Firehose #169: Nazis? We *Hate* Nazis!

Also: Second Sunday Zoom call scheduled for I-don't-know-when-yet o'clock

Three quick reminders before we finger the faultlines of the conservative crack-up: 1) There are tickets still available for our Honda Center appearance in Anaheim Nov. 21 with Megyn Kelly (our guest on Episode #526). 2) There probably aren’t but may still be tickets/waitlisting for our Nov. 23 live event in Burbank. 3) Our monthly Second Sunday Zoom call with paying subscribers is … happening Sunday! Deets TK.

* For those somewhat befuddled by the never-ending Kevin Roberts/Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes psychodrama, it continues to be useful to consult pocket-maps fashioned this week by a bunch of former Fifth Column guests. Starting, off the top rope, with CBS shill Nellie Bowles (#187):

This is a hot topic, so let’s stick to the facts. First, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, put out a full-throated, on-camera defense of Tucker Carlson for hosting Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic little goblin with peach fuzz and a perpetual, thin-lipped smile, as if blood libel were Christmas cheer. No one asked Kevin to get involved; no one needed Kevin in this situation; Kevin just decided to film that since he was feeling a little left out and needed to make his bizarre opinions known. In the video, he blamed a “venomous coalition” of “globalists” for “sowing division” on the right over Fuentes and called all criticism an “attempt to cancel” Carlson. Well, people got really mad about this. I’m sure the donors who pay him a million bucks a year weren’t thrilled that he decided to formally throw the Heritage Foundation into team Rage Against the Jews.

Then began Kevin’s apologies. First, Kevin tried to throw a staffer under the bus for reposting messages in defense of the statement, making a big show of demoting his chief of staff, who later resigned since maybe that would help make all this go away? Kevin also released a written clarification about his feelings toward Fuentes: “Allow me to elaborate.” He tried to do that on Dana Loesch’s show, but she, unfortunately for Kevin, is very smart and it didn’t go well for him. Then, this week he offered a more formal on-camera apology to the staff, saying he “made a mistake.” Then he did another on-camera apology (number three? Four?): “Leadership requires owning the moments where we fall short.” Poor Kevin. […]

The New York Times, by the way, gave Fuentes a gorgeous photo, where he looks hot and cool and sorta misunderstood. And here’s how the piece describes him: “Plenty of conservatives, especially Jewish ones, abhor Fuentes’s growing clout. But by cheering on Donald Trump as he promoted conspiracy theories and systematically destroyed bulwarks against nativism and bigotry in the Republican Party, they helped make Fuentes’s rise possible.” So, in summary, we must conclude the Jews are to blame for Nick Fuentes’s rise, and if it happens, also his fall. Which is so funny because that’s also what Nick Fuentes also concludes!

* Next up, counting-anti-Jews-in-things specialist Jamie Kirchick (#55, #347, #394):

Carlson’s promotion of Fuentes was a signal moment in the former Fox News star’s moral atrophy. It also has forced an overdue reckoning on the American right. For far too long, the problem of antisemitism has been allowed to fester there because too many conservatives have been reluctant to speak out against its chief propagator. Finally, the battle lines are being drawn, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the editors of National Review lambasting Carlson as a reckless hatemonger, while former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former congressman Matt Gaetz and the executive director of the American Conservative disingenuously defend him as a good-faith, just-asking-questions skeptic of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Earlier this week, Carlson said the controversy over his parley with Fuentes is really “a fight over what happens after Donald Trump.” He’s right. […]

For years, there has been a spirited argument between hawks and self-described “restrainers,” those who advocate a less ambitious interpretation of America’s global responsibilities and a more parsimonious use of military force. The problem that many isolationists like Carlson and his acolytes have, however, is that when engaging in these debates they can’t help but sink into the antisemitic gutter. For example, on Tuesday, Carlson said Republicans with a “neoconservative posture … don’t care about domestic policy because they don’t care about the United States. But they do care about the U.S. Treasury and the Pentagon, the projection of force on behalf of Israel.”

Ironically, the politician Carlson is harming most with his antics is the person he wants to succeed Trump: Vice President JD Vance. Carlson, who praised Vance in his discussion with Fuentes as one of the very few people on the right who shares his foreign policy views, reportedly played a decisive role in convincing Trump to name Vance as his running mate. Vance, who has since employed Carlson’s son as his deputy press secretary, invited Carlson to the White House when he guest-hosted the “Charlie Kirk Show” following the assassination of its eponymous host. Having benefited from Carlson’s scorched-earth campaign against “the neoconservatives,” Vance now appears stuck with Carlson’s antisemitic, conspiratorial, anti-American baggage whether he likes it or not.

