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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Traditional conservatives let these beasts into the tent because they thought they could control them somehow. Infuriated over eight years of Obama, the Republican party stopped so harshly condemning ideologies far to the right of the party’s mean—the alternative right. This was, in part, because they noticed the coming of age of the internet-fried generation and decided it was politically advantageous to form alliances with these people.

 It was the birth of the so-called “NETTR” principle—No Enemies To The Right.

 No longer would people like Alex Jones be politically homeless. No longer were groups like the Proud Boys ideological islands. “Cancel culture” was the weapon of the left, and they would not indulge in it. For those aspiring to work with the Republican party, it was no longer important whether you had skeletons in your closet. Be as racist as you like, be photographed at a white supremacy rally, nothing was disqualifying, because NETTR.

 There was universal celebration on the right when tech ideologies seized social media, threw open the sluice gates, and flooded it all, deliberately, with Nazis. It was a victory for free speech. We need Nazis on every platform. We’ve got people like Jim Jordan making sure every platform meets its Nazi quota or else they might be infringing on freedoms.

 What did you think was going to happen?

 According to Rod Dreher, a conservative writer who is apparently close to people who are in a position to know, “30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30 are Groypers.” That is, Nazis, specifically followers of Nick Fuentes. And we can see it, very clearly, just from the federal government’s social media, which is almost certainly run by young people, and which drops white supremacy memes and dogwhistles constantly.

 And yet the absolute breathtaking hubris of people like Dreher, who mourns: “These are difficult days for people like me: Americans who back the Trump administration for its determination to fight back against establishment tyrannies, but who are now troubled by its excesses.”

People like Dinesh D’Souza and Vivek Ramaswamy, who full-throatedly staked their entire political lives to Trumpism, are now complaining that people on the right are being racist to them. Oh no!

 “This is the sh*tshow that Heritage and Tucker have brought upon us,” cries D’Souza, who once received a pardon from Donald Trump after being convicted of committing election fraud, “If this continues, I would not be surprised to see mass desertions of blacks, Latinos and other minorities from the GOP.”

 But this was not brought upon him by Tucker and Heritage. He brought it upon himself. This wing of the openly and gleefully identitarian right has been racist against them the entire time. They absolutely flipped out in January when Trump was putting too many Indian people in his cabinet, a reaction so strong from his now core base of ethnonationalists that he wound up removing Ramaswamy from the DOGE team to calm them down a little.

 All these quisling “traditional” conservatives, Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, JD Vance—yes, even Tucker—who were once revolted by the Trumpian project to embrace vulgarity but ultimately, idiotically, decided to bring Nazis to the table to break bread and strategize for their mutual benefit, did you seriously think these people had less ambition than you?

 The meteoric rise and rise and rise of Nick Fuentes now has the New York Times pegging him as Charlie Kirk’s successor, but I think maybe more than that. If this trajectory continues, I see a presidential run. Remember, the traditional right invited this, nurtured it, and could have killed it at any time. 

 What was the plan, here? What did you think was going to happen?

 How ironic that the real “Great Replacement” turns out not to have been the replacement of white Americans with foreign barbarians, but in fact the replacement of traditional Republicans of all races with the white ethnonationalists who have been scratching at the White House door since 1865 begging to be let back in, promising they’ll behave this time.

 There is another side effect of this self-imposed clusterfuck that the GOP somehow didn’t expect, and this one isn’t good news for them either: 

Off-year elections at the start of November were an astonishing blue sweep. The most notable win was the very decisive victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral election: A self-described socialist, which is traditionally poison in American politics, as well as a Muslim, which is playing New York City politics on extra hard mode for reasons anyone over 25 can tell you.

 But more than that, counties swung blue that had voted red for decades. None of these elections, which are all state and local, change anything in the behemoth of the federal government that is still the sole property of Trump and, apparently, now a bunch of Nazis, but they show something is waking up very quickly on the left side of things.

 It turns out that having Nazis run the government social media, as well as running ICE like the Gestapo, and other extremely conspicuous effects of a far-right takeover of the government, deals enough of a shock that it wakes people up. Abandoning the center to embrace the far-right seemed like a winning strategy in the short term for the Shapiros of the nation, but the median Republican voter, who might have voted for him two or three times, likely expected they were voting for the 2017-2020 Trump era to return. You know, kind of an entertaining media spectacle. But 2025 Trump has just been all misery and gaslighting and starvation and open, conspicuous Nazism.

 The victories of November may not, themselves, change anything, but they might make the Democratic party also think about the benefits of abandoning the center. Maybe they’ll turn their attention to finding the next Zohran Mamdani, or a whole bunch of them, for the 2026 midterms. That would be an interesting experiment, wouldn’t it?

 As much as people like Ben Shapiro are my ideological opponents I don’t want to see them in a fucking concentration camp. But it’s obvious the right no longer have the ability to clean their own house, here. It’s now down to the left to clean up the mess they’ve made.

I'm writing a book about how toxic cultures on the early internet led to a runaway political feedback effect that culminated in Gamergate, then Trump, then January 6, then Worse Trump, and then where we are now. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. A new chapter is coming out this very weekend! So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here:

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