Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem

Summary

The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem

Date: November 14, 2025
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: John Ganz, historian, political theorist, author of When the Clock Broke and writer at Unpopular Front

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deeply into the convergence of figures like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and the rise of "Groyper" politics—a meme-driven, overtly white nationalist, and antisemitic movement—within the American right. Ezra Klein and guest John Ganz explore where these ideas come from, how they've migrated from internet subcultures into the mainstream right, and what this portends for the future of the Republican Party and American political culture at large.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who is Nick Fuentes and What are "Groypers"?

• John Ganz defines Nick Fuentes as “the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America” (04:13).
• Fuentes rose from a middle-class background, became a fervent Trump supporter, and assembled a following of disaffected young men online. He led the so-called “Groyper Wars,” pressuring the conservative mainstream towards the far-right, especially on race, LGBTQ, and the “Jewish question” (04:21–05:23).
• "Groypers" are an online meme-centric subculture, symbolized by a Pepe-like toad avatar, characterized by racist, antisemitic, misogynistic, and conspiratorial content. They use humor and irony to obscure their real ideological intent (06:27–08:51).
• Quote:
  “It’s just a kind of anarchic indulgence of a very sadistic ID that usually involves the humiliation of minorities or women.” — John Ganz (09:38)

2. Cultural & Generational Shift on the Right

• Klein and Ganz discuss how Groyper content now saturates the entire cultural environment for young people on the right (08:51). There is a marked generational divide: under-40 right-wingers are deeply immersed in this meme-heavy, anti-norms universe.
• The right has reinterpreted its opposition to “woke” and “cancel culture” as a license to indulge in ever-escalating transgressions, culminating in harder-edged racism and antisemitism (10:08–12:03).

3. Role of Trump and the Erosion of Norms

• Trump’s emergence in 2016 opened the door to alt-right and extremist figures, breaking down longstanding norms within the right (12:03–14:15).
• While some elements of the alt-right receded after initial backlash (e.g., Charlottesville), meme-driven white nationalism continued thriving beneath the surface, especially among young conservative staffers (13:05–14:15).
• Relaxed social media moderation under Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) accelerated the mainstreaming of these ideas (14:15–15:41).
• Quote:
  “They saw [Trump] and they said, okay, this is our chance… it never really fully goes away.” — John Ganz (13:04)

4. Tucker Carlson’s Central Role

• Carlson has pivoted from establishment conservative to MAGA kingmaker, often echoing white nationalist talking points in subtler terms and seeking to shape the party’s direction.
• He intentionally remade his public persona, moving from “good time libertarian rich kid” to “folksy,” anti-establishment figure (19:07–23:54).
• Carlson is seen as “more helpful to interpret...as a politician,” wielding as much influence as elected officials, possibly positioning himself as MAGA’s next leader (19:25–23:34).

5. The Tucker-Fuentes Interview: Mainstreaming Antisemitism

• Carlson’s two-hour conversation with Fuentes was unprecedented for its open discussion of classic antisemitic tropes (about the “problem” of Israel, “Jews as an unassimilable group,” dual loyalty, etc.).

• Fuentes’ rhetorical style masks extreme positions in neutral-sounding language, making them less shocking and more “rational-seeming” (31:46–33:16).

• Klein highlights the shift from leftist anti-Zionism (universalist, human-rights-based) to rightist ethnostate logic, which leads naturally to exclusion and demonization of Jews as a threatening “fifth column” (34:18–37:52).

• Notable Exchange:

  “The Jews are an unassimilable group, self-interested, internationally organized…animated by a deep hostility to the people that surround them.”
  — John Ganz (33:07, summarizing Fuentes’ rhetoric)

  “The final move… is where Tucker says, ‘We white Europeans, the heritage Americans, we’re taught to hate ourselves. There’s been no rational self-interest since World War II.’ That’s the bridge of antisemitism to Trumpism.”
  — Ezra Klein (33:42)

6. Collapse of Conservative Gatekeeping and Institutional Drift

• Institutions like the Heritage Foundation, now led by Kevin Roberts, are reflecting and amplifying these energies, even as older staffers push back.
• With "moral anarchy" and no immune system against explicit bigotry, young staffers question if there should be lines at all (55:37–57:55).
• Leading figures (Trump, Vance) refuse to condemn or distance themselves from these factions (57:55–58:40).

7. Exploitation of Israel-Gaza Crisis & Cynicism

• The Israel-Gaza war deeply fractured both the right and left.
• Many right-wing figures use anti-Israel rhetoric opportunistically (“I don’t think that Tucker Carlson lost much sleep over the Arabs who died in Iraq. I just have zero sympathy for them…” — John Ganz, 44:26–46:15), blending legitimate criticism with classic conspiratorial antisemitism.

8. The Structural Role of Social Media

• Ganz speculates that the “internet itself is structurally antisemitic” because it enables fringe communities to scale up, and its culture rewards transgression and polarization (73:30–75:50).
• Self-described “losers” and “incels” find community and “sadistic” power online, then project those pathologies outward into politics.

9. Limits and Dangers: Is This Actually Popular?

• Debate on whether this new coalition can attract mass support (67:06–74:08).
• Klein argues that, while this subculture is loud and visible, it is not representative of America's young people, who vote left and have different priorities. But, due to America’s two-party system, even small coalitions can seize outsized power (79:57-82:12).

10. Historical Roots: Pat Buchanan and the Logic of Ethnonationalism

• Roots traced back to Buchanan’s “Death of the West”—a book promoting white nationalist politics, now a canon text for the MAGA movement (70:58–72:39).
• Buchanan’s logic, once marginal, is now central: “Are Jews part of the West, or are they the ‘other’?” (71:22–72:39).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• “Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable. He’s what I would call a racist. Racist…” (Right-Wing Commentator, 01:14)
• “He’s a booger eating white supremacist holocaust denier.” — Ezra Klein (01:22)
• “No one is more responsible for the ‘groiperification’ of the right than Tucker Carlson.” — Ezra Klein (context, recurring)
• “Tucker’s making the same points they’ve been trying to make their entire lives, but much better. He’s found a wider audience and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas.” — Source close to white nationalist circles (21:06)
• “It’s a kind of coalition—declining aristocracy, held down, dissatisfied mob, bringing them together.” — John Ganz (27:01)
• “If you’re going to build an ethnostate, and you are ideologically opposed to there being anything you can’t talk about… it’s almost a hydraulic process towards antisemitism.” — Ezra Klein (40:29)
• “My only warning about that is—I think a lot of young people grew up online. A lot of people are very online. It’s not that different from the norm.” — John Ganz (79:57)
• “This party has shown itself to be totally out of touch with the American people. This party is the wave of the future. And then another election happens. That narrative is forgotten or is proven to be false very quickly.” — John Ganz (83:00)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• [04:13] — Who is Nick Fuentes?
• [06:27] — The origins and beliefs of “Groypers”
• [10:08] — The interplay between irony, provocation, and actual belief
• [12:03] — The Trump effect and the breakdown of norms
• [14:15] — Elon Musk/X’s impact as a “hinge point”
• [19:07–23:54] — The transformation and influence of Tucker Carlson
• [31:46–34:18] — Dissecting the Carlson-Fuentes interview and antisemitic tropes
• [55:37–57:55] — The generational and institutional crisis (Heritage Foundation example)
• [73:30–75:50] — The structural role of the Internet in spreading these ideologies
• [81:22–83:00] — The risks to American democracy if party dynamics continue to erode

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Conclusion/Takeaways

• The antisemitic and ethno-nationalist undercurrents that once existed at the margins have found open champions and gatekeepers within the mainstream right, largely through social media and the breakdown of norms.
• Figures like Tucker Carlson act both as politicians and kingmakers, translating the “sadistic ID” of online subcultures into a politics that is palatable for a larger audience.
• While there is an urge to view this as an online or youth-specific phenomenon, its political consequences are real given America’s two-party system.
• However, Klein and Ganz caution against overestimating this coalition’s breadth, noting that the majority of young people are not reflected in these internet subcultures. Yet the risk remains that, under stress or with the right conditions, these ideas could gain dangerous mass traction.

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Recommended Further Reading (from John Ganz)

• Taking America Back by David Austin Walsh — history of the right’s half-hearted attempts to police antisemitism
• Furious Minds by Laura K. Field — analysis of MAGA intellectuals and justification of their politics
• Prophets of Deceit: Techniques of the American Agitator by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman — classic study of anti-Semitic propaganda in the U.S. (85:25)

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This summary preserves the tone, depth, and complexity of the conversation, highlighting key themes and controversies while remaining accessible and useful for listeners seeking to understand the “Groyper” problem on the right today.