* Picking up the Vance theme: Was it zero days since the Chat mentioned Batya Ungar-Sargon (#451, #502)? Well, let it be written:

[N]ot everyone agrees that Fuentes should be off-limits for a friendly interview or that the fight to keep him outside the tent is one worth having. Vice President J.D. Vance, a close friend of Carlson, posted on X that “The infighting is stupid.” And there’s an effort afoot among online content creators on the right to brand any anger at Carlson and Fuentes as an attempt to silence criticism of Israel. They are arguing that they are being “canceled” for having the guts to point out that young people don’t like Israel anymore.

Nonsense. The fight roiling the right isn’t about young people turning on Israel. It’s a turf war between conservatives and content creators, between those who want votes and those who want views. And you have to choose. The online right has been pushing the Vance view that the real enemy is the left, and there should be “no enemies to my right.” But the racist poison being allowed in through the backdoor by the online right’s thirst for engagement is incompatible with the multiracial coalition built by President Donald Trump. […]

[C]ontrary to what those sanitizing Fuentes want you to believe, the brouhaha isn’t “splitting the right.” It’s splitting the political and cultural right from the content creators who make their money off global, online audiences. Those creators have found that their online audiences crave anti-Israel content, and as a result, they have tried to frame the dustup as being about Israel and free speech. […]

People point to the millions of views popular podcasters get as proof of their influence and relevance, but content creators are deeply divorced from where the vast majority of Republicans and conservatives are on many issues, and this is why: They aren’t reading the room; they’re reading the comments section under their videos, which are filled with people who do not reflect the views of normal Americans.

Unfortunately, even grown-ups like Roberts at the Heritage Foundation forget that all these platforms have global reach. They look at a YouTube video that has 5 million views and suddenly think it means 5 million young American men agree with it, and we must not anger the young men by suggesting Hitler is bad!

* Adding still more value to the social-media discussion is yet another controversial past guest (#323), Chris Rufo:

[Fuentes] embraces taboos not because he has an authentic faith in Hitler or a deep-seated opposition to interracial marriage. He may well believe these things, of course, but that isn’t why he pushes them. Rather, he embraces taboos because doing so drives attention and creates a spectacle in digital media that benefits him.

The tone of his discourse is not authentic, serious, or reflective. It is ironic, cynical, and provocative. When Fuentes lauds Hitler and, in another interview, praises Stalin—irreconcilable ideological enemies—he is not expressing a comprehensible ideology that can be scrutinized in debate. He is engaging in a performance, which only becomes coherent when read as a demand for attention. […]

Fuentes is not a Nazi in a real historical sense, but a live-streamer who wields the still-charged symbol of Nazism to hijack the discourse and bait his opponents into a reaction. He may genuinely believe what he says—I doubt it—but, in either case, that is orthogonal to the point that he is using people’s horror at Nazism to serve his ends.

* The aforementioned Megyn Kelly continues to be in the white-hot center of the debate. At a live performance Wednesday, Kelly was asked by an audience member (beginning at 14:55 of the whole-show clip) how she could have criticized the late Charlie Kirk for having recorded a podcast episode with Gavin Newsom, given that “you did not publicly question Tucker’s decision to give an amicable interview to Nick Fuentes.” Question: “How do you distinguish the two, and what responsibility do you feel as an independent journalist to give or not give a platform to controversial or even like bad actors?” Kelly, after making a Rocky vs. Drago distinction re: Newsom, said, of platforming, “I’m like the guys on The Fifth Column—I don’t even like that term. I mean, what’s ‘platforming’? It’s called interviewing.” She then said that she normally doesn’t criticize dear friends, but that she did have some questions about the Fuentes episode, which may just get answered in a few minutes.

At 24:08, Kelly began to introduce and tell personal anecdotes about her guest. (Sample: “I love Tucker Carlson. Love. I don’t care what anybody says about him, I will always have his back. He’s controversial? So am I!”) Here’s their Fuentes exchange:

She also asked Tucker about his feud with Ben Shapiro. The following evening, she got the other side about both Tucker and Fuentes from … Ben Shapiro:

* One (visual) break! Coming up! Thanks to Arch Stanton for my new Slack avi:

* Feels like a thousand years ago, but I’m duty-bound to note that A) there was a time before Zohran Mamdani’s restoration of the Caliphate in NYC, and that B) I published a pre-election piece under the headline of, “The Democratic Thrill for Mamdani Is a Tell.” Here’s how that ends:

For those of us on the outside of Team Blue, and for the other 332 million U.S. residents who don’t live in (and are sick of hearing about) the Big Apple, here is the tell to watch out for in the coming days: Which prospective victory will Democrats be more fired up about Wednesday, Abigail Spanberger flipping the Virginia governorship away from the GOP, or Mamdani flashing his pearly whites in Gotham? The former is by far the more consequential indicator of the next two years in major-party competition; the latter tells you more about what’s percolating under the Democratic hood.

