I never rated Carlson. His speech at Heritage was lauded but it was a nothing burger! Full of fluff. I watched his interview with Putin. Apart from the boring monologue about Russian history which was revealing it was awful with no challenge.
I would not bother with Fuentes. Jonathan Van Maren has written about the dreaded triplets extensively. Who would bother listening to falsehoods and bile? Owen’s lost the plot when she stated ‘Ye is still my friend’.
I am losing patience with TPUSA and it continued patience with Carlson. Piers Morgan has joined the triplets.
To work out people’s allegiances you trust the discernment that the Holy Spirit gives. All those mistreats you mentioned should be ignored.
The conservative side of politics has many facets and discernment is needed. We don’t present a particularly united front because we think and express a variety of ideas and opinions which in our case should be biblical and different.
Trump has the knack of uniting disparate groups and even cosying up to Marxist leaders like our Prime Minister because he needed a stick to beat Xi with. It remains to be seen if he gets his rare earths. The rumblings have started. He cosies up to Middle Eastern dictators too. I have my doubts about the peace process and definitely about JD Vance now. So we just plod along, praying, reading ,loving Jesus and knowing that it is His redemption is the only redemption and God has a plan for Israel, flawed as it is.
Great and thoughtful piece. Well done wading through Fuentes bile.
Read Melanie Phillips latest piece. It adds to yours, Bethel.
Look, everybody involved here desperately needs Jesus! And the people who claim to have Jesus need to be reminded that he was born a Jewish boy…
A few observations:
1. I think a lot of the “moderates” here unfortunately never learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf. Because a great many of them spent the last few years calling all conservative Christians alt right fascist haters - even when those Christians were fierce opponents of Jew hatred, like Charlie Kirk and Doug Wilson - so now, when actual wolves show up, normies understandably don’t believe them. It’s the medical establishment in the COVID years all over again - once you’ve thrown away your credibility, it’s gone forever, you can’t get it back.
2. In the wake of Kirk’s martyrdom, a lot of Christians are deciding to be much more outspoken and brave about their Christian witness in the public square. Many of these, who do not have a shred of Jew hatred in them, are being slandered as antisemites simply because, for the past several decades, Christian witness has been so unfamiliar to the culture that now it returns it reads as racism, since it’s not universalist. So now a bunch of innocent Christian’s who thought they were part of the mainstream conservative coalition are realizing their allies hate them and their God. This is especially confounding to them since they thought they were the ones living in the big tent, what with all the atheist and gay married and Jewish conservatives they supported for years.
3. It’s almost Christmas. We’ll all be listening to White Christmas, composed by Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin. He didn’t write God Bless America in Yiddish, either. During peak Jewish immigration/assimilation, when my own Jewish ancestors came here, the heavily Jewish (and Hungarian! Ahem…) Hollywood made some of the most beautiful pro-Christian/pro-American movies and songs ever. On the other hand, for the past several decades, every mainstream Jewish organization has gone all in on BLM (which hates Jews) and Muslim immigration (which hates Jews), while attacking Charlie Kirk types (who love Jews). And there’s no common pro Christian pro American culture left to assimilate into even if someone wanted to do so. It was never gonna end well on this trajectory. In the Bible, when God allows his people to be conquered by His enemies, it’s not because he hates Jews or is pro-Babylonian, it’s because they’ve turned away from Him.
2. This is sad if true, do you have specific examples in mind though?
3. Very good and interesting point about there being no thick American Christian culture left. I do think contemporary American Jewry has different "wings" if you will. Bari Weiss and the Free Press wing are friendlier to Christians and seem to have overcome that tri-state blindness that makes Jews of a certain generation convinced that evangelicals hate them.
It's certainly true that elite Jews consistently break left, which is grist for the mill of Fuentes and friends. Though I think October 7 was a wakeup call as a lot of those Jews watched their old BLM friends turn on them.
I have always liked Ezra Levant, he's one of the great Canadian conservative fighters, so I can't express how stunned I was to see him call VP Vance a groyper - yes, a groyper! - for Vance's answer about how he hopes/prays his wife will one day be saved. Like, all spouses should hope that, that's what love is! But I think so few people these days are exposed to basic Christian worldview that this comes across as exceptionally hostile to them. Imagine what he thinks of apologists, or, heaven forbid, missionaries!