Transcript

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[Ezra Klein]

If by the stroke of good fortune or just being a normal person, you had not heard of Nick Fuentes until this month, chances are you've heard of him now.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable. He's what I would call a racist. Racist. Nick Fuentes has said a long list.

[Ezra Klein]

Of very vile things, big time. He's a booger eating white supremacist holocaust denier. The reason everybody's talking about Fuentes is Tucker Carlson, who is arguably at this point the most significant media figure on the American right, hosted Fuentes, a person he has feuded with in the past, for a very friendly two hour chat about the problem of Israel, about the problem of American Jews and whether or not they fit in this country or their loyalties or elsewhere.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest, that's absolutely the case. And that's the only way the country's gonna stay together.

[Ezra Klein]

Exactly.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

That's my concern.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

And I absolutely agree with you. I would say, though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America.

[Ezra Klein]

It was the kind of conversation you would not have heard among mainstream figures on the American right in recent decades. But something has changed. What we are watching is a very old strain of the right vying for control of its future. This right goes back to Pat Buchanan. It goes back to Charles Lindbergh. The idea that the right should be an ethno nationalist coalition which doesn't have room for immigrants very much, does not have room maybe for Jews. That is really not comfortable with anyone who's not what they call a heritage American, who doesn't really bow at the altar of that politics and the primacy of white Christians as a people controlling this country. This has been a logic and an ideology that Trump has broken into the mainstream and that is now following itself to its full expression. If you buy into this, well, it has a place it goes. And now we are seeing more things, figures on the American right truly going there to talk about It I want to bring on John Gans. Gans is sort of hard to describe. He's become a popular political theorist and historian. He writes the great substack Unpopular front. He wrote the book when the Clock Broke, which is about the politics of the 1990s and Pat Buchanan and David Duke and how they prefigure Trump. But he's somebody who has been tracking these ideas and the way they are taking hold on the right and where they come from in our country very, very closely. So I wanted to hear what he thought now that they were breaking this far out into the open. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com John Ganz, welcome back to the show.

[John Ganz]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Ezra Klein]

So let's say that blessedly, you, you've never heard of who Nick Fuentes is. Maybe you've just heard of him in the last few weeks.

[John Ganz]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

Who is Nick Fuentes?

[John Ganz]

Nick Fuentes, I would say is the most popular representative of neo Nazism in America.

[Ezra Klein]

Expand.

[John Ganz]

Well, by his own story. He comes from a middle class background in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in political activism. He was a fervent Trump supporter. Then he ran afoul, according to him, of some gatekeepers in the conservative movement, namely Ben Shapiro, who accused him of anti Semitism when he asked questions about US Policy towards Israel. And then over the years, he assembled a following of other disaffected young men. He launched two campaigns that he called the Griper wars to basically pressure mainstream conservative figures to move rightward on issues to do with race, with LGBTQ issues and with Israel. And the subtext being there, the Jewish question, Jews.

[Ezra Klein]

So he's not that subtext oriented compared to some people in this movement. I mean, he'll talk about an admiration for Adolf Hitler. He doesn't just talk about Israel, he talks about the Jews.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

We have to go a little bit further than to say something's up with the Zionists or Israel. It's not Israel, it is the Jews. And once again, remember who is responsible for it all? The Jews. They are responsible for every war in the world. It's not even debatable at this point. Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan. It's like, well, he was also really fucking cool.

[Ezra Klein]

There's something, there are figures here who, it feels like they try to keep a mask on. Yeah. And he doesn't.

[John Ganz]

He doesn't. And I think that's a key part of his appeal. I think that his viewers find that refreshing. They find it titillating. And they find it to be reflective of their politics.

[Ezra Klein]

You mentioned the grippers. What's a gripper?

[John Ganz]

Well, let me tell you a story of how I learned what groipers are. I was writing a piece for the New Republic about five years ago about the right, and I was learning about what were young people on the right like, what were they thinking about? How did they respond to Trump and what was the future of conservative media and elites in the Trump era? What was going to happen with the Never Trumpers? What would conservatism look like if Trump went away? So that was looking at that. In the course of this, I kind of befriended some young right wing guys and they kept on talking about Groipers, Groipers, Groipers. And I didn't really know what it was. And then I realized that they were kind of a subculture online of trolls and kind of marginal figures. And they had often as their avi or their avatar profile picture, this kind of grotesque toad that looked like Pepe the Frog. And it's my understanding that this subculture is larger than Nick Fuente's and not necessarily under his control or direction, but that he speaks for them. He attempts to speak for them and to unite them into a sort of political force.

[Ezra Klein]

But what do the groipers believe? This is a very meme heavy online trollish subculture that is endlessly dancing on the edge of, oh, aren't we just joking? And so pinning it down can be a little bit like trying to pin smoke. Because you focus in on a view, a meme. It's like, oh, you have no sense of humor. Yeah, but it's the classic. First you're making jokes about the gas chambers, then you're thinking about sending your enemies to them.

[John Ganz]

It's a little difficult for people to understand because we're accustomed to thinking of politics coming from ideas, coming from intellectuals, elites, media figures that disseminate ideas. And this kind of goes in the other direction. It bubbles up from message boards, up from memes, jokes, ironic playfulness, but basically the text, not the subtext of all of them, is kind of a constant barrage of propaganda that's anti Semitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, you name it. And also a lot of content that is conspiratorial, obviously, that sees shadowy actors running the government and is also deeply dissatisfied with the state of America and the prospects it has for people like them.

[Ezra Klein]

So you write this piece on, actually you write a couple pieces on the gorperification of the Republican Party, and you wrote, quote, here's the thing to understand, every single person under say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of groiper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in discord chats, et cetera. Groiperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right. And this point about the people under the age of 40, this idea that there is a pretty big difference in what the 20 somethings on the right are like and what the, you know, the 50 somethings are like. I hear that from the right all the time.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

So for people who do not have texture of that cultural environment, what are you describing? What are they seeing? What does that cultural environment look and feel like?

[John Ganz]

Well, I mean, just recently there were a couple of leaks about group chats and basically, yeah, it's an environment where there's a lot of sharing of memes and jokes and repetition of memes and joking about the Holocaust, joking about Hitler, joking about blacks and making jokes about slavery. And it's just a kind of anarchic indulgence of a very sadistic ID that usually involves the humiliation of minorities or women.

[Ezra Klein]

So a lot of the energy of this and a lot of the way it would get defended is that the right in the late 2000 and tens, early 2000 and twenties, its big enemy was the woke mob. Cancel culture, the thought police, the gatekeepers. And you would hear this described as joking, but a provocation about that. It is showing that you can say what the cultural enforcers don't want you to say. Richard Enania, the sort of dissident right figure and intellectual, describes it as like the based ritual where people on the maga right get together and keep upping the ante to show that they are not part of the establishment, they're part of this counter revolutionary force. How do you think about the interplay between whatever that was? Cause I take it as there was a sort of culture that emerged in response to censoriousness and then the movement into actual belief.

[John Ganz]

Well, yeah, I think that that was a way that people could justify to themselves what they were seeing on an everyday level. And some people could say to themselves and to others that basically they were participating in a cultural revolt against this censorious state of affairs. And that was their interest, which was to tear down those norms and to open a space of freedom. Freedom to do what Is the question? Is it just to say and do racist things? I don't know. So I think it created a structure in which these memes spread rapidly and made it. So people who may have been uncomfortable with it or may have found it at variance with the way they were raised to kind of look the other way and say, we are, in a sense, playing around.

[Ezra Klein]

The first thing that does, it seems to me, is you are breaking down an immune system that people have.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And you can't extricate this, in my view, from Trump.

[John Ganz]

No.

[Ezra Klein]

If you have any hint left of that attachment to old norms and mores and courtesies, well, then you can't be a true Trumpist, because he doesn't attach to any of that. And so you begin demonstrating a cultural affinity to that kind of politics of provocation and politics of no rules. Once you've done that, then you actually don't have that immune system anymore. And so the question you don't believe in the establishment, and you don't believe in any norms, so how do you decide what to believe? Because you're breaking down the immune system that was supposed to protect against people like Donald Trump himself.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, absolutely. I think your point about Trump being the originator of this is important. When Trump appears and people seem to forget this for Some reason in 2016, 15, there was a lot of talk about the alt right, a term that's not used very much anymore. But these people who had previously been on the fringes of American politics greeted the arrival of Trump basically with rapture.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, ecstatically.

