← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
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That even the best of plans sometimes.
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Will Sommer
Need a little support.
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So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our.
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Will Sommer
VRBO Care Guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before.
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Commercial Narrator 2
Your stay, through the moments in between and after your trip.
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Will Sommer
Because a great trip starts with peace.
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Commercial Narrator 2
Of mind and maybe a good playlist.
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Will Sommer
But we've got the peace of mind part covered.
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Bill Kristol
Hi, Bill Kristol here. Welcome to the Bulwark on Sunday. Very pleased to be joined by my colleague Will Sommer, the writer twice a week, I guess, of the excellent newsletter False Flag on what is going on. The extreme right, if that's a distinction that still exists, I don't know. But the online extreme right anyway. But it's terrific. How long have you been with us, Will? About a year, right?
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Will Sommer
About a year. That's right. I think it'll be a year and a few weeks.
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Bill Kristol
Excellent. Big upgrade and for the Bulwark and I hope not too much of a downgrade for you. So it's. But thank you for. Thanks for joining us and thanks for really, people need to read False Flag. It's really been terrific and I used to joke about it that you cover all this insane stuff so the rest of us don't have to. But actually this insane stuff is kind of important stuff. It turns out in the world we now live in, in the second Trump administration and in MAGA world. So I thought you'd give us A little bit of a tour through it. Tell us what sort of you've written on various topics recently. And it's been at the various forms of extremism have been in the news, from Carrie Prajan on the Religious Liberty Commission to Jeremy Carl, this fellow who was nominated by Trump to be Assistant Secretary of State. Candace Owens, you wrote about. Maybe we should begin with that. You just wrote about that Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk's organization tpusa. And then I want to ask at the end, just people can think about it as we're talking, is how important is all this and how mainstream is it and is it gotten, you've been covering it before you came to the Bulwark. How has it gotten more extreme, more powerful than it used to be? But let's begin with the Candace Owens thing, which is pretty extraordinary. You wrote about it just a couple of days ago. So what's, what's up with Candace Owens and Turning, of course, usa.
- [03:04]
Will Sommer
Sure. So Candace Owens is this sort of mega popular right wing YouTuber, but who's also, you know, not just with sort of Trump people. I mean, she's had some breakouts into I think more primary prominent. You know, you know, I was getting my hair cut a few weeks ago and the, the woman cutting my hair said, well, what do you think of Candace Owens? Don't you think she's on to something?
- [03:21]
Bill Kristol
And I thought she has millions and we're talking, I mean, millions of people watching her on YouTube, right?
- [03:28]
Will Sommer
Yes. And so she has sort of some claims to fame, one of which is she thinks Brigitte Macron is, is trans and part of sort of a centuries old criminal cabal. And then that ties in with her other belief, which is that her old friend Charlie Kirk was, was murdered not by Tyler Robinson, the suspect, but by perhaps Israel, perhaps the French Foreign Legion, or in this case perhaps by Turning Point USA himself, the organization he created. So really, ever since that murder happened back in September, she's been on this rampage. And really I think it's starting to have these, these effects on Turning Point USA where I think a lot of rank and file people are starting to think, well geez, you know, did you know, did Turning Point murder its own founder?
- [04:10]
Bill Kristol
And these are people who are not, I mean, who are not otherwise insane. I mean, that may be, but I mean, they're not, they don't seem to be right. I mean, this is penetrating beyond some small little sliver of kooky conspiracy theorists.
- [04:23]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean look, we, we saw at the, the Turning Point conference back In December, kind of the big conference where Ben Shapiro had to get up and he's sort of opposed to Candace Owens because, among other things, she's very anti Semitic. And he gets up and he says, you know, you guys are acting nuts. Why is anyone taking this seriously? Why. Why do you think Charlie Kirk's widow murdered him? And so that conference was kind of derailed by drama over that. And then last week I wrote about how even some Turning Point staffers believe that the organization may have murdered Charlie Kirk because they've gotten so into the Candace Owens line. I wrote about a woman who was fired, you know, for various reasons, but among others, she believed she was fired because she said, you know, I was asking questions about what really happened with Charlie Kirk.
- [05:06]
Bill Kristol
I mean, what about the conspiracies? And you've been, as I say, covering these different strands of the MAGA extremist. Right. And I guess for me, the conspiracism, the belief in conspiracy theories has always been. And you wrote a whole book actually about QAnon, an excellent book, a couple years ago. I mean, I don't know, I guess I'm a little astonished that it's as strong as it is. I think maybe I'm foolish to be astonished. It's been around forever in American history and in the world's history. But is it getting. It's kind of thing somehow one thinks it's the 21st century. People aren't going to believe in these kinds of things anymore the way they did when you read about the, you know, protocol of the Elders of Zion a century plus ago and so forth. But it's. Is it. It seems like maybe it's getting stronger. Is that. Is that right or.
