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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:
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:
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.
I actually stand by the comments made earlier with regards to Fuentes specifically - he's got far too many flaws to be a real vehicle for serious political change, and while being gay isn't something I find disqualifying it is something a large portion of his potential base finds disqualifying (if you're curious, check out Kiwi farms - they have impeccably documented the multiple instances of him being caught red-handed browsing gay porn or gazing longingly into the eyes of another man). His actual movement has some of the worst optics of all time, including a large contingent of groypers that are open supporters of pedophilia (if you want proof, do a search for the term "cunny" in a place where nobody can see what's on your screen).
But there's no putting the genie back into the bottle. Israel has completely torched their reputation with the youth of both the left wing and the right wing. Nobody on the left gives a single shit about accusations of anti-semitism anymore, because those accusations have been used on people like Ms Rachel. When you tell people that a woman taking care of a young girl that had her legs blown off and giving her a chance to have a real birthday party is actually an antisemite, you don't actually make people think that caring for amputee children is bad - you make people think that an antisemite is a pretty young woman who cares about wounded and disabled children. When John Podhoretz says that Trump can say Shylock as many times as he wants because he bombed Iran, or when the ADL says that nazi salutes are fine as long as you support bombing the Palestinians, they're torching the societal proscriptions against antisemitism that have existed since the end of WWII.
And for the right? The majority of conservative youth are either /pol/ adjacent or had their worldview informed almost entirely by second-hand exposure to /pol/ memes and ideas. The information environment on the online, anonymous right is so much more effective at selecting for persuasive memes and ideas than the institutional, pro-Zionist right that whenever there's an even playing field /pol/ wins every single time. I've said before on here that people who are healthy and well-adjusted winners generally don't get involved in antisemitism or other kinds of discrimination because they don't have a need to blame anyone for why they failed - but society has failed so many of these young men that the number of losers has reached critical mass. Even the youth who are actually doing well are growing up in a social context where antisemitism is just a constant fact of life. You are never, ever going to turn a young, radicalised right winger who has grown up on an information diet of /pol/ infographics, Pepe the frog memes and USS Liberty references into a zionist... the only exceptions I've seen of people pulling themselves out of that kind of information environment are cases where they end up trans, and the radical left isn't going to be supporting Israel either.
And of course there's the fact that there isn't actually a rational case for American support of Israel - and especially not for the kinds of ridiculous policies that are currently being demanded, like restrictions on free speech just for Israel or extra taxes forced onto struggling rural populations to help pay for Israel's military and public healthcare system. These policies are unconscionable, and the right is correct to reject them.
I've said multiple times on here and eaten multiple downvotes for it, but Israel has completely torched their reputation around the world, and they have done their absolute best to destroy the social safeguards against anti-semitism in the process. It was incredibly short-sighted, and this is only the beginning - have a look at the rates of Israel support by age, and think about what happens in a few years when more of the boomers start dying off and the younger populations start gaining power. Even assuming nobody changes their opinions at all, a majority of the US population is going to be opposed to Israel by virtue of the inexorable demographic changes of time and death by old age.
Now I'm wondering ... what could Israel have done differently to not taurch their reputation?
This is all Monday morning quarterbacking but:
Try to get their American cousins to not launch a 20 year long pogrom against the demographics that most strongly supported Israel
Try to get their American cousins to not spend 50 years pumping up and covering for all the demographics that hate Israel the most
Realized that their public relations campaign was going the way of Harley-Davidson* sometime in the early 2010s
Done something different regarding October 7, somehow. This is the hardest one, it’s like saying “why not simply prevent 9/11?”
I take the opposite analysis of a lot of this board, I think most of Israel’s flagging support is the result of the American cousins and not Israel itself. Were it not for them, Israel would just be one of many, many foreign countries with a somewhat questionable human rights record.
*Harley-Davidson is a motorcycle company that monomaniacally focused their marketing and product lines around boomers, to the detriment of appealing to any other demographic. The minute boomers got too old to ride, the company’s sales collapsed.
This reminds me of some article I read ages ago on The American Conservative which, in the context of some other mostly unrelated subject, argued that the main cultural force actually driving popular support for Israel in the US is Reaganist boomers picturing Israel as a second Saigon. Their attitude being: we abandoned Saigon like traitors and cowards in the face of the conquering enemy, so we owe it to ourselves to always support Israel, because reasons. The author then argued that the one thing we can surely state about this sentiment is that it has zero relevance to any American born after 1960 or so.
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