[John Ganz]

Ecstatically. And they knew that this was their kind of guy. They knew that the things that he said would open a space for them if it wasn't precisely a perfect vehicle for their politics. It was a real big breakthrough. So they saw it and they said, okay, this is our chance. And then we have a first wave just after Trump is elected, where you have these people crawling out of the woodwork. You have Richard Spencer, you have the Charlottesville riots, and then there is kind of a backlash, and those people seem to sort of get pushed out. There's not that much talk about alt nationalism, the alt right, anymore. And Trump also doesn't really seem to be adopting some of their preferences in foreign policy. And also not. He makes some very tasteless remarks about Jews, but not an ideological anti Semitism that they would want him to do. So this thing kind of goes on the back burner, but it's very much suffusing the culture of young right wingers who are not. They're in the intermediate and lower ranks of the various bureaucracies, the various staffs of conservative institutions. And, yeah, it never really fully goes away.

[Ezra Klein]

But then Something else happens, which is that as weak as the gatekeepers are in this modern era, there are still people with keys to various gates. And by the end of Trump's first term, Trump is banned on most of the major social media platforms. Certainly a lot of these figures are banned on them. And as Trump makes his return, and then very specifically, when Elon Musk buys Twitter, renames it X, takes off functionally all of the guardrails, then the ability of all this to flood into the conservative nervous system really changes. I want you to watch a clip from Tucker Carlson here that I think is interesting.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Unfortunately for the guardians of the old system, the old Republican Party people have been allowed to describe it accurately, mostly because Elon Musk opened up X and you know, when he did that, you get all kinds of filth and nonsense and lies, but you also get some truth, actually quite a bit of truth. And one of the main things that people are telling the truth about that they didn't tell the truth about before, is that our foreign policy really doesn't have much to do with what's good for the United States. And once those words have been uttered, they can't be taken back.

[Ezra Klein]

So Carlson here is talking about Israel. I would say maybe he's not entirely talking about Israel, but that dynamic he's describing, that Musk taking over X is a hinge point, seems true to me. Does it track for you?

[John Ganz]

Absolutely. I mean, all of these figures re emerged when they had been pushed out and they create a media ecosystem that is suffused with these ideas. So first of all, yeah, there is a. A lot of people online are looking for information. They're looking to understand an extremely complicated world. And they have a sense that perhaps the establishment views are either misinforming them or are just flat out boring. And then they discover a narrative about things that's more appealing, simplifying, seems persuasive, exciting. Exciting. And also it cannot be discounted that EC Fuentes in particular is extremely entertaining and they gravitate towards these crackpot ideas. Look, the United States, its support of Israel is a perfectly legitimate topic to dispute and to have differing views about and to criticize. And more and more people are coming around to that position. They saw what was happening in Gaza and they were deeply upset by it. And they look for commentary and opinion on that. And the commentary and opinion on that that they get is not what the New York Times is saying or what the New York are saying, or even left wing outlets like the Nation or something like that. They Get Nick Fuentes, they get Candace Owens, they get all these kind of crackpot views about it, which take that discussion about real world issues and a mixture of rational discussion and commentary that's actually somewhat sophisticated, I would say, in Fuentes case, and then channel that into propaganda for antisemitism. And I think it's important to realize, again, back to your question about ideas and the diffusion of ideas, that not everyone is aware that they're being propagandized. Right. They are in an information environment where this is what they see and it becomes normal. And in a sense, they get captured. People love to talk about the liberal bubble, liberal elite bubble. There is an equivalent bubble of the hard right. So, yeah, that brings this kind of deformed version of the public sphere that Musk allowed to happen. And I think one could argue intentionally.

[Ezra Klein]

I want to get at a bit of backstory here before we get into the Tucker Carlson Nick Fuentes interview, because this is not the first time Nick Fuentes has broken through to the mainstream of conservatism. There's a very famous dinner at Mar a Lago, I believe, where Donald Trump is dining with Kanye west, noted anti Semite. And Kanye brings Nick Fuentes.

[John Ganz]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

At the time, Trump looks like the past of the party. People think, you know, he's like on his way out. It's gonna be Ron DeSantis in 2024 or someone like that.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And I think they also buy the idea, which Trump says afterwards. And I take as even plausible that he doesn't really know who Nick Fuentes is. I think people buy with Trump that he talks to a lot of people. And one reason I think this is breaking through in the way it is, is is twofold. You don't have any of that deniability on Carlson's side. And now everybody understands that the future of Trumpism is up for grabs. How would you describe the role Tucker Carlson plays on the right now?

[John Ganz]

I think that he strives to be a person of great influence in directing the policy, staffing, messaging of the Republican Party. And to a certain extent, he is. He has deep ties to people in the administration, helped get J.D.

[Ezra Klein]

Vance named vice President.

[John Ganz]

Absolutely. I would say it is more helpful to interpret him as a politician.

[Ezra Klein]

I agree with this.

[John Ganz]

Yes. I think that he basically understood the direction of the Republican Party and remade his entire image and self to fit in with it. And he has been very smart about that. And he realized the old institutions ain't what they used to be. Does it really matter that he's on Fox Anymore, apparently not very much. So his creation of a new Persona really is the story of the transformation of the Republican Party.

[Ezra Klein]

So at this point, how would you describe what Tucker Carlson's politics are? What poll of right wing ideology does he seem to hew to and represent?

[John Ganz]

He represents a tradition that's sometimes called isolationist, which views America's entanglement with foreign alliances and interventions in other countries to not necessarily be in our interest, not necessarily dovish, but definitely United States should apply force when it wants, when it needs to, in its own very direct self interest. He calls himself a Christian. I believe he represents a Christian nationalism which is non Zionist or anti Zionist. Again, there are some roots in that and the old right that goes back for the pre war. He is very hostile to immigration. He seems to have a very strong sense of white ethnic identity and thinks that it believes that it's a problem for the country if there are too many non white immigrants.

[Ezra Klein]

Forgive me if I'm misremembering this. Didn't you do an interview with the son of a Ku Klux Klan member?

[John Ganz]

Oh my God, I'm so glad you brought that up. So I was working on a piece in 2020 about the conservative movement and Tucker was a big part of it and his kind of transformation into a right wing populist. I got a remarkable quote from someone who was the child of Don Black, a Ku Klux Klan leader and a big figure in the white nationalist movement. The person I got the quote from, just to be clear, left the movement and was highly critical of it. But here's what they told me from the perspective of my family. Tucker's making the same points they've been trying to make their entire lives, but much better. He's found a wider audience and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas. My father's a little baffled still that it's Tucker Carlson, someone who he always never liked because he saw him as a shill for the Bush administration and the Iraq war. That's bringing white nationalist ideas to the Fox audience. I'm not a very experienced journalist at the time. This is the beginning of my career. I got this quote and I brought this to my other sources for the story who were young people on the right. And I thought I had something dispositive. I thought I had something that showed Tucker Carlson's playing around with things that you really shouldn't, that he's moving in a very disturbing direction. They shrugged, they didn't care. And I found that to be shocking and disturbing. And I think that anecdote says a lot.

[Ezra Klein]

I also think, and I think this is very important to understanding Tucker and the role he plays is he understands something Trump understands, but not everybody does, which is the modern right, even more than the modern left, is driven by attention. Trump has remade it around an attentional economy. And there isn't somebody behind Trump as good at attention as Trump is. J.D. vance certainly isn't. You don't have to be the president to be the leader of maga. That it is very plausible to me that you would have a J.D. vance nomination. But actually, the next leader of MAGA is Tucker Carlson. I think what Tucker Carlson is trying to be is the authentic voice of maga, who, because he doesn't have to do all the political coalition work, he can be purer than someone like J.D. vance, who I think fundamentally agrees with Carlson at this point, but has to maintain or attempt to maintain viability in Michigan.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I think Carlson views himself in that role for sure. Tucker Carlson was sort of the median conservative Republican, to a certain degree, kind of toed the party line on most issues. Iraq, American, Fallen Princess.

[Ezra Klein]

He was on msnbc.

[John Ganz]

He was on msnbc. He also tried to present himself as a kind of reasonable conservative.

[Ezra Klein]

He was like a good time libertarian rich kid.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, there's that, too. And it's interesting. He takes that bow tie off. You know, there's a degree that there's costume changes here. You know, he takes a bow tie off, he now has this more folksy look, checked shirts and so on and so forth in this cabin, et cetera, et cetera. He's cultivating an image of himself as down to earth and folksy and not part of the establishment. And it's, you know, it's hard to take when you realize he's the product of it. But there's something important to understand about Tucker Carlson's turn, I think, to antisemitism in particular. Right. I believe that antisemitism functions as an epoxy for elites that don't really want social changes that would affect their prominence, in fact, want to shore up their prominence and need mass support and need a target and need a story about economic dispossession, a world that doesn't seem to make sense, that serves their interests. You see this in a lot of different places. You see it in Russia, the tsarist regime kind of invented antisemitism for this purpose. The Protocols of Elders of Zion are created in this regime that's feeling the pressure of a mass population that's becoming Dissatisfied with. It creates antisemitism as a way to rechannel that energy. You see this in France where you have an aristocracy and a clergy that is kind of pushed into old institutions, sees its prominence in the society losing out, it's sort of losing its world. And then it needs to find a mass politics, a way to attack its enemies. And antisemitism becomes very useful for that. So antisemitism always works to create a kind of coalition. There's a street gutter, crackpot antisemitism. And then you have what you could call more respectable antisemites. Charles Lindbergh, right. A person who was highly respected, respectable person, a great hero to many Americans, had a racial view of the world and found anti Semitic ideas persuasive.

[Ezra Klein]

Henry Ford.

[John Ganz]

Henry Ford. So you had these respectable anti Semites and crackpot anti Semites and they're coming together, I would say is the creation of an actual anti Semitic politics. Right. And this interview between Fuentes and Carlson is almost textbook. You have the antisemitism of the garter Fuentes and you have the antisemitism of a declining aristocracy. Right. Tucker comes from this preppy background, father was an ambassador, stepmother is Swanson and sees an America that's not the way he wants it to be, that's declining, that doesn't look the way he looks, like that has norms that he doesn't share. And you have Fuentes who comes from, you know, he didn't go to college, he dropped out of college. He comes from a modest background. He is dripping with resentment to a world that he feels doesn't have a place for him in his life.

[Ezra Klein]

A self described proud incel.

[John Ganz]

Yeah. And also very interesting that he does not try to hide it or pretend that he is not socially maladjusted in some way. And that lends him authenticity and makes people gravitate towards it. This meeting between Tucker and Fuentes symbolizes the kind of recognition between these two groups. So yeah, that is in that interview, in that moment, the most perfect encapsulation of anti Semitic politics. Declining aristocracy held down, dissatisfied kind of mob bringing them together. And you have a kind of coalition itself.

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[Ezra Klein]

Let'S get into that interview. I want to play a clip for you that almost felt to me like the heart of it.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world. There are significant numbers of Jews in Europe, but also in the United States. And because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they're a stateless people, they're unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years. And I think that's a good thing. And I guess what I'm saying is that if you are a Jewish person in America, you're sort of. And again, it's not because they're born, but it's sort of a rational self interest politically to say I'm a minority, I'm a religious ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel. There's like a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel and I would say on top of that for the international Jewish community. They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country. And there's like there's no other country that has a similar arrangement like that. No other country has a strong identity like that. This religious blood and soil conviction, this history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted, and in particular the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the temple. That's why Eric Weinstein goes to the Arch of Titus and gives it the finger and takes a picture. We don't think like that as Americans and white people. We don't think about the Roman Empire in 2000 years ago. They do. And I don't think that's me saying the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. I don't think that's me being hateful. I don't think that's me being collectivist. I think that's understanding that identity politics, whether you love it or hate it, whatever you feel about it, it's a reality that we live in a world of Jews and Christians, of whites and blacks. These identities mean something to us and they mean things to each other. And we can't sort of wish them away. And it feels like white people and Christians are the only ones that do that.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

There's no question about that. Your last point, for sure, one of the reasons they do that is because they've been taught to hate themselves, of course, since the Second World War.

[John Ganz]

All right.

[Ezra Klein]

That's what you might call a rich text.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, sure.

[Ezra Klein]

How do you read it?

[John Ganz]

Well, I mean, he's an extremely talented rhetorician and communicator and he does a few things. He presents a vocabulary that does not sound shocking to people, that uses words and terminology that wouldn't frighten people. Sounds like a rational discussion of politics, rational comment on politics, and then weaved into. This is all of the material of classic antisemitism. The Jews are an unassimilable group, self interested, internationally organized, very tightly and all talking to each other and kind of working as one mind who don't have the interests of their host at heart, have their own interests at heart, and are animated by a deep hostility to the people that surround them, to the societies they find themselves. A hatred towards Christians, towards white people, so on and so forth. That is classic anti Semitism. But he keeps on saying things like, and that's a good thing, or something like that. Or it's not really. I'm not trying to be hateful. He presents it as if he's having a discussion of politics like any other.

[Ezra Klein]

And the other move in there, in addition to the Jews are obsessed with the Romans, which I have to say, I don't feel very obsessed by the Romans.

[John Ganz]

I kind of like that.

[Ezra Klein]

But the other move in there, which you see a lot on the right and a lot on the white identity. Right. Let's call it.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Is look, the Jews are just practicing their identity politics. Don't we just have to practice ours?

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And that final move, which is the one Where Tucker says, well, there's no doubt about that. We white Europeans, the heritage Americans, we're taught to hate ourselves. There's been no rational self interest since World War II. That is, I think, a very fundamental move of Trumpism. That's the bridge of antisemitism to Trumpism. This MAGA right has spent years saying, look, the whole left place, identity politics. It's time for white people to stand up for themselves. You're getting all this anti white racism and here it is, right. The Jews are the danger to that. If they're going to practice their politics, you have to practice yours.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, precisely. I mean, look at the core of the Nazi ideology is a social Darwinistic view of the world divided into almost different species of being who are engaged in an endless war with each other. And the Jews are particularly important part of that worldview. They are the most threatening of these beings and trying to launder what is a kind of biological essentialism about the nature of the political through what sounds like, well, normal interest group politics. Of course, in America we have coalitions. We have representatives of different ethnic groups who advocate on each other's behalf. Well, there's a Congressional Black Caucus. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't white people do that? It is a different kind of politics. The idea is that this group is impossible to assimilate and also national unity, the success of the nation, its health is impossible to accomplish without their expulsion. This is the view, and this is the view that Fuentes continually hammers on.

[Ezra Klein]

There is a lot here that's tricky to talk about because you're at this point endless morass of the intersection of antisemitism and Israel. One move I'm seeing from a lot of people on the right at the moment is why should we be talking about what this rumble influencer thinks about the Jews when the left is electing Zoran Mamdani? Right. When there's been these years of debate about anti Semitism on the left, I'll say this super clearly. I've met Zoran Mamdani, voted for Zormani. I don't think there's anything anti Semitic about him at all. But I think you see in the way he has been treated and then also what is happening on the right, a distinction that is worth understanding, a structural distinction. Anti Zionism on the left often pushes towards what I would call liberalism, a belief that all people should have equal rights, that there should be universalism. There's a different version of it. If you're more sort of socialist and Marxist. But the left tends to push towards a universalism. And a lot of the anger at Israel, which is, I think much of it merited, is the way it betrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control. On the right, it's pushing towards ethnostate politics. That the fundamental argument and a way in which Israel's tried, modern Israel's tried to create new coalitions is to say, hey, we're all ethnostates here. But once you buy into the ethnostate frame, then the fact that you see Jews as an ethnic other in your society pushes somewhere very different, pushes towards ideas of expulsion, pushes towards ideas that they're a fifth column within, that they are leading your country to betray its actual interests in order to, you know, that they have dual loyalties. But there is this weird thing where there's been a rise of like Jewish figures or Jewish aligned figures who want to embrace ethnostate politics. I mean, you have like Yoram Hazoni, you know, Jewish lives in Jerusalem, the founder of natcon, going to the natcon conference, which he started saying, look, you have to like the Jews to be a national Conservative.

[John Ganz]

Nobody ever said, and this is for my Jewish friends, nobody ever said that.

[Ezra Klein]

To be a good natcon you had to love Israel. Nobody ever said that to be a.

[John Ganz]

Good natcon you had to love Jews.

[Ezra Klein]

And so one point of anger, I have a lot of people on the right who I think have been playing footsie with us for a long time, is that once you embrace the ethnostate concept, this is where that leads.

[John Ganz]

Well, I certainly am of that opinion. I think, again, let's take this from another angle. Like the way you're talking is a little highbrow. It's in terms of intellectuals like Jeremy. But let's look at this from the ground up. You have a conservative movement that is embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone, a tone of open bigotry in certain cases. Right. And basically the deal that the pro Israel right thought it could make is we can engage in a good deal of racist demagogy, we're okay with it, especially maybe directed at Muslims, Islam. But the line that we draw is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into anti Semitism, that is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self defeating position. So when I talk about gripification, I don't mean to say it's only that people with these extremely specific views about Israel and Jews are taking over the right. It is more that there's a general atmosphere of Moral anarchy of acceptance of extremely hateful and divisive views. There's no immune system. There's no barrier to antisemitism.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, that also goes to the energy that the modern right maga Trumpism generates from transgression. Once you have begun to exhaust the energy of transgression about how you talk about immigrants.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

Trump comes down the escalator, says they're Senate rapists and murderers over here. There's a big outrage. But now being much more anti immigrant on the right, I mean, that's de rigueur. Who cares?

[John Ganz]

Right?

[Ezra Klein]

Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, once you have moved on traditional gender roles. Right. This is the boss battle of Western speech taboos.

[John Ganz]

Right, Right, right.

[Ezra Klein]

And you have seen this didn't begin last week or two weeks ago.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

You saw Elon Musk respond to somebody laying down a conspiracy that it's Jewish elites pushing immigrant voters to take over the country by saying, you've really spoken the truth Here you have a lot of the podcast bro faction that's turned more right, like Joe Rogan bringing on revisionist historians.

[John Ganz]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

Who, you know, was Germany really the bad guys in World War II? What have we not been told about that? So you sort of bring these two things together that you want to build an ethnostate and you are ideologically opposed to there being anything you can't talk about. And you make your money and your attention on these algorithms, and it's almost a hydraulic process towards antisemitism.

[John Ganz]

Yeah. The thing about a kick getting excitement from it, you know, Sartre said it's amusing to be an anti Semite. Look, Mamdani, for example, who some people say is an anti Semite because of his positions on Israel, he's very careful to say, I'm not an anti Semite and to express sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

[Ezra Klein]

And go to synagogues and I mean, Mamdani's a liberal, okay?

[John Ganz]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But he also does not whatever you think is at the heart of his politics, he does not jubate. He is not practicing politics that is based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews, in other words. And Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does to a more subtle extent. Candace Owen does. And that also attracts people because people who feel powerless are very attracted to it because there's someone you can harass and pick on. And it's part of their strategy to take over the right in their direction is to do this in a way, workplace harassment against their Jewish allies. To bait them, to get them to overreact, to unsettle them. The other thing you mentioned is that the taboos are breaking down because World War II and the Holocaust is a long time ago and the generation that experiences is gone and the politics that were created out of the consensus that it's created is disappearing. So some of it is just the passage of time.

[Ezra Klein]

Again, this is tricky to talk about, but you can't get away here from how much Israel Post Oct 7 the war in and the flattening of Gaza has destabilized politics around this everywhere. And again, I think the ways in which it has created tensions on the left have gotten most of the attention for the past couple of years. But in fact it's cracking open the right. And you hear it in this Carlson Fuentes interview. You hear it in the questions getting asked of JD Vance at various events.

[John Ganz]

Now I'm a Christian man and I'm just confused why there's this notion that we owe Israel something or that they're our greatest ally. I'm just confused why this idea has come around around considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.

[Ezra Klein]

That maga on some level it has really rooted itself in this semi isolationist very much America first position and this young very online right one looks at what has happened in Gaza and I think correctly sees it as immoral. But but two asks why are we involved here at a time when we're pushing Europe out on its own?

[John Ganz]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

When we are aggressively insisting that we have no stable alliances except what is directly in our self interest at a given moment. There are ways, many, many, many ways to be anti Israel without being anti Semitic.

[John Ganz]

But.

[Ezra Klein]

But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing never can be connected to antisemitism breaks apart. And I never quite know how to talk about this except that I feel like we're all living through it right now.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I mean it's very difficult, I mean to put my cards on the table. I'm on the left side of the political spectrum and I've been extremely critical of Israel and especially its conduct in the war, which I. I believe they probably committed a genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. But what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for antisemitic agitators and also a lot of people becoming curious about US foreign policy history. There is a certain extent to which they're grabbing a lot of people who Otherwise would be getting involved in the political process in a really positive way. They say, why is American foreign policy like this? Should we be doing this? What's the history behind all this? Why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? They have legitimate and interesting questions, but instead that curiosity, that legitimate curiosity is being picked up by people who have another motivation here. I don't think that Tucker Carlson lost much sleep over the Arabs who died in Iraq. I'm not defending the war in any way, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture. A culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks. And I don't really believe it when he now gets very sentimental about people in Gaza.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

One of the reasons that I'm mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That's not a Western view, that's an Eastern view. That's a non Christian. That's totally incompatible with Christianity. And so I hate that attitude. It's genocidal.

[John Ganz]

I think it's highly cynical. I think when Fuentes expresses some of the most spiteful, dismissive attitudes towards human suffering you can imagine on a show and then he gets very sentimental about this issue.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

This is just a straight up genocide. These people are starving. They're literally dying. It would be formally called the famine, except that Israel will not let any international personnel inside the Strip to assess this, to make that declaration.

[John Ganz]

And you know, that is to drag people in and to think, well, you know, these people have a heart and they're interested in the same topic as I'm interested in. I think it's highly cynical.

[Ezra Klein]

I think one way you can tell is if these views are motivated by impartial analyses of American foreign policy or much more partial views about the Jews is whether or not they tend to coexist with unrelated anti Jewish conspiracies.

[John Ganz]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And so in some ways what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson Fuentes interview with OnlyFans.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

It's like having a TikTok. It's like, here's my link tree, here's my Instagram account, here's my Facebook account, here's my YouTube, and here's my only fans.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Why would any of this be legal?

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Well, there's, like you indicated, maybe there's an intelligence benefit to that. Yeah, maybe there's a political benefit to that. I think that, well, why wouldn't you.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Arrest the people who run something like that?

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

They should be, if you had a Christian government, or how about just a.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Government that cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is only fans? Iran's not turning my daughters to prostitution.

[Ezra Klein]

So to even parse this clip, you have to know that one of the big anti Semitic conspiracies of this era is that Jews in general, and maybe the Israeli government in particular, is behind a lot of porn.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

The reason the Jews run the porn industry, I think, is because they're not Christian. And not only are they not Christian, but they're against Christianity. And the. The people that were the pioneers of porn, they are quoted as saying, this is like a middle finger to God.

[Ezra Klein]

Kanye west has talked about this. David Duke has talked about this. And here you have Fuentes and Carlson sort of gesturing at this. Maybe there's an intelligence benefit to all this porn we've got out there. Now, if you had a real Christian government, we wouldn't allow it.

[John Ganz]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And that's where I think you see something else is happening in the soil here, as opposed to just old school isolationism on American foreign policy.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Yeah.

[John Ganz]

I mean, it's every dissatisfaction with the modern world, every social problem. You relate back to that issue. That's the explanation for it. It simplifies every single social issue, and it makes a recognizable enemy responsible for it. That's not new. You have that same thing going back in European antisemitism, blaming every single social problem back to the Jews.

[Ezra Klein]

I think one of the things that has unnerved me most in the last few weeks was a tweet from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage foundation and the architect of Project 2025. And Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble. And we'll talk about it for immediately coming out and defending Carlson. But around the same time, he had had Jonathan Haidt, the sort of critic of the Internet, at Heritage, to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things. And he sends out this tweet. He says, thank you, Achon Haidt, for reminding everyone at Heritage y the tech tycoons like Leonid Radvinsky and Solomon Friedman are profiting to the tune of millions by preying on America's young men and women. We are proud to be in this fight with you. It is time to arrest, prosecute, and convict the sick perverts behind OnlyFans and Pornhub. Right. And the key thing about this tweet is you could have chosen to single out no one, or if you're gonna single out only two people, there are a lot of people you might choose, like the CEO of OnlyFans is named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics ahead of the Arch foundation, he chooses these two people with very Jewish names.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

It was very hard for me not to read this, as Roberts or whoever's writing for him is pointing towards some affinity with this part of right subculture.

