“Hate is survivable; indifference is not,” said acclaimed photographer Bryce Thompson. “These Holocaust survivors stand as living testaments, urging us never to forget that empathy and action are often the difference between life and oblivion.”

Thompson, who was born in South Africa, initiated a project titled “Borrowed Spotlight,” featuring intimate portraits of 18 Holocaust survivors alongside celebrities. The basic idea: the celebrities are “lending” their spotlights to the last living generation of Holocaust survivors. The project culminated in an elegant 320-page coffee table book, which can be ordered at borrowed-spotlight.com.

Will Durant once wrote that civilization lives in the clearing, and there’s always a hungrier tribe still in the bush, waiting to conquer it. Durant warned that no great civilization is ever conquered from without until it first destroys itself from within. The image is compelling, but the conclusion it supports is wrong.

Durant helped popularize the idea that civilizations follow a natural arc: birth, growth, decay, and death, but that’s not what history shows. Collapse is not the rule, but the exception. What defines most civilizations isn’t that they fall, but that they rise again. Time and again, people have remembered who they were, repented of who they became, and rebuilt what had started to crumble.

The only reason collapses stand out in our memory is because they’re final. The civilizations that recovered don’t mark an end, but only become the next chapter. When civilizations don’t recover, they are remembered only for how they ended, but, when we look more closely, most of them could have ended many times before they finally succumbed, and some lasted for thousands of years.

Let’s look at five cases: Israel, Rome, the Christian Church, the British Empire, and the United States. Each one faltered, each one was tested, and each one chose rebirth, often more than once. Then we’ll turn to the one system that breaks this cycle, an ideology that produces collapse, and never renewal.

Israel: Chosen, Rebellious, and Restored

Israel wasn’t founded on conquest or wealth, but on covenant. Its strength was moral before it was military. When it kept to its purpose, it thrived. When it strayed—toward idols, injustice, or pride—it declined. But it wasn’t a straight descent. Time after time, the people returned, and God restored them, not because they were perfect, but because they remembered.

Allow me to briefly dispel something that might be off-putting to some readers. I am a Christian, so I believe the people of Israel were restored because they returned to God, but a secular reader would read it not as a “return to God” so much as a return to First Principles. With Israel (and later Christianity), God is the First Principle, so the language is fitting, but the framework I’m drawing is not based on religion. This is an accurate reading of history.

During the period of the Judges, Israel cycled through at least seven major episodes of rebellion, decline, and deliverance. Othniel, Ehud, Deborah, Gideon, Jephthah, and Samson all responded to national failure. The people would fall under foreign rule, cry out, and be delivered in a way that wasn’t incidental but was the rhythm of the nation.

Even under the monarchy, the cycle persisted. Saul failed, David repented, and Solomon drifted, leading to the division of the kingdom. The northern kingdom (Samaria) never returned to God and was conquered by Assyria in 722 B.C., but the southern kingdom (Judah) saw several revivals, under Asa, Jehoshaphat, Hezekiah, and Josiah. Each led a brief return to righteousness, and each led to renewal.

Before both kingdoms fell, Israel had already experienced a dozen national restorations. It didn’t fall because it failed once, but because it finally stopped coming back.

And even then, the story didn’t end.

Judah was conquered by Babylon in 586 B.C., but, seventy years later, Cyrus the Great issued a decree and the Jews returned. The Temple was rebuilt, and the law was restored. Ezra and Nehemiah rebuilt not just walls, but national identity.

Later, under foreign rule, Israel rose again. The Hasmonean revolt led to the reestablishment of an independent Jewish state for about a century, and, while Roman conquest ended that, the pattern continued. In 1948, after nearly two thousand years of dispersion, the Jewish people reestablished a nation.

Israel was not conquered once, but many times, and yet it kept coming back. It did not always come back in the same form. Sometimes it returned politically and sometimes spiritually, but it always eventually returned.

What failed was never the First Principles, but the will to uphold them, and each time that will returned, so, too, did the nation.

Rome: Two Thousand Years of Rebirth

From the founding of Rome in 753 B.C. to the fall of Constantinople in A.D. 1453, Roman civilization endured for 2,206 years. It passed through monarchy, republic, empire, division, and relocation. Christianity replaced paganism, and, though Rome was invaded, fractured, and corrupted, it endured until the Ottoman Turks finally took Constantinople, after the Great Plague had halved Byzantium’s population.

