Copyright newstatesman
In 1991, William F Buckley, the godfather of modern American conservatism, dedicated an entire issue of his magazine, the National Review, to investigating whether key allies were anti-Semitic. The paleo-conservative former Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan was judged by Buckley to have said something anti-Semitic. It wasn’t exactly fatal for Buchanan’s reputation (he ran for president again in 1996 and became a talking head on MSNBC) but a line had been drawn. Today, this type of gatekeeping on the right is rare and, when it does happen, impotent. The gate is wide open and strange beasts are wandering in. We would live in a saner world if I didn’t have to tell you about Nick Fuentes. But here we are. The Overton window during Trump’s presidency is being smashed and remade every few months. In Maga’s America, anti-Semitism is something that those in power hesitate to condemn. The rapidity with which anti-Semitism is gaining traction on the American right speaks to the disruption Trump 2.0 has wrought on acceptable opinion. The liberal establishment’s grip on the discourse is arthritic. This, of course, has been a slow process and has taken many years. But over the past nine months we have witnessed as much change as the previous nine years. A bigoted politics is returning, with no Buckley-style gatekeeper to stop it. It promises to reset what is acceptable to say or do for a long time to come. Susan Sontag once wrote that there was no such thing as collective memory. We are all born as blank slates with no memory of history, something that dies with the passing of each witness. What we choose to “remember” is actually that which we deem important in the present. Or the corollary: what we deem taboo. And certain taboos were broken in the Maga world last week. Which brings me to Fuentes, the popular white nationalist streamer whose clips of himself talking down the camera lens dominate the algorithm on Elon Musk’s X. A good summation of Fuentes’s views can be found in his comment that “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it’s that simple”. When he and Kanye West had dinner with Trump in November 2022, Trump quickly distanced himself from Fuentes, claiming not to know who he was. Then, last month, on 27 October, Tucker Carlson invited Fuentes on to his podcast, the Tucker Carlson Show, for a chummy interview, during which Fuentes said that the real problem in America was “organised Jewry”. Carlson ranks above most cabinet secretaries in terms of influence on the Maga right, and he gave Fuentes airtime on one of the biggest platforms in the world. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, published a video in which he defended Carlson for hosting Fuentes, saying that Carlson would always be a friend of Heritage. Even though Roberts went on to condemn Fuentes’s views, this was a big moment: Fuentes had gone mainstream. Fuentes’s self-described trajectory from persecuted freshman to cancelled streamer to denounced white nationalist has filled him with a vindictive self-pity. Carlson urged Fuentes to not be so proud of his ideological victory that he wouldn’t forgive those who weren’t as far-sighted as he. That Carlson suggested Fuentes is in a position to say “I told you so” to Maga shows his views have climbed the hill of supposed respectability. Much of this is born out of “America First”. Part of putting America first, in its adherents’ eyes, means not cowing to the demands of the small country in the Middle East called Israel. This can be positive: it meant Trump had less time for the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu, which the Biden administration had excused. The pressure Trump applied was key to the precarious Gaza ceasefire he forced through. This is one reason why the distinction between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism should be upheld. Remember here the folly of the term “Islamophobia”, a concept that Pakistan, where the persecution of heresy is not uncommon, has successfully got the United Nations to officially recognise. But Fuentes does the opposite: he sees no difference between Israel and Jews. For Fuentes, the sins of Israel are embodied by Jews at large. Not only that, but the problems of the world lie at their feet. At one point in the podcast, Carlson mused that perhaps it’s human nature to become that which you are accused of. What a thing to say. To admit that you are merely a mirror, an inversion of those you oppose. Carlson asked whether being criticised by Jewish commentators such as Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin had led Fuentes to anti-Semitism. No, replied Fuentes, he has always been resolutely America First. He said that he thought early on that he could either recant his beliefs and climb the establishment, or he could force the Republican Party to cavort with him in the gutter. He realised that the “conservative movement is going to have to move to me”. It is a strategy that looks more prescient by the day. [Further reading: How Zohran Mamdani won New York]
