began by claiming public schools in America are removing urinals from boys’ bathrooms because “masculine qualities are oppressive” and boys should “sit down when you pee, like a good little girl”. Carlson used a different set, for that episode, as Tate is under house arrest in Romania, awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking.

It is impossible to say where Carlson will go next. Maybe he’ll find a larger, younger audience. Maybe, like Howard Stern, the former broadcast radio shock jock who turned to satellite radio, he’ll shift to a narrower but even more lucrative format. Only one option seems unimaginable: that he could simply fade away.

At the end of the new biography, Carlson muses on his future, and makes what he intends to be a jab at television. One last conspiratorial offering for you. But for years he was the leading voice on the format, so instead it comes across as unintended confession: “You can tell when someone’s lying to you or when someone’s shading the truth or trying to spin you,” he says. “And there’s a lot of artifice in television.”

That was then. By now, however, he’s proven to be provocative in all the wrong ways, even before the scandalous Fox News-Dominion case. Out went any thoughtful explanations for the social and economic ills of American life, and in came the repetitive culture war agitprop, the febrile conspiracism, and the bizarre advertisements for esoteric “bronze age” lifestyles. Tucker’s segment on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, in which he blamed it on wokeness, was typically vapid and asinine. His recent outlandish attempt to legitimise the sordid events of January 6, denounced even by Republicans, is yet another case in point. And though he apparently hates Donald Trump “passionately”, he still knowingly amplifies his lies nearly every week. My disappointment with Tucker is even greater when I remember the admiration I felt on the first day I met him.

“Tucker! I’m your biggest fan!” I yelled across the crowded hotel ballroom. That was not quite true: I don’t think I had ever sat through a single episode of Tucker Carlson Tonight, but I had watched enough clips and read enough articles about the Fox News host to know that he was a cut above Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and all the other talking heads on that channel. Like Hegel seeing Napoleon at a distance, Tucker appeared to me on that hot and humid Washington summer day in 2019 as the very Weltgeist of the populist age — even more than Trump — and I had pushed and shoved my way through a crowd of conservative activists to be close to the star himself. A nice man nearby took my iPhone and took shots of us as Tucker put his arm around me.

“WHERE ARE YOU FROM?!” Tucker asked in a tone of ebullient surprise, perhaps in reference to my ethnicity, as I was one of a sparse number of non-white attendees at the first National Conservatism Conference. I found it endearing rather than offensive, as some others might have taken it. I told him that I was a citizen of Canada and a student at the University of Toronto who was interning for the magazine American Affairs. “CANADA?!”, he boomed, “I think Canadians often know America better than Americans!” I nodded my head, shook his hand, and walked away ecstatic. Not only did I meet the Weltgeist, but the picture I got of the moment was priceless. I had an impish grin that perfectly captured my excitement while Tucker had a mirthful, red-faced expression: we looked like two old pals.

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When I showed it to friends back in Toronto, they froze in horror. The lot of them were good liberals, after all, but the strange thing was that so was I — even more incongruously, I was also a big-L Liberal, as in a supporter of the Trudeau Liberals. Unable to put two and two together, one friend said: “You might be the only human being who’s a Justin Trudeau Liberal in Canada and a Trump-Tucker Republican in America… Are you some kind of ideological schizophrenic?” While that was not quite the case, the observation nonetheless hit on the peculiarity of my worldview.

I told my friend that in this time of revolutionary change, old political labels were fading into obsolescence. Yes, on the surface, there could be no greater contrast between the two poles of the culture war. However, this was an illusory distinction. In fact, the elections of Trudeau and Trump represented a common response to late-stage neoliberalism. As evidence, I showed my friend another picture, perhaps no less shocking and incriminating than the one of me and Tucker: it was of Steven Bannon and Gerald Butts — the High Dark Lord of Trumpworld and the Grand Vizier of the Trudeau Court — merrily chumming around in the White House in 2017. An article in the New Yorker explained the context for this unlikely friendship:

“They met in New York during the transition and now talk regularly. Bannon sees Butts as a sort of Left-wing version of himself. Last year, as the Prime Minister’s popularity was in decline, Trudeau pushed through a tax hike on the rich, and it helped him rebound… Bannon wants to sell the idea politically by arguing that it would actually hit Left-wing millionaires in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Hollywood… ‘There’s nothing better for a populist than a rich guy raising taxes on rich guys,’ Butts told Bannon.”

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Indeed, the first several months of the Trump administration were still very much alive with the possibility of a genuine populist revolution: not only did Bannon, on Butts’ advice, recommend hiking taxes on the rich, Trump’s close friend, Christopher Ruddy, CEO of Newsmax, was pushing a proposal to build on Obamacare and expand public healthcare for the benefit of the multiethnic working class. But instead of following through on such radical instincts, Trump sold out to the Paul Ryan wing of the party: he passed a massive tax cut, tried to abolish Obamacare, failed on immigration reform, and further deregulated the economy, essentially retaining the Bush-Ryan playbook on nearly every major issue outside of trade — and even that fell short of its goals.

As Trump revealed himself to be nothing more than a neoliberal shill, it seemed as if the only one left to hold the populist line was Tucker Carlson. Here was a conservative who was not afraid to punch up: calling out the Koch Brothers for their malign influence on the GOP, and criticising the Trump-Ryan tax cut as a cave-in to corporate interests. This was the Tucker Carlson I came to see in July 2019 and he didn’t disappoint; the speech he gave at that conference was a clarion call for a new conservatism, one that had more in common with the pro-worker economic populism of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders than with Milton Friedman’s pro-shareholder laissez-faire fetishism.

Around this time, I wrote an admiring profile of Tucker in my school newspaper, part of a series on promising post-neoliberal figures: it also included Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, two young leaders who both ran on regulating immigration. I realised that it mattered less if one was a conservative like Tucker or Kurz or a progressive like Trudeau or Ardern, as long as their actions reflected the populist drive toward containing the excesses of neoliberal globalisation by regaining control over borderless flows of capital, goods, and labour. In my mind, the culture war paled in comparison to this problem, and, though I didn’t care for either the woke sanctimony of Trudeau or the gross reactionary undertones of Tucker, I was willing to put up with their disagreeable soundbites so long as their policies contributed to this larger goal.

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Based on this logic, I resolved to use my position as a culture-war-neutralist Canadian writing in American outlets to inform the US policy debate in ways that were uniquely critical and dispassionate. As Tucker himself suggested, Canadians think about the US more than we’d care to admit — if for no other reason than our survival depended on it. Or as Marshall McLuhan put it, Canada was the perfect “counter-environment” through which to examine the hegemonic American “world environment”.

There was no more pressing issue where the Canadian perspective could be of help to Americans than immigration. Even under Trudeau, Canada is a lot tougher and smarter on migration than the US was under Trump: for instance, Canada has its own longstanding equivalent to mandatory E-Verify — a proposal long advocated by hard-Right American immigration hawks — that neither Trump nor DeSantis could get passed. Trump himself has said: “I think we should have merit-based immigration like they have in Canada.”

If American populists cared to see beyond the woke packaging, they would realise that Canada already had many of the policies they dream about: on family policy, eligible Canadian families enjoy a tax-free monthly payment to help with the cost of raising children (an idea not very different from Trump’s recently floated “baby bonus”). On reviving the heartland, Canada has “equalisation” that transfers money from rich regions to poorer ones like Atlantic Canada, which like much of the Trump-voting American Midwest, is heavily deindustrialised and predominantly white. On bank regulation, 563 banks failed in the US from 2001 to 2023 — Silicon Valley Bank being the latest — and there have been 12 systemic banking crises since 1840. Canada, on the other hand, has had zero bank collapses in the past 25 years and zero systemic crises since its foundation, due to its tightly-regulated Hamiltonian financial system — the opposite of America’s fragmented Jacksonian one. Taking up any one of these ideas could have helped to redeem the populist promise of 2016.

But rather than converging around a programme of economic reconstruction for the benefit of ordinary citizens, whatever their race or identity, the populist movement was subsumed into the sinkhole of the culture war. And Tucker played a leading part in this process.

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The last time I found myself in full agreement with Tucker was in the summer of 2020, when he called out the Leftist rioters who wrought havoc on the streets of American cities. However, six months later, when pro-Trump rioters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, Tucker rushed to depict that riot as a frame-up — or, depending on the day, to valorise the perpetrators as peaceful patriots. The kind of moral relativism that says “Yes — but the other side does it too!” is the culture war in a nutshell. In the years that followed, Tucker’s coverage devolved into a reductive culture war kabuki play, in which he appeared to care more about “owning the libs” than revolutionising the economy.

Around this time, the populist instinct in the US, across Left and Right, had transformed, from an imperative to represent the people’s best interests into a desire to transgress all rules and give expression to the spirit of mob rule. This marked a shift in my worldview. When I first read about the French Riots of May 1968, I sympathised with the glamorous radicals, whereas now I see the merit in maintaining public order above all. Where I once imagined myself singing the Internationale with the students in the Latin Quarter, I now think I would have joined the counter-demonstration in the Champs-Elysées, calling for General de Gaulle to re-establish order. I have never felt more fortunate to be a Canadian than in that period when the US descended into chaos.

But then, as I feared, the Jacobin fever soon crossed the border in the form of the 2022 trucker convoy, which desecrated our national capital and engaged in economic sabotage by blocking Canada’s border crossings and costing the economy billions in lost trade. Just as I didn’t discriminate in expressing my opposition to either “Defund the Police” or “Stop the Steal”, I couldn’t care less about the specific nature of their grievances, for no civilised cause could justify such reckless and vulgar emotional hedonism as was on display. I never thought the convoy were fascists: I took them at their word when they described themselves as “the Woodstock of our time”. And this was precisely why they had to be opposed, for it was the same anarchistic spirit of the late Sixties.

