A Viper in its Bosom

The Right nourished and protected its Antisemitic Wing

On Tuesday, October 28th, Nick Fuentes appeared on the Tucker Carlson show for an over two-hour interview. The video now has almost 4 million views on YouTube. Fuentes, along with Candace Owens, is the Right’s snarling face of gutter antisemitism. (The fallen preppie Carlson still peddles a slightly more genteel version, naturally.) Tucker said he was not sure about putting the 29-year-old on his show, fearing that the public would think he was “a Nazi just like Fuentes.” But put him on, he did, and they amiably chatted, and even seemed to reconcile after their feud. Antisemitism is no longer treated as an obscenity, the equivalent of announcing you’re pro-child molester, but as an opinion like any other, subject to polite disagreement.

Tucker’s platforming of Fuentes, like others recently, is a concession to reality as much as anything else: the energy on the Right belongs to Fuentes and his ilk; Everyone else is scrambling to respond. Some even still manage to act shocked at the intrusion of open antisemitism into the political mainstream. But any longtime observer of the American right looks at this with a more jaundiced eye: It really comes as no surprise.

First of all, the conservative movement never fully expelled its antisemitic wing. Throughout its postwar history, it played an intricate pas-de-deux that involved alternating embrace and rejection. The great myth of the conservative past is that of Pontifex Buckley, excommunicating the heretics. In point of fact, Buckley’s conservative movement also cultivated and maintained relationships with antisemites from the beginning, while also placating its new and mostly Jewish neoconservative allies. It would be tedious to recap the whole saga of Joseph Sobran and Pat Buchanan, but it took many years and many clear signs of antisemitism for Buckley to put an interdict on them. And even then, he was not consistent: a matter of months after a late 1991 National Review issue dedicated to rooting out antisemitism that charged Buchanan directly—albeit with all sorts of hedges and hesitations—the same magazine and Buckley himself endorsed Buchanan’s primary campaign against H.W. Bush. In a nutshell, you have the entire right-wing attitude towards antisemitism: Not a dealbreaker.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the paleo wing seemed to be more thoroughly defeated. The War on Terror and 2003 David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” piece in National Review, written at the behest of Buckley, I believe, was meant to write the paleos out of the movement for not being on board with the Iraq war. They huddled around the new American Conservative, biding their time. The association of the neocons with the disaster in Iraq gave them a huge boost. With the arrival of Trump and the rise of new media, their time had truly arrived. Every single member of the far and extreme right welcomed Trump’s arrival as a kind of deliverance: they knew all the old barriers were breaking down. The genocide in Gaza provided the second great awakening for them: a chance to evangelize with some hard evidence of Jewish perfidy.

The really interesting thing about Carlson’s interview with Fuentes is the latter’s account of his journey to the fringe. In his account at least, Young Fuentes was not raised on Stormfront, or William Luther Pierce, or David Duke, but on Plain Jane neoconservatism:

I don’t know if I’ve ever even said this on an interview before. I was listening to Marc Levin’s show. This goes to show how normie I was. I loved his show, and I actually liked how he was obnoxious and mean to his callers. Yeah. Vicious. I liked that. I thought that was funny. [Fuentes does this too.—J.G.] But I’ll never forget one show, He goes live and he says, America is becoming a majority non-white country. Does anybody think that’s a good idea? I was thinking to myself, yeah, that actually doesn’t sound so good. I didn’t really even think that America is becoming a majority a minority like that.

“Wait, so you were radicalized on Race by Marc Levin?” Carlson asks, incredulously. Fuentes responds: “He planted the seed, at least.” Then, of course, there was the poisonous online message board culture of the Right to do the rest. On Twitter, conservative commentator Matt Lewis opined, “I’ve long suspected that — by running interference for Trump and MAGA (instead of sticking with NeverTrump conservatives) — neoconservatives like Mark Levin were feeding a movement of extremists who would turn on them next.” True enough. But, again, that’s sort of the story of the entire right. At best, they were highly irresponsible and overly fixated on resisting “woke” and “P.C.” You can extend the blame to a many other conservatives, some of them Jewish, who failed to understand the true nature of antisemitism and were obsessed with defending Israel at all costs and beyond all reason. They reflexively did not listen to left-wing interpretations of antisemitism that viewed it as intrinsically and structurally related to conspiratorial, right-wing populism.

(Note that it was the real lowbrows like Levin, Shapiro, and Kirk, who always knew they needed a touch of racist demagogy to attract the hogs—who knew they needed the mob, in other words—that were the most resistant to seeing what was going on. Middlebrows like Bill Kristol got the picture a little quicker.)

In a piece for Vox, Zack Beauchamp describes this phenomenon:

….in the Trump era, attitudes like [Dave] Smith’s — that bigotry isn’t “the worst thing” — have become normative, a kind of anti-anti-racism that holds the Trumpist political coalition together. This “no enemies to the right” politics — shown most starkly, perhaps, by Vice President JD Vance’s refusal to forcefully condemn the infamous Young Republicans group chat — combined with the technological revolution in streaming video and crowdfunding, unfurled a red carpet for America’s antisemites to use as they goose-stepped their way to more wealth, influence, and power.

I really want to avoid this newsletter becoming the I Told You So news, but this was obvious years ago. It’s baked into the structural dynamics of the conservative elite: they could not exist without cultivating and aligning themselves with the mob. And one of the mob’s favorite “ideas” is antisemitism. Back in 2020, a former friend and colleague of Carlson’s nailed him in a New Republic piece I wrote, calling Tucker, “the Father Coughlin of the twenty-first century.” (Carlson now competes for that distinction with Owens and Fuentes, of course.) In that same piece, I wrote one of the paragraphs I still feel most proud of:

Perhaps pro- and para-Trump conservative elites have not fully realized they are making common cause with full-blown cynics and nihilists. Perhaps they truly don’t grasp that their provisional allies on the alt-right are not simply against the present disposition of American institutions, but also devoted to demolishing the restraining influence of standards and institutions altogether. Or perhaps, long saddled with the wounded self-consciousness of outsiders, conservative elites now view the mob as their cousins, sharing a common resentment against the mainstream society from which they, too, feel excluded. At a minimum, the ease with which figures now pass back and forth between the worlds of the alt-right and the conservative sanctums of elite discourse means that we have diminishing cause to distinguish the one world from the other anymore.

And so we arrive at one of the grand ironies of our time, how a political movement that tasked itself with the preservation and protection of America’s greatness and sanctimoniously prattled on about the virtues of Western Civilization has fostered in its midst the destruction of those very things. Out of sheer petulance, it often seemed, they nourished a viper in their bosom. Now it bites them. But we’re all feeling its venom.