- [05:47]
Will Sommer
I think it is. I mean, you know, people will say, well, you know, we've always had these conspiracy theories with us. You can look at the JFK assassination, even go the 1920s, the white slavery panic in Chicago, all these kind of historical examples. However, I think the Internet, among other things, has really, it's made it easier for people to connect with other conspiracy theorists and recruit new people in. I mean, Donald Trump is such a promoter of conspiracy theories that I think it seems more respectable. You know, I mean, if. If you think the 2020 election was stolen, does it seem that crazy that Turning Point killed its founder? Maybe not. You know, maybe it doesn't seem that. That outside, if you already think kind of the most important election, you know, in the modern world was stolen or one of them, you know, and you also have. I think there's just a general sort of sense of distrust of institutions. I think, you know, whether it's the media, academia, or science. And I think people just, they want to. They want to feel savvy. They want to feel like, you know, in the case of QAnon, people would say, you know, I know what the news is going to be before it happens, you know, because I'm on the forums and I'm reading all the files, and so I look at my neighbors and I think, you know, oh, you really believe that mainstream media stuff. So I think there are sort of these. There are these societal issues, and I think there's also sort of these personal appeals that people like. It sort of inflates the ego as well.
- [06:59]
Bill Kristol
And do you think it's gotten more pervasive or sort of just stable over the last six, seven, eight years you've been following it, or there's been any attempt, any success in the attempt to push back on it? People like Ben Shapiro, who, not someone I agree with on many things, but who's not, tends not to fall down that particular rabbit hole too much. I don't think of real conspiracy theories.
- [07:18]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, I think the theme I keep coming back to in my work is that really the right has no. And obviously this also kind of plays into the rise of Trump in the party. There's really no, like, immune system to keep these people out. And so you have a sit where, you know, among other things, I mean, Candace Owens is making a lot of money here. I mean, there's a lot of impetus for her. I mean, she's on a random YouTube video. She's clearing 3,4 million views within a day. And so that is tens of thousands of dollars, at least per video. And she's doing, I think, four a week. And so there's a lot of. I mean, these people are being well compensated. And when people like Ben Shapiro get up, then you have someone come right after that, like the comedian Russell Brand. Brand. Or Tucker Carlson or these people, they say, we don't do cancel culture around here. I mean, similarly, we saw when the Heritage foundation was kind of thrown into chaos over whether it supported Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. And they had to say, well, we don't do cancel culture. This is free speech. I mean, there's very little engagement with what is the content of the ideas. You know. Yes. Are we. Perhaps we're not saying this guy should be arrested, but are we saying, you know, is this someone we want to welcome into our party and treat as a respectable figure? And People really don't want to engage in that kind of conversation.
- [08:25]
Bill Kristol
I think it's so interesting and so important that the guardrails don't, don't guard themselves. Right. They need people to actually enforce them, so to speak, or enforce some limits. And that seems to not be happening on the right at all. Really.
- [08:38]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean, I think a lot of these, the figures that we see as, you know, it's almost funny to talk about the Republican establishment because it is such a Trumpified establishment now. But what we might think of as kind of the post 2016, 2018 Republicans who have kind of made an accommodation with Trump, people like Ben Shapir hero or Mark Levin, I mean, they're just, they just don't have this kind of energy. They seem kind of old and, and stodgy. Where you have figures like Candace Owens, you have these kind of, I mean, people that are frankly, like, much crazier and they're just kind of like lobbing these attacks in. And I mean, you know, sort of the discourse in the online GOP has gotten so far. Right. And so sort of detached from reality, perhaps is a better way to put it that you have someone like Alex Jones coming in and saying, hey, let's do some fact checks here. You know, he's, he's saying, you know, I looked at what Candace Owen says here. Some of this stuff doesn't really back up. And at the point where he's your voice of reason, I think there's some serious trouble.
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Bill Kristol
And this is Alex Jones who became famous or at least became known to me, at least back in, after the 2012 horrible school shooting in Connecticut when he said these were quite likely child actors or something. It was all stage right. I mean, this guy himself is a huge conspiracy theorist.
- [09:49]
Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, he's kind of like the king of American conspiracy theorists. But even he is saying, you know, well, you know, Candace Owens was claiming Erica Kirk met with special, special operatives ahead of the assassination on a military base. And, you know, I just don't really buy that. And for that, by the way, he's, he's attacked and kind of pushed to the margins. And so really, I think a lot of the energy really is towards increasing, increasing conspiracy theories, particularly these ones that I think are both entertaining for people in kind of a true crime way, and ones that sort of flatter their, their beliefs, whether it's, you know, about vaccines, things like that, as usually it.
