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

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

[Clip from the Tucker Carlson interview plays]

Tucker Carlson: Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest, that's absolutely the case. And that's the only way the country is going to stay together. Exactly. That's my concern. 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 the 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 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 prefigured 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 Klein Show at nytimes.com. John Gans, welcome back to the show.

John Ganz: Thanks so much for having me.

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

[Clip from Nick Fuentes plays]

Nick Fuentes: 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 are figures here who it feels like they try to keep a mask on. 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 Groypers. What's a Groiper?

John Ganz: Well, let me tell you a story of how I learned what Groypers 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 I was looking at that. In the course of this, I kind of befriended some young right-wing guys. And they kept on talking about Groypers, Groypers, Groypers. 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 Fuentes 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 Groypers believe?

John Ganz: 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.

Ezra Klein: Right. Because you focus in on a view, a meme, it's like, "Oh, you have no sense of humor."

John Ganz: But it's a classic. First you're making jokes about the gas chambers, then you're thinking about sending your enemies to them. It's a little difficult for people to understand because we're accustomed to thinking of politics coming from ideas, from intellectuals, elites, media figures that disseminate ideas. And this kind of goes in the other direction. It bubbles up from message boards. It bubbles 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 wrote a couple of pieces on the Groyperification 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 Groyper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in Discord chats, etc. Groyperism 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 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. 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 2010s, early 2020s, 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 Anania, 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.

Ezra Klein: How do you think about the interplay between whatever that was? Because 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're 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, 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: 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 in the intermediate and lower ranks of the various bureaucracies, the various staffs of conservative institutions. And yeah, it never really fully goes away. 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.

Ezra Klein: I want you to watch a clip from Tucker Carlson here that I think is interesting.

[Clip from Tucker Carlson plays]

Tucker Carlson: 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 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 reemerged when they had been pushed out and they created a media ecosystem that is suffused with these ideas. So, first of all, yeah, there are a lot of people online who 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.

Ezra Klein: Exciting.

John Ganz: Exciting. And also, it cannot be discounted that Nick 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 Yorker is 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 anti-Semitism. 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. 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 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. At the time, Trump looks like the past of the party. People think, you know, he's like on his way out. It's going to be Ron DeSantis in 2024 or someone like that. 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 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. He helped get J.D. Vance named vice president.

Ezra Klein: Absolutely.

John Ganz: I would say it is more helpful to interpret him as a politician.

Ezra Klein: I agree with this.

John Ganz: I think that he basically understood the direction of the Republican Party and remade his entire image himself 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 pull 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 the 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'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 like 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. 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 towed the party line on most issues. Iraq, American fallen party. He was on MSNBC.

Ezra Klein: He was on MSNBC.

John Ganz: He was also trying to present himself as a kind of reasonable conservative. He was like a good time libertarian rich kid.

Ezra Klein: Yeah, there's that too. And it's interesting. He takes that bow tie off. There's a degree that there's costume changes here. He takes the bow tie off. He now has this more folksy look. Check shirts and so on and so forth in this cabin, et cetera. He's cultivating an image of himself as down-to-earth and folksy and not part of the establishment. And it's hard to take when you realize he's the product of it.

John Ganz: But there's something important to understand about Tucker Carlson's turn, I think, to anti-Semitism in particular. I believe that anti-Semitism 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 anti-Semitism for this purpose. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is created in this regime that's feeling the pressure of a mass population that's becoming dissatisfied with it. It creates anti-Semitism as a way to re-channel 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 anti-Semitism becomes very useful for that.

So anti-Semitism always works to create a kind of coalition. There's a street gutter, crackpot anti-Semitism. And then you have what you could call more respectable anti-Semites. Charles Lindbergh, a person who was highly respected, a respectable person, a great hero to many Americans, had a racial view of the world and found anti-Semitic ideas persuasive. Henry Ford. So you had these respectable anti-Semites and crackpot anti-Semites, and they're coming together, I would say, as the creation of an actual anti-Semitic politics. And this interview between Fuentes and Carlson is almost textbook. You have the anti-Semitism of the gutter, Fuentes, and you have the anti-Semitism of a declining aristocracy. Tucker comes from this preppy background, father was an ambassador, stepmother's Swanson, and sees in America that's not the way he wants 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, 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.

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 in itself.

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.

[Clip from the Tucker Carlson interview plays]

Tucker Carlson: 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 to do that.

Nick Fuentes: There's no question about that, your last point, for sure.

Tucker Carlson: One of the reasons they do that is because they've been taught to hate themselves, of course, since the Second World War.