If Mamdani wins the intra-Democratic beauty pageant, then hold onto your wallets. Populism, at least as channeled professionally through major-party politics, demands not results but proof of marketable concept. Why, you can win a high-profile election simply by smiling on social media and promising stuff even Saturday Night Live finds laughable? Get ready for a rent-freezing, billionaire-taxing, teachers union–fluffing, restorative justice–loving socialist near you. And keep the local U-Haul on speed dial.

* Moynihan did a Report just after the election with Democratic strategist Don Calloway:

* Big tariff case at SCOTUS this week, as we gabbed about briefly with Fox News Liberal (and Raging Moderate!) Jessica Tarlov in #531. The court challenge also came up on The Reason Roundtable, after which my colleagues did one of those edit/enhancement things of me ranting:

* More, er, knowledgeably, Fifdom’s fave court-watcher, Damon Root (#45, #106, #206, Members Only #117, #363, #413, #462), had good pre- and post-writes. From the latter:

It’s always unwise to predict the outcome of a U.S. Supreme Court case based solely on what happened during oral arguments. So let’s go ahead and attempt it anyway. […]

Justice Neil Gorsuch, … in my view, stole the show. Shortly before yesterday’s oral arguments kicked off, I wrote that if Gorsuch “lean[s] in on non-delegation and separation of powers concerns,” it would mean that “Gorsuch may vote against Trump.”

Well, Gorsuch certainly leaned in. Under “your theory of the Constitution,” Gorsuch demanded of [Solicitor General John] Sauer, referring to the Trump official’s repeated invocation of Trump’s inherent power over foreign affairs, “what would prohibit Congress from just abdicating all responsibility to regulate foreign commerce, or for that matter, declare war to the President?”

A few minutes later, Gorsuch pressed Sauer on the inevitable implications of Trump’s claim that Congress had actually delegated such unbridled tariff authority to the executive. “Don’t we have a serious retrieval problem here,” Gorsuch asked, “because, once Congress delegates by a bare majority and the President signs it—and, of course, every president will sign a law that gives him more authority—Congress can’t take that back without a super majority. And even—you know, even then, it’s going to be veto-proof. What president’s ever going to give that power back? A pretty rare president.”

In short, Gorsuch stated, “Congress, as a practical matter, can’t get this power back once it’s handed it over to the President. It’s a one-way ratchet toward the gradual but continual accretion of power in the executive branch and away from the people’s elected representatives.”

* Oh hey lookie that, Moynihan did another episode, in which after yelling more about Mamdani and Eugene Debs and Bill K-r-i-s-t-o-l, brings on noted Dick Cheney expert … Josh Szeps (#25, #80, #103, #117, #196, #328, #423, #445, M.O. #231)?? From his car??? Talking smartly if Aussiely about the “Cheney-to-Trump pipeline”:

* My (related) contribution to the Dickscourse are three old-timey pieces: “Watergate Blowback: The White House’s ongoing battle against post-Nixon sunshine laws” (2004), and the twinned Gerald Ford-obit-pegged “Our Long National Nightmare—Still Going Strong” and “Behind the ‘Long National Nightmare’” (2007).

* Speaking of pipelines, was shocked (if pleasantly!) in the comments of M.O. #284 to discover that the Pod Save America-to-Fifth Column pipeline is very real. Love wins! Though I note that -- unlike Jessica Tarlov, and that other guy! -- our invites to Crooked Con got lost in the mail. (Though in fairness, only one of the three of us would have gone.)

* How the hell did this Firehose get to be 2,500 words long? Have to leave so much on the cutting-room floor! Well, here, care of alert listener Michael Clardy, is a Twitter list of every Fifth guest, how ‘bout that!

* Comment of the Week comes from Felix Dzerzhinsky:

Please please please introduce your fucking guests you drunks.

Walkoff is a newly released version of one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite albums, which is getting a deluxe-edition re-release in two weeks: