Food Fight on the Right
Levin Makes the Case Against Israel
Nick Fuentes is basically a cross between Chris Farley and Joseph McCarthy. At least, that was my quick conclusion after watching his interview by Tucker Carlson.
It was the first and last time I bothered to pay attention to Fuentes, who, over the course of two hours with Tucker, covered a broad array of ideas, experiences, and assumptions that ranged from plausible and interesting to ludicrous and retarded.
(My favorite was his theory that heterosexual pornography is turning people gay. I thought our numbers might be growing, but only now do I know why.)
Fuentes reminded me of Farley because he was too big for his suit and gave the impression of being as surprised as anyone that he was on stage. He reminded me of McCarthy because he had some things right, but mostly does things that undermine the cause he supports.
In the 1950s, McCarthy risked undermining serious and methodical red-hunters like Richard Nixon, who, even on his worst day, could console himself by smiling upon the head of Alger Hiss mounted above his fireplace after his meticulous, calm, fact-based defenestration of the former Soviet spy.
Tucker seemed to conclude Fuentes could be playing a similar contemporary role as McCarthy, noting Fuentes’s critics on the right argue: “… they’re like, ‘Fuentes discredits the reasonable people because he’s always banging on about the Jews, the Jews. And so he makes everyone else look like a Nazi.’”
Apparently I wasn’t as upset by Fuentes’s existence on Earth and appearance on Tucker’s show, probably because I see him as existing mostly in a parallel universe. Unlike, for example, the late Charlie Kirk, Fuentes brings neither money, nor votes, nor organization to the political system.
The only item left after those important things is ideas. He has many, and never had a moment’s hesitation in more than two hours of answering Tucker’s questions. However, notwithstanding his Farley-esque demeanor, he seemed mechanical in his responses. In goes the question and out comes the alt-right answer. (His nemesis, Ben Shapiro, strikes me that way, except with conventional conservative monotone output.) In that sense, he bore another resemblance to McCarthy: somehow kind of smart and kind of dumb at the same time.
Who knew Tucker’s 2024 interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t be the most controversial of his career. From a modest studio in Maine, his interview of Fuentes sparked a genuine crisis on the right. The left is pretty hot and bothered too.
The most immediate casualty is the Heritage Foundation, a wealthy but ossified think tank in Washington that wants to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and isn’t good at doing either. Its leader, Kevin Roberts, has been trying admirably but ineffectively to make the organization politically relevant, as it was during the Reagan administration (1981–1989). In more recent years, it has been known to have a big bank account but come up short on policy or political consequence.
Oddly, Roberts posted a video attempting to support Tucker while both opposing and supporting Fuentes, or at least his right not to be “deplatformed,” as the kids call censorship these days. Not even Bill Clinton and Dick Morris could pull off that kind of 3-D triangulation in their heyday. Roberts, whom Heritage compensated $954,000 in 2023, did a face-plant, sparked open protest and resignations at Heritage, bravely fired a staffer, has apologized repeatedly and has vowed to hunt down antisemitism wherever it may exist.
Rumor has it that a mohel was urgently summoned to the Heritage executive suite.
One presumes Roberts’s days are numbered, but who really cares. His decision to oppose censorship in this instance seemed tactically driven by an urge to suck up to Tucker in a quest for relevance. But the inclination not to dismiss someone or something without argument isn’t bad. This episode has exposed, in parts of the right, some of the most unappealing conduct that marks the left: a desire to censor and a refusal to debate.
This insularity is what ultimately drives the left’s inclination toward political violence. Considering the American people have governed themselves for centuries and managed to sort right from wrong without the help of censors and scolds, can they not still be counted on to hear an argument and make a sound judgment?
I’ll bet they can, pragmatically sifting the sound from nutso, even as Fuentes is blessed by feckless opponents.
One example is Mark Levin, who hosts a weekly Fox News show with an audience of one million people and an average age of 100. According to RealClearPolitics, Levin declared to the Republican Jewish Coalition: “We canceled Pat Buchanan… We cancel stuff all the damn time,” in urging the censorship of not only Fuentes but Tucker, Steve Bannon, and others with whom he differs.
Levin called Fuentes “little Adolf,” adding, “My advice to little Adolf is just go put the brown shirt on. What are you, a coward? Put the brown shirt on. I know you can’t grow the Hitler mustache. You’re still stuck in your prepubescent stage, but give it a shot.”
Thank goodness we have such wise and calm arbiters of what we are allowed to hear, observe, and judge.
The slur against Buchanan is particularly telling. In challenging incumbent President George H. W. Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination, Buchanan presaged today’s New Right, especially its popular opposition to globalism, deindustrialization, uncontrolled immigration, and postmodernity. Many say the seeds of Reagan’s success in 1980 were planted in the failed but unabashed 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater. In the same way, Buchanan’s failed insurgency forms the preface of the Trump era and President Trump’s transformation of the Republican Party into something relevant, electable, and powerful.
As with the New Right today, establishmentarians smeared Buchanan with antisemitism because he opposed aid to Israel. However, in 1991, William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a 40,000-word article, “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” in the then-relevant National Review. It is of course too long to read, but ChatGPT informs me that it examined Buchanan, among others, and, with careful hedging, concluded Buchanan was not an antisemite. I seem to recall hearing that at the time.
I take this stroll down memory lane to suggest that while some claims of antisemitism on the right are correct, some are leveled inaccurately by people who hate the New Right. Levin is a case in point: he said he would never vote for Trump, but now sucks up to him magnificently. But Levin, along with Roberts’s critics inside the Heritage Foundation, the propped-up skeleton that is the National Review, the anti-tariff, open-border glee club at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, longing as they do for Mitt Romney to return with binders of women to export jobs to China, would truly like to turn back the clock to the Republican Party before Trump.
Regarding Israel, one extreme in this debate says support for the Jewish state is part of a globalist scheme by all-powerful Jews and Christian Zionists scheming to undermine America. The other says that criticism of Israel and its wartime conduct and the view that foreign aid is counterproductive are the first steps down a path that leads to a swastika flying over the White House.
Both are wrong. Supporters of Israel are served worst by Levin, and those who want the New Right that Trump has shaped and brought to power aren’t helped by Fuentes. However, as a new Middle East comes into view, driven by Trump’s successes in the region, the back-footing of Iran and its proxies, and the steady rise of the Gulf States, the use of American power and money ought to be up for debate. Clearly it is.
Can today’s leading voices on the right and left have a calm and adult debate about that role?
Don’t be silly: of course not.
