The Toad and the Viper

The Right Wing Melts Down

If you’re on Twitter you may noticed the entire right wing barking up a storm. This time they are aroused not by some incident of wokeness, but each other. First of all, Candace Owens was fired by Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire for finally being too antisemitic. Owens has been critical of U.S. support for Israel, which is fair, but she joined these critiques with speculations about a “sinister ring” of “political Jews” pulling the strings in Hollywood and D.C. Then she liked a social media post that accused Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is admittedly a stupid schmuck, of being “drunk on Christian blood again.” But Owens has long played around with antisemitism and it seems likely that she was the one who red pilled Kanye West on “the Jewish Question:” he started mouthing off in that direction just after their acquaintance began. A little antisemitism was tolerable, but maybe the remarks about the IDF were too much for Shapiro & Co.

Then, The Babylon Bee, the right’s consistently sweaty answer to The Onion and Elon Musk favorite, published the story in the tweet pictured above, with the headline “‘The White Race Must Maintain Our Genetic Purity,’ Says Inbred Man.” The Bee’s readership, who usually relishes a little ethnic humor, went into full meltdown at this “anti-white” provocation by the magazine. Predictably, this included accusation that the Bee had come under the sway of the Jews. This outburst caused a few right wingers, not usually the most reflective bunch, to get a little queasy about the sheer number of full-blown Nazis in their midst. Christopher Rufo, of the Manhattan Institute and engineer of the neo-McCarthyite CRT panic, tweeted the following in dismay:

Rufo, a professional demagogue, calling for responsibility in discourse is, as they say, a little bit rich. Not long ago, he tweeted his congratulations to openly Nazi Bronze Age Pervert on the publication of his book. He also hosted a Twitter space where the strategy of “no enemies to right,” the accommodation and alliance with extremists, was openly discussed. Now suddenly, guardrails are the order the day. Of course, only when they begin to realize this accommodation with the worst people in the world may have some negative consequences for them.

But even richer is this tweet by Pedro Gonzalez of Chronicles mag:

This guy was caught out for being a Hitlerian antisemite a few months ago, made a pro forma apology, and now he’s the voice of reason all of a sudden. Then Ben Shapiro retweeted Gonzalez’s missive. I guess he’s forgiven Pedro for calling him a “subversive Jew” who “[needs] to be marginalized and kept out of something like a MAGA movement at all costs.” (I promise you there’s a point to all this reporting on Twitter, which is perhaps not the highest form of journalism.)

Are they all idiots or assholes? Well, how about both? Over the past few years, the right wing intelligentsia has undergone a process I call “groyperfication,” the steady infiltration of the ideas, myths, images, and figures from the lunatic fringe into the mainstream. I might sound a litttle like Tailgunner Joe myself talking about infiltration, but it’s the perfect word: they became permeated and then saturated with the stuff. With the right’s usual puerility—rampant adult oppositional-defiant disorder perhaps—they started to parrot Nazi memes. They didn’t stop to think for a moment about the consequences of this. No, that would be “cringe” and bowing down to libtard orthodoxy. There’s a meme among right wingers that women don’t really have their own political opinions, they just emulate their peer groups. As usual, they are projecting and this is really themselves they are talking about: they just regurgitate memes and repeat things ad nauseam. These things start in tweets and group chats and go from there. In fact, Peter Thiel’s entire culture war strategy based on Girard’s theory of mimetic desire—the notion that people find the imitation of others around them irresistible—is premised on this insight. Of course, it’s the other guys—or girls—that do this, but they are the bold, independent thinkers.

I used to think it was important for there to be a strong center right to fend off the attack from the fringe, but most of them have proved themselves to be, at best, Vichyistes, deluding themselves that they are somehow doing their own, distinctive thing and even providing some responsible guidance. They are just managing the occupation. Now, when it’s biting them in the ass a little, I think, “Fuck ’em, they have it coming.” Two proverbs occur to me as I observe these internecine battles. One is, “If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” The other is Russian and a little bit vulgar — ебала жаба гадюку — “a toad fucking a viper,” meaning “both sides are vile.”