Ezra Klein: All right, 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, a rational comment on politics. And then weaved into this is all of the material of classic anti-Semitism. 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 in. 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.

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. I kind of like the Romans. 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, is, "Look, the Jews are just practicing their identity politics. Don't we just have to practice ours?" 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 anti-Semitism to Trumpism.

Ezra Klein: This MAGA right has spent years saying, "Look, the whole left plays 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. 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 a 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 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?

John Ganz: 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 endless morass of the intersection of anti-Semitism 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? 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 Zoran Mamdani. 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.

John Ganz: Sure.

Ezra Klein: On the right, it's pushing towards ethnostate politics. The fundamental argument, and a way in which modern Israel has 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. It 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, that they have dual loyalties. But there is this weird thing where there's been a rise of Jewish figures or Jewish-aligned figures who want to embrace ethnostate politics. I mean, you have Yoram Hazony, a Jewish man living 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. Nobody ever said, and this is for my Jewish friends, nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Israel. Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Jews. And so one point of anger I have is that a lot of people on the right who I think have been playing footsie with this for a long time, 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. The way you're talking is a little highbrow, in terms of intellectuals like Hazony. But let's look at this from the ground up. You have a conservative movement that has embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone, a tone of open bigotry in certain cases. 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, at 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 groyper-ification, 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 anti-Semitism.

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 — Trump comes down the escalator, says they're sending rapists and murderers over here, there's a big outrage — but now, being much more anti-immigrant on the right, that's de rigueur. Who cares? Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, once you have moved on traditional gender roles, 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. 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 who ask, 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: you want to build an ethnostate, and you're 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 anti-Semitism.

John Ganz: Yeah, the thing about getting excitement from it. 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. And go to synagogues. Mamdani is a liberal.

Ezra Klein: OK, yeah, exactly.

John Ganz: Yeah. But he also does not Jew bait. He is not practicing a politics that is based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews. And Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does to a more subtle extent. Candace Owens does. And that also attracts people. 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 kind of take over the right in their direction, 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. The generation that experienced it is gone, and the politics that were created out of the consensus that it created is disappearing. So some of it is just the passage of time.

Ezra Klein: It's tricky to talk about, but you can't get away here from how much Israel post-October 7th, the war in Gaza 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 J.D. Vance at various events 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, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours." MAGA on some level 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.

John Ganz: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: But two, asks, why are we involved here at a time when we're pushing Europe out on its own? 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 many, many, many ways to be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing never can be connected to anti-Semitism 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. 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 believe they probably committed genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. But what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for anti-Semitic agitators and also a lot of people becoming curious about U.S. 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. "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. 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. "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." That is to drag people in and to think, well, these people have a heart and they're interested in the same topic as I'm interested. I think it's highly cynical.

I think one way you can tell 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.

Ezra Klein: Right. So in some ways, what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson-Fuentes interview.

Tucker Carlson [clip]: With OnlyFans, 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 OnlyFans. Why would any of this be legal?

Nick Fuentes [clip]: 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—

Tucker Carlson [clip]: Why wouldn't you arrest the people who run something like that? They should be. If you had a Christian government. Or how about just a government that cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat or is OnlyFans? So 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. "The reason that 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 people that were the pioneers of porn, they are quoted as saying, this is like a middle finger to God." 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." And that's where I think you see something else happening in the soil here as opposed to just old school isolationism on American foreign policy.

John Ganz: Yeah, 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 anti-Semitism, 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. Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble for immediately coming in and defending Carlson. But around the same time, he had had Jonathan Haidt, the critic of the internet, at Heritage to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things. And he sends out this tweet: "Thank you to Jonathan Haidt for reminding everyone at Heritage yesterday. 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." The key thing about this tweet is you could have chosen to single out no one. Or if you're going to single out only two people, there are a lot of people you might choose. The CEO of OnlyFans is named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics, the head of the Heritage Foundation, he chooses these two people with very Jewish names. It was very hard for me not to read this as Roberts, whoever's writing for him, pointing towards some affinity with this part of right subculture.

John Ganz: I think you're absolutely right to pick up on that. 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 U.S. foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, he would mention Kissinger. He would mention Richard Perle. He would mention those guys. Would he mention Jeane Kirkpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No. Some of those names, not important. So, yeah, continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. It's the center of their politics.

Ezra Klein: But it just struck me, and this is true for Roberts and 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... You then also had 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 friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. 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." He's in a bit of hot water for that now.

