This is seriously an awesome encapsulation of the state of play.
I just finished the outstanding Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and this is where what Reagan began with his embrace of the then rising Religous Right. The path was paved for Trump, and the neocons, the new right, and the business interests felt they could control the beast they had leashed.
They were fooling themselves then, and are fooling themselves now.
Completely agree. And they still haven’t completely woken up to the that fact that they are the useful idiots of the folks they thought were their useful idiots.
I am not the right guy to say whether Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is insightful as a description of our political moment post-2020 but I did find it refreshing as a description of what living through our current moment is like.
In the back half of the book she brings in Roth and Operation Shylock as part of a frank discussion of something that I have seen very few contemporary writers describe in a personal way that struck me as true to life : the figure of “The Jew” as defined by non-Jewish society and how it can drive one kind of mad.
I say all of this just to opine that it has been a kaleidoscopic of surreal paranoia to watch the greatest threat to American Jews go mask off in the same week that the institutions that purport to represent that group go tilting, racistly, at wind mills.
In short, it feels like so many institutions are going to bat for The Jew while everyday Jews like myself, and millions of others are left both isolated and devoid of actual institutional support.
The crass and vitriolic nature of social media anti-semitism (e.g. “It was promised to them 3000 years ago,” penny on sidewalk jokes etc) is both extremely disturbing and I think suggestive that this is not about Israel.
Your Churchill quote perfectly captures the neocon trajectory. They chose to be Honorary Whites under Trump because NeverTrump was a political dead end, now they're shocked that the Groypers they empowered don't actually need them anymore. The Heritage interns agreeing with Fuentes isn't surprising, its the inevitable outcome of a decade spent radicalizing youth through Pepe memes and edgelord culture. Bannon's offer to redirect the hate toward Mamdani is the same formula, join the fascist project and you get temporary protection. The neocons will take that deal again because the alternative means admiting they enabled this entire trajectory from Charlottesville forward.
Brian Roberts: [as Max and Brian are leaving the beer garden where the audience, led by a Hitler Youth boy, is singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"] Do you still think you can control them?
This is the party bedding down and tucking in for their very own Night of the Long Knives, but the unconvincingly closeted Brownshirts may fare very differently in this rhyme.
Once a student asked me why the Nazis called themselves "national socialists." I think this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists." He was confused. Fortunately I had researched this a bit, and I said that they called themselves socialists to fool working-class people into thinking that they were on the side of the working class. And in fact Hitler's party probably did do more for working class people in Germany than our present American fascists will ever do for working class people. So maybe it wasn't a total lie. But now it would be.
> this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists."
A quintessential Americana here, thank you. Also makes me think that we should portray Trump as communist more, first, surely not for nothing, with his penchant for state management of the private sector enterprises and whatnot, and second, because the toxicity of the branding is of the utmost importance in this country.
Claiming to be the people who don't "cancel," while you cancel (i.e. fire, cut, prosecute, deport, sue, defund) any person or institution with insufficient fealty to the Boss, is already quite the feat. Then the worst creatures crawl out of the sewer and you let them in the house because "we don't cancel."
And this is the movement that pretends it is saving civilization.
Have you been digging into David Horowitz, John ? He seems like an interesting neocon-to-MAGA link. He was a long-time mentor to Stephen Miller, he kickstarted Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Jack Posobiec was a member of his student org Students for Academic Freedom (as was Miller). He's the father of Marc Andreessen associate Ben Horowitz & in the Andreessen-Douthat NYT interview, Douthat says about him that "everyone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another."
He was a former member of the New Left and a marxist who turned against the left in the 70s (for somewhat understandable reasons). In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (which then became the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in order to wage a cultural fight with the left, using its own tools.
I have found little on the links between both men (except one of the comments in the Chronicles eulogy saying that "Sam Francis gave him some measured praise that he deserved"), but he may be one of the sources where Francis picked up that idea of waging a Gramcian battle for hegemony on the right.
The most sad - or maybe ironic, depends how you see it - thing is people like Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro will take the route from 2016 nevertrumpers and will endorse Gavin Newsom...
It's hard not to see an echo of the 2020 woke moment in these institutions struggling to reconcile themselves to an uncomfortably radical set of views among their staffer and intern class, birthed almost entirely through their internet consciousness.
On the one hand that should make one mindful about people on the right seeing corporations and universities and whatnot "surrendering" to the "woke mob" as an irresistible tide radically reshaping American life and thought when a lot of us could clearly see how paper thin and fake it all was because we were closer to it.
But then on the other hand this movement holds actual executive power and discretion and means of state violence in a way the wokesters never could have dreamed of.
This is seriously an awesome encapsulation of the state of play.
I just finished the outstanding Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980, and this is where what Reagan began with his embrace of the then rising Religous Right. The path was paved for Trump, and the neocons, the new right, and the business interests felt they could control the beast they had leashed.
They were fooling themselves then, and are fooling themselves now.
Completely agree. And they still haven’t completely woken up to the that fact that they are the useful idiots of the folks they thought were their useful idiots.
I am not the right guy to say whether Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is insightful as a description of our political moment post-2020 but I did find it refreshing as a description of what living through our current moment is like.
