Firehose #174: Come and Get Us, Stephen Miller!

Also: Shapiro vs. Carlson vs. Bari vs. Megyn vs. Alex Jones vs. Candace Owens vs. Vivek vs. Fuentes vs. MBD vs. Avik vs. Kmele vs. Walsh!

Well, that escalated quickly.

One day you’re looking at a routine disruption of the Turtle Island Liberation Front; the next you’ve got White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Deporting Everybody Who Isn’t an Afrikaner Stephen Miller announcing that “vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States.” Do you even capitalize, bro?

(Actual Washington Post article about the anti-terrorism task-force controversies here.)

* Let’s see, any interesting news on the rightward half of the political news/commentary spectrum….

Before we get into the individual slap-fights, a tentative stab at a Grand Unifying Theory for the conservative crack-up that’s been evident since at least our clarifying Oct. 2 conversation with Megyn Kelly: It’s the succession, bro.

King Lear is meeting Knives Out. A patriarch whose potency has no chance of being passed down is letting the next generation gouge each other’s eyes out for the chance to inherit a rapidly depleting and possibly radioactive estate. As their attention turns on each other, the mad king blurts out the occasional I’M STILL HERE!, but otherwise busies himself with strip-mining the national jewels for his actual family’s enrichment. The exiled GOP establishment starts loudly cracking knuckles.

As teased out a bit on Episode #537 and Members Only #291, it is precisely Donald Trump’s ideological mercuriality that leaves would-be successors and interpreters, who definitionally do NOT have his talent to retain core audience amid blatant policy reversals, in a lose-lose situation, to the extent that their business depends on his fanbase. Go out on a limb defending POTUS’s outlier positions, and he’ll saw the branch clean off. Stick to “Whatever he says and does is great!”, and the normie-adjacent audience will shrink almost as fast as your soul.

For everyone else, it’s war—over the Epstein files, over A.I., over Israel, over military intervention, over H1-B visas, over anti-Semitism, over whatever the hell a “Heritage American” is. MAGA entrepreneurs compete on edgelordery, try in vain to match the master’s insult comedy, then defend their exposed turf like wounded wolverines.

This past week’s fratricide, which culminated at the Turning Point USA conference in Phoenix, began with an olive branch petition of sorts—Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie and successor head of TPUSA, met in private Monday with conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, at a four-hour summit brokered by Megyn Kelly. (“I have been working behind the scenes to try to foster a day between them,” Kelly said on her podcast. “I really fully believe God’s role for me here is to possibly play a role in getting this whole thing to a better place.”) In the run-up to the meeting, Owens had devoted some 40 episodes to questioning, and often providing insane (and TPUSA-implicating) answers to, the official storyline of Charlie’s murder; prompting Erika to finally respond (in an interview with CBS News honcho Bari Weiss) “Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop.”

Any truce lasted less than a day. Owens started her Tuesday podcast with “Shabbat Shalom,” replaced her theme song with “Hava Nagila,” and reiterated her suspicions that Israel and TPUSA had something to do Kirk’s assassination. A defiant Kelly, meanwhile, told critics of her Candace-handling to get bent: “She and I have only gotten closer as people try to make me attack her … so fuck off.”

Enter Daily Wire founder (and former Candace Owens boss) Ben Shapiro. Alert readers may recall from Firehoses #168 & #169 that the right’s circular firing squad started blasting away in earnest seven weeks back when Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts offered a full-throated defense of Tucker Carlson’s kid-gloves interview with Nazi incel Nick Fuentes. On Wednesday, Shapiro was supposed to give a talk about his new book at Heritage HQ. Instead, with Roberts sitting alongside, he pilloried Carlson as “an opponent to conservatism,” and warned that “if Heritage Foundation wishes to retain its status as a leading thought institution in the conservative movement, it must act as ideological border control.” Here’s the whole speech plus Q&A:

On Thursday, Shapiro went onstage at the TPUSA conference and delivered a stemwinder that The Free Press in its reprint would headline, “Only Cowards Tolerate Conspiracy Theorists: Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and others make vile accusations through vague insinuations. Beating their distortions requires honesty and clarity.” The full video is below; first, there were a couple sections I think of particular interest to Fifth Column listeners, starting with a bit on how to approach our political media ecosystem at a time of institutional collapse, vanishing trust, and a demand for bullshit:

I want to talk about … how to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters.

Because something is new: an informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos. Opportunity, because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and hear. And chaos, because an anarchic informational environment means that we must be smart in how we assess the information and arguments we hear.

Why does this matter? Because today, the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty, who offer nothing but bile and despair, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters.

