When Robert Conquest’s publisher asked him to expand and revise The Great Terror in light of the information revealed by the newly-opened Soviet archives, Conquest is said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. I had a similar reaction to reading Rod Dreher’s horrified account of his recent trip to Washington, in which he discovered that the GOP has spawned a generation of repulsive antisemites.
Dreher was appalled to realize that Gen Z Republicans are head-over-heels cuckoo for Nick Fuentes—positively tripping over one another, he reports, to embrace Fuentes’ bracing views about Jews and the Holocaust. He writes:
…. The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes—that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.
If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians—especially trad Catholics, I learned—are neck-deep in anti-Semitism.1 They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.
Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”
When I say it’s to Dreher’s credit that he’s appalled, I’m sincere. As I said to Dan, I’ve always found Dreher a sympathetic fellow, if immensely naive. I’m glad to be confirmed in my instinct that he’s a decent sort.
But my God, Rod—if I may: It took you a decade to realize where this was going? And you still don’t grasp the connection between the movement you’ve embraced and this—its predictable terminus?
I published the following on November 7, 2016. You are not looking a phenomenon that no reasonable person could ever have anticipated:
1. “These people.”
There are four well-known Americans in that clip: Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, James Comey, and Barack Obama. It makes sense for them to be in that ad, given the circumstances. The other three? George Soros, Janet Yellen, and Lloyd Blankfein. A bit less obvious why they’re there.
TRUMP: Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people. (The visuals show stacks of dollar bills, signs pointing to Wall Street and to the Capitol.)An odd way of putting it. In what way will it be more controlled by Americans than the current government? Americans voted for this one, didn’t we? It’s comprised of Americans, right?
T
RUMP: “The Establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests, they partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”Who are “these people?”
TRUMP: The political establishment that is trying to stop us is the same group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and foreign policies that have bled our country dry. The political Establishment has brought about the destruction of our factories, and our jobs, as they flee to Mexico, China, and other countries all around the world. It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.Say what? What kind of global power structure is responsible for these decisions, and which decisions were they, exactly? How exactly was our wealth stripped and put into “a handful of large corporations and political entities?” And by whom?
TRUMP: The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you. The only force strong enough to save our country is us. The only people brave enough to vote out this corrupt establishment is you, the American people. I’m doing this for the people and for the movement and we will take back this country and we will make America great again.And why did he illustrate this with photos of American Jews who work in finance?
But surely he didn’t mean it that way. Reading anti-Semitism into that is paranoid.
No, he meant it that way. The voice-over comes from a Trump speech at a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, in October:
TRUMP: There is nothing the political establishment will not do. No lie they won’t tell, to hold their prestige and power at your expense, and that’s what’s been happening. … We will end the politics of profit [my note: known as capitalism?], we will end the rule of special interests, we will end the raiding of our jobs by other countries. … We’ve seen this firsthand in the WikiLeaks documents, in which Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends and her donors. … Let’s be clear on one thing, the corporate media in our country is no longer involved in journalism. They’re a political special interest no different than any lobbyist or other financial entity with a total political agenda, and the agenda is not for you, it’s for themselves. And their agenda is to elect crooked Hillary Clinton at any cost, at any price, no matter how many lives they destroy. For them it’s a war, and for them nothing at all is out of bounds. This is a struggle for the survival of our nation, believe me.And this imagery, all of it, comes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (If you’ve never read that through, please do before deciding you disagree). Here we have wealthy, international bankers plotting to destroy our nation and take over the world, a mysterious global cabal that controls politicians through their money or through the power of the media they dominate, a ruthless and amoral “war” to exploit the naive, the poor and the vulnerable for their own greedy ends. The only word missing is “Jew.”
PROTOCOLS: … The nations of the West are being brought under international control at political, military and economic levels. They are rapidly in process of becoming controlled also on the social level. All alike are being told that their only hope lies in the surrender of national sovereignty. …After Trump gave that speech in Florida, the Anti-Defamation League immediately protested, calling on him to abstain from using “rhetoric and tropes that historically have been used against Jews and still spur anti-Semitism.” That’s to say, there’s no way he could have been unaware that these rhetoric and tropes have historically been used against Jews and still spur anti-Semitism, particularly since his speech is used against Jews and does spur anti-Semitism. Read that last link through to see what I mean. This has been widely reported; he surely knows about it.
