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The Right’s ‘Civil War’ Is Not About Nick Fuentes
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The Right’s ‘Civil War’ Is Not About Nick Fuentes
The pro-Israel side distracts from the bigger issue.
(Photo by Saeed M. M. T. Jaras/Anadolu via Getty Images)
It seems like just a year ago it was difficult to get anyone of note to speak out against Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Since then, more and more people have acknowledged it. But there remains a shrinking minority of opinion makers working at the behest of an old establishment that has lost whatever grip it ever had on the stories the public tells itself.
For the past several weeks, those old-guard commentators have been telling themselves and their donors (who else is listening at this point?) that there is a “civil war” raging on the political right. Well, that’s true enough. But here’s the gaping hole in their story: They present the battle simplistically, as a fight between decent, upstanding conservatives on the one hand, and a nefarious coalition of unscrupulous antisemites on the other.
Victor Davis Hanson recently argued that the “rise of antisemitism on the right” came “to the fore” when Carlson published a video interview with Nick Fuentes which “caused an enormous controversy because of the things that Fuentes has said in the past. …That record is well documented.” Carlson has also interviewed “the World War II revisionist Darryl Cooper,” Hanson warned.
Notice what’s missing from Hanson’s little play within a play? That’s right—the most significant drama of our time and the massive moral outrage on everyone’s minds: the genocide in Gaza.
There is indeed a civil war taking place on the right. But it’s not fundamentally over the comments of Nick Fuentes—however indefensible they are. It’s about the comments and actions of powerful people with influence over the lives of Palestinian men, women, and children.
The whole debate needs a radical reframing and grounding in reality—as well as in the will of the general populace, a growing number of whom (of every political stripe and every ethnic group) are revolted by the genocide and want their elected officials and public commentators to thoroughly divest themselves of it.
And here’s that reframing: The civil war on the right is not a battle between those who denounce the “hate speech” of Nick Fuentes and his “groyper” followers and those who will not. It’s a battle between those who will denounce genocide and those who will not.
And so far, the anti-genocide faction is winning handily—in part because they are often the only ones directly engaging in the debate at all.
If you listen to The American Conservative’s Curt Mills’ media appearances, Dave Smith’s debate performance in July at Turning Point USA, and the commentary of numerous others, you’ll find they’ve done their homework. Their opening salvos in this battle have all been full of details: about the almost countless examples of documented war crimes against civilians in Gaza, about Israeli influence over America’s foreign policy, about the philosophical tenets of political Zionism, about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s top lieutenants speaking in overtly bigoted and genocidal terms, about the prime minister’s corruption, and so on.
The responses, Hanson’s included, are completely free of such details, refuting none of these criticisms, dismissing them as unfair demonization of Israel, and instead attempting to give the impression that the real controversy is over the character and comportment of a few political commentators they resent: Carlson, Fuentes, etc.
Not once in Hanson’s whole lazy, meandering commentary on the divisions forming on the political right did he mention Israel’s crimes in Gaza. It’s a bizarre omission, given that Carlson has essentially accused Hanson’s wing of the Republican Party of joining establishment Democrats and global elites in becoming complicit in Israel’s genocide.
Why would Hanson and other critics of Fuentes and Carlson not defend themselves against such a grave charge? The answer is obvious: because their position of complicity with Netanyahu’s campaign of violence against Palestinians is indefensible.
And so, rather than address the central reason for the civil war on the right, men like Hanson point to what people like Fuentes have “said in the past”—notably, on topics other than the one at hand.
And rather than tackle the impossible task of defending their practice of engaging in “holocaust revisionism” in real-time, these commentators warn about “World War II revisionism”—as if the pet theories of amateur historians about the events of 80 years ago are a more real and present danger than the most highly-positioned and heavily-funded men in the world propagandizing 24-7 for an ongoing genocide.
Meanwhile, what everyone else has noticed and been alarmed by is precisely that pro-genocide propaganda—much of it so stomach-turning that it’s no surprise Americans of all backgrounds are increasingly unmoved by the accusations of antisemitism coming from promoters of Israel’s violence. As I recently reported, a large majority of American Jews now believe Israel is committing war crimes.
We see a sitting U.S. congressman joking about the murder of Palestinian children and calling for nuclear bombs to be dropped on Gaza.
We see mainstream neoconservative commentators calling Arabs a “people of death” that is inherently a threat to civilization, and respected pundits calling for entire cities in Gaza to be “carpet-bombed.”
And we see moral leaders like Pope Leo XIV and Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Pierbattista Pizzaballa raising their voices against the bloodshed—only to be mocked and dismissed and smeared.
“And what do we as conservatives on the right do?” Hanson said in his commentary on the right’s civil war. “I think we have to speak out, according to our station, anytime we see this recrudescence of antisemitism…. It’s a disease. It’s a morbidity. We cannot let it spread. And it’s past time to stop it.”
Speaking out against bigotry and dangerous rhetoric of the kind that foments ethnic hatreds and leads to real-world violence is indeed exactly what we need to do.
But unlike the American public in general and a growing majority of Jewish Americans, the pro-genocide faction on the political right is so far the last group to do so.
The post The Right’s ‘Civil War’ Is Not About Nick Fuentes appeared first on The American Conservative.
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