Another one I was thinking of was Sean Davis, the Federalist co-founder, who keeps getting called by John Podhoretz a lover of Hitler/fan of the protocols of the elders of zion for espousing 100% basic Christian teaching, it's bizarre. I'm actually pretty sensitive about anti-semitism given my background, and Davis has never said anything even remotely in that ballpark, and he's not one of those edgelords who yells Christ is King in malice at Jewish accounts or anything, he literally just says normal Christian theology things. Then again, I don't find this sort of thing remotely antisemitic, it is generally widely accepted teaching in most Christian denominations including mine, but apparently some people find arguing it to be overtly antisemitic, which is not fair in my view at all:
and, of course, i think a day after i posted my comment, a new example presents itself of a bunch of people attacking a conservative Catholic intern as antisemitic merely for declining an invite to a sabbath dinner. this was a very nice response trying to cool down that tension, fwiw:
to go back to my 'american culture is dead' soapbox, there is a second reason why i believe these tensions are happening (besides the frightening new sensation to many of christians actually being christian in public). used to be, when we had our middlebrow shared culture, every educated American would have read, or at least known of, the likes of Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Richler - or at least watched a few Woody Allen movies! Allen makes a joke of Jewish paranoid hostility to gentiles in Annie Hall (where Alvy Singer thinks literally everyone is antisemitic), but it's funny because it's true, and Bellow and co. spent a lifetime writing about variations on it. And every mainstream middlebrown type understood the joke and the problem it depicted. Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, all about Jewish suspicion of the goyim, was as recently as my childhood the Canadian version of Catcher in the Rye - in that it was on literally every high school reading list. And in the 60s/70s/80s, everyone knew who Bellow/Roth were. Incidentally, if you don't have time for Portnoy's Complaint, one of the best short stories ever is Defender of the Faith:
Anyway, these days, all those guys have been stripped from the curriculum because they're old white guys (well, Woody Allen had some other issues, too...). At my old high school, there's no more Richler, but there's plenty of awful woke indian propaganda now. And that middlebrow culture of the pre-cable era is dead, nobody knows who Bellow or Roth are anymore. On the flip side, in the 60s/70s/80s any educated Jew could check in on the WASP attitudes by reading the likes of Cheever or, if they wanted to get a more conservative Catholic worldview, Flannery O'Connor.
Today, we are completely blind to each other and this is kindling for major misunderstandings and explosions.
I grew up in a secular Jewish northeast kinda community, and literally never once met anyone who went to church weekly (or synagogue weekly either! a friend or two would get barmitzvahed for traditional reasons but nobody believed it). I never stepped foot anywhere near a church and couldn't have told you the difference between a protestant and catholic if my life depended on it. Decades later, I'm saved by the grace of God, we go to church a couple times a week, have a big network of homeschooling Christian friends of various denominations, and josh each other about drinking grape juice at communion or sprinkling babies or whatever, and have serious debates about whether it's ok to watch the Chosen if it was produced by mormoms, lol. This kind of daily faith/interfaith existence is completely alien to the secular world at large and I think now that they're catching glimpses of it they simply can't compute.
Ok, super long rant, sorry. Point is, read more books and have more intense discussions about God!
Let me add something to lighten the mood, though it is related. I’m on an email chain with a bunch of elderly Jews who like to send good jokes, got this one from my friend today:
A nice Jewish boy goes off to college and his father says to him, “Have a wonderful time. All I ask of you is, don't marry a shiksa.” Sure enough, the boy falls in love with a beautiful Catholic girl. “I want to marry you but I promised my father I wouldn't marry a gentile,” he tells her.
She says, “I love you so much I'll be happy to convert.” She does and they marry.
A few years later the father calls his son and asks if he can come in Saturday and help with inventory. “I can’t,” the son explains. “My wife wants to go to shul and then have a quiet sabbath meal.”
“What did I tell you about marrying a shiksa!” screams the father.
Regarding your previous comment: Yes, I did see the to-do over the Catholic guy asking about shabbat dinners. That was a highly unfortunate moment with him and the Jewish lady clearly talking past each other, and all the more unfortunate that it was publicized. Of course the whole town hall went public, but still. Anyway, I agree with you that it was bad for people to pile on him.
I've had a bit of friendly interaction with Sean Davis, but I admit I don't think he's had helpful takes through this. He seems to have been consistently in Tucker's corner and pushing the idea that the concern over Roberts/Heritage is much ado about nothing and boils down to a proxy war against Vance. I agree it was dumb for Podhoretz to go off half-cocked the way he did, but I would say in my own hopefully more measured way that I just think Davis has read the moment wrong. Defining boundaries is actually a good and important thing to be doing at the moment, and it's not just about a neocon cabal somewhere playing 4D chess.
I like your point about cultural blindness. Although, the fact that Jews have historically been so pervasive in media and pop culture is of course wielded by the groypers as proof that they're controlling everything...
You’ve drawn the line exactly where it belongs—between criticism and complicity. You keep the air clear, exposing how "nuance" so often serves as moral fog.
I think you’re really on to something when you point out that much of this goes back to elevating non-interventionist foreign policy to maniacal levels of importance. Post-Iraq, some people have let their traumatized commitment to The Never Ever Ever War become so intense that it deadens their moral sense to anything else. It’s been interesting as someone who also regularly reads Rod Dreher to observe how he’s handled this. I don’t always agree with his takes on foreign policy, and I occasionally roll my eyes a bit when he talks yet again about how ashamed he feels for supporting Bush ‘43. But I think his commitments to social and religious conservatism, as well as his human decency, run deep enough that even those strong feelings haven’t induced him to suck up to dictators or demonize Israel in the way many in Tucker’s mold have. Rod may feel that The War on Terror was largely a con job, but he has other values of sufficient importance not to let that disillusionment consume his soul.
Right, and I can just hear the counter-objection that it's the neocons who focused maniacally on foreign policy first, the paleos are merely objecting. I just think that isn't true. I can remember all the way back in 2015 or thereabouts when these types were already foaming at the mouth about David French, before he took his hard left turn and went full lib, merely because he was one of those cursed neocons-who-writes-for-National-Review.
There's been a new development indicating that Heritage may have tied themselves up in legal knots by signing something with a perpetual (!) non-disparagement clause as part of their partnership with Carlson. In which case, yikes. It would explain a lot.
I watched a lot of the leaked staff meeting today where Roberts took questions. It was hard to listen to. I'm still not convinced he's the guy Heritage needs right now. He didn't acknowledge that even his Hillsdale speech was a mess. But he has some understanding that he messed up big time.
I've a deep aversion to No Enemies To The Left/Right thinking so my views on this become apparent. We are who we read, listen to, hang out with, and so on. That's even more the case with who we introduce people to, whether socially or parasocially.
One of the things that Hannah Arendt really challenged me on when I read her treatise on totalitarianism is how vital the role sympathizers play at each stage of the game in legitimating radical views to the normie crowd. Whereas the striver wants to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole into the inner sanctum of whatever it is, the sympathizer is a bridge builder because they hold sympathies with both the normies and the "whoa that's a little extreme" camps.
Yes, Dreher has just been citing Arendt in his recent writing. It's pretty eerie to look at her warning signs of a society on the brink of totalitarianism. Carlson is definitely the chief sympathizer of our era.
I can go anywhere and read multiple column feet of screeching against various unclean denizens of the alt right. I consider it a waste of talent. What I can't find is anyone actually responding to their concerns, and they do give voice to real concerns. One may like Tucker or not, his style is to let someone talk and let his listeners decide what they think of what is said. I listen to Tucker when I get the chance because I want to hear what the latest pariah has to say in their own words, not in someone else's clips; not that I have trust issues or anything.
I listened to Tucker's interview with Nick. Nick reminded me of the young Mohammed, at least according to some. He came to the church in Alexandria with questions and ideas and was kicked out on his ear for his audacity, and likely uncouthness. That didn't end well.
Seems a poor strategy for the political side that has valued the free exchange of ideas.
Maybe someone will address the questions of his audience rather than the man. I'll be waiting as I have some of the same questions.
I think it's important not to soften who and what Fuentes is with an adjective like "uncouth." He's not a misunderstood Voice of the Youth who's just a bit rough around the edges, he's a miserably jealous, power-hungry deviant. If men are wandering into his shop for a fix, giving him free press isn't the way to help wean them off fentanyl.
Also, he cleaned himself up (somewhat) to go on Tucker. The streams where he calls pedophilia "based," fantasizes about abusing women, instructs his audience to pledge undying loyalty to himself, and much more, are a bit more clarifying.
I do want to write some more about masculinity issues. Are those related to the questions you would have?
I think it is important to deal with ideas and issues and less with people. As repugnant as a person may be, they are generally expressing ideas which can be answered with reason. If they have a following, it is likely because their ideas resonate. By responding with reason, we address the idea for all to hear. We aim to change minds, even hearts; perhaps our own.
In the case of Fuentes, much of the attraction is the transgressive; like grade school boys. The more adults rail against it the more attractive it is. But there are substantive questions underlying the muck. For instance, the question which must not be asked; why does israel matter?
Unless Fuentes was lying about his past, the reaction to that question, and the unwillingness to respond to it with reason, drove him to the darkness. He is not alone. Ad hominem should not be a tactic of the Right, and certainly not of Christians.
I very much appreciate your writing, and that you took the time to respond to my comment.
I believe it's a category error to classify what I've said here as ad hominem. I don't think Fuentes has a coherent "ideology" per se, I think he improvises based on what shocks people and racks up clicks. And the question of "Can't we criticize Israeli policy?" to a great extent functions as a red herring distraction from what's really going on with Fuentes and company. Nobody is forcing him or his followers to fixate on Israel one way or another. It has no practical relevance to their lives, jobs, dating, etc. When Jordan Peterson still had cultural purchase, he approached disaffected young men like this the right way: By concretely exhorting them to better themselves in their immediate spheres and telling them that small actions had great significance.
Lying about one's past is a negative we would agree on, as would lying about someone else's past. I have no knowledge of anyone's veracity so have no opinion on that.
"Why can't we criticize Israel" is no red herring and is very much germaine to every American in whose name, and with whose money, israel is supported. I have mixed feelings on the matter which have nothing to do with how much I may like or dislike Jews, individual or collective. I am clearly not alone.
I have no problem exhorting young people to better themselves in every way possible. I suspect we would make more headway were we to treat their questions with respect and honesty. Please understand, this has little to do with Fuentes the individual and everything to do with Fuentes the ideal.
The testimony of our Palestinian brethren in Gaza and West Bank, what they claim of Israel, is why Fuentes is relevant. One can ignore Fuentes. One cannot and should not ignore what the Palestinian members of our family have been saying of Israel for decades.
I want to proceed with caution when referring to sources like for e.g. Munther Isaac. This book review at Mere Orthodoxy (an outlet that's by no means automatically favorable to Israel) was enlightening:
Pallywood is wholly unreliable except as a measure of the extent to which Islam is a religion of lies. And I do not discount Israel's capacity for exceptionally poor behavior; at the individual level as well as officially.
Do we have an actual American conservative movement? I am a bona fide, actual, full blown, total worldview, American conservative, of some age now, and I don't think there is anything presently like an "American conservatism." The closest we've had in my life was the 80s Reaganism, which I would gladly take right now. I don't think we've splintered now, there was little to nothing to splinter, we've been wandering since the 80s, with most "conservatives" not even being able to articulate what American conservatism is, much less state why it's good and why we should have it.
It's in pockets here and there sure, but I don't see any general American conservatism in a living breathing doing things form. This is why we have Tucker, and Fuentes, and French, etc... and perhaps most of all... Trump.
I am still an optimist because my hope is the same as yours, but it's so frustrating.
If there were something I could do, besides what I've already done, I would do it.
We have no common culture in large part because we have no common history. The Left understands the value of narrative and how destructive it is to their efforts to destroy the West. They are succeeding by first gutting education and now by flooding the zone with people with whom we have little to nothing in common.
I don't think most "conservatives" are conservative. Things would be different if they were. I think they're of the right in some way but not actually conservative.
Conservatives want to conserve the best of their judeo Christian past. Ass someone who is not American I don’t really care about the definition of an American conservatism. It might shock you all to know that you are not the centre of the universe. Conservatives come in many forms. But our biblical Christian faith must be at the centre.
Is Fuentes serious? Or is he a con man seeking attention like Andrew Tate? Does Fuentes call himself a Christian or is he mentally ill? To reinterpret history in such a dastardly way is not decent.
"centre of the universe" ??? I'm sorry friend, are you confused? Bethel's article, the whole point, is literally about American conservativism. So, that's the topic of the comments.
Ok so no outsiders allowed. I take the point. Americans only allowed to comment. I already don’ t read the americanise pieces. Obviously conservatism is only American .
When we talk about someone being "Conservative," I am not sure we all work with the same definition. In fact, the term is used so frequently and in so many different contexts with so many different meanings that I am not sure it can actually be restored as a meaningful political descriptor. What do you mean when you use the term "Conservative?" I am reluctant to declare people whose ideas I find abhorrent to not be "true Conservatives" when I am not sure who is a conservative or what being a conservative means. It smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy. A term that has been used to describe everything from French ultra-royalism to Ronald Reagan is bound to contain many things I do not like.
I'm always going to be a three-legged stool type, and I'm always going to look askance at the David Brooks types who embrace social progressivism while still insisting we have to call them "conservative" because they can quote Edmund Burke. When someone articulates conservative principles in some areas but not others I'll frame it as "So-and-so is conservative on [X, Y issues]," or "So-and-so is partly conservative." So Douglas Murray is an example of someone who would call himself conservative in the British sense, but it's again kind of irrelevant to social conservatism.
I believe you're making my point. This is a people problem, aka a sin problem.
Generally, people cruise through life, unexamined, and without a fully formed worldview, which American conservatism is.
No True Scotsman fallacy kicks in when someone redefines something (conservatism in this case) to exclude a counterexample that challenges their claim, rather than addressing the counterexample directly. That definitely pops up especially when one starts with an unclear or ill formed idea of what conservatism is.
If someone genuinely doesn't know what American Conservatism is, I would point them to many resources, probably starting with the Sharon Statement:
The statement you link to is a fine definition of a certain type of American Liberal Conservatism, but the way that the term "Conservative" is used academically and historically is much vaguer and also much broader. The term was not particularly common in early America, if I recall. The first political party to label itself Conservative (as opposed to receiving the label as a pejorative) of which I am aware is the British Conservative Party, whose ideology was initially a sort of moderate Toryism, committed to a greater or lesser degree, to the power of the British Aristocracy and to the established Anglican church. In the rest of Europe Conservatism was defined by loyalty to throne and altar, whether in a Protestant form (F.J. Stahl and Groen Van Prinsterer) or a Catholic one (De Maistre, Donoso Cortes). Most such movements were allergic to liberalism, to democracy and often to capitalism. Now maybe they are not actually conservative, but in that case the academics and the people are using different definitions. And it seems as if such movements were using the term conservative first, so they perhaps have a better claim to the term than American conservatism. Perhaps my interest in 19th century Europe has made me excessively sensitive to terminology.
So very well said, Ms. McGrew - thank you.
I never rated Carlson. His speech at Heritage was lauded but it was a nothing burger! Full of fluff. I watched his interview with Putin. Apart from the boring monologue about Russian history which was revealing it was awful with no challenge.
I would not bother with Fuentes. Jonathan Van Maren has written about the dreaded triplets extensively. Who would bother listening to falsehoods and bile? Owen’s lost the plot when she stated ‘Ye is still my friend’.
I am losing patience with TPUSA and it continued patience with Carlson. Piers Morgan has joined the triplets.
To work out people’s allegiances you trust the discernment that the Holy Spirit gives. All those mistreats you mentioned should be ignored.
The conservative side of politics has many facets and discernment is needed. We don’t present a particularly united front because we think and express a variety of ideas and opinions which in our case should be biblical and different.
Trump has the knack of uniting disparate groups and even cosying up to Marxist leaders like our Prime Minister because he needed a stick to beat Xi with. It remains to be seen if he gets his rare earths. The rumblings have started. He cosies up to Middle Eastern dictators too. I have my doubts about the peace process and definitely about JD Vance now. So we just plod along, praying, reading ,loving Jesus and knowing that it is His redemption is the only redemption and God has a plan for Israel, flawed as it is.
Great and thoughtful piece. Well done wading through Fuentes bile.
Read Melanie Phillips latest piece. It adds to yours, Bethel.
Love Jonathan van Maren! You're very right that Trump is a total opportunist as well. One of many reasons why I could never warm to him.
TPUSA seems to be struggling to find its feet, and frankly and tragically Kirk opened the door for Tucker.
I tried not to wade through too much Fuentes bile, it was hard to stomach!
I'll look Melanie up.
Look, everybody involved here desperately needs Jesus! And the people who claim to have Jesus need to be reminded that he was born a Jewish boy…
A few observations:
1. I think a lot of the “moderates” here unfortunately never learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf. Because a great many of them spent the last few years calling all conservative Christians alt right fascist haters - even when those Christians were fierce opponents of Jew hatred, like Charlie Kirk and Doug Wilson - so now, when actual wolves show up, normies understandably don’t believe them. It’s the medical establishment in the COVID years all over again - once you’ve thrown away your credibility, it’s gone forever, you can’t get it back.
2. In the wake of Kirk’s martyrdom, a lot of Christians are deciding to be much more outspoken and brave about their Christian witness in the public square. Many of these, who do not have a shred of Jew hatred in them, are being slandered as antisemites simply because, for the past several decades, Christian witness has been so unfamiliar to the culture that now it returns it reads as racism, since it’s not universalist. So now a bunch of innocent Christian’s who thought they were part of the mainstream conservative coalition are realizing their allies hate them and their God. This is especially confounding to them since they thought they were the ones living in the big tent, what with all the atheist and gay married and Jewish conservatives they supported for years.
3. It’s almost Christmas. We’ll all be listening to White Christmas, composed by Jewish immigrant Irving Berlin. He didn’t write God Bless America in Yiddish, either. During peak Jewish immigration/assimilation, when my own Jewish ancestors came here, the heavily Jewish (and Hungarian! Ahem…) Hollywood made some of the most beautiful pro-Christian/pro-American movies and songs ever. On the other hand, for the past several decades, every mainstream Jewish organization has gone all in on BLM (which hates Jews) and Muslim immigration (which hates Jews), while attacking Charlie Kirk types (who love Jews). And there’s no common pro Christian pro American culture left to assimilate into even if someone wanted to do so. It was never gonna end well on this trajectory. In the Bible, when God allows his people to be conquered by His enemies, it’s not because he hates Jews or is pro-Babylonian, it’s because they’ve turned away from Him.
1. No argument here.
2. This is sad if true, do you have specific examples in mind though?
3. Very good and interesting point about there being no thick American Christian culture left. I do think contemporary American Jewry has different "wings" if you will. Bari Weiss and the Free Press wing are friendlier to Christians and seem to have overcome that tri-state blindness that makes Jews of a certain generation convinced that evangelicals hate them.
It's certainly true that elite Jews consistently break left, which is grist for the mill of Fuentes and friends. Though I think October 7 was a wakeup call as a lot of those Jews watched their old BLM friends turn on them.
Examples:
I have always liked Ezra Levant, he's one of the great Canadian conservative fighters, so I can't express how stunned I was to see him call VP Vance a groyper - yes, a groyper! - for Vance's answer about how he hopes/prays his wife will one day be saved. Like, all spouses should hope that, that's what love is! But I think so few people these days are exposed to basic Christian worldview that this comes across as exceptionally hostile to them. Imagine what he thinks of apologists, or, heaven forbid, missionaries!
Another one I was thinking of was Sean Davis, the Federalist co-founder, who keeps getting called by John Podhoretz a lover of Hitler/fan of the protocols of the elders of zion for espousing 100% basic Christian teaching, it's bizarre. I'm actually pretty sensitive about anti-semitism given my background, and Davis has never said anything even remotely in that ballpark, and he's not one of those edgelords who yells Christ is King in malice at Jewish accounts or anything, he literally just says normal Christian theology things. Then again, I don't find this sort of thing remotely antisemitic, it is generally widely accepted teaching in most Christian denominations including mine, but apparently some people find arguing it to be overtly antisemitic, which is not fair in my view at all:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/07/01/what-does-the-bible-really-say-about-who-the-true-israel-is/
and, of course, i think a day after i posted my comment, a new example presents itself of a bunch of people attacking a conservative Catholic intern as antisemitic merely for declining an invite to a sabbath dinner. this was a very nice response trying to cool down that tension, fwiw:
https://x.com/JordanSchachtel/status/1986244066544382064
to go back to my 'american culture is dead' soapbox, there is a second reason why i believe these tensions are happening (besides the frightening new sensation to many of christians actually being christian in public). used to be, when we had our middlebrow shared culture, every educated American would have read, or at least known of, the likes of Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Richler - or at least watched a few Woody Allen movies! Allen makes a joke of Jewish paranoid hostility to gentiles in Annie Hall (where Alvy Singer thinks literally everyone is antisemitic), but it's funny because it's true, and Bellow and co. spent a lifetime writing about variations on it. And every mainstream middlebrown type understood the joke and the problem it depicted. Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, all about Jewish suspicion of the goyim, was as recently as my childhood the Canadian version of Catcher in the Rye - in that it was on literally every high school reading list. And in the 60s/70s/80s, everyone knew who Bellow/Roth were. Incidentally, if you don't have time for Portnoy's Complaint, one of the best short stories ever is Defender of the Faith:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1959/03/14/defender-of-the-faith
Anyway, these days, all those guys have been stripped from the curriculum because they're old white guys (well, Woody Allen had some other issues, too...). At my old high school, there's no more Richler, but there's plenty of awful woke indian propaganda now. And that middlebrow culture of the pre-cable era is dead, nobody knows who Bellow or Roth are anymore. On the flip side, in the 60s/70s/80s any educated Jew could check in on the WASP attitudes by reading the likes of Cheever or, if they wanted to get a more conservative Catholic worldview, Flannery O'Connor.
Today, we are completely blind to each other and this is kindling for major misunderstandings and explosions.
I grew up in a secular Jewish northeast kinda community, and literally never once met anyone who went to church weekly (or synagogue weekly either! a friend or two would get barmitzvahed for traditional reasons but nobody believed it). I never stepped foot anywhere near a church and couldn't have told you the difference between a protestant and catholic if my life depended on it. Decades later, I'm saved by the grace of God, we go to church a couple times a week, have a big network of homeschooling Christian friends of various denominations, and josh each other about drinking grape juice at communion or sprinkling babies or whatever, and have serious debates about whether it's ok to watch the Chosen if it was produced by mormoms, lol. This kind of daily faith/interfaith existence is completely alien to the secular world at large and I think now that they're catching glimpses of it they simply can't compute.
Ok, super long rant, sorry. Point is, read more books and have more intense discussions about God!
Let me add something to lighten the mood, though it is related. I’m on an email chain with a bunch of elderly Jews who like to send good jokes, got this one from my friend today:
A nice Jewish boy goes off to college and his father says to him, “Have a wonderful time. All I ask of you is, don't marry a shiksa.” Sure enough, the boy falls in love with a beautiful Catholic girl. “I want to marry you but I promised my father I wouldn't marry a gentile,” he tells her.
She says, “I love you so much I'll be happy to convert.” She does and they marry.
A few years later the father calls his son and asks if he can come in Saturday and help with inventory. “I can’t,” the son explains. “My wife wants to go to shul and then have a quiet sabbath meal.”
“What did I tell you about marrying a shiksa!” screams the father.
LOL!
Regarding your previous comment: Yes, I did see the to-do over the Catholic guy asking about shabbat dinners. That was a highly unfortunate moment with him and the Jewish lady clearly talking past each other, and all the more unfortunate that it was publicized. Of course the whole town hall went public, but still. Anyway, I agree with you that it was bad for people to pile on him.
I've had a bit of friendly interaction with Sean Davis, but I admit I don't think he's had helpful takes through this. He seems to have been consistently in Tucker's corner and pushing the idea that the concern over Roberts/Heritage is much ado about nothing and boils down to a proxy war against Vance. I agree it was dumb for Podhoretz to go off half-cocked the way he did, but I would say in my own hopefully more measured way that I just think Davis has read the moment wrong. Defining boundaries is actually a good and important thing to be doing at the moment, and it's not just about a neocon cabal somewhere playing 4D chess.
I like your point about cultural blindness. Although, the fact that Jews have historically been so pervasive in media and pop culture is of course wielded by the groypers as proof that they're controlling everything...
We are a complicated group. Difficult to unite because we think.
You’ve drawn the line exactly where it belongs—between criticism and complicity. You keep the air clear, exposing how "nuance" so often serves as moral fog.
I think you’re really on to something when you point out that much of this goes back to elevating non-interventionist foreign policy to maniacal levels of importance. Post-Iraq, some people have let their traumatized commitment to The Never Ever Ever War become so intense that it deadens their moral sense to anything else. It’s been interesting as someone who also regularly reads Rod Dreher to observe how he’s handled this. I don’t always agree with his takes on foreign policy, and I occasionally roll my eyes a bit when he talks yet again about how ashamed he feels for supporting Bush ‘43. But I think his commitments to social and religious conservatism, as well as his human decency, run deep enough that even those strong feelings haven’t induced him to suck up to dictators or demonize Israel in the way many in Tucker’s mold have. Rod may feel that The War on Terror was largely a con job, but he has other values of sufficient importance not to let that disillusionment consume his soul.
Right, and I can just hear the counter-objection that it's the neocons who focused maniacally on foreign policy first, the paleos are merely objecting. I just think that isn't true. I can remember all the way back in 2015 or thereabouts when these types were already foaming at the mouth about David French, before he took his hard left turn and went full lib, merely because he was one of those cursed neocons-who-writes-for-National-Review.