The second, which name-checks Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, concerns what Shapiro considers the obligations that conservative commentators have in the face of high-profile batshittery (my words, not his):

[F]riendship with public figures who do or say evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter. Politics isn’t The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Politics is about principle. And if you are willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people. […]

So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace’s targeting of TPUSA, or to mirror her insane line of questioning, because you “love” Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly—a person I consider a friend—characterizing Candace as a “young mother,” and thus shying away from condemning her actions or fibbing about them. That’s simply a nonstarter. Meghan Markle is a young mother. So is Ilhan Omar, for that matter.

And when Megyn says that “my goal and my job here is to try to understand—yes, where Candace is coming from on this,” as she did this week, and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself “into this on one side,” that’s a moral and logical absurdity. There is only one moral side here: Erika’s side.

The video:

Tucker Carlson, in closing the first night of TPUSA, shot back: “To hear calls for like, de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? This is hilarious.” Carlson also contended that anti-Semitism wasn’t as widespread and damaging as anti-white racism, and denounced Republicans for being too antagonistic toward Muslims. Whole video:

Megyn Kelly, meanwhile, clapped back hard at Shapiro during her TPUSA conversation Friday, answering a question from Jack Posobiec about a post-Kirk “rift within the conservative movement” by saying, “I mean there’s a rift, but it was starting even before we lost Charlie. And it revolves around Israel,” and then later in the convo:

[A]s the [Israel-Gaza] war went on, two years later, people were starting to turn on them. It felt like too much. And then we were under pressure to get involved; we had the Iran bombing and so on. And the pressure started to mount on those of us who were pro-Israel to not allow the doubters their say. To try to censor them, or disagree with them publicly, or call them out. And neither Charlie nor I felt like that was what we wanted to do, at all. Nor was it our job. We’re not the policemen of the conservative moment -- I’m not, he wasn’t. Ben Shapiro isn’t either. […]

I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement. Which shows a willful blindness about his position in it…. So I resent the whole thing, I object to the whole thing. Ben and I—he had the nerve to call me a “friend” before he called me a despicable coward, for not calling out the people he wants called out…. I resent that he thinks he’s in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when.

So I don’t think we are friends anymore.

Kelly also criticized Bari Weiss (veteran of Episodes #89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) for publishing and promoting Shapiro’s speech over at Free Press. Whole video:

* This recap is already way too long, and only scratches the surface of the internecine feuds. Oh, there was Vivek Ramaswamy (#411) vs. Nick Fuentes & other online-right enthusiasts for the “loony” Heritage-American hyphenation. Avik Roy vs. Michael Brendan Dougherty on same. Alex Jones (!) vs. Candace Owens. Our own Kmele vs. Matt Walsh. I’m sure J.D. Vance will sort it all out in the end.

* Speaking of Kmele & the ongoing right-wing drama, that’s what the latest Tangle News pod was about, featuring some guest insight from National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke (#7).

* Shall we move on? Let’s. Moynihan on his Report this past week had on Hunter Biden’s former business partner & fellow Burismaite Devon Archer, a convicted fraudster who was pardoned earlier this year by (why not?) Donald Trump. From the write-up: “Archer, a Yale graduate and former Citibank employee, details his transition from a baby bundler for the John Kerry campaign to a central figure in the business dealings of Hunter Biden….Archer provides critical clarity on the true nature of the Biden brand during his tenure at Burisma, explaining that Hunter Biden’s primary value was providing a sense of American power to protect the company from regulatory pressure. He confirms that Joe Biden was placed on speakerphone during business dinners and meetings approximately 20 times to exchange niceties and words of encouragement. While Joe Biden did not discuss specific business transactions, Archer characterizes the former Vice President’s repeated claims of being unaware of his son’s business dealings as a categorical lie, citing a personal letter Joe Biden wrote to him thanking him for the partnership.”

* Moyney also sat down with historian Brendan Simms about his 2019 book Hitler: A Global Biography, and how Winston Churchill of late has been portrayed as a World War II villain:

* After Monday’s Reason Roundtable, the editing/chop-chop wizards put some of my skepticism about regime-changing Venezuela into a lil’ bit:

* Comment of the Week comes from Human Being:

Actual quote from Andy Serkis on his adaptation of Animal Farm: “First and foremost, we are not making a film about Communism and Stalinism because if Orwell was writing the story today, he would be talking about other relevant topics like globalization and corporate greed.”

Apparently Orwell’s ghost must’ve told him that the real issues with Animal Farm were that it was too harsh on commies and there weren’t enough fart jokes or Cybertrucks.

Walkoff, an old fave party trick, is another from my forthcoming People Who Died playlist.