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It also became clear that these “populists” were not speaking on behalf of the people, but were often privileged members of the political class, who egged on the mob and used the name of the people to indulge their own ambitions. It was perhaps as a rebuke to the pretensions of would-be demagogues that Alexander Hamilton exclaimed: “Your people, sir, is a great beast!” The task of restoring economic sovereignty in a post-globalised world still had to be accomplished, but from now on by means other than populism.

I’ve never been reluctant to criticise Trudeau, but I was never more in agreement with his actions than when he finally shut down the convoy: order had to be restored. Predictably, Tucker and his followers on both sides of the border regarded it as nothing less than tyranny and in January, he casually called for a Bay of Pigs-style invasion to avenge the convoy and “liberate” Canada. All of a sudden, Tucker was a regime-change-loving neocon! It was just a bad joke, of course, at least, I think.

However, the invasion of Canada has already begun, mentally if not militarily. Instead of America becoming more like Canada through the adoption of reforms, Canada is becoming more like America through the culture war. Every day, our liberals sound more like American liberals, regurgitating all the latest progressive academic jargon, while our conservatives sound more like MAGA Republicans, parroting Q-like conspiracy theories and waving the Stars and Stripes.

Canada stands for freedom and order, argued Tory nationalist philosopher John Farthing: “That, if you will, is our national romance and on that basis alone we should be ready to pit [a single] Mountie against all the Jesse Jameses of Wyoming.” It is a terrible yet glorious thought: for the day that last Mountie dies is the day Canada dies, and the day Tucker Carlson wins.

I doubt Carlson really longs to go for a drink with cartoon confectionery. But this isn’t the first culture war over the sexuality, or otherwise, of imaginary cartoon nonhumans. Last year, there was Minnie Mouse’s trouser suit, and in 2021, Space Jam’s Lola Bunny gained clothes and lost the bouncy boobs because, according to the makers of Space Jam 2, the previous depiction had “objectified” her.

These aren’t just a more than usually frivolous outcrop of the ever-present culture wars. They can also be read as evidence, writ small, of something bleaker: the accelerating collapse of cultural creativity into endless, stagnant, and usually woke reboots and remixes.

But there’s hope amid  the despair: the M&Ms story offers a glimpse of emerging, net-native narrative forms that look nothing like anything from the print era. And this is a development with far-reaching implications for those currently preoccupied with how (or if) artistic renewal is possible.

This is a growing number, too. For it feels as though “culture” has hit the wall. The novelist Ewan Morrison lamented with this sense of stasis recently, arguing with the late cultural critic Mark Fisher that “the future has disappeared”. This has left us, he suggests, an oppressive sense of eternal present where, instead of new narratives, “the arts have been dominated by remakes, reboots, sequels, spin-offs and imitations, leaving an ever-shrinking space for genuine creativity and new ideas”.

Of the 40 “most anticipated films” in 2023, for example, only three were original screenplays. Goldeneye, a classic video game, has just been relaunched for Switch. Morrison deplores that “The techno-capitalist future will be a kind of Groundhog Day”, in which “we’re consuming the same reprocessed products again and again and again”.

And this threatens to strand us in what I’ve come to think of as “Human Centipede culture”, after that cult horror movie in which victims are stitched together mouth-to-anus, forcing each to consume the excreta of the one in front. For an onrush of generative AI technologies is already accelerating this proliferation of reboots. Buzzfeed has augmented its human writers with quiz-writing AI, while futurists predict a deluge of automated content in every field from art to pornography that will swamp our ability to tell who is human — or to care.

Battles about the latest reboot of some or other cartoon icon, in movies and advertising, likewise convey this sense of ever emptier culture-as-regurgitation. But where did all the original stories go? Morrison blames corporate entertainment conglomerates. But while this is part of the picture, it’s also a side-effect of the creative class coming adrift — alongside the ruling elites — from the material world.

And this is to a significant extent an effect of the digital revolution. As we slide further into that revolution, these changes are producing escalating class conflict riddled with surreal (and often bitterly controversial) phenomena, from the moralisation of pandemic policy, through declaring Black History Month more important than water, to the obvious cruelty and absurdity of letting males who identify as women compete against female athletes or be incarcerated alongside women. Throughout, the governing political cleavage today is over when — or even whether — the world as it is matters more than the world as it should be.

This has subtler effects too, on art and culture. The philosopher and mechanic Matthew Crawford argues that the hidden tradeoff of “user-friendly” modern technologies is in increasing our sense of mastery and control over the material world, at the cost of the more efficacious mastery that comes from understanding what he calls its “affordances” — which is to say potential, and limits.

Crawford cites the difference between a car or motorbike whose direct steering provides feedback on road surface and demands a tactile harmony with the vehicle, and how it feels to drive modern vehicles which are partially controlled by computer: a development that both empowers and de-skills the driver. Elsewhere, the essayist Beth Tilson makes a similar contrast between abstract knowledge, and what she calls “literacy of the fingers”. Tilson describes how learning to make bread required gaining this literacy, which she contrasts with the kind of abstract knowledge that is more generally privileged in the modern world – but is no less essential.

I agree: there’s an unbridgeable gulf between writing about bread, and knowing by touch when a bowlful of dough is ready to prove. This knowledge was once widespread, and echoed by a multiplicity of other tactile forms of engagement with the world. And this sense of rootedness in the physical, Crawford argues, is discernible in golden-era animation – a fact perhaps linked to the sheer laboriousness of making such work. I hadn’t appreciated just how time-consuming this is, until my daughter and I had a go at stop-motion animation; we produced, after an entire morning’s work, a single second of footage. The sheer volume of artistic work and skill poured into making the classic, hand-drawn Disney animations is staggering.

Perhaps the most (to date) under-priced impact, in cultural terms, of first the technologisation, and now digitisation, of everything, is the way it attenuates these tactile relationships with the world. As we lose embodied knowledge about the material world’s affordances, forms which previously seemed self-evident come to seem weightless, empty, and naff. We are deprived of affordances to think with.

This is perhaps easier to see in the built environment. Online advocates of “trad” architecture are fond of asking architects what’s stopping them building in classical styles, usually implying that this signals moral decline. But the actual answer is less moral than material: traditional, beloved architectural styles aren’t there for the pretty. They’re required by the limits of what you can build in brick, stone, or wood without the structure collapsing under its own weight. But modern materials such as steel girders and reinforced concrete eliminate many of those constraints, meaning architects are suddenly freer to build any shape they wish.

It’s difficult to know where to begin with anything, if you could build anything. In architecture, this produces sometimes mind-bending results: structures that play with the liquefaction of real-world material constraints.

The digital transformation does something equivalent to our cultural life. For Crawford, this is visible in the contrast between older animated works — with their clear if playful relationship to the laws of physics — and the weightless quality of contemporary Disney Club content. Here, there’s no sense of struggle with, or submission to, material reality. Instead CGI animations — a medium that’s always somehow eldritch and insubstantial, compared with hand-drawn styles — depicts storylines in which some kind of physical challenge is solved by the arrival of a deus ex machina technology.

And with culture grown weightless by the loss of real-world material references, no wonder we get stuck with reboots. There’s simply too little common material frame of reference left to do anything but re-work existing IP.

Meanwhile, the arguments about sexy cartoons keep recurring precisely because these serve as proxy for a running battle about how far the de-materialisation of everything can be pushed. McCartney, designer of pantsuits, spoke for the weightless when she crowed that “This new take on her signature polka dots makes Minnie Mouse a symbol of progress for a new generation,” explaining: “She will wear it in honour of Women’s History Month in March 2022.” It may seem absurd, but McCartney’s perspective simply reflects the fact that, in practical terms, for those now “liberated” from material constraints, sex dimorphism really isn’t very important — because for both sexes, “work” means staring at a computer.

Should this class and worldview prevail, the triumph of reboot culture is all but assured. But even if, as seems likely, this signals the end of art and culture as we know it, the final twist in the M&Ms controversy suggests storytelling may yet make a comeback in new, net-native, wholly de-materialised form. For it transpires that the controversy was, in fact, manufactured: a synthetic culture war incited to induce the predictable backlash, then inflamed further by announcement that the “spokescandies” would be withdrawn.

They haven’t. There will be a new M&Ms advert featuring them at the next Super Bowl. The whole thing was a confected, participatory, net-native drama, played out on the giant collective swarm-canvas of online culture-war controversy, with everyone – even Tucker Carlson – playing their part.

And the aim? To sell you empty calories. Nothing could offer a clearer illustration of how completely commerce and culture fuse, in the emerging narrative genre of mass-participation, online swarm theatre.

But there might be a way forward, and it lies in the germ of sense in Carlson’s protest against the “spokescandies”. He speaks for many in standing for the truth that the world isn’t actually weightless and radically liquid. The material world is still, well, material, for everyone outside the laptop class. For most people on the planet, water is considerably more important than Black History Month. And the affordances of sex dimorphism come sharply back into view the moment you do a manual job, or have a child, or in fact depart the realm of ideas for embodied life for any length of time at all.

And this, in turn, underlines the fact that we don’t need to resile into endless remixes. There is, in fact, no shortage of material affordances to think with. The biggest obstacle to reviving art and culture is the class with a stranglehold on the means of cultural production. For, whichever side of the political aisle they claim to sit, this class will fight tooth and nail to avoid relinquishing their technologies, and re-acquainting themselves with the constraints of the material world.

There’s a great deal of subterranean argument online about the whys and wherefores of creating “dissident art”. But it’s up against a monolith of determined de-materialisation, and the Human Centipede culture this produces. Perhaps our only hope lies in artists and storytellers willing to seek out beneficial constraints to think with – and able to transmute these into images and stories that still carry the world’s true weight.

Recently, the label has made multiple forays into the gothic, not least by mining the aesthetics of climate collapse for several recent shows. (As one women’s magazine enthused: “Balenciaga brought the apocalypse to Paris and we’re here for it.”) So perhaps brand managers expected the disturbing imagery of young kids surrounded by bondage gear to be treated as just another subversive juxtaposition in the service of selling things. This time, however, the bourgeois were not so much thrillingly épaté as absolutely bloody incandescent — because they assumed that childhood itself was being sold.

