🔒 The Political Gulf is Widening. The Right Will Suffer For It.

In an eye-rolling turnaround, Republicans are suddenly whinging that there are a whole bunch of Actual Nazis in their movement.

 The left, of course, have been warning them about this for years, but their reaction has been to sit on their “reals over feels” high horse and say we’re being hyperbolic and hysterical. They use it as an accelerant for the victimhood complex that still fuels their movement even as they hold absolute power over the United States, power such that it enables the president to bypass both congress and the judiciary and rule by fiat. For a month after the killing of Charlie Kirk they were saying that the Nazi libel was a deliberate tactic driving leftists to murder them.

Now, I want to be clear and I hope I’ve always been clear, the left isn’t without fault on this point. Nazi overdiagnosis is real and not everybody to the right of you is a Nazi, even if they’re really bad or even really racist. George Bush isn’t a Nazi, Sean Hannity isn’t a Nazi, Jesse Singal certainly isn’t a Nazi. You can utterly repudiate their views, as I do, without committing a category error.

 A lot of the time, such as with a lot of members of the Trump administration including Trump himself, people say “Nazi” when a more appropriate term is “fascist,” which is also something very bad but doesn’t carry the same punch as “Nazi.” Calling everybody to the right of you, even those who also fall short of fascism, a Nazi, robs us of the language to describe an actual Nazi when one comes along.

 Nick Fuentes is a Nazi.

When I wrote just a few weeks ago about the very dangerous way in which Glenn Greenwald had endorsed and sanitized Fuentes, I hadn’t predicted just how quickly and dramatically things would escalate. But I knew they would escalate. I predicted the status of Greenwald would launder Fuentes’ views upward to ever more respectable and mainstream pundits, to broadcast them like an infected signal to the greater public.

 In the weeks following the Greenwald interview, Fuentes was invited onto the popular Red Scare podcast, and after that, he landed his first truly golden gig—the Tucker Carlson show. As with Greenwald, Carlson actively facilitated the sanitization of what Fuentes believes and represents.

 Until this escalation, Fuentes was seen as someone whose reach was kind of quarantined to the Alex Jones tier of wingnut podcast punditry. After Tucker, the rise of Actual Nazism within MAGA became difficult for the rest of the movement to ignore. Again, the left saw it for a long time, but for the right, the canary in the coal mine was Ben Shapiro, one of the most prominent figures in Trump support but also, somewhat famously, a Jew.

 Shapiro has had reason to look nervously around at his inner circle for a while. Since early last year, working at his media company, The Daily Wire, must feel to him like a situational horror movie in which, day after day, his employees arrive at work with suspicious puncture marks on their neck, staring at him in an unnerving way.

Candace Owens was the first Daily Wire employee to turn Hitler-curious, and was fired in March 2024. Then Jeremy Boreing, the company’s co-founder, went on a Lauren Chen podcast that included Fuentes and told him he was a fan of Fuentes’ show and thought he was very talented, but admittedly was “troubled” by some of the things Fuentes says. (In context, he was responding to Fuentes’ opinion that drag performers and certain politicians should be executed for blasphemy, and that Jews who fail to convert should be driven from positions of influence). When you’re Jewish, as Shapiro very much is, this isn’t really the level of pushback you would hope your business partner would give to a statement that you should be removed from public life if not exterminated.

More recently, it’s Daily Wire’s other big star, Matt Walsh, who is showing a disturbing affinity for a certain type of character on the far right. You just need to check out his Twitter feed to see who he’s talking to and boosting.

“Captive Dreamer” is a reference to a memoir written by a member of the Waffen-SS, but you don’t need to speculate too much about what that means because a report by the Daily Dot went into just how much of a Nazi this guy is.

The photo in “FischerKing’s” profile is of Bobby Fischer, an American chess grandmaster, who was also a Nazi.

 So Ben Shapiro suddenly notices that he seems to be surrounded by Nazis and influential conservatives like Carlson platforming and promoting Nazis. The true depth of the problem revealed itself when, after speaking out about it and getting some fellow Nazi-hating allies on his side, he was chastened by none other than the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, who posted a video urging them not to “cancel our own people” and to “focus on our ideological enemies on the left” and refrain from attacking people on the right like Carlson and Fuentes.

 But for traditional conservatives like Ben Shapiro, especially those like him who disliked Trump initially but came to opportunistically latch onto his movement, looking back on your whole project over the past ten years…

 Exactly what the fuck did you think was going to happen?

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