John Ganz: Yeah, he is.

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 an extremely important part of the conservative movement or the right wing now, and wants to maintain a relationship with him. But 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 in the conservative movement. Watching that 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 Hazony flew in from Israel to try to sort things over. It was a very weird video. I was so taken aback by it. And then he falls back on what they all fall back on now: anti-cancel culture, anti-wokeness. Which means there are 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 fissures 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 J.D. Vance questions doing, what you hear in some ways Tucker doing, is really saying that doesn't make any sense. And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists.

John Ganz: Like, what is that? And I can just say for myself, I dislike them more than anybody. Because it's Christian heresy and I'm offended by that as a Christian. 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 in the 1970s, where evangelical Christians are looking at what's happening in Israel as 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. Now, I think younger Christians, younger evangelical Christians, I'm not sure how much of a hold dispensationalism has anymore. It seems to be something of older generations. So I think that appears to be changing.

Ezra Klein: I agree with you. But this goes 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.

John Ganz: It's worth saying that Bill Buckley's war against anti-Semitism has been overstated. Let's put it that way.

Ezra Klein: But the younger, many of the younger Heritage Foundation staffers are standing up and saying, "What did Kevin do wrong here? If there's not room for what he said, is there not room for me?" And I think this is getting at a very big thing. It's what I sort of understood Roberts is doing. 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, white nationalist energy.

John Ganz: Yeah, I think that's a good read on this situation. Rod Dreher, who is a person of the far right but is horrified by everything that's going on, wrote recently that a friend of his who has connections to the Republican Party and the conservative movement estimated that some 30 or 40 percent of young staffers were groypers. And I would say to that, well, the other half maybe don't go to the last taboo of anti-Semitism, but definitely don't have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking in nasty ideas about that. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. I think that there is a major generation gap. The younger staff of the conservative movement are much more open to Fuentes' ideas. And they've also come up in a situation where, since their introduction to politics, they've been suffused with this. 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 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 Fuentes.

John Ganz: No, he's not.

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

John Ganz: Well, I think there's a lot of reasons for that. I think the main reason is, look, Trump gets a lot of mileage out of 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 himself.

Ezra Klein: Also, his administration is full of these people at this point.

John Ganz: Well, yes, that's true. But maybe it was not as true in the first term.

Ezra Klein: No.

John Ganz: 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 to alienate them and attack them.

Ezra Klein: So there have been conservative figures pushing back. Ben Shapiro has particularly, I think, gone to war.

John Ganz: Yeah.

Ezra Klein: 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 groypers. We don't go to Nick 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 is that one of the other main figures on the anti-Semitic right is Candace Owens, who was birthed within the Shapiro organization.

Ezra Klein: Hired by the Shapiro organization.

John Ganz: Hired by the organization. Cultivated and turned into a star. Yes, part of them trying to skate to where the puck was going, to get a younger audience, to get a hipper audience of conservatives. And Shapiro says, "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 Sobran. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time. Hitler admirers, Stalin admirers, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters. You're damn right we're going to cancel them and deplatform 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. It's a group of people who I consider to have 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 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 right.

Ezra Klein: Zoran Mamdani, 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 anti-Semitism back to Zoran Mamdani. They're trying to make him the hate figure. And to say, "Can't we all come together?"

John Ganz: Yes.

Ezra Klein: And so Ben Shapiro says, "When has Tucker really criticized Zoran Mamdani?" The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zoran Mamdani since October 5th on his show is once. And it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zoran Mamdani. 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 going to denaturalize Mamdani." So it directs this energy, this energy of racial hate, really, that seeks to expel a racial other against a safer target. 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 designated enemies that are okay. People ask a rational question: well, why are these people off the table? And then the answer comes back, 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 the politics that's based on that, why make an exception?

John Ganz: I mean, as you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump in 2016. Shapiro said, "Trumpism breeds conspiracism. Conspiracism breeds anti-Semitism. Trump is happy to channel support of anti-Semites to his own ends." So Ben Shapiro, not a dumb guy at that time. If you go back and read a bunch of what he said back then, it's very, very, very prescient. The other thing is, what's the superpower they're going to suddenly discover that they're going to 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 going to finally discover some new secret weapon in this battle? I don't know where Levin was, but there was clearly an effort from Shapiro and others to make DeSantis the future. So I don't understand where they suddenly think they're going to find the weapons or the army that's going to support them in this war.

Ezra Klein: Well, this is what I think is frightening when you look at their situation 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 just appeared on the show, he was 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 that Vance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is. That Vance is groyper adjacent, let's call it.