Internet sleuths quickly tracked down details of an earlier Balenciaga campaign, in which background props had included a Supreme Court ruling on the illegality of child pornography, as well as a book by an artist controversial for depicting tortured children in his work. The two separate campaigns were quickly conflated by commentators, jointly presented as a case of paedophilic imagery gloating lasciviously in plain sight. Some observers went further, interpreting the placing of lettered packing tape in the most recent campaign as spelling out a reference to Baal, the Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices.

In some quarters of the populist Right, where the legacy of QAnon still looms large, Christmas had come early. Tucker Carlson weighed in, bravely putting his own history of joking about child rape behind him, to connect the incident to groomer discourse and admonish the world to “stop sexualising kids”. Creepy geezer-bro Andrew Tate argued that Balenciaga was being deliberately open and explicit about paedophilic sympathies because the “people who are in charge of these brands, and of the Western world” are “Satanists” who deliberately “tell you what they are doing” in order to avoid karmic retribution for their sins. (Any reflection by Tate on earlier frank admissions of his that “I am absolutely sexist and I’m absolutely a misogynist” went unrecorded.)

Though — of course — I don’t know the truth of what actually happened at Balenciaga, it seems to me that the “deliberately paedophilic” interpretation is probably wrong. But that doesn’t mean the whole thing was an accident. As others have suggested, rather than acting as a direct manifestation of a paedophile conspiracy, it seems more likely that the campaigns were offering knowing nods to the aesthetics of paedophile conspiracies. Viewed in this light, the problem is not so much the imagery but that the proles on the internet hadn’t done a Masters in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths.

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This interpretation is in keeping with the modus operandi of high fashion. The higher the couture, and the more luxurious the brand, the more effort must be made to signal this status to the world. One traditional way to do this is by using hand-embroidered silks and other gorgeous fabrics to make clothes. But a reality-transcending brand image can also be achieved by dressing women up in totally impractical garments they can’t walk or get through doors in, or — as Balenciaga also recently did — by inducing a celebrity such as Kim Kardashian to wear ridiculous facemasks in public on a number of occasions.

As Louise Perry has argued, fears about paedophilia are often viewed by liberals as classically low-status, and associated by them with the “ignorant and credulous working classes”. And so, ironically sneering about low-status cultural fears about paedophiles, in a way only detectable to a few knowing onlookers, is automatically high-status. Job done. Or it would have been, had it not proved understandably impossible for most onlookers to tell the difference between representation and reality.

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Liberals have a fetish problem

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As with Balenciaga’s attraction to the gothic, the fashion world more generally has long played about with savagery and psychic darkness for the purposes of selling people things they don’t need. In practice this often means glamourising various terrible things done to women. Alexander McQueen’s first two (visually stunning) collections were called “Jack the Ripper and his Victims” and “The Highland Rapes”. A 2007 Dolce & Gabbana ad campaign was highly suggestive of gang rape, and a 2003 Sisley campaign of bestiality between a woman and a bull.

Generally speaking, the fashion industry is littered with pictures of young women with a sexualised, exploited, fetishised, or downright quasi-paedophilic vibe. And female consumers apparently lap it up — perhaps because they tell themselves, accurately, that promoting abusive sex is not the direct point. As with everything else in the fashion world, nothing is positively asserted, but only referred to obliquely or quoted in order to generate interest in the clothes.

Yet when you look at some of the blank-eyed skeletal young models who still tend to be preferred by designers, it’s impossible to maintain that the casual brutality dished out to women in the representational realm of fashion doesn’t have consequences for the real one. Models are treated by the fashion world as living dolls you can pick from a book purely on the basis of appearance, then dress them up, choose their poses, control their food intake, and fly them around the world to serve you, until you don’t want them anymore. Granted, not every model is skinny or young these days, but even those who aren’t are just as heavily objectified — every personalised aspect of them being diminished to a commercially favourable appearance, interchangeable with some other commercially favourable appearance, should the originally-booked girl have a breakdown or get a breakout.

But at least most models are adults, technically anyway. For me, an under-explored aspect of the Balenciaga scandal is the apparent fact that parents somewhere have let their very young children be photographed in these campaigns. It is bad enough to represent grown adults as slack-jawed, vacant children, but a lot worse to turn children into slack-jawed, vacant little adults. Generally speaking, I marvel in horror at parents who use their children to make money by modelling or acting in adverts. No matter how much fun children allegedly have doing it, or how much money goes into their trust funds because of it, there is nothing about having one’s appearance objectified by strangers for money that’s compatible with healthy childhood development.

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And of course, it’s not just commercial modelling. Famous for admonishing us against using other humans as mere means to our ends, Kant also warned that “parents cannot regard their child as, in a manner, a thing of their own making”. Then again, he wasn’t on Insta. The internet is full of influencers using their own children for likes and clicks. If social media has turned many of us into narcissists, then it seems to have turned our children into narcissistic extensions of ourselves — only there to say something flattering about who we are. A generation of kids are growing up, made supremely conscious of how their bodies and faces look as they go about their daily lives, before they really know anything else about themselves. And we made them that way.

Moral panics get off the ground partly because they pick up on unconscious forces genuinely rippling through a culture. It doesn’t seem to me a coincidence that there’s increasing prurient interest in paedophilia and grooming at the moment, when at the same time there have never been so many culturally acceptable ways to objectify your own child. Paedophilia — which of course exists, and nobody should pretend different — involves the egregious and permanently life-changing treatment of a living human child as a sexual object. But there are subtler ways to use children as means to adult ends. We can sign them up to a modelling agency. We can put them in a beauty pageant. We can upload their pictures with amusing captions on Facebook, in a way that makes us look like good parents.

So the original fear about Balenciaga — that they are selling kids — was perhaps not entirely wrong. If not kids, then collectively we are at least selling childhoods. And the hideous teddy bear fetish bags highlighted in the doomed ad campaign now seem to me to be an uncannily apt symbol of what we are doing. A much-beloved figure, originally invested with so much innocence, joy, and love, now turned into something to be used.

The Great Replacement theory argues that an elite cabal, often Jewish, sometimes Leftist, seeks to “replace” Western whites with minority immigrants. Like any conspiracy theory, it has is a kernel of truth upon which the fantastic elements are grafted. Many mainstream and liberal writers have drawn attention to the ethnic transformation of the West. The term “replacement population” has a long history of use by demographers and geographers. In Western countries, whites are a smaller share of the population than they were in 1960, and I suspect this is why many French or Americans think replacement is real.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that Jews have had much influence over such changes, and while the Left has sometimes celebrated demographic change or sought to capitalise on it electorally, the claim that Leftists orchestrated this change is not credible. Immigration policy in the US has long been driven by short-termist rather than long-termist considerations. Indeed, the Democratic architects of the transformational Hart-Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 claimed it would not alter the ethnic composition of the United States. There is no evidence they believed otherwise.

Do Tucker and Trump bear responsibility for Buffalo? From a social scientific standpoint, this account is plausible, but so are several others. Vivid images and emotions often lead us to snap judgments that are highly prone to confirmation bias. In order to surmount such biases, the scientific method asks us to step back from emotive data points, entertain competing theories, and open our own explanations up to falsification.

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Consider the following hypotheses on how media and political narratives might influence mass shootings like the one in Buffalo:

1. Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump and the Republicans are to blame.

Trump spoke of “fine people” among the Charlottesville rioters, and Carlson has said that “the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World”. A number of others, including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, have endorsed the theory that lax border enforcement is a deliberate Democratic policy to improve its electoral fortunes. These comments could have created the narrative mood music within which the shooter operated.

2. Michael Moore and other progressive pundits are guilty.

The 2020 US census showed that the absolute number of white people had declined for the first time in American history, a result that came mostly from a change in the census question. But mainstream papers failed to highlight this, Instead running sensationalist headlines such as: “Number of White people falls for first time”; “America’s White Population Shrank for the First Time”; or “Vast Stretches of America Are Shrinking. Almost All of Them Voted for Trump”.

The documentarian Michael Moore called the announcement of these census results “the best day ever in US history”, marking the end of “white supremacy”. “This is fabulous news”, added Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. In a recent column for National Review, Rich Lowry cites a number of mainstream Left-wing voices arguing that liberal immigration policies would help the Democrats gain and hold power. Given that numerous psychological studies show that telling white Americans that they are going to become a minority makes them more conservative and populist, this progressive messaging could have created a cultural climate conducive to white anxiety.

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3. Progressive commentators who have talked up the threat of white supremacy and division indirectly motivated Gendron.

The shooter apparently scrawled the name Virginia Sorensen on his weapon, referring to a woman killed in a racially-motivated attack by a black man on a parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin. There has been a sharp rise in the use of terms such as “white supremacy” and “racism” in the American media since 2014-15, despite growing interracial marriage, decreasing prejudice, and a marked decline in police killings of African-Americans since the Sixties. Like white liberals, most black Americans believe a young black man is more likely to be killed by police than in a car accident, even though the latter is six- to ten-times more likely. Could progressive media outlets have heightened the racial threat perceptions of the Waukesha killer, sparking Gendron’s tit-for-tat terrorism?

4. Trump, Carlson, and GOP populists are reducing the level of white nationalist terrorism by providing an outlet for ethnocultural fears.

Though I haven’t seen this thesis mentioned anywhere, it has a solid basis in the expert literature. On this view, political and cultural outlets for grievances, if blocked, can force sentiment into highly insulated extremist bubbles, increasing the risk of violence. Conversely, when terrorists participate in politics, they tend to moderate, as happened with the IRA and Sinn Fein.