In the back half of the book she brings in Roth and Operation Shylock as part of a frank discussion of something that I have seen very few contemporary writers describe in a personal way that struck me as true to life : the figure of “The Jew” as defined by non-Jewish society and how it can drive one kind of mad.
I say all of this just to opine that it has been a kaleidoscopic of surreal paranoia to watch the greatest threat to American Jews go mask off in the same week that the institutions that purport to represent that group go tilting, racistly, at wind mills.
In short, it feels like so many institutions are going to bat for The Jew while everyday Jews like myself, and millions of others are left both isolated and devoid of actual institutional support.
It is very bad.
The crass and vitriolic nature of social media anti-semitism (e.g. “It was promised to them 3000 years ago,” penny on sidewalk jokes etc) is both extremely disturbing and I think suggestive that this is not about Israel.
Your Churchill quote perfectly captures the neocon trajectory. They chose to be Honorary Whites under Trump because NeverTrump was a political dead end, now they're shocked that the Groypers they empowered don't actually need them anymore. The Heritage interns agreeing with Fuentes isn't surprising, its the inevitable outcome of a decade spent radicalizing youth through Pepe memes and edgelord culture. Bannon's offer to redirect the hate toward Mamdani is the same formula, join the fascist project and you get temporary protection. The neocons will take that deal again because the alternative means admiting they enabled this entire trajectory from Charlottesville forward.
Brian Roberts: [as Max and Brian are leaving the beer garden where the audience, led by a Hitler Youth boy, is singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me"] Do you still think you can control them?
Like Bain’s line in one of those Batman movies: “Do you feel like you’re in charge?”.
This is the party bedding down and tucking in for their very own Night of the Long Knives, but the unconvincingly closeted Brownshirts may fare very differently in this rhyme.
Bill Kristol has gone from NeoCon OG to endorsing Zohran.
Not exactly, but closer than I ever thought he’d come.
He also calls Trump communist! He's come a long way, baby!
Once a student asked me why the Nazis called themselves "national socialists." I think this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists." He was confused. Fortunately I had researched this a bit, and I said that they called themselves socialists to fool working-class people into thinking that they were on the side of the working class. And in fact Hitler's party probably did do more for working class people in Germany than our present American fascists will ever do for working class people. So maybe it wasn't a total lie. But now it would be.
> this student was pretty conservative and maybe kind of admired the Nazis a bit, but didn't like it that they were "socialists."
A quintessential Americana here, thank you. Also makes me think that we should portray Trump as communist more, first, surely not for nothing, with his penchant for state management of the private sector enterprises and whatnot, and second, because the toxicity of the branding is of the utmost importance in this country.
Claiming to be the people who don't "cancel," while you cancel (i.e. fire, cut, prosecute, deport, sue, defund) any person or institution with insufficient fealty to the Boss, is already quite the feat. Then the worst creatures crawl out of the sewer and you let them in the house because "we don't cancel."
And this is the movement that pretends it is saving civilization.
Have you been digging into David Horowitz, John ? He seems like an interesting neocon-to-MAGA link. He was a long-time mentor to Stephen Miller, he kickstarted Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Jack Posobiec was a member of his student org Students for Academic Freedom (as was Miller). He's the father of Marc Andreessen associate Ben Horowitz & in the Andreessen-Douthat NYT interview, Douthat says about him that "everyone who is a young person on the political right in the 1990s and early 2000s, as I was, has had at least one encounter with David Horowitz of one kind or another."
He seems to have been held in some esteem by paleocons, as this Chronicles eulogy and the, hum, edifying comments on it suggest (https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/in-memoriam-david-horowitz/)
He was a former member of the New Left and a marxist who turned against the left in the 70s (for somewhat understandable reasons). In 1988, he founded the Center for the Study of Popular Culture (which then became the David Horowitz Freedom Center) in order to wage a cultural fight with the left, using its own tools.
I have found little on the links between both men (except one of the comments in the Chronicles eulogy saying that "Sam Francis gave him some measured praise that he deserved"), but he may be one of the sources where Francis picked up that idea of waging a Gramcian battle for hegemony on the right.
Apropos post: “Are Jews White?” https://open.substack.com/pub/anniegottlieb/p/are-jews-white?r=16gkv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
The most sad - or maybe ironic, depends how you see it - thing is people like Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro will take the route from 2016 nevertrumpers and will endorse Gavin Newsom...
never happen for loomer
Nick Fuetes already vibed out on Newsome and his Aryan looking family.
I think it was just to troll Vance who has an Indian wife. And look now what Vance is saying about her wife's religion
“For now.”
Indeed. It’s turkeys jostling for the baster as they debate the contents of the stuffing. Sad to see, but see it we might.
It's hard not to see an echo of the 2020 woke moment in these institutions struggling to reconcile themselves to an uncomfortably radical set of views among their staffer and intern class, birthed almost entirely through their internet consciousness.
On the one hand that should make one mindful about people on the right seeing corporations and universities and whatnot "surrendering" to the "woke mob" as an irresistible tide radically reshaping American life and thought when a lot of us could clearly see how paper thin and fake it all was because we were closer to it.
But then on the other hand this movement holds actual executive power and discretion and means of state violence in a way the wokesters never could have dreamed of.
That last line is a banger. Spot on
Dems aren't monolithic on Israel. Incipient civil war more like it. Donors will run the show, which will be their downfall once again.