- [10:22]
Bill Kristol
Makes them feel part of an inside circle that knows the truth when everyone else is Having the wool pulled over their eyes. Right.
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Will Sommer
Well, I mean, look, she calls it the, the Candace Intelligence Agency. And you have all the, you know, when, when Candace Owens met with Erica Kirk for kind of the peace meeting and people were saying, oh my gosh, is Erica Kirk going to murder her? And you had all these Candace Owens fans posting their videos of, you know, me nervously waiting for Candace to make it home. So, yeah, it does have this community aspect, too.
- [10:48]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. You mentioned in passing of Candace Owens, anti Semitism. It's almost like just taken for granted. Well, some of these people are going to be anti Semites. That's another thing that I guess I thought foolishly had been pretty well relegated to the quite far fringes. And she's hugely popular and somewhat influential. Tucker Carlson, almost as popular, but maybe even more influential, has launched with the president of the United States, after all, in the White House within the last month. And what about the anti Semitism side of it, which then gets into this little, you can also describe maybe the controversy this week where this religious liberty commission Trump set up and Carrie Froujon, if that's how you say her name, the former beauty queen is on it and caused a raucous. But what about the anti Semitism? How big is that?
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Will Sommer
Yeah, I mean, I think anti Semitism is really, you know, taking hold in part of the Republican Party and in a way that people don't really want to deal with it directly, but it's really thriving. I mean, whether it's a figure like Nick Fuentes, who on one hand, you know, Tucker Carlson was really lambasted for having this friendly interview with. But, you know, four years ago, Donald Trump dined with him at Mar a Lago. So it's sort of like the horses out of the barn at that point. Or someone like Candace Owens who talks about Jews drinking children's blood. I mean, this is crazy stuff. And I think some of it is linking up with, you know, perhaps legitimate criticism of Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza. But there's kind of this, especially among younger Republicans, there's this kind of antipathy towards Israel as a result of that. And then you have a figure like Candace Owens who says, you know, well, actually it's not just about this war, it's about how the Macrons are part of this. You know, this going back to the Middle Ages, these Jewish groups have been trying to undermine Christian civilization. I mean, really, like just, I mean, Nazi stuff. I mean, really, I mean, she's drawing on these, you know, she'll, she'll hold up a book that was literally written by a guy who was then favorably cited by the Nazis. And so, I mean, it is crazy stuff. And I think a lot of people on the right are just really afraid to take it on. And, you know, this stuff getting to your point, the Carrie Prejean thing, now, if that name rings a bell to people, it's because back I think California was looking at this was around Prop 8 back in 2008, 2009, about banning gay marriage. And Ms. California USA, who was Carrie Prijon at the time, beauty queen, she comes out against gay marriage. And this became this kind of one of these classic Obama era controversies. And now, you know, she's had a great run on the religious right and she's on the Religious Liberties Commission, which I think was clearly having a meeting to kind of like whack these universities over the head. It was about anti Semitism. I think they wanted to make it about all these Palestinian, pro Palestinian students run amok. Instead, she gets up there.
- [13:23]
Bill Kristol
Just to be clear, this commission is not like a commission set up by Congress with people from both parties. It's just a Trump invented thing with 11 Trump appointees. Right?
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Will Sommer
Yeah. So it's run by the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, who by the way, when he won a primary, when I was a young Republican, I was supporting another side in high school. And when he won that primary for state senate, that was when I said, all right, this party is nuts. I got to go. You know, so I go way back with Dan Patrick. But so he runs it. And you have, you have August figures like Dr. Phil. You know, you have all this kind of cast of characters and Carrie Prejean is talking and the guy who runs the Babylon Bee, which is kind of like the conservative onion, he's like a great foe of Candace Owens and this kind of lurking anti Semitism, he's saying, you know, well, if we're here about the anti Semitism thing, we got to talk about Candace Owens, we got to talk about all these other figures. Carrie Prison goes, hey, wait, you can't say that about Candace Owens. And then she kind of goes, she's like, look, I'm a Catholic. We Catholics can't support Israel. By the way, a Catholic convert of less than a year, you know, but she's taking all these other Catholics on the panel are saying, you know, I think you may need to check back there on the encyclicals. But yeah, I mean, it is crazy stuff. And so now this commission is sort of at loggerheads because they're trying to fire her, she says. Only Trump can fire her, and as far as I know, I don't think the White House has weighed in.
- [14:38]
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- [15:38]
Will Sommer
If you're.
- [15:39]
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Bill Kristol
You know, these commissions, it's interesting too. So this commission, I don't know much about it because I do know that my friend, I haven't seen him in a while. But Mayor Soloveitchik, who's a distinguished rabbi in New York and the scholar of many things, Jewish and genuine scholar, is on it because he's a sort of Trump act. Trump adjacent, I would say type. Very, very, very anti left, very anti woke, very anti the left's hostility to Israel, willing to forgive, in my view, just a little too much the rights. Anyway, he's on his commission and we did, to be fair, rebuke Carrie Prejean, right, for what she had said. You can't speak say you're speaking for all Catholics. Catholics are very complicated group.
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Will Sommer
But.
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Bill Kristol
But there he is sitting there with Dr. Phil and Carrie Prejean And I do think, I wonder how much the, the, the. The willingness of sort of respectable. Not sort of respectable. He's rabbi of a major synagogue in New York. Respectable figures to consort with the fringe figures and be on the same stage with them and the same panel with them and the same commission with them. Makes people think, okay, well, this is a, you know, there's nothing. We should have to listen to this, too. They're all. He's up there listening to her. Why shouldn't we listen to her? Right. I mean, I, I guess I'm struck by that on the right, and this is, of course, very true, the Republican Party in general, the degree to which the more sane, mainstream acquiescent types are really helping the conspiracy theorists. And in this case, I think the anti Semites gained some credibility. I don't know how much it matters. Maybe they would have credibility anyway because they're so popular online. But I guess I was just struck. I hadn't realized he was on this commission. I paid no attention to it, but there he is suddenly sitting on this panel with Carrie Frigean.
- [17:46]
Will Sommer
I think that's a real thing. I mean, look, this is someone who, I mean, we remember from this controversy long ago, but who really was. She seems to be, well, networked, but it was not. Did not really have much of a public profile these days. But now, as a result of this, because she was elevated to this commission and she's going to get fired from it in kind of a big way. I mean, she's gained like a hundred thousand. She had like 3,000 Twitter followers. Now she's going to have a hundred thousand less than a week later. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the way that they host these debates, there's this aspect of, you know, I think whether it's Nick Fuentes or whoever, that they're kind of putting it on equal ground. It's like, well, where do you stand on Jews? Right? Where even five years ago, that would be a crate. Like, what do you mean, where do we stand on Jews? I mean, they, you know, I think that's. It's really kind of online debate culture type of thing, you know. And I guess the other thing, I would say it's sort of related to your point. Even people like Ben Shapiro, these people who are sort of seen as like, we're going to stomp out the craziness on the right, they can only really do it by saying, hey, we don't want to be like the left, you know, or they'll say, you know, they're they're talking all this anti Semitic stuff. Do we want to be like the crazy left with their pronouns and bio? I mean, it's these things that are really not equivalent at all. But it's sort of like the only way they can relate to their audience without offending them.
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Bill Kristol
No, that's really important. No, I'm struck by that. The reason not to do this is that it might be like the left, which isn't really like, it's like 100 times worse than the left in my view. But whatever. Even the Wall Street Journal types go down that path. Right. And so half of their chastising when they do choose to take on Trump or some Trumpists or some right wing extremists, half of their argument is this is going to hurt us politically because it's going to take away our argument that it's the left who are extreme. It's not actually confronting it on the merits the time. Right. Or saying this is just unacceptable. It's kind of remarkable. I mean, when Bill Buckley turned, you know, excommunicated, so to speak, Pat Buchanan and Joe sober and said there's no room for this kind of anti Semitism on the right, I think that was 1991. I don't recall that he spent a whole lot of time saying, well, the main reason to do this is because the left has an anti Semitism problem, which it did then and does now. And that we have to sort of. It'll hurt us politically. He said, this is wrong, this is dangerous. We know where this leads in the 20th century and so forth. You don't hear that rhetoric that. You don't hear that kind of condemnation as much these days.
- [20:02]
Will Sommer
No, I mean, and Pat Buchanan, you know, just to take one example, really have having a resurgence on the right. I mean, certainly the proud boys love Pat Buchanan. That's kind of at every event they read a selection from his book Death of the West. But, but I see that more and more as sort of like, you know, they're certainly not pulling out what God and Man at Yale or anything like that. The old Buckley books.
- [20:23]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that's a really old book. I was struck Jeremy Carl, this nominee for Assistant Secretary of State, Senator Kaine and Cory Booker and others read passages back to him that he had written about white erasure and whites being wildly discriminated against and the suicide of the west and so forth. Pretty racial stuff. I mean, he used the word white. They didn't use it about him. Some of the people on that side disguise the white stuff. And call it more, you know, Anglo Saxon culture or something like that. But anyway, what struck me about him is he fine, he's some guy who was a writer, Claremont and all this, but he has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy. And the Trump administration, we knew about his work and decided to nominate him. Now, they may have thought he might not make it through and not care that much. Maybe it's kind of throwing a bone to their white supremacist supporters. But on the other hand, they have enough such supporters that they have to throw them the bone. Right. I mean, I guess it's a little different to be Candace Owens and be however popular you are. Still not quite in polite circles, you might say, in main political circles, but this guy is the nominee of the Trump administration to be an Assistant Secretary of State and for Public diplomacy. It's not a nothing job.
- [21:39]
Will Sommer
Oh yeah. I mean it's. I think when we look at this and I really, this testimony initially kind of. I missed it last week. I was so busy with the, the looks Max and Clavicula.
- [21:49]
Bill Kristol
Oh yeah, we'll have to get to that in a minute.
- [21:52]
Will Sommer
These characters. But anyways. But when I was looking at it, I was like, this is crazy. I mean this. But I think what it to is something that way. Way back after the Charlottesville march, Alex Perrine wrote about as sort of like, this is sort of the future of the young GOP because the people are not attracted to what used to draw people to Republican Party does not anymore. You know, people aren't like, I gotta cut those taxes. I mean it's this kind of like racial animus often that is drawing people to become like a GOP staffer. And you know, we can look at it with all of the last year we saw Paul and Gracia who was nominated to for a Senate confirmed position, who said something along the lines of like I have a real Hitler streak in a text message. There was the Young Republicans chat leak. So this kind of stuff is like just really awash in sort of the GOP operative staffer class to the point where I don't even know if they were trying to throw a bone here. I mean it may have just been, well, we. This is a right wing guy, we're going to put him in this position. And it's almost like that's just the baggage that comes with it. And I'm sure, you know, people like Stephen Miller probably don't even see that as baggage. I mean, but this kind of idea of like, well, it's just America should be a mostly white country. And you know, these are this really much more kind of like white ethnic view of life, I think is becoming more prominent now.
- [23:01]
Bill Kristol
And you're right to sort of say what you said about it's old fashioned to me to think that maybe they're just throwing up a bone because in fact it's an important part of the coalition and half of them believe it. I mean, I do think a friend of mine made this point to me the other day. We have to, you know, someone was saying to him that, you know, these decent Republicans, the establishment Republicans, they need to stop, they know better, but they have to stop going along with this. And he said, I'm, and I kind of agree with him. He said, I'm tired of hearing this. What does it even mean to say they know better? If you go along with something for years, you're part of it. I mean, you don't get credit for having some 10pm conversation with one close friend in private about how I'm a little uncomfortable with this. If you're going on with it the other 23 round along with it and voting with it and supporting it financially and supporting it in other ways, depending on what part of the Republican establishment or conservative establishment you're part of, if you're just willing to accept this the other 23 hours of the day, you know, so I, I, I think that's a very good. Yeah. Point. I mean this isn't sort of a, let's keep these people over here happy. They're part of the actual coalition and not a small part of it. Ingrassia, who you mentioned, is in the Trump administration. Right. They pulled him back from some Senate confirmed job, I think, but he's, he's there, I can't remember which department he's in now. Dhs.
- [24:11]
Will Sommer
Yeah. It's not like he, they said, oh my gosh, you know, you gotta go. I mean, yeah, they clearly said, well, you're not gonna pass through the Senate, but let's give you another job somewhere else. And you know, this is something that kind of happens over and over and it's, you know, Ross or excuse me, the guy who lives in Hungary, the writer.
- [24:28]
Bill Kristol
Roger.
- [24:29]
Will Sommer
Roger, yes. And he wrote this thing saying, you know, well, perhaps 30% of the GOP operative class are groipers or in other words, Nick Fuente's followers. And I think that's probably overstated, but I think perhaps they don't see them. Maybe they're not tuning in every night to watch Nick Fuentes. But I think it's fair to say that a lot of them are, you know, hold those similar values and are sort of this, this at least this kind of edgy anti Semitism. They, you know, all these sort of racial aspects of it that I think we did not see, you know, 10, 15 years ago among young Republicans.
- [25:00]
Bill Kristol
I mean, Roger, just to be clear is I used to know a little bit 15 years ago. It's kind of interesting guy in certain ways, but I was got my opinion off the rails. But yeah, he's living in Hungary. He's pro or bond. He's explicitly anti liberal. I think it's liberal in the broad sense. I mean sort of pro illiberalism and the Orban kind. He came back to Washington and I guess did talk to some staffers on the Hill, did some events and said he was shocked by the number and by the, by the fervor both the number of people who were on the far right to his right, let's put it that in the world you're talking about and also by the fervor of their beliefs. And he said 30% of them or something have this kind of worldview. And that caused a bit of a ruckus was he's on the whole been associated with, I'd say a milder version of that worldview. You know, it's not like me or me saying it, you know, so. But you think that's maybe a little high, but not it doesn't sound other people I've talked to say that's not crazy, that there really is.
- [25:58]
Will Sommer
I think perhaps that figure is. It's, it's I've seen some pushback from sort of conservatives in D.C. who say, well these are not groipers. But I think Rod is essentially right in that like that percentage perhaps higher is people who hold what we think of as kind of like Fuentes ideas, even if they're, they're not wearing the Fuentes cap or what have you, but this kind of this anti Semitism, this racism and you know, I mean to, I mean, yeah, I think we're seeing it more and more and you know, these chat leaks suggest as much.
- [26:24]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that is interesting. Those are private communications where presumably they to their friends and they're sort of saying what they, what they presumably believe. You mentioned this one piece of yours. I'd say you've probably written close to 100, right? You've been here once. Yeah, twice a week for 50 weeks, 100 newsletters. The one piece of yours I didn't quite Read. Because I just thought, oh, my God, I can't even do. This is about a week ago you wrote about. I don't even know who this guy is actually Clavicle, whatever this, who is this person?
- [26:48]
Will Sommer
Clavicular. Clavicular, right.
- [26:50]
Bill Kristol
But I'll be killed by our colleagues Catherine Lowe and others who keep in Slack saying, you got to talk about this, Bill, and you got to watch Bill's face when. When Will explains this to him. So say a word about this. I do think it does tie into something, another aspect of the, of the right wing extremism, which is the kind of macho side of things and the manosphere at all. But anyway, say a word about clavicular.
- [27:09]
Will Sommer
Yeah. So clavicular is a guy who's 20 and he's sort of the most prominent face of looks maxing. Now, let me know if you've ever gotten into this scene, Bill, but I'm all ears.
- [27:19]
Bill Kristol
But this is, this is your expertise. Well, I'm here to learn from you.
- [27:22]
Will Sommer
You know, it's guys who take. They're kind of adjacent to incels, so the involuntarily celibate. Right. So these are guys who, they look around and they're saying, you know, they have very negative views of women. But in the case of looks maxers, they say the most important thing in the world is to be in your life is to be extremely good looking. It's kind of like a Zoolander thing. And they'll stop at nothing to get good looking. And so in Clavicular's case, he's. He has smoked meth to get kind of a hollow cheekbone. He. He BONE SMASHES now, bone smashing is when you take a hammer or your fist and you whack yourself to try to build, you know, shatter your cheekbones in the hopes that they grow back better. And this man is now, you know, a hero to many young men.
- [28:04]
Bill Kristol
So what is that all about? What do you make of all that? I mean, what, seriously, you know, Umberto Echo, the wonderful Italian novelist and critic, died maybe, what, 15 years ago. So he has this terrific essay from 1995 called Ur Fascism, which I recommend to everyone. I think it was in the New York Review of Books, but if you Google it, it's free. You can get it in various places online. And so it's Umberto Eco, Eco. And he says we've sort of neglected the fact that fascism could make a comeback. This is written when Milosevic was taken over in, in Serbia and there' ethnic cleansing. We all knew about communism. We knew about Nazism, but we didn't really focus on fascism, which was a very important part of the 20th century. And he very presciently, in my view, says this can come back. There's something in human nature that likes aspects of it. And he stresses the macho side of it, what we now call the manosphere, all this stuff. And so that little essay had a big influence on me. And I think I personally also thought, okay, we're sort of, of course, that exists in human nature. I'm not totally naive about this, but, you know, we're kind of beyond that as a culture, but I guess not so much, huh?
- [29:09]
Will Sommer
Well, and of course, to your point, I mean, a lot of fascism is, you know, aesthetics and this kind of, this idealized man. And so just, you know, last week as Clavicular is kind of riding his fame, he was just profiled in the Times, I think in Sunday's issue as he's writing this, he goes to New York, hangs out with the Dime Square crowd, which are these kind of reactionary artists, many of them funded by Peter Thiel, who of course would love to see a sort of monarchist dictator installed. It's obviously very close with J.D. vance. And and so I, I think we're seeing, and you know, Clavicular was dancing in a nightclub with Nick Fuentes and singing Hail Hitler, this Kanye west song. And so I think you can look at these kind of different fascist elements overlapping with one another in the United States. And, and in the Clavicular's case, someone with a huge platform that he's constantly live streaming. It is a grim situation out there.
- [30:01]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, that does sound grim. So much worse than when you began. How did you get into covering this? I've never really asked you this since, incidentally. Yeah, I seem like a relatively normal, well adjusted person. You come to Washington to be, make your way in journalism, and suddenly you're covering the sort of wackiest parts of the extreme right.
- [30:19]
Will Sommer
Show me the looks, Maxers. So in this case, I grew up in Texas as a very ardent young Republican. Republican. I was reading, you know, the Bill O'Reilly book for teens and all this. And then as I mentioned, Dan Patrick beat this family friend of ours I was supporting in a Texas Senate race. And among that and the Iraq war and Katrina, it was all right about that time. And this is for the Republican run against gay marriage. And I thought, oh, yeah, yeah, I don't think this is for me, but I had this, still had this real passion for right wing media. And so I I was following this was the rise of characters like Ben Shapiro, who, at the time, his whole thing was that he was, like, a virgin. And so, I mean, these kind of colorful characters were emerging. And then at the start of 2016, you know, I would go to parties, and people would say, have you ever heard of Milo Yiannopoulos or Laura Loomer? And I'd be like, oh, my God, I know all about him. And then my wife said, you know, here's an idea. How about bothering me with this stuff so much you write about it. And so I started to do that with the newsletter, and. And here we are today. And they're. They're. You know, I think, unfortunately for the country, these people are more relevant than ever.
- [31:17]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. You know, I first met Bannon maybe 2013, at some gathering in Washington, and he told me, and, you know, he was. He said, look, I don't like you guys. And it was the Weekly Standard. We're. We're gonna. We're gonna defeat you. And I said, well, okay, it's a free country. You should put out your own magazines and do your best. And. And then he. And now they have. Certainly. In terms of the conservative movement, how important is Bannon? I'm just curious. Was that Bannon is a very, I think, a shrewd guy and I think was important in this all, or is it all kind of now beyond him? And is he. I don't know. How central is he to it, do you think?
- [31:51]
Will Sommer
So we're talking about C. Bannon? Yeah, yeah, good question. You know, he's a tough one to kind of get a read on. I mean, he has this podcast, War Room. To me, it's a little unclear what his influence is. I mean, I think he has the War Room Posse. I mean, this is the audience. And I think if he says, you got to deluge this one congressman because we're mad about this bill, I think that can kind of be real. And I think they can sort of occasionally pick off nominees if they want, or sort of head off someone from getting nominated to something. On the other hand, it's hard to tell because I think Bannon is. Is so available to the mainstream press that often he gets, quote, people say, well, you know, Steve Bannon said so, you know, and that's. So. It's a little hard to tell. I will say, though, new lawsuit was filed against him over a cryptocurrency alleged scam he was involved in. Takes me back to the days of Build the Wall, when he was, you know, represented, you know he was involved in this effort to build a privately funded border wall that obviously resulted in federal indictments. So I think he was pardoned by Trump. And so but this new crypto thing, it's really funny and I will be writing about it soon. So. So stay tuned. There's a lot more. Steve Bannon in our the number one.
- [32:53]
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- [34:21]
Will Sommer
Our future.
- [34:23]
Bill Kristol
And what about that? I mean there seem to be no consequences, if I could say, for engaging in grift and in scams. I think it's fair to say in his case he was convicted and then pardoned by Trump. I. I guess he may have been.
- [34:37]
Will Sommer
Pardoned pre conviction, I think.
- [34:38]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's right. But he was in jail. Maybe he was in jail for more. That was for contempt of Congress anyway. I mean, what about the lack of accountability, to say the least. I mean does anyone ever get chucked out of this movement for going too far or behaving in too gross away or in too corrupt a way?
- [34:58]
Will Sommer
You know, it's funny you say that. I mean, on one hand it does seem like there's basically, there's no oversight. There's this sense that, you know, they'll, they'll live forever and they can do whatever they want. I mean, Mike Cernovich himself, a big right wing guy, he tweeted a few months ago that when he visited, it's D.C. you know, he looks around at the graft and the corruption of the Trump administration and he says, like, do you guys know Democrats are going to take power again at some point? Like there will be prosecutions if you keep this up. It's not that there's no, no law forever. And people say, I don't know, you know, we're just getting our money while we can. And on the other hand, I do think, you know, occasionally people will get banished for, you know, it doesn't take, you know, a lot of these figures. I mean, someone like RFK Jr. Who's done all these twisted things, I mean, he's obviously here to say he sort of has that Trumpian Teflon feel to, at the moment, but these kind of right wing, smaller figures, I mean, I wrote about Alex long ago, Ali Alexander, who was kind of one of these right wing figures who got busted for texting an underage boy in a sexual way. I mean, he had to go, but I think, you know, if he was more powerful, would he have stayed? Probably. You know, I just wrote about Elijah Schaefer, who's kind of a Glenn Beck protege who got, was doing a real religious turn and had kids and married and then he got caught having an affair with another right wing personality, was very traditional Catholic. And so, I mean, he's kind of on the outs, but he'll probably be back. I mean, these guys. And it all comes down from Trump. Right. I mean, this shamelessness, the sense of never apologizing as long as you don't apologize. You can say, I think people have really absorbed that.
- [36:24]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. Maybe finally just a word about Trump. Because for me, when I get asked about this a lot, you know, as you can tell, I know 1/100th of what, you know, 1/1000th about the actual, all these characters and what's going on in that world. But I, my sort of generic answer is, look, look, we've often had conspiracists and bigots and anti Semites and lunatics and our politics on both sides, on both extremes and elsewhere as well. And that's just a huge country and it's, you know, and maybe the Internet's made that more accessible to more people and social media and the usual explanations. At the end of the day, having a president who either embraces it or at least tolerates it or thinks of these people as part of his coalition, as you say, the stop the steel stuff from the very beginning. But also in 2015, he was a birth. Everyone forgets Trump before he ran for President in 2011, 2012. Someone who has a taste for conspiracies, a taste for bigotry, I would say willing not, you know, not willing to draw any lines at all. Having that person as president for four years, having that person do January 6th and then survive it, get renominated, get reelected president. I feel like that can't be. That can't. The importance of that can't be overestimated. I mean, it's one thing. You can have an awful lot of craziness on the fringes of your politics, and it can be distasteful and it can be damaging. It can do real damage having all the craziness as part of a coalition that's led by the President of the United States and is a respectable part of the coalition, from the point of view of the President of the White House, as we've been saying, right. These people aren't being banished. Steve Miller is as much of a white supremacist as Jeremy Carl, you know, So, I mean, I don't know. I feel like that part. Maybe that's why it seems like it's on steroids this last year, because Trump got himself reelected after everything and is running an administration in the second term that's not at all embarrassed about this in a way, that there were enough traditional types in the first term to kind of try to shun some of these people off the side or even out of the administration. What do you think about that?
- [38:26]
Will Sommer
Oh, totally. I mean, just to take one example, I mean, there was this thing where a lot of pro Israel influencers on the right took a very nice luxury trip to Qatar that apparently certainly appeared to be funded by some Qatari group or government. And then suddenly they come back and they say, oh, my gosh, Qatar rules. We actually don't like Israel anymore. We love Qatar now. I think in the past, that would be seen as this, like, real obvious graf, even on the right, and people would shame them. But then, I mean, are you really gonna be mad at them when Trump took a $800 million plane from Qatar? I mean, you know, all they did was stay in the Four Seasons or Doha or what have you. So I Mean, I, I think there is that sense of, you know, Trump. I mean, he's obviously making billions of dollars off his coins and these Middle Eastern deals. So, you know, why not, you know, why not get mine while, you know, if you have any amount of influence or voice on the right and people.
- [39:10]
Bill Kristol
Like me, can't this look stupid at some point? Just saying, well, this stuff's crazy, it's extreme. Well, it's the President, United states, who got 50% of the vote. It doesn't think it's crazy and extreme. He thinks it's not quite. He doesn't quite say these things all the time, but he certainly doesn't excommunicate these people from his coalition. Quite the contrary. J.D. vance, as you said earlier, explicitly gave a speech. Was that at Turning Points usa, where he sort of took the side of, we have to have a big tent, including all these people. We can't be. Yeah. We can't draw the red line. So, yeah, having a Trump Vance administration is not a trivial thing, I suppose, from the point of view of these people's power and influence.
- [39:44]
Will Sommer
No, no, definitely not. I mean, it. Obviously they get a lot more money, I think, from people who are hoping, who are courting them. There are all these, you know, suddenly these people will be tweeting about, you know, law, American laws regarding Indian oil and Russia. I mean, clearly these things they don't really care about, but someone's paying them. And so, I mean, it's really a free for all right now in terms of the graft on the right.
- [40:06]
Bill Kristol
Well, thank you for covering all these people. And what's next? What's your next newsletter?
- [40:10]
Will Sommer
Well, you know, potentially this, this Bannon, you know, crypto lawsuit or, you know, there are all kinds of options I, I think shaping up. I mean, these guys keep me busy.
- [40:19]
Bill Kristol
They do. And you have a great, you know, like, many topics to, to cover, but. And it's good that you keep your cheerful demeanor because I, I might get a little depressed dealing with these, all these things week after week, but I suppose they, but look, it's very important. It is really important, as I said. But I do think this is something, something that people like me, honestly have under appreciated. And it's really important to bring home how crazy it is, if I can put this in my own terms, how conspiracist, how bigoted, how dangerous, and that it's not just the thing that's kind of distasteful on our fringes, but it is part of the governing coalition. The governing coalition of the country. So thank you for being the person who's following this every day. And people really need to read false flags. And thanks for joining me today.
- [41:07]
Will Sommer
Will hey, thanks for having me on.
- [41:10]
Bill Kristol
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Bill Kristol
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