Jacob Ravndal, a leading terrorism scholar, has shown that far-Right terrorism is lower where support for national populist parties is higher, and vice-versa. As Ravndal notes, “a predominantly pro-immigration elite perceived as hostile towards people with anti-immigration concerns might be exploited by the extreme Right to mobilize new followers and… motivate terrorism and violence”. Gendron’s manifesto referenced far-Right underworld figures like Tarrant, but never cited mainstream Republican populists like Trump or pundits like Carlson. Gendron’s behaviour could have stemmed from an inability to openly discuss his anxieties, pushing him toward radicalisation.

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5. Progressive politicians and media are reducing the level of white nationalist violence that would otherwise occur.

According to this theory, by enforcing taboos on racism and white supremacy, and spotlighting the threat of white nationalism, progressives reduce the appeal and respectability of racist beliefs, shrinking the potential pool of recruits from which extremists can draw. Likewise, white nationalist ideas, if rendered taboo, will have a harder time reaching a wider audience. If we think of white nationalist terrorism as an interaction between mental illness and ideology, a smaller universe of ideologically-sympathetic people makes it less likely that any one of them will carry the fatal combination of psychological instability and ideological motivation.

6. All the ideological stuff is beside the point.

Nearly 2,000 people were killed in mass shootings in the US between 1999 and 2020: around 100 per year. Many of these shootings were carried out by mentally unstable individuals like Gendron, who threatened to kill himself and his classmates before settling on a racist attack. Tighter gun laws or better tracking of potentially dangerous mentally ill people could ultimately ensure that events like these become less frequent.

***

All these hypotheses are falsifiable. One way to do so would be to design a study in which half a survey sample read a statement by a conservative or progressive pundit and half see innocuous text. Then those taking the survey answer a set of questions pertaining to their views of minorities and attitudes toward violence. If the group which read the offending passage expresses more hostile attitudes, this is evidence for a real effect. Alternatively, we could collect large-scale data on measures of each thesis and see which best correlates with terrorist outcomes. What is pointless is for partisans to cherry pick examples and ride their favoured horses.

Even more inexcusable is the tendency to use one’s cherished theory to censor opposing political views. On the Left, this typically involves smearing those who advocate reducing immigration or having more open conversations about white identity by accusing them of being complicit in white nationalist violence. On the Right, this can entail unsubstantiated claims about the danger of conservative Islam or criticising Israel.

I’m not a free speech absolutist. There is a point at which a proven risk of serious violence is a legitimate reason to restrict speech. However, the onus is on the censor to provide rigorous and overwhelming evidence. Hot takes from political opponents should be dismissed until serious analysis is produced. As with Covid-19 or speeding restrictions, liberal societies must accept some loss of safety to enjoy their freedom.

His critics countered that he has not only severed all connections with Left-wing outlets but attacks them with vindictive ferocity, and can now be seen regularly on Carlson’s show, where they get along famously. I interpreted Bump’s description as a deadpan provocation, challenging the idea that Greenwald’s long-running identification with the Left matters more than what he now says and does. A bigger question, not new but intensified by the Ukraine crisis, is whether “Left” and “Right” are remotely adequate descriptions of the current political landscape.

I’m bemused by the idea of “the Left” as a unified, monolithic entity. (For this reason I don’t capitalise “Left” or “Right” except when it is a publication’s house style.) History supplies no evidence to support this notion of homogeneity. The Labour Party, for example, often feels like a marriage of convenience between people who hate each other. No Conservative can needle a Corbynite as much as a Blairite can, and vice versa. When I read some publications, “the Left” encompasses everyone from Joe Biden to a bearded millennial with a hammer-and-sickle in his Twitter handle, but then I turn to Twitter and see Owen Jones denouncing Paul Mason, an actual loud-and-proud Marxist, as a “neo-McCarthyite” and remember that the Left is diverse and fractious.

Responses to the invasion of Ukraine have been educational. Few western commentators are stupid enough to be explicitly pro-Putin but a significant number, including Greenwald and Carlson, are anti-anti-Putin. You can identify them by their obsession with Nato, “legitimate security concerns”, “poking the Russian bear”, the Azov battalion, and hypothetical biological warfare laboratories, all of which are popular Kremlin talking points. Their arguments usually begin with some throat-clearing variation on: “The invasion of Ukraine is abhorrent but…”

Some of them were once associated with the Left but now occupy a more chaotic space: former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, former Labour MP George Galloway, former comedian Russell Brand and former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi. (This is the world of the former.) Some, like Carlson, JD Vance, Nigel Farage and Steve Bannon, are clearly on the Right, if not the far-Right.

Some appear to be nothing more than contrarian narcissists who trade as “free-thinkers”. Others, who can be found in varying proportions in organisations such as the Stop the War Coalition, Democratic Socialists of America and Young Labour, come to anti-anti-Putinism via the far-Left. It will not surprise you to learn that many of the above made regular appearances on the now-banned Russian television channel RT.

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Owen Jones gets into trouble because he insists on describing marginal groups as “the Left” and springing up to defend their honour. When the Labour leadership demanded that 11 MPs withdraw their signatures from a Stop the War statement, Jones decried it as “an excuse to purge the Left” — even though those 11 constituted about 5% of the PLP and one-third of the Socialist Campaign Group. Either the Left is a major political force with popular support for its policies, or it is a fringe of the fringe. Which is it?

The idea of a Left-Right spectrum originated with a seating arrangement. After the French Revolution, members of the new National Assembly who supported the king gathered to the president’s right and revolutionaries to the left. “Left” and “Right” caught on in Britain during the Spanish Civil War, which at the very same time exposed how inadequate those definitions were. Writers such as George Orwell and Franz Borkenau observed with horror that Stalinists in Spain murdered and defamed socialists and anarchists, employing tactics similar to those of the fascists they were fighting. The study of totalitarianism developed from those early efforts to explain the puzzling kinship between mortal enemies on the far-Left and the far-Right.

During the Forties, the likes of Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Andre Gide and Albert Camus became known as the “Non-Communist Left”. To them, the difference between Stalinism and democratic socialism was night and day — Clement Attlee suspended five Labour MPs for pro-Soviet sympathies — but this fundamental divide in the Left often confused conservatives. When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.” In the early Sixties, rejection of Soviet communism was one of the founding principles of the New Left, even if many of its members went on to mimic the error by lionising Mao.

Despite these major fractures, Left and Right were useful labels so long as economics and class interest dominated politics. Party policies on tax and welfare may still cleave that way but voting behaviour does not. People regularly vote against their class interests, prioritising cultural values and identity over economics. If you hadn’t noticed before 2016 that parties of the Left were becoming, relatively speaking, more middle-class and parties of the Right more working-class, then Brexit and Trump made it unignorable. In the UK, while Labour broadly leaned towards Remain and the Tories towards Brexit, there were enough Thatcherite Remainers and socialist Leavers to create unlikely new alliances. (Then again, in the Seventies, the two most prominent Eurosceptic MPs were Tony Benn and Enoch Powell. Europe has that effect.)

Strange bedfellows have been a growing feature of the past decade in what we generally call populist movements even when they’re not popular. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the gilets jaunes in France, or people who spread conspiracy theories about the White Helmets in Syria, it can be almost impossible to tell whether the person talking is on the far-Left, far-Right or has no coherent ideology at all. The rise of identity politics has fractured the Left, too. There are Marxists who reject it outright and socialists who gravitate towards the socially conservative Blue Labour. The language of politics has not yet caught up.

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The anti-anti-Putin Left are most usefully described as “campists”, whose geopolitical philosophy is summed up by the phrase “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. America is the font of all evil, therefore its opponents must have something going for them.

The British-Syrian writer Leila Al-Shami calls this “the anti-imperialism of idiots”: “This pro-fascist Left seems blind to any form of imperialism that is non-western in origin. It combines identity politics with egoism. Everything that happens is viewed through the prism of what it means for westerners — only white men have the power to make history.” Russia’s unprovoked war of imperialist aggression is as inconvenient to campists as China’s oppression of the Uyghurs. Either they must find a way to blame America after all or they must downplay the issue. Left-wing support for corrupt authoritarians such as Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega is disappointing enough, but sympathy with Vladimir Putin, Bashir al-Assad and Xi Jinping is symptomatic of a morally broken worldview.

At the risk of sounding like Walter in The Big Lebowski — “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” — old-fashioned Stalinism had a certain logic. The USSR was for a long time the world’s only socialist country, and many people believed that if socialism failed there, it would fail completely. So they shut their eyes and ears to the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the Holodomor and so on, until the denial became intolerable. Malcolm Muggeridge compared the British human-rights activists who whitewashed Stalin’s Russia to “vegetarians undertaking a pious pilgrimage to a slaughter-house because it displayed a notice recommending nut cutlets”.

Campists don’t even need the advertisement for nut cutlets, because they do not know what they stand for, only what they oppose. This is how you end up making excuses for dictators who bomb hospitals while demonising the people who pull the bodies from the rubble as terrorists and/or CIA assets. This is how people who define themselves by their opposition to the US invasion of Iraq find themselves claiming that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine. It is obscene.

The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye popularised the Horseshoe Theory, which argues that the extremes of Left and Right curve towards one another rather than sitting at opposite ends of a straight line. Hotly disputed by people who consider it a “smear” on the Left, it has the drawbacks of simplicity as well as the benefits. It does not mean that the far-Left are no different from fascists, any more than Stalin was a Nazi. I see it as an observation rather than an ironclad prescription. I know people far to my Left whose moral and intellectual integrity is unimpeachable, but I’ve also encountered antisemites, Assadists and Putin apologists who claim to be socialists. Another term for this, again harking back to the Thirties, is “red-brown alliance”.

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Back in 2009, Michelle Goldberg observed that Infowars host Alex Jones occupied “the shadowy territory where the far-Right curves around and meets the far-Left”. The invasion of Ukraine has made the existence of this tendency undeniable. Last week, Iranian state television broadcast a conversation between suspended Labour MP Chris Williamson, sacked university professor David Miller and prominent Stop the War member Lowkey about alleged Zionist influence in Ukraine. However that confederation of ghouls might define itself, it does not represent any Left that I identify with. Yet you can see for yourself how many influential people on the Left rallied to the defence of Williamson and Miller over allegations of antisemitism not so long ago.

