Conservative Marc Theissen column: Trump built a winning coalition. White nationalists will destroy it.

[Landon Caeli]

Snort. The Claim on the table was

"Fuentes broadcasts his flaws publicly, and his messages are amplified by those on the right."

From your source:

Nick Fuentes, an online personality known for his racist and antisemitic views, has elicited renewed interest from national news publications and political figures in recent months, exemplified by a series of his appearances on podcasts popular with right-wing audiences

Yes, Fuentes has appeared on other people's podcasts, which are popular. But
It says nothing about Fuentes having an increased fan base of his own.

It also says he has "elicited renewed interest from "national news publications" and "political figures"... Those national news publications that he has elicited interest from, appear to be primarily left-wing news, like BBC, who are actually condemning him.

If you agree with that, and that's all you've been claiming this whole time, then I suppose we agree. And I admit I misunderstood who Mike Johnson was referring to when he said "he" has a lot of listeners - he was actually referring to Carlson, which is true.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Yes, Fuentes has appeared on other people's podcasts, which are popular. But
It says nothing about Fuentes having an increased fan base of his own.

That might possibly be devastating to someone who had made such a claim. As it is, the claim I made is substantiated.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Civil war underway as GOP struggles to 'expel the lunatics': analysis​

“One faction, led by Jewish conservatives and Christian Zionists like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, accuses Roberts [Heritage] of coddling an antisemite [Fuentes]. Another prefers a ‘no enemies to the right’ approach, which mirrors the language that Roberts used in his video,” reports Jones. “There have been prominent resignations, a contentious town hall at Heritage, and denunciations of various sorts. Throughout it all, the groypers cavort. The Establishment right, which they despise, may be ripe for implosion at last.”

Jones said the Roberts video arrived at a contentious moment for American conservatives. The post-Trump trajectory of the right “is not yet assured, and the movement is consumed by questions of succession, ideology, and strategy.”

“To many, like Roberts, the furthest-right fringe is more palatable than liberalism or the neoconservatism that preceded the Obama years. Only an alliance of the most radical tendencies on the right can transform the nation for decades to come, or so the logic goes,” she wrote.

“The boundaries that he set forth, William Buckley, in the early 1960s, were twofold,” [conservative scholar] Rector said. “You have to expunge all antisemitism, all of it. But that’s just part of it … the other is you have to expel the lunatics.”

“... Yet the right’s eternal patience with antisemitism, and all other forms of racism and misogyny and queer hatred, are precisely what brought us here,” said Jones. “And so, despite all the heat, the board of Heritage is siding with Roberts for now.”

 

[essentialsaltes]

Glenn Beck attempts to patiently explain to his rightwing fans that Hitler was bad.

The idea that Adolf Hitler was some misunderstood or even "good" figure while Winston Churchill was the real WWII villain was once confined to the extreme fringes and unknown to almost everyone else. Today, however, the idea has resurfaced with disturbing visibility — no longer limited to neo-Nazi forums but now defended or entertained on major podcasts, viral social-media threads, and platforms with tens of millions of listeners and viewers.

Glenn Beck, a lover of history and collector of historical artifacts, is appalled that this revisionist narrative is being taken seriously.

“I really don't get it. History, real history, is not a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. It's ink on paper, orders in filing cabinets, telegrams, diaries, bodies. It's what actually happened, not what we hope happened,” he says.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn sets the record straight about Hitler, Churchill, and WWII.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Trump-backed candidate Vivek Ramaswamy sounds alarm on rising MAGA racism in NYT op-ed​

now he's running for governor of Ohio on a MAGA platform.

But his Indian-American heritage has become a huge target for attack in right-wing circles — and on Wednesday, he released a New York Times op-ed warning that this rising racism is on the brink of tearing the conservative movement apart.

"Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation," wrote Ramaswamy.

The problem, he warned, is that a growing contingent of right-wing activists and strategists no longer believe this, and instead subscribe to an "identitarian" vision of America based on ancestry and ethnicity, where outsiders don't belong.

"Older Republicans who may doubt the rising prevalence of the blood-and-soil view should think again. My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs ... and calls to deport me 'back to India' (I was born and raised in Cincinnati and have never resided outside the U.S.)."

[I note that many conservative voices in these very own forums have been aggressively pushing this identitarian vision, if not about Ramaswamy in particular.]

 

[essentialsaltes]

Trump built a winning coalition. White nationalists will destroy it.​

Fuentes – who is the at the heart of the ideological civil war currently consuming the influential conservative Heritage Foundation think tank — is a known Holocaust denier who regularly demeans racial minorities and has called for the "death penalty" against Jewish people and practitioners of all non-Christian faiths.

