THE dividing line between Nazi and nasty is important on the American Right. That means it’s coming here, since there are no national boundaries in the online world. My favourite illustration comes from a couple of years ago, when Rupert Murdoch was briefly engaged to a Californian widow, Ann Lesley Smith, and Vanity Fair reported: “One source close to Murdoch said he had become increasingly uncomfortable with Smith’s outspoken evangelical views. ‘She said Tucker Carlson is a messenger from God, and he said nope,’ the source said. A spokesperson for Murdoch declined to comment.”
Mr Murdoch is the quintessence of nasty, but not Nazi; Mr Carlson, who some people think is merely nasty, has found an audience of five million on YouTube since being sacked by Mr Murdoch from Fox News.
A couple of weeks ago, Mr Carlson brought on to his podcast Nick Fuentes, who really is a Nazi. Mr Fuentes has urged his followers to attack President Trump from the Right, and said things like “We’re in a holy war and I will tell you this. . . We have God on our side. They will go down with their Satanic master. They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.” But this was said not about Muslims, but about Jews. It goes without saying that his views on Muslims are similar, and some of his followers have criticised J. D. Vance for having a Hindu wife.
The emergence of open anti-Semitism on the American Right is concealed from us if we look at the world through the lens of the Gaza War and assume that anyone who hates Muslims must therefore be pro-Jewish. But, at Charlie Kirk’s funeral, Mr Carlson had already revived the Blood Libel, whe he imagined “a bunch of guys sitting around eating hummus” and conspiring to kill Jesus.
The Heritage Foundation, the house think tank of the Republican Party, then lurched to support Mr Carlson and condemned as “virtue-signalling” any discomfort that people might feel at the Trumpist embrace of attitudes towards the Jews which have been visible in public since 1945.
About the only amusing consequence of this is the sight of previously Trump-supporting intellectuals, or journalists such as Rod Dreher, discovering whom or what they’ve woken up in bed with and now prepared to gnaw off their right arms, like foxes in a trap, to wriggle free. Richard Hanania, in Unherd, is unillusioned and, I think, prescient.
“The fact that Heritage, too, has now fallen in line suggests that what we’re seeing is something much more ferocious and remarkable than even the most pessimistic critics of the online Right appreciated,” he writes. He goes on to argue that “we must consider the possibility that we’re observing something much more capable than wokeness of remaking one side of the political spectrum and thus enduring as a long-term force in American society. . .
“Right-wing radicalism taps into human nature in a way that wokeness never could. . . Racism, sexism, tribalism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism are organic parts of our souls, and can dominate societies for centuries. While most Americans aren’t inclined toward a [Fuentes] worldview, it does seem strong enough to take over one half of the political spectrum in a country with a great deal of education polarization. And while there were ballot-box backlashes against wokeness, the Right becoming more crudely populist has been associated with relatively high levels of electoral success.”
JAMES MARRIOTT, of The Times, wrote a really fine essay recently on the way in which literacy underpins democracy — at least the democracy that can be distinguished from mob rule — and on the probably disastrous consequences of the widespread loss of real literacy, which is so obvious online. But his latest piece on those lines was sloppier. Perhaps this is because the first one was on Substack and the second one was in The Times.
In his Times column, he picked out several Trumpist influencers as bad guys: Tucker Carlson, of course, for his claim last year to have been physically mauled by a demon while he slept in bed with four dogs last year; Candace Owens, who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man, and that the earth may be flat; and Peter Thiel for his identification of Greta Thunberg with the Antichrist.
But his answer to the problem is just a remix of the most arrogant and off-putting tunes of the New Atheism. He thinks that Steven Pinker is “the Enlightenment’s current greatest defender”. Hanania depresses me quite a lot, but, if Marriott’s right, we really are all doomed.