Trump knows that many Jews—along with many who recognize the provenance of the imagery—were horrified by that speech, and many anti-Semites thrilled by it. Yet this is the ad he’s running in the last days of the campaign. He took a speech that had already been denounced by the ADL for ambiguously playing with the classic tropes of exterminationist anti-Semitism and made it unambiguous by decorating it with images of rich, powerful Jews. He either knew what he was doing or he’s not smart enough to feed himself unaided.
Oh, he’s just opening up the Overton window so we don’t have to choke on political correctness anymore, Besides, the Left is really anti-Semitic, too.
The KKK, white supremacists, church-burners, mosque-vandalizers, and every other truly deplorable group in America has been galvanized and Overton-windowed by Trump’s campaign. Trump, in full awareness of what’s been shaking out of this tree, keeps shaking it. Did he pause to imagine the consequences this might have for his own daughter and grandchildren? Responsibility? Decency? Concern about the effect this is having on our country and its social cohesion? No, screw it: he doubled down.
2. Worse things have happened.
A vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, wrote Newt Gingrich yesterday, likening her to Richard Nixon, “is a vote for four years of corruption, investigation, and gridlock.”
Yes. I know. That’s okay. It’s not what ideally I’d wish, but it’s not the worst thing in the world.
I do not think Trump is Hitler, if only because historical analogies are always flawed. But the analogy is correct enough in some respects that who would want to see whether it holds in the most relevant respects? Trump has this in common with Hitler (and with all garden-variety despots, too; it is a fixed personality type): enamorment of conspiracy theories, raving speech, anti-intellectualism, unprincipled opportunism, clownishness, bluster, threats, certainty that there are simple solutions to complex problems, vulgarity, palingenetic fantasies, appeals to ethno-nationalism, an obsession with “strength,” “stamina,” health, and physical perfection, a hatred of women, an instinct to mock the weak and the crippled, a disgust with “losers,” a hysterical fear of germs and contamination, literal and metaphoric. He invokes foreign cancers that must be excised before they metastasize and destroy a body politic weakened by traitors. He believes that winners and the strong enjoy the moral right to rule. He holds that the nation can be saved only through the singular genius and energy of a “great personality,” as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf or a “great temperament,” as Trump read in Mein Kampf. “I alone can fix it” says Trump. “I am your voice.” He is visibly excited by talk of violence; his mental map of the world is one of perpetual conflict. His bragging, ranting, and perseverating, his disconnect from reality, his millenarianism, his hatred of liberals, conservatives, and the press, his fascination with dictators, thugs, lowlifes and creeps, past and present—for goodness sake, must he bark in German before the analogy is alarming enough? Trump is not just an oaf and not just a bully. These words are naive. Our imaginations and vocabularies have become hollowed out. He exemplifies a specific mindset, temperament, and ideology: it is a fascist one.
No, it is not absurd to invoke fascism; it’s absurd to deny it. He has not said, outright, that he has no use for democracy and the law, but his contempt for both is clear enough. This is a good enough definition of the fascist minimum:
“ … a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anticonservative nationalism. … a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome the threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics, and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.”
“Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” … “fascists advocated a mixed economy aimed at achieving autarky through protectionism and interventionism … ” a solution of “anti-socialism, dirigiste economics and social policy, imperialism, militarism, leader cult, [and] the compromise with traditional conservatism” … “We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.” (“Does not our bourgeoisie rise in moral indignation when it hears from the lips of some miserable tramp that he doesn’t care whether he is German or not, that he feels at home anywhere, as long as he has enough to live on?”) To the victors go the spoils. The casual promise that he will order the military to commit murder, transforming America from the country that hanged war criminals at Nuremberg into one whose criminals will need hanging. “They won’t refuse, they’re not going to refuse me— believe me.”
