The MAGA meltdown; Mamdani's Rainbow Coalition; Remembering Tatsuya Nakadai
Reading, Watching 11.16.25
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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You can buy When the Clock Broke, now in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the UK, it’s also available there.
In case you missed it, this week I interviewed
about her new book, Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right.
I also appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to talk about right-wing antisemitism.
During the show, I repeated a quote I got a long time ago from R. Derek Black, now Adrianne Black. You should check out her book The Klansman’s Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism: A Memoir, which came out last year.
Over the weekend, the MAGA coalition seems to have gone into full meltdown.— More commentary on that this coming week.
In the Times yesterday morning, there was a big piece on the Tucker fiasco. I noticed this quote from Jonah Goldberg:
Several people who were once friendly with Mr. Carlson said in interviews that they found few common traits between the affable libertarian-leaning contrarian of the past and the strident polemicist they see today.
“The undue pleasure he gets in going after Israel and being attacked for it probably comes down more to his desire to be transgressive than to animosity toward Jews,” said Jonah Goldberg, the editor in chief of the conservative online publication The Dispatch and a former friend of Mr. Carlson.
This struck me because it’s virtually identical to what William F. Buckley said about Pat Buchanan back in 1991:
I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament.
When are they gonna learn?
A report from Emily Jashinsky of unHerd pushed back on Rod Dreher’s claim that “30 to 40 percent of young staffers are groypers.” One of her sources in the administration said the following:
This is just false…Antisemitism in so far as it exists on the majority of the young right is a punchline. People are skeptical of Israel but that doesn’t mean they hate Jews. They hate being told what they’re allowed to think and find funny.
Once again, I have to quote Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew:
Never believe that anti‐ Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
I wasn’t sure if I should share this, but the weirdest and most hateful response I’ve gotten to the interview so far was from the pro-Israel right: Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, who’s originally Egyptian and whose story involves being seduced by antisemitism as a young man and then rejecting it. As far as I can tell, he makes a living through various neoconservative fellowships and sinecures. A while back, I subscribed to his Substack because an essay he wrote about the Middle East looked interesting. But I quickly came to the conclusion he was a charlatan who cloaked superficiality in pretentious verbiage. For instance, here’s his description of his own prose:
I have been told—more than once, in fact more times than I care to count, though I will count them if pressed, being a man of methodical disposition when it suits me—I have been told that I am rhetorically unrestrained. That my currency is maximalist overstatement and hyperbole. That I cannot make a simple point without turning it into a baroque exercise in excess, dripping with gargoyles and flying buttresses.
Now, any half-educated person knows that gargoyles and flying buttresses are Gothic, not baroque, so this metaphor is a mess. It’s fake erudition. Anyway, I opened up his newsletter’s email yesterday to see this:
I need to say something uncomfortable: the Klein-Ganz type of Jewish intellectual absolutely deserves what they are getting from the groypers—pitchforks, torches, and all. The tragedy is that the rest of us are caught in the crossfire.
He should feel uncomfortable, because he’s confessing to antisemitism! If you call the groypers what they are, this sentence reads more clearly: “the Klein-Ganz type of Jewish intellectual absolutely deserves what they are getting from the Nazis—pitchforks, torches, and all.” On Twitter, he went on to write, “Now, this Jewish liberal-left intellectual, I must be honest, has been as destructive to this country as the groyper claims.” So, “the Nazis are right about left-wing intellectual Jews.” That’s just antisemitism, from its content to its form: it positively drips with malice. He’s so preoccupied with driving this venomous attack home that it fails on the level of analysis. As it so happens, the groypers are not after me and my ilk at the moment; they are waging an internecine war against Mansour’s neoconservative patrons, and antisemitism is a weapon in that war. We are caught in the crossfire.
Mansour is a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, a think tank that’s at least partially funded by the state of Israel. I wonder if they know—or care—that one of their fellows is engaging in base antisemitism?