In Britain, Left-wing writers such as Paul Mason, George Monbiot and Daniel Randall have long been fierce critics of campism. In recent weeks, Leftists from Ukraine and Syria have denounced it, too, while the Polish group Left Together has withdrawn from Yanis Varoufakis’s DiEM25 and the dubiously named Progressive International for their both-sides framing of the invasion. “You, decades after the Eastern European version of communism collapsed and Russia turned into a turbocapitalist, authoritarian regime, are still claiming that the man in charge of it is some kind of ‘anti-imperialist’ hero, despite him doing pretty much all he can to assure his stated aim of rebuilding the Russian empire and beyond,” wrote Zosia Brom in a furious piece called “Fuck leftist westplaining”. They have had enough of this nonsense, and who can blame them?

We are currently experiencing a moment of rare political unity on the subject of Putin and Ukraine, which makes the spectrum-scrambling dynamics of anti-anti-Putinism brutally clear. The Left-Right axis became popular because it helped to clarify existing political positions but now it obscures reality so frequently that I wonder we are so addicted to an archaic binary. Whether someone describes themselves as Left-wing or Right-wing no longer interests me. The only thing that matters is what they’re actually saying.

What bothered me was the extent to which several high-profile populist conservatives were seeming to reflexively side with the cruel Russian autocrat. I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine. The country was a “pure client state of the United States State Department” said Carlson. “Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

These interventions, made as Russia began an invasion that looks set to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, look high risk and low reward. These commentators are undermining the credibility they have accrued for taking bold stances on the “security and identity” issues their base really cares about. Namely: wokeness, the border, crime and defending national heritage.

This is a real shame for populist conservatism in the United States. During the height of progressive moral panics such as the Covington Boys, George Floyd protests or Rittenhouse trial, Tucker’s show was an oasis of sanity. It was, too, on exposing campus craziness and anti-white rhetoric in institutions, or the scale of illegal immigration. He defended the legitimacy of Americans who wanted to regulate the pace of ethno-cultural change and protect social cohesion, taking immense flak from the great and the good. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, highlighted the blind spots and biases of progressive organisations and tech firms. Most American politicians and legacy media outlets failed to cover these issues objectively.

And yet, when it comes to a suite of other problems, the incisive logic of the sceptics and their marshalling of evidence yielded to sweeping neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about a manipulative power elite. This became evident during the pandemic, a tricky new challenge in which experts and politicians had to optimise between death rates and freedom. While governments and public health bodies may have got the balance wrong, and overreached with mask mandates, such a complex issue does not lend itself to maximalist claims.

Instead, the difficulties of policymaking during the pandemic demanded building a patient case with data and arguing for the dial to be turned a bit towards greater personal autonomy. Indeed, the politics of anti-lockdown libertarianism has not paid off for those, such as Nigel Farage, who have attempted to campaign on it. It was never a populist position.

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Another tricky issue which is largely tangential to populist voters’ concerns is foreign policy, where, even with Putin issuing marching orders to unprepared conscripts, populist elites continued to carry water for this killer. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán all, at various moments, spoke warmly of him. While it is legitimate to make a realist case — as John Mearsheimer has done — for tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.

What lies behind this bizarre empathy toward Putin’s thuggish regime?

First, there is an important disconnect between Right-wing populist elites and their audience. Populist elites compete with mainstream intellectual elites, yearning for an overarching meta-theory to rival progressive liberalism or libertarianism. Many also desire a modicum of politically-correct respectability and thus try to pretend they are motivated by a desire to speak for the downtrodden. This typically results in a neo-Marxist mélange focused on globalist power elites and their manipulation of the masses. All of which pushes populist intellectuals toward grand theories of global economic and political order that bear little relationship to what national populist voters and audiences actually care about.

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Steve Bannon talks endlessly about the perils of free trade, Davos and the working class, despite the fact the data shows very clearly that cultural attitudes and views on immigration, not material deprivation, are what predict support for Trump. Likewise, Brexit elites such as Boris Johnson or Douglas Carswell, with their libertarian dreams of a sovereign free-trading Britain, are strangely disconnected from actual Brexit voters, who were — like Trump voters — mainly motivated by a desire for less immigration and slower cultural change. The more Brexit voters glimpse the real Johnson, who cares nothing for these things, the less connected they feel to him.

Populist elites have developed a fixation on global elites and institutions as self-interested scheming actors, and have become obsessed with mobilising opposition to the globalist juggernaut. Rather than viewing the problem as a western cultural-Left worldview which repudiates national tradition and elevates a cult of victimhood, we are treated to conspiratorial musings about the “Great Reset” and elites in Davos, Geneva or Brussels. My limited experience, having given talks at some of these institutions, is that the more international the organisation, the less woke it is. Yes, western high culture permeates global institutions, but these are nodes rather than the epicentre of the problem.

Once convinced of their neo-Marxist grand theory, some populist elites, fired by hostility to the rules-based liberal world order, feel compelled to develop an anti-western foreign policy. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic carries them toward Putin’s Russia and quasi-illiberal democracies such as Hungary. An isolationism which originally sprang from the valid concern — after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that American nationhood not be defined by missionary democracy promotion has mutated into support for autocracy.

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The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers. “Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.

Yet any honest appraisal of Putin’s Russia would reveal that its religiosity is weak, immigration substantial, and the Eurasianism of Putin and Alexandr Dugin would readily trade cultural homogeneity for more territory. Moreover, as the Russianist Edwin Bacon observes: “Eurasianists embracing Orthodoxy identify themselves as having far more in common with what they would call other traditional faiths — notably Islam, and principally Shi’a Islam — than with other Christian churches.” Putin’s Russia is a ramshackle, corrupt, aggressive despotism. It is not “really hot stuff” as Donald Trump put it once. It is not a post-woke paradise.

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Populist elites also appear to like Russia because it has spurned liberalism, failing to appreciate that wokeness, whose sacralisation of minorities is used to restrict liberty, is best resisted by liberal arguments. They confuse procedural liberalism, which has been vital for the West’s success, with Left-modernist values such as celebrating diversity and change, which developed much later and are not central to liberalism.

As a ‘rational populist’ and liberal nationalist, I maintain that the values of the median voter should be reflected in policy, but that those tasked with carrying out such policies should be guided by science, analytic logic, and expertise. The problem with many Western elites is not their technical skills, but their post-national woke values, which spring from religious rather than rational wellsprings. While populist commentators correctly skewer the progressive pieties of the elite media and political class, the anti-globalist conspiracy theorising of many needs an urgent reality check. Populist pundits and politicians should resist the urge to stake out contrarian positions on every news item, tacking instead to the centre ground on side issues to avoid losing support for core issues.

Hopefully the Ukraine crisis can serve as a wake-up call, drawing them back toward the cultural problems their base actually cares about.

Take the debates surrounding the trucker protests in Ottawa. The mainstream press, by and large, has attempted to assimilate the protests into categories familiar from the Trump years.

According to Politico, “far-Right” truckers, some of them sporting “Confederate and Nazi flags”, have “wreaked havoc on Canadian cities”. In the Guardian, one writer warned that the “siege of Ottawa” was an “astroturfed movement funded by a global network of highly organised far-Right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine.” Slate, after dropping the trigger words “militia”, “hate”, “extremist”, and “Nazi”, called the protests an “armed occupation of a G-7 capital”. All linked the truckers with the domestic threat posed by Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American far-Right.

Critics of the establishment have responded with their own counter-narrative, aimed at portraying the truckers in a sympathetic light while focusing attention on the tyrannical response of the Canadian government. After Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Powers Act, Tucker Carlson labelled Canada a “dictatorship” and warned that similar measures would soon be coming to the United States. Over the weekend, as Ottawa police attempted to clear the city centre, Twitter was filled with viral videos of police violence against the protestors, juxtaposed with old quotes from progressive leaders praising the BLM protests of summer 2020, intended to highlight their hypocrisy.

These narratives have a recognisable logic, which holds whether the underlying event is the truckers or the Capitol riot. They are tribal, pitting a virtuous “us” against a malevolent “them”. They are curated to provoke fear of, and rage against, the out-group, often through “empathic triggers” that highlight aggression against the in-group. They are also, in a loose sense, conspiratorial, running together phenomena that have no logical connection except within the pattern of the narrative.

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This is easy to recognise in Right-wing conspiracies about the 2020 election, but establishment media indulges in something similar. When CNN leads a story about Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word with a line about a man carrying “a Confederate flag inside the US Capitol rotunda”, the purpose is to train readers to create an emotional connection between the podcast host and white supremacist domestic terrorism, when none exists in reality.

The war between these tribal narratives, according to media theorist John Robb, is the defining feature of US politics today. He argues that a combination of establishment failures — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis — and the information explosion ushered in by the internet have annihilated the legitimacy of the old narratives that used to hold Western states and societies together, nationalism being the most prominent one.

But humans are tribal and narrative creatures — take one story away and we will invent another one. Today, our most compelling narratives — the ones that provide us with the sense of “fictive kinship” formerly provided by membership in a nation, religion, or ethnic group — are political narratives defined by enmity.

This development, claims Robb, is largely the product of social media, where we are presented with more information than we can possibly pay attention to, let alone understand. We make sense of it by picking patterns out of the noise. These patterns, however, are social phenomena. And as the pioneers of clickbait discovered a decade ago, we are especially drawn to content that provokes a strong empathic response — generally something shocking or outrageous, though our specific triggers will depend on which pattern we are curating. Over time, we come to identify with those who respond to the same triggers and assimilate them to the same pattern. Our tribe is the collective of people outraged by the same things that outrage us.