Had it not been for the Great Plague, Byzantium might still endure to this day.

We tend to think of the Roman Empire as having fallen in A.D. 476, but the Byzantine Empire was not a successor state; it was Rome. Byzantine rulers bore Roman titles, Byzantine laws derived from Roman codes, and Byzantine citizens saw themselves as Romans.

People tend to forget that Rome did not split into two empires, but became so big that it had to be ruled from two separate locations to keep it intact, and, though the Eastern Roman Empire governed from Constantinople, the empire never actually changed, enduring for nearly a thousand years more.

Only when the Ottomans breached Constantinople’s walls in 1453 did the Roman line finally break. And even then, the memory of Rome shaped the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the modern West. There is, after all, a reason that the fall of Constantinople and the Renaissance occurred around the same time—those who could flee the Ottoman Turks did, and they brought with them what had been lost: Roman culture, art, and science—the very things whose absence had helped cause the Dark Ages.

Many believe the Renaissance began when Islamic scholars reintroduced classical knowledge to Europe, and, while this is partially true, what Islam preserved and transmitted came from their conquest of Byzantine territories.

It’s not just that the Black Death disrupted the West. It hollowed out the Byzantine Empire, leaving it too weak to resist the Ottomans. When Constantinople fell, the heart of Rome returned. That infusion of classical knowledge into Italy was not an accident of trade or a revival of curiosity. It was a direct consequence of plague and conquest. The Black Death did not just help end the Dark Ages by destabilizing Europe; it ended the Dark Ages by bringing Rome back.

There is wisdom in this: even in the darkest of times, it was the Black Death that ended the Dark Ages.

The Byzantine Empire endured through at least five major cycles of decay and renewal. After the fall of the Western Empire, Byzantium reasserted Roman law and order under Justinian. When it nearly collapsed under Arab invasions in the seventh century, it rebounded through military and administrative reforms. The Macedonian dynasty led a cultural and territorial renaissance. Following a catastrophic defeat at Manzikert in 1071, the Komnenian emperors restored the empire again. Even after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204, the Byzantines returned in 1261, reclaiming their capital and reviving the state again.

I started this section focusing on the Eastern half of the Roman Empire because it lasted so long, but the same pattern holds true for the Western half, which survived three major periods of collapse and recovery. In the third century, amid civil war, economic ruin, foreign invasions, and breakaway states, the empire nearly disintegrated, but was pulled back from the brink by Aurelian, who reconquered lost territory, and Diocletian, who restructured its administration and military.

These were not small adjustments; each was a genuine recovery. After Theodosius’s death in 395, the Western Empire began a long decline it could have but did not reverse. Rome would be sacked, North Africa lost, and imperial power gradually replaced by barbarian warlords. The empire didn’t fall because it never recovered. It fell because, after so many recoveries, it finally lost the strength to rise again.

Ironically, the Huns and Visigoths who sacked Rome did so not as foreign invaders in the traditional sense, but as Roman legions, mercenary forces who, due to rampant inflation and the devaluation of the denarius, could no longer support their families and turned on the empire that failed to pay them. The groups that finally destroyed the Western half of the empire were not trying to end Rome—they just wanted to be paid.

Even before Rome split into East and West, the Classical Roman period passed through at least five major cycles of decay and recovery, each threatening the system, and each answered, until the split, by reform.

After the death of Augustus, emperors like Caligula and Nero brought instability, but order was restored under Vespasian. Following the golden age of the Five Good Emperors, Commodus and a series of weak successors plunged the empire into chaos. The third century nearly destroyed Rome entirely through civil war, secessions, plagues, and invasions, yet it recovered again under Aurelian and Diocletian. After the Tetrarchy fractured, Constantine the Great reunified the empire, moved the capital to Constantinople, and restructured both church and state. Theodosius I would hold the empire together one final time, reasserting unity in both theology and law. When he died, the empire was permanently divided, but not before proving, over and over, that Rome did not endure because it avoided crisis. It endured because it refused to let crises become collapse.

The Church: Truth Endures Where Institutions Fail

The Christian Church began in humility and sacrifice. It had no armies and no borders, and yet it changed the world. With power came rot, and, over time, bureaucracy replaced devotion.