Our system is proof against that? The one helmed by Paul Ryan von Papen and Ted Cruz Hindenburg? If it is an insult to memory too readily to make comparisons Germany in the 1930s, it is also one to refuse, when it is warranted, to make them at all—or even to ask if they’re warranted.
Hillary Clinton and her bewildered personal press corps are so depleted in imagination, so weighted down by the freight of clichés, that they can only reach for a word-soup that makes Trump sound kind of fun, by golly: racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic—isn’t he an imp! The string of admonishments irritates more than it alarms. The words she needs are nouns: tyrant, autocrat, Caudillo, lunatic, despot, fool.
3. But He’ll Appoint the Best People
But what of his promises to appoint the best advisors and save the Supreme Court? Isn’t good old, bland old Mike Pence reassuring? Like a trial for witchcraft, this question represents a concession to lunacy. We cannot seriously be discussing Donald Trump’s promises and political ideas, can we? Diligently fact-checking his claims, examining the cost and feasibility of his policy proposals? Can he even remember his promises from day to day? You know that any original idea he has is crazy and any sensible idea is ghostwritten. He’s not able to be sensible: There’s a cognitive deficit there. His memory seems often to stop in the 1980s, when he styled himself the king of New York real estate, chasing strange on its nightclub circuit. He speaks and answers questions in ways that make no sense, in strings of unconnected words bookmarked by perseverations and bizarre ejaculations. He cannot help himself. His coterie has him lashed to the mast right now to keep his fingers off his Twitter account, but he’ll wriggle out of their grip soon enough. Which one of his advisors, do you think, will be the real power behind the throne? Steve Bannon? Melania?
4. Lesser Evils
As everyone says, every day, Trump says or does something that before this election would have stopped a presidential candidacy stone cold. None of it seems to matter. Almost everything he says is vile or a lie, his contempt for decency exceeded only by his contempt for other Americans. None of it seems to matter.
But Hillary lies. She does. But the difference is this: Her lies are a plausible version of reality—even if they’re not true, they could be true—and her lies are not her appeal. Hillary heads up a plodding, bureaucratic, unimaginative coalition over whom she exercises no charismatic pull at all. Trump, however, has entered a folie à deux, or a folie à millions, with a significant sector of the American public. It’s unremarkable that one Donald J. Trump is incoherent, grandiose, and delusional—many are; what is astonishing, and so dangerous, is the number of Americans who are eager to share his delusions. This is new. It is why I’m not comforted by the constitutional limits on the American president’s power. We’re compelled to take seriously what he says, taking all of his contradictory proposal seriously—and literally—even if the exercise degrades us by its nature.
… When newspaper editorials frantically quack that Trump is attacking the traditional norms and institutions of our democracy, they’re right. He is. But this argument isn’t going to work on his supporters, because this is why they like him. They believe democracy has failed. They believe this political system is killing them, literally. You may be debating whether to vote for him with a clothespin over your nose, but if you’ve read this far, you’re not Trump’s power base. A solid core—how many, I don’t know—wants a revolution. They’re not voting against Hillary, or with a heavy heart, or to save the Supreme Court. They want to burn it all down, Year Zero, take a wrecking ball to Washington, and lock up the people on whose watch this took place. That these phrases are clichés shouldn’t dull us to a key point: They mean it.
… The hostility Trump supporters feel for urban people—whom they call liberal elites or the GOPe or globalists—makes sense, too, looking at the numbers and the maps. But I’m not going to kid myself. These are not my familiar, fellow conservatives. They’re people who hate me because I live in the city. Their repurposed quasi-Bolshevism—elites, Establishment, globalists, cosmopolitans—frightens me: I don’t want to find out if it’s the sort that ends in exterminating the kulaks and offing everyone with eyeglasses.
The kind of conservatism I believed in may have once been a reality, or I may have been deluding myself. But my instinct for self-preservation, if nothing else, tells me it’s best to enter a defensive alliance with the decent center-left against the extremists on either side. Because there is no center-right in America anymore.