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The clearest example of how this works in the real world is the response to the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. The video was shocking and vivid. In a previous media environment, however, it would have had its emotional impact blunted by layers of context, expert commentary, and he-said-she-said quotes from local police and the Floyd family. Instead, the video was immediately assimilated to patterns such as “systemic racism”, provoking mass rage and mobilisation against not only Chauvin or the Minneapolis police department but the United States as a whole. Video of the ensuing protests set in motion a similar dynamic on the Right, as users curating patterns about “BLM rioters” and “antifa terrorists” circulated vivid footage of lootings, arsons, and assaults, often framed to induce outrage at the Left-wing politicians and journalists who were vocally supporting the protests.

Robb developed his framework as a way of understanding how digital politics and social media were bleeding over into the real world during the Trump administration. Trump himself, of course, had ridden a wave of social media enthusiasm into the White House, and his election prompted many of his more elite, media-savvy opponents to self-organise into the #resistance, which identified and amplified every real and imagined outrage of his presidency (including conspiracy theories about Russiagate).

Robb dubbed the open-source network supporting Trump ‘the #insurgency’. Unlike ‘the resistance’, which operated in the open and tried to compel government and corporate action through moral coercion and appeals to expert consensus, the #insurgency was largely anonymous. It sought to confuse and disorient its opponents, often through jokes and targeted harassment, and to prevent the emergence of consensus around resistance narratives.

For Robb, however, 2020 kicked the tribalisation of American politics into overdrive. First came the pandemic, which damaged an already fraying social fabric and forced Americans to spend more time online than ever before. The death of George Floyd then served as a huge empathic trigger for the Left, not only sparking mass popular mobilisation but also inducing a moribund Democratic Party establishment and many mainstream institutions to officially endorse Left-wing patterns such as “white supremacy”. The Right, in turn, began to tribalise in earnest after November 2020, uniting around patterns of conspiracy — surrounding the 2020 election, vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Tech censorship — promoted by Trump and his allies.

The final accelerant, in Robb’s telling, was the Capitol riot. The assault on the Capitol proved for the Left that Trump and his supporters — including the Republican Party and virtually all of its voters — were not merely racists but existential threats to the republic, whose suppression was crucial to ensure the survival of democracy. Perhaps more importantly, the Capitol riot prompted the major tech companies to openly align with the Left, disconnecting Trump — then the sitting president — from their networks under the guise of preventing further violence. Given the control of these companies over not only political discourse but also much of the infrastructure of modern life, this alignment, for Robb, amounted to a declaration of corporate sovereignty over the U.S. political system.

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Today Robb sees, on the one hand, a corporate and political establishment aligned around enforcing curated, Left-wing patterns as the de facto consensus view of reality — one that combines a technocratic emphasis on “facts” and “science” with a tribal moral narrative about the existential threat posed by racists and white supremacists, constantly reinforced by curated, emotionally charged stories that fit the pattern. On the other hand is an emerging tribal Right — though this tribe can more easily accommodate cranks and dissidents of all political persuasions — organised around a curated pattern of elite conspiracy, drawing its strength from any and all establishment failures and from attempts to censor or suppress its narrative. The victory of the former would represent what Robb calls “networked fascism”, or the alignment of government and corporate power behind a single approved narrative. The victory of the latter would lead to dissensus, disunion, and nihilism.

Robb’s framework provides a useful, if alarming, way of looking at contemporary debates over “misinformation” and online “hate”. Whether or not one buys his ominous warnings about “networked fascism”, his diagnosis of the tribal dynamics of social media — our tendency to assimilate information into politicised patterns, and to respond to empathy triggers that fit our pattern with rage and loathing directed at our tribal out-group — is an important reminder about the ways in which we are constantly emotionally manipulated by social media, often in ways we don’t recognise. And it should make us sceptical of both top-down attempts to enforce a consensus interpretation of reality — which is usually messy and offers few clear moral lessons — and of any bottom-up patterns that posit, as an explanation for all the phenomena that trigger us, some unified conspiracy or plan.

For individuals, too, Robb’s work is a warning about how easily the architecture of social media can be weaponised to make us hate our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is precisely when we don’t experience the emotion as “hate”, but rather as justified outrage against the enemies of everything righteous and holy, that we should be most suspicious.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten — and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in — is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer — which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point — the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau — hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times’ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

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But the presence of open division among Canada’s political class — though fatal enough on its own — pales in comparison to the much deeper issue here. Throughout the protests, it’s been clear that the authorities — from Trudeau’s government down to the city of Ottawa itself — have lost control of the situation on the ground.

Tow truck companies openly refuse to tow trucks, and even the police force has proven itself to be unreliable. After an order came down to cut off the demonstrator’s supply of fuel for their trucks, the OPS did some perfunctory confiscations of jerry cans, but the only real result was that demonstrators started carrying around jerry cans en masse as a form of resistance. Not that they had to resist too hard; few police officers seemed interested in doing any policing in Ottawa — they were too busy being filmed hugging and greeting the protestors.

The same can be said of the Canadian Armed Forces, who do not seem bothered enough to play a role in resolving these demonstrations. In fact, the military is now investigating at least six of its members for actively supporting the trucker protest. Two of those under investigation belong to the elite Joint Task Force 2. Compared to the total manpower of the CAF, this might seem like a trifling matter, but as an indication of overall political reliability, it cannot be dismissed. The US military has seen similar indications of political unreliability with its own Covid mandates, so this is hardly some issue unique to Canada, either.

Where does all this leave the Trudeau government? Critics talk about creeping totalitarianism in Canada — though with the invocation of an outright legal state of exception it’s hard to say whether totalitarianism is actually “creeping” anymore. Others, mainly Americans, mutter darkly about “a certain F-word”. One can sympathise with the alarm informing these remarks, without fully buying into them. It only takes a couple of minutes thinking about the situation in Canada to realise how incredibly weird it is — and that weirdness requires some serious explanation.

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When was the last time we saw totalitarianism associated with a government that has unreliable control of its police? That can’t control the roads of its own capital? A government calling for something akin to martial law but emphatically rejecting using the military — because they probably wouldn’t follow any orders to enforce it that they were given?

Tucker Carlson is calling Trudeau “the dictator of Canada“, but this seems like a very odd dictatorship indeed. One of the reasons given for calling this state of exception was that it allowed Trudeau to draft tow truck companies into performing paid but involuntary work.

This may well prove to be a crisis that undermines yet another plank of the post-Cold War liberal era, but V for Vendetta it is not. In that dystopian society, the state of exception is simply a normal way of life. Here, the police will not hesitate to shoot you the moment you cause trouble, and the fall of the totalitarian government comes after it is no longer able to keep the population in check through violence and intimidation. In Canada right now, however, the truth is much stranger than fiction. The state of exception has belatedly arrived only after clear signs from the police and the military that they are absolutely not going to be shooting anybody to begin with.

In regards to Trudeau’s actions being a form of “fascism”, that is perhaps an even harder case to make. It’s a point understandably overlooked today, but fascism, seen in its own day, was most definitely a forward-looking political force. The official hymn of the Italian fascist party under Mussolini, Giovinezza, literally means ”youth”. In the context of the early Twenties, fascists saw themselves — and were seen by many Western contemporaries, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt and David Lloyd George — as a rejuvenating, revolutionary force, whether for good or ill.

So let’s be honest with ourselves: it is impossible to look at this weak Canadian government — barely capable of enforcing its will on its own security forces — as a Mussolini-style fascist New Dawn. This sputtering display is about as far from a youthful springtime of the nation as it is possible to get. Trudeau seems mostly tired, under siege, and bereft of ideas, and politicians like him — who self-style as “defenders of democracy” — are now clearly becoming a sort of spent ideological force, barely able to muster a lick of respect from their unruly subjects.

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But perhaps that is the new day that is dawning. Perhaps we are all headed in the same direction as Canada, where political polarisation between the rural population and the urban managerial classes, between the people who give orders and the people who are supposed to follow them, eventually produces a situation so untenable that the system simply snaps.

Not every part of the system, though. It is notable that Trudeau is calling on the banks and tech firms to help restore public order, while excluding any meaningful role for the military. The banks, as well as various parts of the tech sector, are increasingly looking like the only powerful institution that the managerial classes can expect to count on in a true crisis. Especially once the cops, truckers, firemen, pilots, rubbish collectors, special forces operators, sailors, and meter maids bid their politicians farewell and thanks for all the fish.

Unfortunately (or maybe not), those who derive an almost pornographic pleasure from fantasising about imminent totalitarian dystopia are likely to be sorely disappointed in the days and years ahead. Acts like the one just undertaken by the Canadian government amply illustrate that there’s no ten-thousand year Reich of Technocracy coming anytime soon.

The gulf in our societies between the people who work in the real world — those who keep the planes flying and the power on — and the restive and radicalised “email workers” of the urban class keeps growing more and more ominous and intractable. Trudeau can freeze as many bank accounts as he wants. If he thinks it’s a workable solution to this crisis, then the chaos is just getting started.

You would expect that kind of statement from a “defund the police” advocate, but Rittenhouse is a former youth police cadet whose support for “Blue Lives Matter” was used to try and paint him as a racist and far-Right extremist. His world-weary cynicism about the FBI, expressed as Carlson nodded along approvingly, signals a major shift in a central axis of American politics.

Distrust of federal law enforcement was, until quite recently, a markedly Left-wing attitude, but it now represents a baseline among Republican voters. In February 2015, a Reuters poll found that almost 84% of Republicans reported a “favorable” view of the FBI. By February 2018, only two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, a different Reuters poll showed 73% of Republicans agreeing that “members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimise Trump through politically motivated investigations.” Imagine how those same people feel now, after Special Counsel John Durham’s indictments have exposed the FBI’s role in perpetrating the Trump-Russia dossier fraud.