[John Ganz]

I think you're absolutely right to pick up on that. I mean, Pat Buchanan used to do this. What they used to say about Pat Buchanan is he always talks about Goldman Sachs, but not Morgan Stanley. And Pat Buchanan always would say when he was opposing some US foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, he would mention Kissinger, he would mention Richard Pearl, he would mention those guys. Would he mention Jean Kirkpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No, those names not important. So, yeah, continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. I mean, it's the center of their politics.

[Ezra Klein]

But it just struck me, and this is true for Robertson, the way he responds to a lot that's happening, where you might think, oh, is this just the attentional side of the right? Is this just the people who are trying to create big events for the YouTube algorithm or for the X algorithm? And maybe it begins there, but when you see it jump these lines, I mean, you then also the Kevin Roberts response to the Carlson Fuentes interview. My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence and technology. But when it doesn't, conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces. In Washington, we will always defend our.

[John Ganz]

Friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda.

[Ezra Klein]

That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.

[John Ganz]

He's in a bit of hot water for that now.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, he is.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

But that was his first instinct.

[John Ganz]

Yes, I think that's his first instinct. He wanted to defend Tucker, who I think he views as extremely important part of conservative movement or the right wing now and wants to maintain a relationship with him, obviously. But yeah, the Heritage foundation is essentially part of the nervous system of the conservative movement. It's one of the important think tanks that comes up with policy that supports the work of intellectuals and elites. And the conservative movement. And yeah, watching that and watching the institution seem to break in that direction was remarkable. And that caused a firestorm. He has apologized, he has walked it back. His friend Yoram Hazoni flew in from Israel to try to. To sort things over. Yeah, it was a very weird video. And it struck me as almost coming from sci fi. I was so taken aback by it. And then he falls back on. What they all fall back on now is anti cancel culture, anti wokeness, which means, like, okay, there's no standards anymore. We don't cancel people.

[Ezra Klein]

But there's another interesting part of this when he says, my loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. One of the things that you see when you begin diving into the Fishers on the right about this is for some time there's been a fairly close embrace between evangelical Christianity and Israel. And that has in some ways solved this coalitional problem on the right. And what you hear Fuentes doing what you hear, people coming up and asking JD Vance questions, doing what you hear, in some ways, Tucker doing is really saying, that doesn't make any sense.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists, what is that? I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody. Because what. Because it's Christian heresy. And I'm offended by that as a Christian.

[John Ganz]

I mean, look, the attachment of evangelicals to Israel is a particular current in evangelical Christianity. Dispensationalism, it's one that some argue has very deep roots in American past because of Calvinist ideas and American Christian Zionism going back to the founders. And there's something to that. But this emerges really as a mass phenomenon kind of in the 1970s, right, where evangelical Christians are looking at what's happening in Israel as kind of signs of the coming apocalypse. And that becomes extremely popular and Israel is befriended, is cultivated because they think it is about to bring about the rapture and so on and so forth. Now, it's true, I think among younger Christians, younger evangelical Christians even, I'm not sure how much of a hold dispensationalism has anymore. It seems to be something that's like a lot of the things we're discussing of older generations. So I think that that appears to be changing. I agree with you, but this goes.

[Ezra Klein]

To what you're talking about with Roberts. He did have to walk this back. He's apologized. He said he let Heritage down. This has led to a bunch of interesting reporting on what's been going on inside the Heritage Foundation. And one thing you hear in that reporting is that there's a big generational split where older staffers were furious at Roberts and are standing up in meetings saying, the right. Bill Buckley always knew that you had to eject the anti Semites on the right. I see you rolling your eyes. It's worth saying that Bill Buckley's the extent of his war against anti Semitism has been overstated, let's put it that way. But the younger, many of the younger Heritage foundation staffers are standing up and saying, what did Kevin do wrong here?

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

If there's not room for what he said, is there not room for me? And I think this is getting at just this very big thing, which is. And it's what I sort of understood Roberts is doing that. You have a lot of people on the MAGA right trying to skate to where they think the puck is going and what they see among their young, among their staffers, among the people they interact with on social media. Is that where it's going is around this much more? I would call it like white nationalist energy.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I think that's a good read on this situation. I think Rod Dreher, who is a person of the far right but is horrified by everything that's going on, he wrote recently that a friend of his who has connections to the Republican Party and the conservative movement estimated that some 30 or 40% of young staffers were gropers. And I would say to that, well, the other half maybe don't go to the last taboo of antisemitism, but definitely don't have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking and nasty ideas about that. That's my own commentary. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. I think that there is a market generation gap, that the younger staff of the conservative movement are much more open to Fuentes ideas. And they've also come up in a situation since their introduction to politics, they've been suffused. They've come up in an environment that's filled with this. They don't know a world before it. It's their common sense in a way. So yeah, I think that they are struggling with the fact that they're probably going to have staffing issues and they already are.

[Ezra Klein]

And Trump has not criticized like Trump can weigh in on things when he feels like it. He called Carlson crazy when Carlson criticized him for the Iran bombing. Trump is notably not weighed in on this. Vance has only said he doesn't like the infighting.

[John Ganz]

Well, I think, well, there's a lot of reasons for that. I think that the main reason is, look, Trump gets a lot of mileage about seeming out to lunch or in his own world. The fact of the matter is he's a successful politician. He understands, and he's always understood from the beginning that this extreme right is a constituency that he can't really afford to alienate, that he has to court. I think his administration knows that they can't totally distance him. He's never completely distanced.

[Ezra Klein]

Also, his administration is full of these people.

[John Ganz]

Yes, that's true, but maybe it was.

[Ezra Klein]

Not as true in the first term.

[John Ganz]

No. And I think they're very interested in what this section of the right has to say and they realize this is part of our coalition. We cannot afford forward to alienate them and attack them.

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[Ezra Klein]

To all of us.

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[Ezra Klein]

So there have been conservative figures pushing back. Ben Shapiro has particularly, I think, gone to war and has tried to call this out and really try to play the old, at least mythological, William F. Buckley role. Trying to say no, we don't do this, we don't go to groipers, we don't go to Nico Fuentes. There are lines in our movement. What have you thought of Shapiro's response, the reaction to it?

[John Ganz]

First of all, the thing to remember about one of the other main figures on the anti Semitic ranked is Candace Owens, right. Who was birthed within the Shapiro organization. So think about that.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, hired by the Shapiro organization.

[John Ganz]

Hired by the Shapiro cultivated and turned into a star.

[Ezra Klein]

Yes. Part of them trying to skate to where the puck was going.

[John Ganz]

Right. To get a younger audience, to get a hipper in the sense of conservatives, a hipper audience. And Shapiro says, like we're going to draw the lines here. And Mark Levin at the Republican Jewish Conference says, what do you mean? We don't cancel people. We canceled David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobrin. We canceled pornography on tv. We cancel stuff all the damn time. Hitler admires, Stalin admires, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters. You're damn right we're gonna cancel them and de platform them. I mean, it's too little, too late in my view. The opportunity has passed. Most of the people who saw where the Republican Party was going and didn't like it and were clear sighted about it went into the Never Trump movement, which was not politically viable. Right. It's a group of people who I consider to have kind of preserved their honor, but don't have a mass constituency. The party's not there. These people stayed with MAGA and everything. It represented the destruction of all these norms and institutions that would prevent something like this. So I just am also extremely angry and frustrated with the pro Israel and neoconservative right for looking the other way when it came to the racist takeover of the riot. Zoramdani, perfect example of this. What has happened in the wake of the giant controversies that exploded about Fuentes going on Tucker, the leaks of the chats, you have major figures on the right who are trying to redirect the conversation about antisemitism back to Zoran Mamdani. They're trying to make him the hate figure.

[Ezra Klein]

And to can't we all come together?

[John Ganz]

Yes. And so Ben Shapiro says, when has Tucker really criticized Zoran Mandani? Right. The number of times that Tucker Carlson.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

Has mentioned zoran Mandani since October 5th on his show is once.

[John Ganz]

And it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

About the appeal of Zoran Mandani.