Two More Heritage Foundation Board Members Resign Amid Tucker-Fuentes Fallout​

Shane McCullar and Abby Spencer Moffat, resigned on Tuesday, citing concerns over Heritage’s direction and approach to combating anti-Semitism.

[McCullar]: No institution that hesitates to condemn antisemitism and hatred—or that gives a platform to those who spread them—can credibly claim to uphold the vision that once made the Heritage Foundation the world’s most respected conservative think tank. And, I cannot, in good conscience, remain on a board that is unwilling to confront the lapses in judgment that have harmed its credibility, its culture, and the conservative movement it once helped shape.

[Moffat]: Heritage’s handling of recent challenges reveals a drift from the principles that once defined its leadership. When an institution hesitates to confront harmful ideas and allows lapses in judgment to stand, it forfeits the moral authority on which its influence depends.

 

[zippy2006]

"if you're in the GOP, and you oppose Israel, that must mean you're on Team Fuentes" wasn't a thing as much in 2016 because the overwhelming majority in the GOP supported Israel, so their support was the "distancing mechanism" of sorts.

Now the waters are a little more muddy.

Fuentes is the guy who sees the problems of immigration in his own community, starts speaking out about it, is called "Hitler," and decides to just embrace the shibboleths. He is a product of the pro-immigration rhetoric, namely the way anyone who opposes immigration is associated with Hitler. Given that Jews resist assimilation, they are an easy trope for his platform (link). I don't think Fuentes is the one who made it about the Jews or about Hitler. I think he responded in kind to those who want to make everything about the Jews and Hitler. His embracing of shibboleths and his iconoclasm obviously became a habit.

So if one reads Fuentes as someone opposed to immigration, then he belongs in the mainstream of the conservative party. If one reads him as an anti-Semite, then he belongs to the far right. Groypers read him the former way; the liberal center reads him the latter way; and conservatives split the difference. From a conservative perspective the problem with Fuentes is his hyperbolic rhetoric and his unwillingness to tone it down. That's a real problem, but it doesn't undermine the underlying phenomenon of Nick Fuentes, and that underlying phenomenon is something that is not going away.

 

[essentialsaltes]

So if one reads Fuentes as someone opposed to immigration, then he belongs in the mainstream of the conservative party.

That was not the mainstream of the conservative party of Reagan. Is it the mainstream now?

Fuentes is not opposed to immigration; he is opposed to "non-white imigration".

 

[essentialsaltes]

Turning Point USA Conference Devolves Into MAGA War​

Right-wing commentators Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson used their speeches at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest to take shots at each other, only further emphasizing the right’s growing divide on Israel, conspiracy theories, and Jeffrey Epstein.

“When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country [Israel, wink wink], he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence,” Shapiro continued. “He’s simply maligning people that he disagrees with. Which is indeed par for the course, for a man who was once a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein.”

“The people who refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks—and some of them are speaking here tonight—are guilty of cowardice,” Shapiro said, obviously referring to Carlson. “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes … you ought to own it.”

“That guy is pompous,” [Carlson] said, according to Politico. “Calls to deplatform at a Charlie Kirk event? That’s hilarious.”

Carlson addressed the crowd afterward, attacking the rampant Islamaphobia present in Shapiro’s pro-Israel wing of the movement. (Carlson has recently been accused of being anti-American for his ties to Qatar, his criticism of Israel, and his acknowledgment of its genocide in Palestine. He has also faced criticism for his platforming of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.)

“Attacking millions of Americans because they’re Muslims? It’s disgusting. And I’m a Christian!” he continued. “I’m not a Muslim, I know there’s a lot of effort to claim I’m a secret jihadi, I’m not.… What you’re doing is trying to divide the country."

Turning Point USA Conference Devolves Into MAGA War

The unified MAGA front no longer exists.

www.yahoo.com

 

[ThatRobGuy]

So if one reads Fuentes as someone opposed to immigration, then he belongs in the mainstream of the conservative party. If one reads him as an anti-Semite, then he belongs to the far right. Groypers read him the former way; the liberal center reads him the latter way; and conservatives split the difference. From a conservative perspective the problem with Fuentes is his hyperbolic rhetoric and his unwillingness to tone it down. That's a real problem, but it doesn't undermine the underlying phenomenon of Nick Fuentes, and that underlying phenomenon is something that is not going away.

The issue with Fuentes isn't the "what", it's the "why" with regards to his rationale.