What does it mean when America’s law-and-order party comes to see law enforcement, along with much of the federal government, as fundamentally illegitimate? The answer is being worked out by a crop of Republicans whose project is to extend the politics of Trumpism beyond Trump. Blake Masters, a close business partner of tech investor Peter Thiel who’s running for a Senate seat in Arizona, has called for “standing up to the bureaucratic national-security state.” In a campaign ad, Masters describes a nation under siege from within, “up against a media that lies to us, schools that teach our kids to hate our country, and corporations that have gotten so big, they think they’re bigger than America.”

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There are clear echoes in that message of Steve Bannon, Trump’s original campaign manager and another Thiel associate, who championed a war against the administrative state on behalf of American workers. Bannon lasted less than a year in the White House, but he now runs one of the most popular podcasts on iTunes, War Room, which has more than 100 million total downloads. In an appearance on the podcast this week, Masters told Bannon: “I consider that you simply don’t negotiate with terrorists. And I believe the Democratic Party, Schumer, Pelosi and Biden are holding us hostage.”

Masters, along with two other Thiel-backed political candidates — Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, who’s running for the Senate in Ohio, and Army Special Forces veteran Joe Kent, a self-described “Trump endorsed America 1st Congressional candidate,” who’s running for a House seat in Washington state — distinguished themselves from other Republicans by offering early and vocal support for Rittenhouse.

It’s easy to see why, since the Rittenhouse trial seemed tailor-made to illustrate the premises of their brand of populist nationalism. A young, working-class, white Trump supporter, Rittenhouse was subjected to a public smear campaign in which President Biden himself impugned him as a white supremacist in a campaign video. Meanwhile, the state prosecution deflected attention away from the evidence supporting Rittenhouse’s self-defence claims and onto his motives by suggesting that he had come to Kenosha looking for trouble — despite the fact that Rittenhouse could be seen on video, shortly before the shooting, offering medical aid to Black Lives Matter protesters.

As the prosecution bumbled its way through the trial and got publicly scolded by the judge, it only further proved the point of those who see an American regime spanning the upper layers of government, media, and business that is not only illegitimate but incompetent, run by emissaries of a “clown world,” as a popular phrase on the Right has it.

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“Think about what this says about our disgusting elite leadership in this country,” Vance said in a video message recorded days before the Rittenhouse verdict. “If we don’t defend this young boy who defended his community when no one else was, it may very well be your baby boy that they come for.” The day Rittenhouse’s acquittal was announced, Masters tweeted: “This case reminded us that our justice system, like every other institution our ancestors built, is under siege, and that the besiegers are very close to victory.”

The rallying cry of the “Rittenhouse Republicans,” which at times approaches the rhetoric of revolution, is that the ruling class has become parasitic on the lives of ordinary Americans. “We despise our government & corporations benefiting from the security & labor of our working class solely for the benefit of elites who have no loyalty to our nation, rather they despise us & are using the wealth they generate to fund our decline,” Kent recently tweeted. Both Masters and Kent say they think Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Aside from the specifics and symbolism of the Rittenhouse case, publicly supporting him makes sense in terms of the demographic changes in the makeup of the major political parties. While Wall Street business executives and upper middle class professionals now overwhelmingly back the Democrats, the Republicans have, by default as much as by choice, increasingly courted the working class. Over the past decade, the party’s biggest gains have been among white voters without a college degree, and in the 2020 election, it made some inroads with voters of all races without a college degree.

Trump’s conception of a power struggle with the U.S. “Deep State” saw a contest between the voters’ elected representative and the shadowy forces controlling the levers of government behind the scenes. But for Kent, Masters, Vance, and the other aspiring heirs of Trumpism, the state itself is the enemy. Their efforts, like Trump’s, are directed as much against Republican orthodoxies and the Beltway establishment as against Democratic policies. Gone is the old conservative divide between “good” institutions like the military and the corporate boardroom and “bad” ones like the media and teacher’s unions. “Our military leadership is totally incompetent,” Masters said recently in the wake of the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan. “Our top generals have turned into woke corporate bozos,” he tweeted, “and our troops deserve better.”

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But where Trump’s approach was visceral and inseparable from his singular personality, his would-be successors are more sober and more ideological. They are also supported by the kind of political infrastructure that was conspicuously lacking in the chaotic and chronically understaffed Trump administration.

Masters, Vance, and Kent are all political newcomers between the ages of 35-41, and all three are backed by funding from Thiel. The Vance and Masters campaigns both received $10 million through super PACs, while Kent got $5,800, the legal limit in his race. Their vision for America, broadly aligned with the post-libertarian ideas Thiel has espoused over the past decade, calls for a secular, nationalist politics of the common good. The greatest threat to the American people, they say, is the unchecked power of the Democrat-dominated administrative state and the transnational corporations operating under its auspices.

The conventional script for beltway Republicans in the pre-Trump era called for limiting the power of government and letting social policy be set by individual choice and market mechanisms. But for the national populists and conservatives of the new post-Trump Right, that laissez faire approach simply cedes power to woke corporations and lobbying interests. The only way to reform the state is to take control of it and replace current ruling class functionaries with a new elite that will serve the interests of working and middle-class Americans.

“The end goal is human flourishing,” Masters recently told the journalist Peter Savodnik. “You want a strong middle class in America. There’s a whole set of values and a whole lifestyle attendant to that. I think that’s a goal, and I think too many conventional, you know, business Republicans they’re agnostic on that. They don’t care what the consequences of their policies are.”

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It now remains to be seen whether Masters and the others can win. In Ohio, Vance is battling it out in a tight primary race against the state treasurer, Josh Mandel, another Trump supporter from the party’s increasingly crowded populist wing. In Arizona, Masters was trailing behind the state’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich 27% to 9% in a recent poll. But Trump, who previously called Brnovich “lackluster” for refusing to order an audit of Arizona’s 2020 election result, only entered the race a few weeks ago, with a scheduled appearance at a fundraiser for Masters. In Washington state, a poll from early November shows Joe Kent leading both the Democrat, Brent Hennrich, and the six-term incumbent Republican, Jaime Herrera Beutler, who broke with her party and voted to impeach Trump, in his House race.

With poll numbers for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at historic lows, the Democrats are looking exceptionally vulnerable going into the 2022 midterm elections. The crucial question for the Rittenhouse Republicans is how far voters want to go in rejecting the current system. So far, the most visible repudiation of the Democrats has come from the Virginia governor’s race, which was won by Glenn Youngkin, a classic C-suite Republican. Perhaps the greatest challenge to the firebrands of the new Right isn’t from Democrats but from the push by the leaders of their own party to restore the Beltway consensus.

Yet there are signs that the old version of bipartisan centrism in DC may be unsustainable. A recent Harvard poll of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 found that 39% overall believe American democracy is in trouble. That’s a significant segment of young voters, but what’s notable is that the disillusionment was far more pronounced on the Right. More than half of young Trump voters think America is a “democracy in trouble”. Nearly a quarter, 22%, believe it has already “failed”.

But in Washington, the seeds of today’s political discontent were already being sown. Two years after Clinton had swept to power, the Republicans took both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Never again, battle-hardened Republicans promised to themselves, would they stay locked out of power for that long.

In its place spawned a new grassroots conservatism that was angry and uncompromising, finding its voice in a conservative “under-media”, as Andrew Breitbart termed it, that included Drudge Report (1995), Fox (1996) and Newsmax (1997). But it was Fox, which first aired 25 years ago today, that dominated, providing an outlet to a white Middle America that felt neglected and ignored by Washington and the established media.

Politics was indeed becoming angrier, but a deeper, spiritual malaise had also been spreading beneath the surface. The cultural and sexual revolution of the Sixties, Vietnam, Watergate and the oil price crisis chipped away at the post-war building blocks of American society, particularly in the heartlands where wages were stagnating and jobs were moving offshore. By 1994, trust in the Government sunk to its lowest point ever.

This was the environment into which Fox was born. Its benefactor, Rupert Murdoch, was so desperate to seize it that he offered to air Fox for free — and even paid cable companies $20 a subscriber.

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But to fully understand how Fox became the news empire that it is today, you need to understand the man central to the entire operation. His name was not Rupert Murdoch, but Roger Ailes. The Chairman, as he became known, was a grotesque figure whose jowls would expand like a toad’s vocal sac when he was irate (an employee once put a frame around a hole in the wall and wrote: “Don’t mess with Roger Ailes.”).

This anger — part pathological, part driven by what he saw as a corrosion of American values — informed much of Fox’s coverage. This became clear from the very first sequence of the channel’s launch: criminals, flag-burning, and protests formed the basis of Fox’s nightly news coverage. These were topics that the liberal media refused to cover, argued Ailes, and America wanted to hear them. As he later said:

“I’ll tell you what television didn’t do at the time. … It didn’t reflect what people really thought. I mean, they’re sitting there saying, ‘Wait a minute, New York’s going broke, Los Angeles is broke, the United States is broke, everything the government has run is broke, Social Security is broke, Medicare is broke, the military is broke… Why do we want these guys making all these decisions for us?’”

A former Nixon operative, Ailes learned from his boss how to mine and re-package feelings of resentment back to his base. He cultivated an us-vs-them mentality among viewers (and voters) that put them on a permanent war footing. Using tough, earthy language, news anchors would speak to viewers like they were foot soldiers, warning them that Christians were under attack, liberals were starting a war and the media was out to get you.

Crucially, there was always an enemy, which again stemmed from Ailes’s own paranoia. In fact, so petrified was the Chairman of being attacked by gay rights activists in the 1990s that he installed bomb proof glass in his office window. When Fox was first established, he situated its newsroom in a windowless bunker replete with an in-house research unit — known as the “brain room” — that required special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” said one Fox insider. “It’s where the evil resides.”

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Indeed, there was something faintly ridiculous about the whole thing. On the Fox sofa would sit a chopstick-thin blonde wedged between two Irish-American walruses telling viewers that their country was under threat. They were, in effect, trying to mobilise a patriot army, even though the median age of that army was 65. Programmes would therefore be interrupted by commercials (of which there were many) that were largely geared towards class action hip-replacement lawsuits and wonder drugs for erectile dysfunction. It was like an army general having to remind his soldiers to check their catheter bags before going to battle.

