On being totally anti-Nazi – Suzanne Schneider in NYRB:

‘On November 5 the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, convened an uncomfortable meeting. “I made a mistake, and I let you down,” he told a hall full of the conservative think tank’s staff and fellows in a video leaked to The Washington Free Beacon. A week earlier Roberts had recorded a staunch defense of Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with Nick Fuentes, the stridently racist, misogynistic, and antisemitic online personality, had split the conservative world in two.

Fuentes, a white nationalist, peppers his praise for Hitler with denunciations of the state of Israel and its American lobbyists. Carlson, for his part, was careful to stop short of blaming the Jews for Israel’s conduct during the interview with Fuentes and distances himself from the overtly fascist right. (“I’m totally anti-Nazi,” he told the podcaster Theo Von last week.)’

(…)

‘Multiple Jewish leaders and organizations, meanwhile, withdrewfrom Heritage’s anti-antisemitism initiative, Project Esther, which characterizes antisemitism as the product of “a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)” that aims to undermine American aid to Israel. The project has of late been a crucial vehicle for Heritage’s assault on the political left, stirring up campaigns against progressive academics, politicians, and activists, but now it finds itself at something of an impasse. “We are bleeding trust, reputation, perhaps donors,” Daniel Flesch, a Project Esther staffer, warned at the town hall; the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the initiative “could be imploding.”’

(…)

‘American conservatives have never uniformly embraced the principle of equality or rejected blood-and-soil nationalism. From the original America First coalition to the John Birch Society to Pat Buchanan’s failed presidential campaigns, antisemitic, nativist, and white supremacist currents have often run close to the surface of “establishment” conservatism. The difference in the years since Donald Trump’s first election is that a new crop of “post-liberal” intellectuals and institutions—including the National Conservatism movement, the America First Policy Institute, the Conservative Partnership Institute, and, in its latest iteration, Heritage itself—have labored to make conservatism’s ideological fringes respectable, recasting them in the lofty language of political theory. In the process, they have narrowed the distance between the movement’s extremes and its center.
The result is a GOP that has largely abandoned the principles of equality and individual rights while embracing ethnonationalist, conspiratorial thought.’

(…)

‘Today the distinction between “fringe” and “mainstream” has been further eroded by a radically decentralized media landscape. Figures like Fuentes and Carlson, excluded from traditional platforms, can exert enormous influence on the conservative movement all the same. Fuentes’s account of his own origins, in his interview with Carlson, turned on the story of being “canceled on the right” as a freshman in college for refusing to toe the party line on Israel. He was later suspended from social media platforms, but made a triumphant return to X in May 2024 after Elon Musk acquired the company.
Carlson has proved similarly adept at navigating the new information environment. After his firing by Fox News, he quickly established his own YouTube channel, which currently has 5.1 million monthly followers, nearly four times as many people as Fox & Friends has viewers. There he dabbles in the sensational and conspiratorial, interviewing 9/11 truthers, characterizing vaccines as “demonic rituals to replicate God,” and entertaining Milo Yiannopoulos’s case for conversion therapy.
This means that gatekeepers at institutions like National Review and The Wall Street Journal, much as they might wish to hold certain boundaries, can no longer exercise good movement hygiene.’

(…)

‘Thus far most of the American right has managed to make room for antisemitism without abandoning its commitment to Zionism. For all the ink spilled about Carlson and Fuentes, elected Republicans remain nearly unanimous in their unconditional support for Israel, a sturdy alliance that will require a generational shift to undo. The robustness of this coalition has motivated some Jewish groups to accommodate the conservative movement’s open anti-Jewish sentiment—as has those groups’ almost singular obsession with left-wing anti-Zionism. The ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, for example, has called groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace “the photo-inverse of the extreme right.” Yet last January, after Elon Musk made what can only be called a sieg heil at a celebration of Trump’s inauguration, the ADL notoriously called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” Nine months later, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the organization took down its hallmark database of hate groups and deleted the page dedicated to Turning Point USA.’

(…)

‘The resurgence of open antisemitism on the right has many sources of fuel, from an unresponsive political system that leaves Americans distrustful of elites and vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking, to the live-streamed genocide committed in the name of the Jewish people. But in a prodigious twist of irony, the post-liberal thinker who has perhaps done more than any other to reestablish the intellectual legitimacy of white, Christian nationalism is the Israeli-American founder of the National Conservatism movement, Yoram Hazony. It was telling that, at the November 5 meeting, Roberts announced that he had called on Hazony, his “closest Jewish friend in the world,” to guide him through his personal and professional crisis.
Hazony, whose NatCon conferences have brought together hundreds of conservative intellectuals, policy wonks, and politicians, including Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and a who’s who of the institutional side of the MAGA movement—from J.D. Vance to Tulsi Gabbard, Russell Vought, Sebastian Gorka, Josh Hawley, Steve Bannon, Patrick Deneen, and Roberts himself—has labored to construct a reputable theoretical scaffolding for ethnonationalism since the populist upsurge of 2016. His 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism presents a view of the nation that runs dangerously parallel to those that understand American Jews as a foreign pathogen within the body politic. The ideal political community, he posits, emerges naturally out of membership in families and tribes—from common history, culture, language, or religion. (The state of Israel is his template for his illiberal, nationalist vision of democracy.) All of this makes the idea of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy quixotic if not altogether farcical: “What is needed for the establishment of a stable and free state is a majority nation whose cultural dominance is plain and unquestioned, and against which resistance appears to be futile.” Perhaps nowhere comports so poorly with Hazony’s idea of the nation as the United States, where the separation of church and state and the rejection of ethnicity as the basis of political belonging have allowed Jews and other minorities to flourish. But for Hazony “the United States is held together” by something quite different: “the bonds of mutual loyalty that unite the American nation, an English-speaking nation whose constitutional and religious traditions were originally rooted in the Bible, Protestantism, republicanism, and the common law of England.”’

Read the article here.
The gatekeepers are dying because of a ‘radically decentralized media landscape’.

Blood-and-soil nationalism that once upon a time could be seen as utterly un-American has become mainstream, and from history we know, where blood-and-soil nationalism is being served antisemitism is the side dish, sometimes even the main dish.

Some of the staunchest defenders of the real existing Jewish state are willing to embrace the blood-and-soil nationalist in return for what? I don’t know, for being despised a bit less I guess.