[John Ganz]

And then Steve Bannon goes, he Attacks Mark Levin. He says, these guys aren't really maga. And he has a point, because they weren't back then. They weren't with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani. Mark Levin, instead of running your mouth, what are you doing in New York City? I tell you what we're doing. We're gonna denaturalize Mandami. So it directs this energy, this energy of racial hate, really, that seeks to expel a racial other against the safer target. Right. That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by being like, look, just be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want. But it's against its designated enemies that are. Okay. People ask a rational question, well, why are these people off the table? And then the answer comes back. It's like, well, because Christianity or because Israel represents Western civilization or some kind of rationalization like that. And the anti Semites say that makes no sense to us. And in a certain sense, yeah, why not? If the world is divided into these racial groups and this is the way you are, and we practice a politics that's based on that, why make an exception?

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, as you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump in 2016. Shapiro said Trumpism breeds conspiracism. Conspiracism breeds antisemitism. Trump is happy to channel support of anti Semites to his own ends.

[John Ganz]

Okay, so Ben Shapiro, not a dumb guy at that time.

[Ezra Klein]

If you go back and you read actually a bunch of what he said back then, it's very, very, very prescient.

[John Ganz]

The other thing is, what's the superpower? They're gonna suddenly discover that they're gonna do that. They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They tried. Many of them tried. Ben Shapiro was an opponent of Donald Trump. Mark Levin was an opponent of Donald Trump. So they're gonna finally discover some new.

[Ezra Klein]

Secret weapons in 2024. I don't know where Levin was, but there was clearly an effort from Shapiro and others to make Desantis the future.

[John Ganz]

Sure, sure. And yeah. So I don't understand where they suddenly think they're gonna find the weapons or the army that's gonna support them in this war.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, this is what I think is frightening when you look at their situation kind of coldly. Their kind of last best hope is that they don't believe Trump himself is an anti Semite. Their last hope is Trump himself. And I mean, they'll say that, but when I appear on more or less saying that, but they're all much more afraid of what's coming next. Of J.D. vance in particular. Where I think the view many Republicans hold is advance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is that Vance is gruper adjacent, let's call it.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Ezra Klein]

And there is still an online Republican Party to some degree. You know, Ted Cruz, if you sit.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

There with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit.

[Ezra Klein]

In that evil Lindsey Graham.

[John Ganz]

I just want to make it really clear. I'm in the Hitler sucks wing of the Republican Party. What is this Hitler shit? I don't know.

[Ezra Klein]

Anyway, but it is the older Republican Party, right?

[John Ganz]

I think that they made a deal with the devil in a certain way and now they're paying for the consequences. Now, another way to read this, obviously it's all very scary and these are bad things and the transformation of the Republican Party into this stuff is not good. It wasn't great before, in my opinion, but now it's really something else. The other thing is this might be a politics that ends up when it's exposed to the public being too weird and too fringe. It has some mass constituency. Will it do well in a primary? Yeah, maybe. Probably. Will it do well with the rest of the public? I don't know.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, it's done well in primaries before. I think this actually gets to something important. So your book is very much about Pat Buchanan and earlier strains of this. For those who didn't grow up in the politics of the 1980s and 1990s or didn't write a bestselling book on it as you did. Who's Pat Buchanan?

[John Ganz]

Pat Buchanan is a major figure in the conservative movement. He was a member of the Nixon administration. He kind of represented the ideological conservatives, like the Buckley conservatives, the National Review crowd within the Nixon administration. He then went on to be a very important syndicated columnist, appeared on tv. He was a communications director for some time in the Reagan administration. Important loud voice on the right. He ran two primary campaigns for the Republican Party, one in 1992, which my book focuses on, which wounded George H.W. bush's candidacy. So there was kind of a constituency for his type of politics. He is also probably the person who expressed anti Semitic views in public. The most notable anti Semite in American politics for a very long time.

[Ezra Klein]

I always think of this clip of Trump talking about Buchanan is worth revisiting.

[John Ganz]

Now, how about Pat Buchanan?

[Ezra Klein]

What do you think of that now?

[John Ganz]

He seems to be the guy you'd have to battle. Well, that's true. He's anti Semitic, he's anti black. He obviously has been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler in some form. And I just can't imagine this guy. I don't want you to hold back.

[Ezra Klein]

Give me how you feel now.

[John Ganz]

I mean, I can't imagine, you know, that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate.

[Ezra Klein]

So that's an earlier Trump incarnation, Right. Flirting with a third party run for president.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things, like trade, since the 80s, but not on everything.

[John Ganz]

You know, there was a man, Pat Buchanan, a good guy, conservative guy. And, you know, it's not that we're, you know, Pat Buchanan. Look at that.

[Conservative Critic / Commentator]

Good, good guy.

[Ezra Klein]

Wow.

[John Ganz]

Young people, they know Pat Buchanan, right? We know Pat Buchanan. He came in second in the New Hampshire primary, and for 45 years, he made an unbelievable career of it. He was a hot item. He was on every show.

[Ezra Klein]

And it's been interesting watching so many of these figures, Nick Fuentes being one of them, but not by any means alone. Kevin Roberts, all of them really rehabilitate Pat Buchanan.

[John Ganz]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

I think the Republican Party used to pride itself on not going down Buchanan's lane. It went down another lane instead. George H.W. bush and then George W. Bush. But it seems like now Buchanan ism is winning.

[John Ganz]

That's the thesis of all the work I've been doing for the past decade in my book. Yes, I think that's true. And actually it was interesting at the beginning of this presidency. I thought, oh, man, I got something a little bit wrong. It's Pat Buchanan. Plus you gotta be nice to Israel. Right. So they're like, okay, we can be the trade stuff, the immigration stuff that. But we're going to keep in place in order to keep the coalition together, this reflexive support of Israel, partly to do with Jewish Republicans and partly to do with Christian evangelicals. And then when this explodes, I was like, oh, well, I guess that never fully went away and it wasn't totally submerged. And this coalition wasn't that stable.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, also, it gets to this point that Buchanan has an internal logic.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

And when you embrace it, it becomes hard to embrace 80% of its logic, but not 100% of its logic. So there's this book Buchanan wrote years ago called the Death of the West. JD Vance has said it is the first political book he ever read. How would you describe the death of the west thesis and how it relates to modern Republican Party politics.

[John Ganz]

It basically describes a world where the white race is submerged by the invasion of brown peoples, and that needs to be prevented by any means necessary. Essentially, it's a work of polite white nationalism.

[Ezra Klein]

And there's a tremendous amount about fertility rates in it. I mean, even in the first Trump term, reading it, it was striking to me how much the modern right had fully absorbed this book by this guy who was pushed out to the margins, or it seemed to be for a long time. But I mean, now I think if you're going to pick a founding text for maga, people talk about all kinds of different weird thinkers, but Death of the west by Buchanan feels to me like a pretty fair center of the canon.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I mean, look, critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to Western civilization. And the way Buchanan use it, it's not a subtext. It's what Western civilization means. It means white people. It doesn't mean Homer and Dante and Plato and so on and so forth. Or in ideas, it means a certain racial stock that makes up Western people. And basically the division on the right right now is, are Jews part of that Western white people?

[Ezra Klein]

So I guess one thing that part of this conversation then reflects is how much of this is all the Internet and attentional dynamics. And as such, we are moving into this structurally. And there aren't very good political answers to it. I mean, you had this line that one could even say that the Internet itself is anti Semitic, which also was a kind of provocative line. But I'm curious because you've been writing more. You gave the speech at Chicago where you're talking about the sort of modern version of fascism as a response to the way the Internet has destabilized the way we communicate in the political sphere. How much do you see what we're in as a structural feature of the medium on which politics now primarily, certainly political communication primarily takes place. What follows from an analysis like that?

[John Ganz]

Well, I mean, the comment about the Internet being structurally antisemitic, very speculative theory of mine that I cannot defend right now. But yeah, obviously the change in the way people consume media creates the possibility for new communities to form. Right. People who would generally be cranks and fringe people with all a few audience members find mass audiences. Right. So there's a component of that. There's also the fact that the Internet, it's almost like the birth of cities is the way I think about it. It's almost like urbanization. It creates an enormous amount of what you might call sanitary problems. It creates an enormous amount of waste, pollution and stuff like this. And we haven't come to a way of being like, okay, well, we're going to decide how we govern this new city. It's very interesting though. Where do people get into this stuff? You mentioned pornography, right? It comes from this really seedy underbelly of the Internet. The chan bulletin boards or message boards, 8chan, 4chan, et cetera, like that. It comes from a community that consumes porn, very edgy porn, sometimes illicit porn. It came from the same underbelly, the sewage of the Internet, from the gutter. It is the favorite ideology of the very people who sometimes have addictive relationships to those things and feel entirely disempowered to detach themselves from it, feel like they have no lives or future. The Internet is their only life and future. But it also presents itself as a politics that would solve those problems, right? All of the things that happen because of modernization or the creation of these new structures, we have the answer to fix them all. It's interesting. Fuentes openly says, I'm one of those guys. He's like, I'm kind of a loser, an incel. There's no women in my life, et cetera, et cetera. But the way he does that and the way he attracts an audience and the way he entertains his audiences when he has their questions come on, he sadistically attacks them, right? He makes fun of them, he teases them.