John Ganz: Yeah, I think that's right.

Ezra Klein: And there is still an old line Republican party to some degree. Ted Cruz. If you sit 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 in that evil. Lindsey Graham. "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." Anyway. But it is the older Republican Party.

John Ganz: Right.

Ezra Klein: I think that they made a deal with the devil in a certain way, and now they're paying for the consequences.

John Ganz: 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, when it's exposed to the public, ends up 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 best-selling book on it, as you did, who's Pat Buchanan?

Ezra Klein: 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. It's worth revisiting. "Now, how about Pat Buchanan? What do you think of that? 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. Give me how you feel now." "I mean, I can't imagine, you know, that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate." So that's an earlier Trump incarnation. Right. Flirting with a third party run for president. Yeah. We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things like trade since the 80s, but not on everything. "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. Good, good guy. Wow. Young people, they don't. 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. 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 Buchananism is winning. That's the thesis of all the work I've been doing for the past decade in my book.

John Ganz: 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, you know, 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 Buchananism has an internal logic. And when you embrace it, it becomes hard to embrace 80% of its logic, but not 100% of its logic. You know, so there's this book Buchanan wrote years ago called *The Death of the West*. J.D. 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. 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. You know, 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.

Ezra Klein: Yeah, I mean, look, critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to Western civilization. And the way Buchanan used 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 an 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 is 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? Like what follows from an analysis like that?

John Ganz: Well, I mean, the comment about the internet being structurally anti-Semitic, 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 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. Like 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.

John Ganz: It's very interesting though, you know, like where do people get into this stuff? You know, 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, you know, the favorite ideology of the very people who, you know, 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? You know, all of the things that happen because of modernization and the creation of this new, of these new structures, we, we have the answer to fix them all.

John Ganz: It's interesting, you know, Fuentes openly says, like, I'm one of those guys, right? And 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. "What do you mean, what do I think? That's your question? So Byron Donald, some like black Republican benchwarmer, 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. What do you think about that? That's your question. What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that? You fucking idiot." 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, you know, 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 that the right is becoming Twitter poisoned, ex-poisoned. And, you know, that guy in a basement making fun of his followers claiming to be an incel politics. Right. I mean, I've spent the last week like immersed in prep for this. Yeah. You begin to think it's the world and then you like look up and you like kind of shake your head and you remember it's not. Yeah. And the right seems so hooked in to its own attentional drugs at the moment. Yeah. 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. He has said that himself.

Ezra Klein: That, I mean, one thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them, it's 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 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, you know, 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, oh, 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 right's 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.

John Ganz: 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 like, I think that, you know, a lot of young people grew up online. A lot of people are very online. It's not that different from the norm. But what I would say is that I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically.

Ezra Klein: Yeah.

John Ganz: 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. Right. 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. And then I look around, if you look at who Trump has lost support among, it's young people. He has cratered among young people. You look at how Zoran Mamdani did in the election among young men, like incredibly well. The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuentes, is also wrong. It's totally wrong. And I think it's a weird way. One thing you often see, I think, is that old people don't understand young people. Right. And so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituency saying, I speak for the young now. And, you know, people care about the cost of living, right? They swing around based on that. 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 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. I mean, it's one of the big dangers with America's two-party politics. Right. 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 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, you know, maybe J.D. Vance loses in 2028, but then there's a big recession. Right. And Tucker Carlson runs in the 2032 primaries, or somebody who's, you know, Tucker-pilled or whatever it might be. And the issue you have there is that if the Democratic Party for one reason or another becomes unacceptable to people, then the fact the Republican Party is run by grouper 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.

John Ganz: Yeah, 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.

Ezra Klein: Yeah, I agree with that.

John Ganz: But, you know, like, here's the thing about every single election happens and Americans say, this proves our theory of the case. The country is 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. Or 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 independents who weren't, you know, watching Nick Fuentes. They were pissed about their groceries. They were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house.

John Ganz: 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 like 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 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 with 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. But I do believe there are conditions under which they become more appealing and stronger. And it's, you know, a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we're experiencing now.

Ezra Klein: And then always our final question. What are three books you recommend to the audience?

John Ganz: Okay. So I'm going to 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 anti-Semitism. 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. They have arguments for it. And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It's called *Prophets of Deceit: Techniques of the American Agitator*, and it's by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. And it's an 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.

[Credits roll] Ezra Klein: This episode of The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Ashley Braun. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Marina King, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Carol Saburo, Amun Sahota, and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.