Good point about Rod.
You hit every nail on the head. I hope Roberts resigns and TPUSA and Vance clearly disown Carlson.
There's been a new development indicating that Heritage may have tied themselves up in legal knots by signing something with a perpetual (!) non-disparagement clause as part of their partnership with Carlson. In which case, yikes. It would explain a lot.
I watched a lot of the leaked staff meeting today where Roberts took questions. It was hard to listen to. I'm still not convinced he's the guy Heritage needs right now. He didn't acknowledge that even his Hillsdale speech was a mess. But he has some understanding that he messed up big time.
I've a deep aversion to No Enemies To The Left/Right thinking so my views on this become apparent. We are who we read, listen to, hang out with, and so on. That's even more the case with who we introduce people to, whether socially or parasocially.
One of the things that Hannah Arendt really challenged me on when I read her treatise on totalitarianism is how vital the role sympathizers play at each stage of the game in legitimating radical views to the normie crowd. Whereas the striver wants to go deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole into the inner sanctum of whatever it is, the sympathizer is a bridge builder because they hold sympathies with both the normies and the "whoa that's a little extreme" camps.
Yes, Dreher has just been citing Arendt in his recent writing. It's pretty eerie to look at her warning signs of a society on the brink of totalitarianism. Carlson is definitely the chief sympathizer of our era.
I can go anywhere and read multiple column feet of screeching against various unclean denizens of the alt right. I consider it a waste of talent. What I can't find is anyone actually responding to their concerns, and they do give voice to real concerns. One may like Tucker or not, his style is to let someone talk and let his listeners decide what they think of what is said. I listen to Tucker when I get the chance because I want to hear what the latest pariah has to say in their own words, not in someone else's clips; not that I have trust issues or anything.
I listened to Tucker's interview with Nick. Nick reminded me of the young Mohammed, at least according to some. He came to the church in Alexandria with questions and ideas and was kicked out on his ear for his audacity, and likely uncouthness. That didn't end well.
Seems a poor strategy for the political side that has valued the free exchange of ideas.
Maybe someone will address the questions of his audience rather than the man. I'll be waiting as I have some of the same questions.
I think it's important not to soften who and what Fuentes is with an adjective like "uncouth." He's not a misunderstood Voice of the Youth who's just a bit rough around the edges, he's a miserably jealous, power-hungry deviant. If men are wandering into his shop for a fix, giving him free press isn't the way to help wean them off fentanyl.
Also, he cleaned himself up (somewhat) to go on Tucker. The streams where he calls pedophilia "based," fantasizes about abusing women, instructs his audience to pledge undying loyalty to himself, and much more, are a bit more clarifying.
I do want to write some more about masculinity issues. Are those related to the questions you would have?
I think it is important to deal with ideas and issues and less with people. As repugnant as a person may be, they are generally expressing ideas which can be answered with reason. If they have a following, it is likely because their ideas resonate. By responding with reason, we address the idea for all to hear. We aim to change minds, even hearts; perhaps our own.
In the case of Fuentes, much of the attraction is the transgressive; like grade school boys. The more adults rail against it the more attractive it is. But there are substantive questions underlying the muck. For instance, the question which must not be asked; why does israel matter?
Unless Fuentes was lying about his past, the reaction to that question, and the unwillingness to respond to it with reason, drove him to the darkness. He is not alone. Ad hominem should not be a tactic of the Right, and certainly not of Christians.
I very much appreciate your writing, and that you took the time to respond to my comment.
Actually, Fuentes was in fact lying about his past. Here's a thread by Kassy Akiva unpacking some of it:
https://x.com/KassyAkiva/status/1983200532492616088
I believe it's a category error to classify what I've said here as ad hominem. I don't think Fuentes has a coherent "ideology" per se, I think he improvises based on what shocks people and racks up clicks. And the question of "Can't we criticize Israeli policy?" to a great extent functions as a red herring distraction from what's really going on with Fuentes and company. Nobody is forcing him or his followers to fixate on Israel one way or another. It has no practical relevance to their lives, jobs, dating, etc. When Jordan Peterson still had cultural purchase, he approached disaffected young men like this the right way: By concretely exhorting them to better themselves in their immediate spheres and telling them that small actions had great significance.
Lying about one's past is a negative we would agree on, as would lying about someone else's past. I have no knowledge of anyone's veracity so have no opinion on that.
"Why can't we criticize Israel" is no red herring and is very much germaine to every American in whose name, and with whose money, israel is supported. I have mixed feelings on the matter which have nothing to do with how much I may like or dislike Jews, individual or collective. I am clearly not alone.
I have no problem exhorting young people to better themselves in every way possible. I suspect we would make more headway were we to treat their questions with respect and honesty. Please understand, this has little to do with Fuentes the individual and everything to do with Fuentes the ideal.
The testimony of our Palestinian brethren in Gaza and West Bank, what they claim of Israel, is why Fuentes is relevant. One can ignore Fuentes. One cannot and should not ignore what the Palestinian members of our family have been saying of Israel for decades.