But there was a scintilla of self-awareness too; a nod and wink to the camera that this was entertainment as much as it was news. In fact, Fox had one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN, and the organisation did very little in the way of original reporting. Instead, it decided what the news was, telling its viewers what to care about, and sometimes even waiting for Democrat leaders to respond to a story before it took the opposite line (as it did with Obama and the George Zimmerman shooting).

All the while, Fox’s influence grew, far outstripping that of its rivals. By 2008, it had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined, pulling in over two million viewers a night. Politically, it was pushing viewers to the Right, too. One study showed that in districts where Fox News was available, there was a Rightward drift in voting patterns while another found that if Fox News hadn’t existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.

Such was Fox’s influence that Republican leaders would beg Ailes and other executives to ordain them; even Barack Obama — who faced grim levels of racist coverage before and during his presidency — held a behind-closed-doors meeting, agreeing to do more interviews in exchange for dialling down his coverage. “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us,” said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. “Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox.” Having tipped the electoral balance in George W. Bush’s favour by prematurely declaring him president in 2000, this was undoubtedly true. Ailes, too, was keenly aware of this fact. By 2010 Fox’s power was so great that the chairman declared that he wanted to “elect the next president”.

Yet it was not until Trump that Fox and the White House became almost inextricably linked. Throughout Trump’s presidency, it was never quite clear if Fox was the tail wagging the dog or the other way around. Between 2018-2020, Trump live-tweeted Fox news programmes 1,100 times, so much so that Fox and Friends began talking to Trump rather than about Trump. On one occasion, the hosts of Fox and Friends asked the President to flash his lights on and off in the White House if he was watching.

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This close relationship between the President and network was bound to turn ugly if and when the two fell out. This occurred after the 2020 election when Trump deemed Fox to be insufficiently zealous in toeing his stolen election line. He called on his supporters to instead watch OAN and Newsmax, two Right-wing insurgents that made Fox look like C-Span: in one viral OAN clip from last month, a presenter pulled the plug on an interview with a veteran for criticising Trump, as well as his predecessors, for the country’s military problems in Afghanistan. He then pledged his allegiance on camera to the dear leader.

But Fox’s rivals were not just queuing up on the Right. During last year’s election, moderates and Democrats also flocked to MSNBC and CNN, which led to Fox suffering its worst ratings in 20 years. For the most part, though, Fox remains dominant. In recent months, it has restored its position at the top of the leaderboard, securing an average prime time audience of 2.4 million nightly viewers.

And so Fox News remains king of Red America. It’s certainly helped that every week, liberal late night talk show hosts laugh at the dumb rubes featured on Tucker Carlson Tonight or the Ingraham Angle. But what they don’t understand is that this mockery and condescension were the basis for Fox’s birth: a platform for disenfranchised, disillusioned conservatives who felt looked down upon by coastal elites and Washington. Every sneer, jibe and insult since only justifies Ailes’s project. This is Fox’s world; America just lives in it.

Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Budapest has revived a longstanding debate over Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is, depending on your political sympathies, a would-be dictator or a conservative statesman of the first order. Whatever happens after Carlson’s visit, the battle for Hungarian higher education is a better guide to Orbán’s politics than the travel itinerary of a cable TV pundit.

Orbán and Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling conservative party, are often accused of building an authoritarian state. This overstates both the extent of their political control and their ideological ambitions. The Hungarian Prime Minister is best understood as a conservative institutionalist who seeks to seize the commanding heights of Hungarian society by influencing the country’s key organisations and cultural organs. In pursuit of this goal, Orbán is often opportunistic and unscrupulous, disregarding norms and playing political hardball with his opponents. Although these methods fall short of an authoritarian takeover, they will shape the playing field of Hungarian politics for years to come.

The Prime Minister’s critics typically conflate his take-no-prisoners political style with a more potent and far-reaching form of autocracy. This tendency is evident across the political spectrum, from President Joe Biden’s remarks lumping Orbán in with Belarussian Dictator Alexander Lukashenko to recent broadsides from neoconservative writer David Frum.

A recent post by the liberal pundit Heather Cox Richardson is typical of the genre. Richardson says Hungary is a “one-party state”. This would be news to Gergely Karácsony, the opposition Mayor of Budapest and an oft-mentioned candidate to succeed Orbán as prime minister in the 2022 parliamentary elections. Karácsony was elected in 2019, along with anti-Fidesz mayoral candidates in nine other cities and towns across Hungary. In a country of 10 million people, this counts as a significant political rebuke. One-party states do not allow opposition figures to run the capital, speak at protest rallies in front of Parliament, and lay the groundwork for a national campaign.

One senses that many of Fidesz’s foreign critics are motivated by something other than a sincere interest in Hungarian civil liberties. Once again, Richardson’s post is revealing. According to her, Orbán “wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture”.

This is a curious understanding of Hungarian democracy. Hungary has not been a multicultural society since the end of the First World War. The country has been remarkably homogeneous for the entirety of its post-1989 democratic period, and the same is true of most of its neighbours. The most recent example of a multicultural society in Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, dissolved into sectarian violence over two decades ago.

If Orbán isn’t the illiberal bogeyman of Richardson’s nightmares, what is he? A common lament from American conservatives is that the Left’s dominant cultural position effectively nullifies Republican electoral victories. In Hungary it is the Right that exercises commanding influence over many vital cultural organs. Independent media exist but state news outlets dominate the airwaves. Universities are career-oriented and bereft of typically Left-wing departments. State-supported theatres produce rock operas about Hungary’s history and national heroes. The Hungarian cultural and political environment has been shaped by a conservative government that is comfortable wielding the levers of institutional power.

The recent government grant of $1.7 billion to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, a residential college that offers conservative students fellowships, stipends and networking events, is characteristic of this strategy. The college was founded in the 1990s to train Hungary’s post-communist elite and is unabashedly patriotic and conservative in its emphasis. It now has access to a source of funding that exceeds Hungary’s annual higher education budget.

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If you visited Budapest at any point last year, you probably noticed people wearing yellow “Free SZFE” masks on the streets. These are markers of another institutional battle, this time over the national academy of film and theatre. Like almost every university in Hungary, SZFE is a public institution. Last August, university management resigned en masse to protest the installation of a new government-appointed Board of Trustees, which they described as a threat to institutional autonomy and artistic freedom. Sporadic student protests have continued since the resignations.

From local theatres to national institutions like the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and SZFE, the Hungarian Government’s involvement in education, culture and the arts is extensive, at least by American standards. This gives the ruling party considerable powers of patronage to shape the country’s cultural output. Orbán has enthusiastically used these levers to push the Hungarian mainstream in a conservative direction.

A similar process can be observed in Hungarian media. Critical voices are not banned or suppressed, but Fidesz-friendly outlets receive a disproportionate share of revenue from government advertising. The staff of Index, a popular independent website often critical of Orbán, all resigned last summer to protest the ouster of a top editor under suspicious circumstances. Before the resignations, Index received almost no government advertising, despite having among the highest traffic of any news sites in Hungary.

Yet it would be wrong to describe Hungary as a reactionary monoculture. The Index resignations provoked a firestorm on social media, a sphere that remains unregulated, open and contentious. Former Index staffers quickly launched a subscription-based news outlet, Telex, to replace their old website. Hungary is also awash in Western media and cultural products. In 2018, the Luxembourg-based RTL Klub was the country’s second most popular television channel by audience share. The tens of thousands of Hungarian expatriates who live and work in Western Europe reliably transmit news, gossip and criticism to their friends and relatives back home.

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Instead of throwing critics in jail, Orbán is attempting to create a conservative version of the “opinion corridor” of acceptable Left-wing views described by the writer Karl-Ove Knausgaard in Sweden, or the progressive environment at elite American media and academic institutions. Unlike in the United States, this environment did not emerge from non-state actors. It has been fostered from above by a ruling conservative party that is not constrained by small government nostrums or overly-concerned with procedural niceties.

Orbán’s critics may indulge in hyperbole, but there are real dangers to this approach. Creating a state-based network of patronage invites favouritism, corruption and the erosion of public confidence in government agencies. The declining credibility of Hungarian state media, which is widely viewed as pro-Fidesz, is just one example of this. Another is the well-founded allegation of corruption surrounding the Government’s purchase of Covid vaccines. A lack of concern for procedural fairness can bleed into a disregard for basic civil liberties. The recent Pegasus disclosure of state eavesdropping on independent journalists is a worrying sign that Orbán is open to more explicitly coercive measures to suppress his critics.

The Carlson visit to Budapest is a footnote in American politics, but the Fox TV host’s sudden interest in a small Central European country does signal an interesting transatlantic convergence. European conservatives have traditionally been more comfortable with big government than their American counterparts. Carlson’s meeting and related developments within the Republican Party suggest that American Right-wingers are getting over their aversion to state activism.

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Carlson began his career as a libertarian-ish magazine writer and cable TV commentator before becoming the media standard-bearer for grassroots conservatism during the Trump era. Orbán was a young anti-Soviet dissident turned pro-Western political leader who later pivoted to a populist brand of conservatism after becoming prime minister again in 2010.

Whether these ideological shifts were motivated by sincere changes of opinion, new conditions, or canny opportunism is probably unknowable. However, they do reflect profound changes in their respective societies. Rapid cultural and economic upheaval since the 1990s have made many Hungarians skeptical of the EU, market capitalism and, more broadly, the liberal Western order.

In the United States, the Left’s cultural dominance, a widespread sense of economic precarity, and the rise of Donald Trump have given big government conservatives an opening. Orbán may lose the next election and Carlson may be forced off the air by his critics, but the underlying conditions that gave rise to both figures will be with us for some time. And if American conservatives do jettison their traditional attachment to small-government ideology, they may look to figures like Orbán for a new political blueprint.