Out of the corner of my eye, I have been paying some attention to the ongoing conflict in some areas of rightward politics over Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes and the subsequent defense of Tucker by Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. The story got a nod in yesterday’s tab-clearing post, for example.
My initial reaction to this story was that it reinforced my negative views of both Tucker Carlson and the Heritage Foundation. Additionally, I learned as a result of this story that Heritage has an authoritarian policy on speech wherein they officially speak with only one voice, and that the members of Heritage are not allowed to voice public dissent. You know, as is befitting an organization that sees itself as a “think” tank.
At any rate, Will Sommer this morning pointed out that the conflict continues to ripple, Groyper War Consumes the Biggest Right-Wing Think Tank.
BEN SHAPIRO DID SOMETHING UNIQUE on Monday. Not only did he open his show with a fiery intervention in the right’s roiling feud over white nationalist Nick Fuentes—he devoted his entire show to the topic.
“No to the groypers!” Shapiro said at one point, defiantly.
The conservative commentator’s exhortation was the latest shot to be fired in the civil war that has been roiling the right since last week when Tucker Carlson welcomed the racist, antisemitic, Holocaust-denying Fuentes into the conservative mainstream with a friendly interview. It’s a conflict that has consumed the MAGA movement, unnerved activists, drawn in top lawmakers, and left some conservative institutions in a state of upheaval. Shapiro, taking his turn on Monday, called it “the most important thing happening in the country.”
[…]
But Shapiro had a third target that would have seemed baffling just a week ago: the Heritage Foundation, the monolithic conservative think tank that serves as one of the main pillars of the Republican establishment.
So, on the one hand, it is a hopeful sign for the health of the American polity that there is an active faction that sees Nick Fuentes and his ilk to be outside the realm of acceptability.
I mean, this is a headline in the NY Post, of all places: Heritage Foundation in revolt over Tucker Carlson defense after controversial Nick Fuentes interview: ‘Footsie with literal Nazis’.
On the other hand, it is more than concerning that there is a faction that is defending Tucker Carlson’s platforming of Fuentes and that that faction is linked to what is essentially the intellectual (I use the term advisedly) wellspring of the current administration.
I prefer the days when anyone or anything like Fuentes and his groypers would be anathema to mainstream politics.
The following from the Post piece is quite concerning.
“If we are labeled on the same side as Nick Fuentes, then we deserve to lose,” chimed in a fourth Heritage colleague, who later added: “Talking with some of the interns I think that there are a growing number of them who actually agree” with the views Fuentes espoused.
Cool! Young people who are working at the center of conservative intellectual power and who are doing so because they want to have prominent roles in American politics are groypers.
But, you know, people who are concerned that elements of the American right at ranging into fascism are alarmists. Amiright?