I want to proceed with caution when referring to sources like for e.g. Munther Isaac. This book review at Mere Orthodoxy (an outlet that's by no means automatically favorable to Israel) was enlightening:
https://mereorthodoxy.com/christ-in-the-rubble-book-review
Pallywood is wholly unreliable except as a measure of the extent to which Islam is a religion of lies. And I do not discount Israel's capacity for exceptionally poor behavior; at the individual level as well as officially.
Do we have an actual American conservative movement? I am a bona fide, actual, full blown, total worldview, American conservative, of some age now, and I don't think there is anything presently like an "American conservatism." The closest we've had in my life was the 80s Reaganism, which I would gladly take right now. I don't think we've splintered now, there was little to nothing to splinter, we've been wandering since the 80s, with most "conservatives" not even being able to articulate what American conservatism is, much less state why it's good and why we should have it.
It's in pockets here and there sure, but I don't see any general American conservatism in a living breathing doing things form. This is why we have Tucker, and Fuentes, and French, etc... and perhaps most of all... Trump.
I am still an optimist because my hope is the same as yours, but it's so frustrating.
If there were something I could do, besides what I've already done, I would do it.
We have no common culture in large part because we have no common history. The Left understands the value of narrative and how destructive it is to their efforts to destroy the West. They are succeeding by first gutting education and now by flooding the zone with people with whom we have little to nothing in common.
We do have a common history. We have a telos, but you're correct. The left is destroying it, perhaps has destroyed it?
Conservatives are multifaceted and complicated not blindly loyal like Communists and socialists.
I don't think most "conservatives" are conservative. Things would be different if they were. I think they're of the right in some way but not actually conservative.
Conservatives have many hangers on that are not truly conservative.
Conservatives want to conserve the best of their judeo Christian past. Ass someone who is not American I don’t really care about the definition of an American conservatism. It might shock you all to know that you are not the centre of the universe. Conservatives come in many forms. But our biblical Christian faith must be at the centre.
Is Fuentes serious? Or is he a con man seeking attention like Andrew Tate? Does Fuentes call himself a Christian or is he mentally ill? To reinterpret history in such a dastardly way is not decent.
"centre of the universe" ??? I'm sorry friend, are you confused? Bethel's article, the whole point, is literally about American conservativism. So, that's the topic of the comments.
Ok so no outsiders allowed. I take the point. Americans only allowed to comment. I already don’ t read the americanise pieces. Obviously conservatism is only American .
I didn't say or imply anything of the sort. I'm not sure why you're being cross here, but it's pointless. Blessings to you, have a good day!
When we talk about someone being "Conservative," I am not sure we all work with the same definition. In fact, the term is used so frequently and in so many different contexts with so many different meanings that I am not sure it can actually be restored as a meaningful political descriptor. What do you mean when you use the term "Conservative?" I am reluctant to declare people whose ideas I find abhorrent to not be "true Conservatives" when I am not sure who is a conservative or what being a conservative means. It smacks of the No True Scotsman fallacy. A term that has been used to describe everything from French ultra-royalism to Ronald Reagan is bound to contain many things I do not like.
I'm always going to be a three-legged stool type, and I'm always going to look askance at the David Brooks types who embrace social progressivism while still insisting we have to call them "conservative" because they can quote Edmund Burke. When someone articulates conservative principles in some areas but not others I'll frame it as "So-and-so is conservative on [X, Y issues]," or "So-and-so is partly conservative." So Douglas Murray is an example of someone who would call himself conservative in the British sense, but it's again kind of irrelevant to social conservatism.
I believe you're making my point. This is a people problem, aka a sin problem.
Generally, people cruise through life, unexamined, and without a fully formed worldview, which American conservatism is.
No True Scotsman fallacy kicks in when someone redefines something (conservatism in this case) to exclude a counterexample that challenges their claim, rather than addressing the counterexample directly. That definitely pops up especially when one starts with an unclear or ill formed idea of what conservatism is.
If someone genuinely doesn't know what American Conservatism is, I would point them to many resources, probably starting with the Sharon Statement:
https://yaf.org/news/the-sharon-statement-a-timeless-declaration-of-conservative-principles/
The statement you link to is a fine definition of a certain type of American Liberal Conservatism, but the way that the term "Conservative" is used academically and historically is much vaguer and also much broader. The term was not particularly common in early America, if I recall. The first political party to label itself Conservative (as opposed to receiving the label as a pejorative) of which I am aware is the British Conservative Party, whose ideology was initially a sort of moderate Toryism, committed to a greater or lesser degree, to the power of the British Aristocracy and to the established Anglican church. In the rest of Europe Conservatism was defined by loyalty to throne and altar, whether in a Protestant form (F.J. Stahl and Groen Van Prinsterer) or a Catholic one (De Maistre, Donoso Cortes). Most such movements were allergic to liberalism, to democracy and often to capitalism. Now maybe they are not actually conservative, but in that case the academics and the people are using different definitions. And it seems as if such movements were using the term conservative first, so they perhaps have a better claim to the term than American conservatism. Perhaps my interest in 19th century Europe has made me excessively sensitive to terminology.