There is more to that essay. All of it holds up well. I wish it didn’t. Last night, after reading Rod’s report, I couldn’t sleep. The pleasure of saying “I told you so” is one thing. Realizing that I was right is another.
It’s now November 13, 2025. A full nine years later, Rod is discovering, to his surprise, that the moral climate in our nation’s capital is squalid:
… I came away with the feeling that [Gen Z Republicans] are only tenuously dedicated to democratic politics. I told one very smart and decent Zoomercon who despises the anti-Semitic turn in his circles that I’ve been hearing that fascism—actual ideological fascism, not the media’s idea of anybody to the Right of Lindsey Graham—is gaining traction among young white British males.
He said, innocently, “So what’s wrong with fascism?” He meant it, not in a challenging way, but in a way that conveyed the sense of we have to think about this now. He talked about how the disintegration of our culture is accelerating, and liberal democracy seems impotent to stop it. He went on to explain that if he had to choose between living under left-wing authoritarianism or the right-wing version, then that wouldn’t be much of a choice. To be clear, he wants neither, but he fears that the disintegration of our culture is going to put us all in the position to have to reconcile ourselves to one or the other.
… I tell you, it was dark. But I kept hearing this, over and over, and I concluded that it cannot be dismissed.
I tell you: I am sincere in saying that it is to his credit that he’s appalled.
Next, Rod discovers the socioeconomic roots of Zoomer rage:
…. Then he [Rod’s Zoomer interlocutor] went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.
… The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia. The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people.
In the same essay—again, published in 2016—I wrote this:
Still more dangerous: His supporters are right to be furious. The Republic is sick, perhaps mortally. The elites are rotten; they have betrayed the public. … The most striking point, the warning alarm that everyone ignored: falling life expectancy among working-class white people. This is (or should have been) unthinkable. Within recent memory it was axiomatic that Americans were wealthier, healthier, more productive, longer-lived, and in every way better-blessed than any other people in the world, a truism that every child would get at least as far as his parents, and probably a lot further. To see falling life expectancies in America in any cohort is stunning, a complete reversal of demographic trends over the past century. The rising mortality rate is owed to despair—to drug poisoning, suicide, obesity, and alcohol-related liver disease. It’s eerily reminiscent of the catastrophic seven-year life-expectancy drop among Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Counties that voted for Trump in the primaries map closely, almost one-on-one, with counties where we see falling white lifespans. The anger makes perfect sense. It’s completely logical that people who have literally lost years of their lives during the Obama years see the prospect of Hillary—a third Obama term, in effect—as a mortal threat. There’s no way to say to these voters, with a straight face, “Come on now, you’re exaggerating, it’s not that bad. Hillary will be fine” It is exactly that bad; she won’t be fine, they’re dying. If I thought for a moment that Trump had something to offer us, I’d vote for him. But he doesn’t. He will make it worse than she is able to, faster. He is set to give the staggering Republic a last push over the edge. And then watch out, because the next guy won’t be Ben Sasse.
And what do you know, the “next guy” is here. His name is Nick Fuentes. It’s time, Rod, to stop kidding yourself about the people you’ve embraced. They did this.
What you encountered in Washington became predictable when we put men like them in power. No one who was any part of this madness can get us back out of it. It is not too late to realize this and to say so.
You write:
I don’t want to tear it all down, but rather reform it. There are no historical examples in which “tearing it all down” produced a better, more just, more functional order.
If you mean this, then you must get as far away from these people as your legs will take you. Renounce them. Throw in your lot—as other decent conservatives have, however uneasily—with sensible, reform-minded Democrats.
Yes, the far left wing of the Democratic Party is insane. Yes, the Democrats are a hapless lot. But there is still such a thing as a moderate Democrat. If you add your numbers to them, there will be one more.
There is no longer such a thing as a moderate Republican. This really is the state of the contemporary GOP—or to be precise, being unwilling to say hell, no to this is the state of the GOP.
Look, the whole administration is shot through with it. This is our Department of Labor:
JD Vance is not the solution to the problems Rod observes. He is the problem.
(He was speaking of fully-grown, adult GOP activists, by the way.)