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

What do you mean, what do I think? That's your question. So Byron Donald, some like black Republican bench warmer, gets up at the RJC and says, I love Israel, I support immigration. You say, what do you think about that? What do you think I think about that, dipshit? That's your question? The show is like, we hate immigration, we're against Israel. Hey, so this guy says he likes immigration in Israel.

[Ezra Klein]

What do you think about that?

[Right-Wing Commentator / Guest]

That's your question? What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that, you fucking idiot?

[John Ganz]

Because essentially, like, that's at the root of this. It's about a certain type of powerlessness that comes to express itself in sadism. There is a degree of self loathing among these people that it can't also be discounted. There's a degree to which they have accepted their position as being kind of outside of society, as being unrepresented, and they just want to burn it all down.

[Ezra Klein]

I think I have this theory about Twitter, which is that whichever political coalition is in control of it, at a given moment is going to pay dearly for that. The left sort of had the wheel on Twitter around 2020, and by 2024, a lot of the positions that got taken for that reason, a lot of the culture that emerged on it ended up proving a profound political loser. And I remember people being terrified on the left when Elon Musk bought it. But what I see is the right is becoming Twitter poisoned X poisoned. And that guy in a basement making fun of his followers, claiming to be an incel politics.

[John Ganz]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, I've spent the last week immersed in prep for this. And you begin to think it's the world and then you look up and you kind of shake your head and you remember it's not. And the right seems so hooked in to its own attentional drugs at the moment. And J.D. vance, who seems to want to be the future of the right, is very, very, very hooked in to its weird subcultures. And he has said that himself that. I mean, one thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them is like, this is going to be a loser. And I don't think it's specifically the anti Semitism of that too, but the whole gestalt of craziness like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens and I mean, there's just so much as they try to absorb this in and Tucker Carlson and. And if I were to have some optimistic loss on any of this, and I don't feel great about it, it's that that's a pretty weak politics, particularly after Trump, who has a very particular showman's capability and role in American culture.

[John Ganz]

No, I think your point about Twitter being a kind of mixed blessing or it's extremely useful when you're kind of putting together the campaign and the coalition and about to launch an attack. And when you're in power, you need to have normal democratic tools to understand where the electorate's at. And the types of explanations, ideas, memes on Twitter are a different reality. And it interprets what's going on in the rest of the world in a very distorted way. Right. So an election happens, there's a negative result for your party. A normal political mind would say, maybe some of our messaging is bad, our policies are bad, the electorate is expressing issues with us that gets metabolized in Twitter and all kinds of insane conspiracies and so on and so forth. So it definitely distorts what the notion of the rights public is. Now, that's very dangerous because they're living in kind of another reality. But it Also, when they're in a democratic society, yeah, it detaches them from the things that they could do to alter course. And yeah, I think that it's still true that a lot of the things that we're talking about are, as they say, very online and attract a kind of subculture. My only warning about that is I think that a lot of young people grew up online. A lot of people are very online. It's not that different from the norm.

[Ezra Klein]

But what I would say is that I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically. And what I mean by this is the 2024 election scared the hell out of Democrats about what was happening with Gen Z. Rightly so. Huge swing towards Trump. And so then when somebody like Nick Fuentes self described, you know, incel and brain poisoned edgelord comes up and says, I am speaking on behalf of these young men, he has a tendency to say, well, okay, like I don't understand these young men anymore. Maybe he is right. And then I look around, if you look at who Trump has lost support among, it's young people. Right. He has cratered among young people. You looked at how Zoran Mamdani did in the election among young men incredibly well. The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuente's is also wrong. And I think is a weird way. One thing you often see, I think, is that old people don't understand young people. And so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituencies saying I speak for the young now. And you know, people care about the cost of living. Right. They swing around based on that.

[John Ganz]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

There seems to me to be something here that even I don't think the Republican Party has the pulse of the young. It's that it has the pulse of its online young. And that is a very malformed sense of even the young public.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I think there is a lot to that. I think there's a lot to that. I do think, though it must be admitted that this is a party with mass support and it increasingly has tailored a message to try to get people who feel disaffected with the way things are going. So if there are a lot of people, other shocks, and there isn't some way in which the country gets on a footing where people feel like they can be prosperous, where they can have decent lives and these pathologies continue, that politics is going to get an additional purchase.

[Ezra Klein]

I mean, it's one of the big dangers with America's two party politics. If one of the two parties becomes extreme, then it doesn't take that much for the extreme wing to come into power. Right. You can take over a party.

[John Ganz]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

With a fairly narrow part of that party being well organized. Different candidates split support in the primaries and all of a sudden you have Trump in 2016 or maybe J.D. vance loses in 2028. But then there's a big recession and Tucker Carlson runs in the 2032 primaries or somebody who's Tucker Pilled or whatever it might be. And, and the issue you have there is that if the Democratic Party for one reason or another becomes unacceptable to people, then the fact that the Republican Party is run by groper extremists, you make a couple political moves to the center and hide it a little bit during the election, then you're in real trouble. I mean, my sense of our politics now is that on the one hand the Republican Party is weakening itself and on the other hand the possibility of 20th century calamity style outcomes just keeps going up.

[John Ganz]

Yeah, I agree with you. But here's the thing about every single election happens and Americans say this proves our theory of the case. The country has fundamentally changed. Here are the people who are important, here are the people who are not important. This party has shown itself to be totally out of touch with the American people. This party is the wave of the future. And then another election happens. That narrative is forgotten eris proven to be false very quickly. We don't really know what the electorate looks like until election day. So we're always kind of guessing and saying, oh well, there's a lot of these kind of people, a lot of this kind of people. We don't know what messages are going to be successful. Things come out of nowhere, things disappear. Coalitions are never permanent. They're very fragile in American politics. They fall apart quickly. As you mentioned, the loss of young people, the loss of independence, who weren't watching Nick Fuentes, they were pissed about their groceries, they were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house. So I don't think I'm of two minds of it too. I do believe that there is a weakening of the party's mass appeal through its moving towards the other things. But my only worry about that is these things have sophisticated techniques of propaganda to get mass support. And Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are exhibiting those things. They know what they're doing. They are not the Nazis of yesteryear who were skinheads and put swastikas everywhere and scare people. They know how to deliver this message in A way that's palatable or more palatable. My sense of, of things in America is that if a message comes along, that is, yes, there are problems with the establishment, but we need to make some changes to the way our economy works. And I don't particularly hate or want to kill or harm anybody. That message is going to be a lot more successful to people because I think most Americans are not obsessed with sadistic fantasies of harming each other. So I don't think it's an inevitability that those politics will take over. And I think. But I do believe there are conditions under which they become more appealing and stronger. And it's a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we're experiencing now and.

[Ezra Klein]

Then all as our final question, what are three books you recommend to the audience?

[John Ganz]

Okay, so I'm gonna recommend two recent books and an old book, and they're about this subject. This is not for reading, for fun. One is Taking America Back by David Austin Walsh, which is a kind of history of the right's half hearted, let's say, attempts to police antisemitism. One is Furious Minds. It's a new book by Laura K. Field, which is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right and how they justify, explain, rationalize things that are going on, give arguments for it. And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It's called Prophets of Techniques of the American Agitator and it's by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. And it's a extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of anti Semitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States.

[Ezra Klein]

John Ganz, thank you very much.

[John Ganz]

Thanks so much for having me. Ezra Foreign.

[Ezra Klein]

This episode of the Israel Clancho is Produced by Jack McCordick. Fact Checking by Ashley Braund. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kelbeck and Jan Kobel. Original music by Carol Saborough, Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Semolewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

[Podcast Announcer]

Did you know that parents rank financial literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families. With Greenlight, you can set up chores, automate allowance and keep an eye on your kids spending with real time notifications. Kids learn to earn, save and spend wisely, and parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money. With guardrails in place. Sign up for Greenlight [e-mail] podcast.