America’s most important city will now be governed by a young, far-left Muslim mayor whose extreme views (on Israel, on race, on policing) would have been politically disqualifying only the day before yesterday. Zohran Mamdani, 34, a charismatic man with virtually no political experience, came out of nowhere and toppled the storied Cuomo political dynasty.
On that same election night, Virginia voters elected as the state’s Attorney General a Democrat, Jay Jones, who had a few years earlier told people over text that he fantasized about murdering a Republican opponent. Jones even wished that the Republican’s children would die to teach the GOP lawmaker a lesson in suffering.
Only weeks prior, an assassin shot to death the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The man police arrested, and who appears to have confessed to his friends and family, is a radicalized young leftist who reportedly sought to defend the honour of his transgendered lover.
One might have thought that loose talk of political killings would have rendered a politician’s campaign instantly defunct. Not anymore. No prominent Democrats criticized Jones over the texts, nor did voters seem to mind. America has changed, and not for the better
Meanwhile, on the US Right, elites are in a swivet over the rise of Nick Fuentes, a bona fide neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier. Fuentes, 27, hosts a livestreamed show online where he condemns “world Jewry,” women, racial minorities, and normie Republicans.
Though Fuentes has built up a cult following among a segment of young white men, most Americans had likely never heard of him — until Tucker Carlson, the most influential conservative media figure in the country, recently welcomed Fuentes to his own much more popular interview show.
Carlson, who can be a very tough interviewer, treated Fuentes with the tenderness and solicitude of a London bobby confronting a radical Islamist. For his part, Fuentes was on his best behavior. If you were one of the millions who have seen the interview on YouTube, and whose first exposure to Fuentes was the Carlson encounter, you would likely have thought that Fuentes was edgy, and had a chip on his shoulder about Jews, but was more or less normal.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Nick-and-Tuck scandal is roiling the Right for understandable reasons. This vicious internal fight is in large part driven by a fight for the post-Trump GOP future.
My view, which I have expressed personally to friend-of-Tucker J.D. Vance, is that there is no way to co-opt the Fuentes cult. It is a Trojan horse to corrupt the GOP and to destroy the prospect of the Vice President succeeding Donald Trump in 2028. Though Vance despises Fuentes, the snaky Republican Senator Ted Cruz, whose virtues are few — though at least he hates neo-Nazis — is already moving to tie Fuentes to the presumptive GOP front-runner.
Handling this will require extraordinarily political skill. Based on what numerous DC sources tell me, it really is true that somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of conservative political and think tank staffers under the age of 30 are either Fuentes cultists or fellow travelers. A brilliant young observer in Washington told me last week that his co-generationalists drawn to Fuentes don’t necessarily agree with his entire program (such as it is), but rather share his nihilistic desire to “burn it all down.”
He explained that they have lived their formative years within a soft-totalitarian woke culture that blamed people like them — whites, males, Christians — for all the problems of the world. Many of them have suffered actual discrimination at the hands of the left in power, operating with Robespierrian virtues. And they are furious.
Worse, they face dismal economic prospects. Many, perhaps most, will never be able to afford a house, long considered the bedrock of the American dream. Because of feminism, pornography, political polarisation, and the isolating effects of social media, relations between the sexes are in a catastrophic state. Many rightly despair of ever finding a partner and starting a family.
What’s more, the Zoomers are by far the least religious generation in American history. Standard American Christianity — moralistic, therapeutic, and middle-class — has no draw for these young people. The best of those who are finding their way to faith are embracing liturgical traditions — Catholicism, Orthodoxy — with deeper theological roots. The worst are doing so while importing evil ideas about Jews that they heard online. Christian leaders, clerical and otherwise, who were formed in a different era, have been left gobsmacked and unprepared for this radicalisation.
The point is not to justify in any way the young Right’s turn to fascism, the young Left’s embrace of socialism and communism, and the enthusiasm both sides have for anti-Semitism. It is to say, though, that there are deeper causes for this crisis, which has been a long time coming.
It has all happened before. In her magisterial 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt identified several cultural factors present in pre-totalitarian societies. By far the most important was mass atomization and radical loneliness. In the 1950s, which is recalled by Americans as a golden age of social cohesion, Arendt saw it everywhere. It is difficult to imagine what she would have made of how the Internet has gone through social bonds like a whale through a net made of candy floss.
Other factors were loss of faith in hierarchies and institutions; embracing transgression for the pleasure of seeing gatekeepers humiliated; an eagerness to exchange the search for truth for false narratives that offer psychological comfort; and, of course, the valorisation of anti-Semitism.
These things are everywhere now, and nobody in power seems to have the faintest idea what to do about them. Averting a Weimar-style moral crash will require immense political skill, and no small amount of luck. Last summer, at an international festival, I overheard a young man with a British accent complaining, with justice, about what the Tories and Labour have done to his country through mass migration and their feeble response to Islamisation. He said, “The only thing that can fix my country is fascism.”
Alarmed, I texted a smart, soberly conservative journalist friend in London, asking if that sentiment was common. Sadly, he said, it is among that generation. He added, “The truth is, Nigel is really the only thing standing between Britain and fascism.”
The deeper I’ve gone into the analysis of David Betz, the civil war expert at King’s College, London, the more plausible that journo’s analysis has become. Betz has been sounding the alarm for some time about how the UK and western European states are all ripe for civil war, based on what the academic study of how civil wars begin teaches us.