I assume that the young antisemites of the GOP are embracing these views chiefly because they’re imbeciles. Most young people are. This generation is in particular trouble, though, because they can’t read; we never bothered to educate them; and we allowed the tech industry—along with our most dangerous adversaries—to conduct deranging experiments on their immature brains:
So they’re imitating their peers, especially the ones who seem cool to them, because that’s what kids do. They’re scandalizing their elders, especially the ones who have disappointed them, because that too is what kids do. But they’ve suffered no social or professional penalty for taking things too far; to the contrary, the vice-president of the United States runs interference for them. It’s not a revelation that when a society refuses to enforce elementary social norms, people act like savages. As Hannah Arendt noticed—and Dreher is right to evoke her—evil is often banal.
Dreher is also right, when describing the ringleaders, to evoke Dostoyevsky.
… if you really want to know what’s going on among the leading edge of the politically active young Right, you would do better to read Dostoevsky’s Demons than any conservative magazine.
Absolutely. These kids are demons—they walk right off the page. Fuentes is exactly like the poseur revolutionary Pyotr Stepanovich, intoxicating his followers with irony, transgression, and the promise of forbidden knowledge. There’s nothing at all new about this kind of self-consciously aestheticized nihilism or the erotic thrill in seeing society fall apart. (I actually agree with pretty much everything Rob writes here.)
In fact, the parallels between Verkhovensky’s conspiratorial cell and the Groypers are painfully apt. These movements parasitize a broader social malaise; they attract men who feel emasculated by modernity, enraged by their own impotence, exhilarated at the prospect of cleansing a degenerate world. Ideology is secondary, in this scheme of things, to style—the style being one of gleeful nihilism, an adolescent delight in shocking the bourgeoisie, the conviction that destruction—of norms, first, then, inevitably, people—is a form of heroism.
From Verkhovensky’s “fog and fire” monologue:
When it’s in our hands, maybe we’ll mend things … if need be, we’ll drive them for forty years into the wilderness. … But one or two generations of vice are essential now; monstrous, abject vice by which a man is transformed into a loathsome, cruel, egoistic reptile. That’s what we need! And what’s more, a little ‘fresh blood’ that we may get accustomed to it. Why are you laughing? I am not contradicting myself. … We will proclaim destruction. … Why is it, why is it that idea has such a fascination. Butwe must have a little exercise; we must. We’ll set fires going.… We’ll set legends going. Every scurvy ‘group’ will be of use. Out of those very groups I’ll pick you out fellows so keen they’ll not shrink from shooting, and be grateful for the honour of a job, too. Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before. … Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods. … Well, then we shall bring forward … whom?”
This is the ideological DNA of 4chan, mass shooter manifestos, and Groyper accelerationism.
Verkhovensky’s circle, like that of the squabbling MAGA podcasters, is petty, theatrical, self-dramatizing, and prone to confusing its own ressentiment for revolutionary clarity. Other characters in the book are familiar, too: Shigalyov is Curtis Yarvin in a fur coat, scribbling “neocameralism” on birch bark, muttering about sovereignty and formalism while his tea goes cold.
“ … In order to avoid further uncertainty, I propose my own system of world-organization. Here it is.” He tapped the notebook. “I wanted to expound my views to the meeting in the most concise form possible, but I see that I should need to add a great many verbal explanations, and so the whole exposition would occupy at least ten evenings, one for each of my chapters.” (There was the sound of laughter.) “I must add, besides, that my system is not yet complete.” (Laughter again.) “I am perplexed by my own data and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I start. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.”
Silicon Valley is full of Shigalyovs, actually. And yes, Arendt would recognize them instantly; Dreher is right to say this:
And if I were writing a new edition of Live Not By Lies, I would absolutely revise the book to account for the lies that are consuming the Right today.
Hannah Arendt, man: like I’ve been saying, she is the diagnostician of our Weimar moment. I won’t repeat myself here—I’ve been quoting her a lot lately—but after these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism—or at best, authoritarianism. It could go either way, Left or Right. Said one source, “They [Groyper types] look at Mamdani’s success in New York, and think, ‘Why can’t we do that?’”—meaning, why can’t we try to get a true radical into power?