As I noted before, he describes himself as a "racialist" (which he claims is different than "racist", but there are many similar practical effects)

So for the immigration topic, the "what" is seeing the problems that can be created by it (which a wider portion of the population can find points of agreement on), the "why", in the case of Fuentes, is because he believes there are certain native, inherent, biological traits associated with various races are that immutable, can't be corrected, and therefore can't gracefully co-exist with his own race. The way he describes his position is in the theme of "I don't hate them, it's not their fault they were born inferior, that can't help it, but we can't have them here ruining things for us"



Perhaps a more simplistic example of why the "Why" matters as much as the "What" in terms of the message and policy prescription...

The What: "I want to ban casinos in this neighborhood"

The Why #1: "Casinos are associated with increases in other types of crime, alcohol-related incidents, and financial hardships"
vs
The Why #2: "I don't want a Casino here, because I don't want a bunch of Italians running around my neighborhood with their mafia activities and loan-sharking"


While wider swath of people can likely agree on the "What", the people who are of mindset #1 aren't going to want to be associated with the subset of people holding mindset #2. (out of fear that it'll make them look bad, despite the policy prescription itself being identical)

 

[zippy2006]

So for the immigration topic, the "what" is seeing the problems that can be created by it (which a wider portion of the population can find points of agreement on), the "why", in the case of Fuentes, is because he believes there are certain native, inherent, biological traits associated with various races are that immutable, can't be corrected, and therefore can't gracefully co-exist with his own race. The way he describes his position is in the theme of "I don't hate them, it's not their fault they were born inferior, that can't help it, but we can't have them here ruining things for us"

I think this is basically backwards. Your implicit idea is incorrect, namely the idea that the explanation one gives for a position is causally prior to that position. That's simply not always the case. Fuentes was not always a "racialist" (a term which you did not define, hence the scare quotes). Yet he did always recognize the problems of crime. So epistemically, that violent crime is evil is Fuentes' most basic premise, and after that premise you begin to get the explanatory layers. The first explanatory layer is, "Violent crime is associated with immigration," or, "Violent crime is associated with race." The second explanatory layer on your claim is, "Violent crime is associated with race because of 'racialism'."

The very common error that you make is to think, "Fuentes begins with the premise of 'racialism', and this logic leads to a dislike of immigration." That's a bad read.

While wider swath of people can likely agree on the "What", the people who are of mindset #1 aren't going to want to be associated with the subset of people holding mindset #2. (out of fear that it'll make them look bad, despite the policy prescription itself being identical)

You are right that if a position is associated with bad motives then the position will be held in suspicion, and will be avoided even by those who favor it on different motives.

But the deeper issue is that your why/what distinction isn't philosophically rigorous, and this is because any "why" involves its own "whats." At a deeper level the problem is that the "why" provided is not always more fundamental than the position itself (and this is what your assessment misunderstands). Very often the "what" is the point and the "why" is an ad hoc justification. What this means for Fuentes is that if you can't admit that violent crime is bad and is disproportionately committed by blacks (in Chicago), then you're a hack, and your scrutinizing of his tertiary "whys" is insincere. For someone like Fuentes your "what" represents the problem that everyone should acknowledge, and your "why" is his solution to that problem, which is self-consciously more arguable than the problem itself. If someone criticizes his solution without offering an alternative solution of their own—or even worse, of refusing to acknowledge the problem at all a la Piers Morgan's "per capita" debacle—then they will receive Fuentes' scorn.

 

[zippy2006]

While wider swath of people can likely agree on the "What", the people who are of mindset #1 aren't going to want to be associated with the subset of people holding mindset #2. (out of fear that it'll make them look bad, despite the policy prescription itself being identical)

Simplifying this a bit, the issue is that Fuentes began with a less extreme "why," was gaslit, and then said, "screw it." At this point he is as interested in offending the gaslighters as he is interested in getting people to see the "what" without scurrying away for fear of the gaslighters. The approach is very rational if you understand it. Fuentes thinks that if he doesn't fight the gaslighters directly then everyone will avoid the objective problem of immigration for fear of being called a "racist."

Now I agree that there are problems with the causal analyses that Fuentes has identified (and these are rational problems, not merely moral problems). But those problems were caused by his disregard of the intellectual Overton Window, and that disregard is due to gaslighting. So there's nothing simple about the problem of Fuentes, and it will never go away as long as the post-war generation continues to resort to the sophistry of gaslighting, shibboleths, and taboo to get their way in every argument.

 

[Hans Blaster]

Seriously guys, you don't want to soft pedal Fuentes. He is a self-described fan of Hitler and anti-Semite. No one "forced" him to be that way or say those things.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Turning Point USA continues

[Steve] Bannon fired back on Friday night from the same stage, accusing Shapiro of wanting to take over Turning Point USA and putting Israel's interests ahead of the United States.

"Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads," Bannon said to cheers from the crowd of thousands at the Phoenix Convention Center.

“This is a proxy on [the presidential race in] ’28,” Bannon, who was a top adviser to Trump during the 2016 campaign and the early days of his first term, said Friday night, adding that Kirk was an opponent of "this concept of greater Israel and Israel first."

Kelly responded to Shapiro's calling her a coward [for not pushing back on Candace Owens] during her conversation with Posobiec.

"I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement," Kelly said. "It reminded me when the girl who was the head of our middle school chorus told me she was going to take all of my friends away from me."

Despite the bitterness, Posobiec said in a brief exchange with NBC News before his sit-down with Kelly that there is an upside for AmericaFest and Turning Point USA in the rhetorical warfare.

"I thought it was great," Posobiec said. "Got a lot of clicks."

MAGA infighting over Israel and 2028 heats up at the Turning Point USA conference

A long-brewing fight between MAGA influencers spilled onto the stage of Turning Point USA's first annual conference since the slaying of Charlie Kirk, the organization's co-founder.

www.yahoo.com

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Turning Point USA continues

[Steve] Bannon fired back on Friday night from the same stage, accusing Shapiro of wanting to take over Turning Point USA and putting Israel's interests ahead of the United States.

I saw there were some rather heated debates and jabs going back and forth.

I didn't watch the actual event, but I saw excerpts of it on TYT when they covered the following day.

Seems like Shapiro and Carlson were slinging quite a few barbs at each other.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Vance refuses to set red lines over bigotry at Turning Point USA's convention​

Vice President JD Vance said Sunday the conservative movement should be open to everyone as long as they "love America," declining to condemn a streak of antisemitism that has divided the Republican Party and roiled the opening days of Turning Point USA's annual convention.

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/22/g-s1-103284/vance-at-turning-point

 

[zippy2006]

Kelly responded to Shapiro's calling her a coward

Shapiro needs to realize that once a sizable constituency agrees with a position, it must be contended with. It doesn't matter what the position is. His exclusionary policies only work when the constituency represents a tiny minority.

 

[essentialsaltes]

Heritage Foundation rocked as massive number of workers suddenly quit​

The catalyst for many resignations was Roberts' defense of Tucker Carlson's interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Carlson, a fired Fox News personality, conducted the controversial discussion, which has also created divisions within Turning Point USA.

While the exact number of departing staff members remains unclear, the Washington Post reports that 13 former Heritage employees, including three in leadership positions, have been hired by Advancing American Freedom, a competing policy organization founded by former Vice President Mike Pence. The group announced it raised more than $10 million to fund these hires.

Heritage Foundation rocked as massive number of workers suddenly quit

As offices close for the Christmas holidays, the conservative Heritage Foundation faces a significant staff exodus with the prospect that many departing employees have no plans to return.According to the Washington Post, Heritage President Kevin Roberts, a principal architect of Project 2025...

www.rawstory.com

 

[Hans Blaster]

Shapiro needs to realize that once a sizable constituency agrees with a position, it must be contended with. It doesn't matter what the position is. His exclusionary policies only work when the constituency represents a tiny minority.

Which position is it that Shapiro needs to contend with because a sizeable contingent agrees with it? (This thread has been a bit muddled generally and the outages haven't help. I too have avoided quoting other posters because of the issues.)

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Which position is it that Shapiro needs to contend with because a sizeable contingent agrees with it?

I'm assuming the recent GOP fracturing over Israel funding/support.

I tried to search for my old post where I cited the stats from Politico/Pew Research... but alas, the site issues are impeding my ability to do so.

But in a nutshell, prior to 2020.
GOP support for Israel was north of 85%, and Democratic support was over 60%, which, when you combine those, made it a third rail.

Fast forward to now:
Well over half of Democrats are now critical of it, and due to pundits like Megyn Kelly and Tucker breaking down the taboo, so are about 30-35% of Republicans.

...meaning, it's no longer "political suicide" to be critical of Israel anymore like it was a decade ago.

The days of merely labelling one an Antisemite for being critical of Israel isn't going to be the political slam dunk it used to be, and the Ben Shapiros and Mark Levins of the world are going to contend with that.

Evidence of that would be what happened in the NYC mayoral race. When each of the candidates who were still using the "old thinking" got the question about "Do you plan to visit Israel if you win?", one at a time, they all raised their hand and bragged about how many times they'd been there.

Mamdani said "no, there's no need for me to go to Israel, there are Jewish people here in New York I can talk to if I need a Jewish perspective" (paraphrased)

Mamdani won. (in a city that has the 2nd largest Jewish population in the world)