French security experts echo Betz’s alarm. In Washington last weekend, I spoke to a French journalist who went into exile in America to escape death threats by jihadis angry at his reporting exposing their networks. He tells me that the establishment, including the media, in his country do not want to face the ugly realities of the moment, regarding mass migration, Islamisation, and the increasing radicalisation of native populations, who believe with reason that they’ve had their country stolen from them via decades of policies executed by uncaring elites.
Given all this, it would be a surprise if there wasn’t a grotesque reaction from right-wing youth who do not have the internal taboos we older people took in with our mother’s milk. After World War II, one rejected anti-Semitism. After the end of segregation in the US, racism was off-limits (until the Left, around 20 years ago, revived it in the form of illiberal left-wing identity politics). The Cold War taught us the evils of Communism — but its end sent awareness of its brutality down the memory hole for those not old enough to remember.
The British ruling class is so obsessed with Ukraine that it ignores the collapse of free speech in their own country
As I said, countering all this, while avoiding the outbreak of civil war, is an immense challenge, one that will require both boldness and subtlety in equal measure. Because the roots of this crisis are complex and deep, and resist a mere political fix, those in a position to beat back this extremism are going to have to think and act with extraordinary skill, both publicly and privately.
To that point, what an appalling thing it was to see aged Tory grandee Charles Moore, writing in the Times, smearing Cambridge professor James Orr for his alleged association with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and that lot — merely because Orr is a close friend of Vice President J.D. Vance.
I am not neutral on this matter. James Orr is a friend, and one of the most upstanding men in political life on either side of the Atlantic. There is nothing remotely anti-Semitic or pro-fascist in the man’s soul, and it is a scummy thing for a man like Lord Moore to insinuate it. But why on earth, I first thought, should any British public figure be expected to take a public position on an intra-American right-wing fight, of which most Americans are only dimly aware?
It is likely because Lord Moore must think by this he can damage Reform’s Nigel Farage. Dr. Orr is a senior adviser to Farage, and as such, cannot defend himself publicly without dragging the Reform leader into this ugly American controversy.
Because of the delicacy of this matter, and the daunting difficulty of managing the forces that have brought America (and Britain) to this moment, much of the pushback against what Fuentes represents has to happen behind the scenes. Why not just be grateful that a patriotic, God-fearing man like James Orr has the ear of the American Vice President in this critical moment?
Similarly, the Tory journalist Dominic Lawson’s attempt to slander Dr. Orr in the Sunday Times by calling him a Putin sympathiser was a disgrace. Lawson criticised Orr for stating that more people are arrested in Britain than in Russia for practicing free speech. This is not a wild claim, but actually true. According to Orr, official figures show that in 2023, Russia (a country at war) arrested 3,253 people on free speech violations. As disturbing as that is, in the same year, the United Kingdom, a country at peace, took a staggering 12,183 of its own citizens into custody on speech violations.
Orr’s point, obviously, was not that Russia is superior to Britain, but that the British ruling class is so obsessed with Russia and Ukraine that it ignores the collapse of free speech in their own country, and the immiseration of thousands of Britons for exercising their fundamental liberty as subjects of the Crown — a liberty denied to Russians. In Hungary, where I live, I have spent four years listening to Americans and western European leaders dishonestly demean Viktor Orban as Putin’s lapdog simply because the prime minister of Hungary — a nation with no love for Russia — has steadfastly pointed out painful geostrategic truths about the Russia-Ukraine war that Western elites prefer to ignore.
As I said, I am not neutral on the question of James Orr. Nor am I neutral on the question of Nick-and-Tuck, and have probably destroyed a friendship that once meant a lot to me to speak out against this evil. This is not pleasant, but as I am a conservative writer who is not involved in party politics, I have that luxury, and therefore that responsibility. So it goes.
Earlier this year, at a Nashville screening of the documentary film series based on my 2020 book Live Not By Lies, an audience member asked me a good question. Given that the book focuses on the totalitarian threat coming from the woke Left, don’t I agree that with the anti-woke Donald Trump in office, the danger has passed?
Not at all, I responded. The woke successfully marched through every major American institution, and will not be easily dispatched, even by Trump. But it is also the case, I told her, that as long as the social and cultural conditions enunciated by Hannah Arendt in 1951 still obtain — and they very much do — we remain in danger of succumbing to the totalitarian temptation.
“I no more want to live under right-wing totalitarianism than I do left-wing totalitarianism,” I told her. What I did not see clearly at the time was how far the march through right-wing Washington institutions by young neo-fascists had advanced. Nor was I fully aware of how widespread the appeal of Fuentes, a geeky Goebbels of the incels, had become among men of his generation.
Well, I get it now. We on the Right who are in a position to speak out loud against it must do so. But out-of-touch Boomers, who are clueless about the causes of this postmodern crisis and the complicated responses to it now being formulated by men and women of character — including Britons who are fighting behind the scenes to keep this American poison from reaching British shores — really should keep their mouths shut.
Adam Smith assures us that there is a lot of ruin in a nation, by which he meant that a nation can bear a lot of trouble without falling apart. Heaven knows that the Tories, like their Labour and Liberal Democrat counterparts, have done their dead-level best to test Smith’s insight. In the US, the Republicans and the Democrats in this century have done the same.
Having failed so miserably, they should show some humility, and, recognising that they have forfeited the confidence of the British people, trust that Nigel Farage and the people who are advising him have a better understanding of the moment and what it requires.
That Cambridge man Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” It would be a mistake to assume those who are publicly silent are not speaking, and acting in quieter ways that might actually be politically effective, as opposed to winning impotent huzzahs among the superannuated gentlemen of St. James.