This is why it’s so frustrating to see him land on the idea that Viktor Orbàn and JD Vance—of all people!—are the solution.
It’s also frustrating to see him accept uncritically the excuses he’s offered for this phenomenon—Jew-hatred, that is. His interlocutors tell him it’s a “reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel.” That’s absurd. They say things like this:
An older friend—another despiser of anti-Semitism—said that we have to find a way to talk about the reality of Jewish influence in American life, for good and for ill. I took him to mean basically this: Jews really are disproportionately powerful in American life, and they are not shy about using that power to advance their own interests, and the interests of other groups they favor. The taboo against noticing that, and talking about what that might mean, is gone with the Zoomers. If we want to fight anti-Semitism, we have to face this seriously.
Come on. You think these people want a serious conversation about this? It would be a short conversation: Jews are disproportionately powerful because we educate our kids and encourage them to become doctors and lawyers. We’re not shy about advancing our interests because no one in America is. You think that conversation will solve things? Give me a break. This is antisemitism. It is ancient. It was around long before the ADL: Within living memory, an advanced European civilization got it into its head that it would be a good idea to murder every single Jew alive. Hamas—and a non-trivial number of similar Islamist groups—still think exactly this. Let’s not be idiots. It isn’t the ADL.
Nor is it the war in Gaza. Sorry, Andrew: It just isn’t.
That is the excuse. It is not the cause. Americans pay no attention whatsoever to any other conflict overseas. According to preliminary estimates, more than 2,000 civilians were just slaughtered within the first few hours of the RSF’s entry into El Fasher. Civilians—as I type this—are being summarily executed, raped, burned alive in their homes. Americans don’t care. Candace Owens hasn’t mentioned it once. But Israel is our ally? So is the UAE, which is backing the RSF. We arm the UAE—it’s the largest market for US goods and services in the Middle East. We send the UAE billions of dollars worth of arms, which it is sending directly to these blood-drenched monsters. It would be worth a protest. But there are none. Tucker Carlson hasn’t mentioned it.
The much more interesting question is why no one cares about the “hideous footage” from any other armed conflict, and why so much of the media has waged an unremitting propaganda war against Israel, on behalf of a genocidal Islamist terrorist group. Researchers led by the British-Israeli lawyer Trevor Asserson found that in the first four months of the war, the BBC breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times; it has been forced to correct an average of two stories a week since October 7.
Gaza was razed because Hamas turned decades of donor aid into a massive, booby-trapped terror-tunnel system larger than the London Tube, constructed for the sole purpose of torturing and murdering Israelis. They refused to allow a single Gazan civilian to shelter in it. There is no way to destroy tunnels like those without destroying the buildings above them. Yes, the war was unbearably brutal. So was our war against ISIS. Does no one recall what we did to Mosul? It remains a rubble-strewn, booby-trapped wasteland. It will take another 20 years, probably, to clear the ordnance.
The hideous footage below isn’t the razing of Gaza. It is the razing of Mosul. We did this. I don’t recall a word of protest when it happened. But had there been, I don’t think we’d have had much patience with it. ISIS was monstrous. That obscene Caliphate had to be destroyed. War is an unspeakable tragedy. Don’t start one.
Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens did not become what they are because they were profoundly moved by the plight of the Palestinians. The idea is risible. They hate Jews because “they have chosen to devalue words and reasons,” and feel, as Sartre remarked, “entirely at ease as a result.” Reason with them? Include them in the big tent? Appeal to their better natures?
How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to [the anti-Semite] … if out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. ... Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
This is the real meaning of “Queers for Palestine.” They know it’s absurd.
To demand of Jews that we have a “serious conversation” about our disproportionate power and the way we’ve silenced these very serious and very legitimate criticisms of Israel is to ask us to debase ourselves. And we won’t. The only appropriate reaction to people like Fuentes and the rest of these loathsome, preening reptiles is, “Fuck you.”
“If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism … ” That’s darling.
