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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *

Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:

  • "As far as I have seen Fuentes occupies the space of fairly ineffective troll."
  • "Groypers are not a real faction in republican politics lol. I could speak with a dozen R voters off the street here in Texas and I doubt more than 1 even knows they exist."
  • "As Sagan pointed out, they laughed at the Wright Brothers but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Fuentes is Bozo the Clown."

Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.

This appears not to have happened:

"There has been speculation that @Heritage is distancing itself from @TuckerCarlson over the past 24 hours. I want to put that to rest right now—here are my thoughts [attached video statement]"

The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.

From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.

*Apparently this is a series now.

A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side.

You know that most of the reason the Near East hates the West is because of us propping up Israel, right? Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11 and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea.

And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!

Western protection of Israel was explicitly cited as a motive for both September 11

I tend to think that bin Laden was more insulted that Saudia Arabia chose protect itself from Saddam by having HW Bush set up shop rather than invoke his Mujahideen who were fresh off defeating the Soviets. That seems more salient in a lot of ways -- it was infidels setting up military bases in the holiest of Islamic countries and it was a personal slight. Moreover, the fight between Islamic Arab states and the secular pan-arabism of Saddam and Nasser was still in full flight.

And it's not even like all Jews support Israel!

I'm pretty sure it's not even a majority of them at this point, as long as we use the expression 'support for Israel' in the Likudnik / AIPAC-ist context.

I feel like that is both true but also sort of just an excuse to justify direct terrorist action against America. It was one reason among many, and I can't help but feel like if we were less supportive of Israel 9/11 would have still happened. We still meddle quite a bit on our own out there. I have a Ron Paulish stance on it.

There is a legitimate geopolitical reason for propping-up Israel, but it sounds Machiavellian when stated explicitly. Israel cuts the Arab world in half, preventing them from coalescing into a caliphate which would be a global power. Israel is the cornerstone of America's divide-and-conquor strategy in the Middle East.

I'm no expert on the geopolitics of that region, but it seems to me if anything could bring them together, it's their common hatred of Israel.

I’m no expert on the Middle East either, but it sure seems to me that shared animosity towards Israel counts for surprisingly little over there: despite the ruling elite of Turkey and Iran being rabidly anti-Israel, the two countries consistently refuse to cooperate and regularly back opposing factions in, e.g., the Syrian conflict. Similarly for Saudi Arabia against Iran, Saudi against the Houthis, and to a lesser extent Qatar and the Gulf Arabs competing against their fellow Arabs for Trump-senpai to notice them.

Honestly I suspect that with the exception of the Houthis and the Iranian hardliners, the anti-Israel sentiment is largely just political theater, a cheap way for a mostly-apathetic elite to shore up support with the masses and to burnish their “pious, God-fearing Muslim” credentials while continuing to suck from the teat of US foreign aid and (in the case of Turkey) NATO membership.

Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves. So Israel beating up Iran and acting as a mild constraint on Turkish ambitions in Syria is the only way this actually happens, and both are newer than US support for Israel.

Arabs won't coalesce on their own, they need to be oppressed by somebody or they'll fight amongst themselves

Hell, most of the time they’ll fight amongst themselves even when they are being oppressed by an outsider, hence why the Ottomans and later the British were able to play “divide and conquer” in the region for so long.

The Arab world has tried this before - the United Arab Republic lasted three years, and it wasn't Israel that broke it up, it was Syrian elites resisting Nasser's power. The Arab world is simply too fractious to unite, they're even too fractious to cooperate in opposing Israel. Israel's proximity to the Suez Canal is more geopolitically important than the simple fact that it sits between Egypt and Syria (nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen).

I submit to you that the United Arab Republic would have been a lot more stable if it were contiguous. Things may have been different if Nasser had the ability to drive a tank column into Damascus. If you need to look at a map to know what country is between Egypt and Syria, go ahead.

nothing is stopping Egypt and Saudi Arabia from uniting across the Red Sea, but that's clearly not going to happen

The main thing stopping this is US foreign policy. The US funds a quarter of Egypt's military expenses (which is extremely relevant because the Egypt is controlled by the army), and defends Saudi Arabia whenever they are threatened militarily.

Syria wasn't able to hold Lebanon, and this is- as later history of the Assad regime shows- not due to squeamishness on the part of the former. Arabs are just a combination of incredibly fractious and bad at war without domination by a non-Arab power. No doubt there will soon be Israeli proxy forces(druze, probably Jewish settler, maybe Maronite) establishing non-state governments and mucking things up even more.

Perhaps Nasser would have been able to hold it a little longer by force, but Syria is, as recent history shows, not an easy country to hold by force, particularly when your "force" is an Arab army with all that entails.

As for Egypt and Saudi Arabia unifying, do you seriously think the Saudis look at Egyptians with anything other than dripping contempt that would make BAP blush? Do you think the Egyptian stratocratic barons under Sisi could restrain themselves from clumsily sacking Saudi Arabia's oil wealth? For all the vile stuff that America has done in the Arab world, if you take Western hegemony out of the picture, you wouldn't get some fantastical unified caliphate, you'd have a generational bloodbath that would only end when the last warlord runs out of oil.

Uh, you'd get the ottoman and persian empires reborn. Arabs killing each other would line up to be proxies for more militarily competent neighbors in exchange for influence- this is how Hezbollah came to control Lebanon- and that's how empires are formed.

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