In a grim inversion of the Eucharist, where bread becomes the Body of Christ, the Church, once also called the Body of Christ, became an empire. That empire even became literal in the form of the Papal States (territories in central Italy governed directly by the pope from the eighth century until 1870).

By the time of Gregory VII and Innocent III, spiritual leadership had become political command. The Church crowned emperors, excommunicated kings, and dictated terms to monarchs. The medieval Church levied taxes, launched crusades, and prosecuted heresy through inquisitions. In many places, it blurred the line between salvation and subjugation.

By the time of the Reformation, that decay was impossible to ignore. The sale of indulgences (monetized forgiveness) sparked outrage. The Church had built opulence on top of poverty, but the Reformation was not a rejection of Christ so much as a plea to remember Him.

Luther’s 95 Theses of 1517 were aimed at correcting doctrine, not destroying faith. The wars that followed, bloody and brutal though they may have been, weren’t really about Christ; they were about power.

Theology was the banner. Power was the motive. What the empire feared wasn’t heresy; it was the rebirth of actual Christian belief.

Once Catholicism gave up on crushing Protestantism, it had to compete with it. The Catholic Counter-Reformation began with the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which reasserted doctrine, reformed clerical abuses, and reinvigorated pastoral care. Orders like the Jesuits emerged not to silence Protestants, but to out-teach them. It was a quiet transformation, but no less real: a spiritual reawakening inside the very institution that had lost its way.

Now both Catholicism and many Protestant churches are in a period of decay as they chase a younger and more secular audience, replacing spiritual purity with modern sentimentalities. The Church Growth Movement and seeker-sensitive models, while well-intended, often sacrificed truth for appeal. Whether or not these institutions survive is not the issue as other churches are staying true to the Bible, and those churches are thriving.

Even now, the Gospel survives. The Church has been reborn not because of institutional strength, but because the truth it carries cannot be killed.

The British Empire: Decline without Disappearance

Like every great power, Britain knew both failure and renewal. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 checked absolutism and reaffirmed Parliament’s supremacy, breathing new life into the ideals of the Magna Carta. Later, as the moral contradictions of empire became impossible to ignore, Britain didn’t collapse; it reformed. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807, followed by the abolition of slavery itself in 1833, was not the end of empire, but its moral rebirth, arguably marking the moral peak of the empire, and, when Britain could no longer sustain global domination, it did something no empire had done before: it gave power back. The post-war transformation of empire into Commonwealth wasn’t collapse, but reinvention. Britain handed self-rule to its former colonies and turned command into cooperation. These were not acts of decay, but of conscience. The British Empire didn’t fall because it failed. It stepped back because it remembered what it was.

Unlike the sharp collapses and dramatic recoveries seen in Rome or Israel, Britain’s renewal came through conscience rather than catastrophe, with reform rather than revolt. When the cost of dominion became too high, Britain did what no empire had done before, handing power back, and reshaping its influence through the Commonwealth. Its declines were less dangerous, its revivals less dramatic, but the cycle is there all the same: a rise through power, a reawakening through principle, and now a decline through forgetting.

Christianity gave rise to the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment built on it, and the British Empire carried it across the globe. Most modern accounts of colonialism treat it as inherently evil, and, in some cases, such as the Dutch East India model, that’s fair, but not all empires behaved the same. France extended full citizenship to its colonial subjects, and though Britain initially approached its colonies through exploitation, it gradually learned that the more prosperous its colonies became, the more prosperous England became. Mercantilism failed; free trade worked, and it was Britain’s slow but decisive shift from mercantilism to open trade that enabled it to rise, not just as a conqueror, but as a global economic power.

Two inconvenient facts are rarely acknowledged today. First: wherever the Union Jack went up, the ideals of the Magna Carta soon followed. Second: if we look at today’s wealthiest nations outside of Western Europe, the map still looks suspiciously like the old British Empire. There’s a reason for that. It wasn’t exploitation that built modern Canada, Australia, or Singapore, but legal inheritance, political reform, and the export of ideas rooted in Christian morality and classical reason.

The Enlightenment, incidentally, cannot be separated from Christianity. It emerged not in opposition to religion, but through the encounter between Judeo-Christian moral order and Greek rational philosophy, preserved in Byzantium and reintroduced to the West after the fall of Constantinople. That synthesis gave the West its structure, and it was from that structure that Britain built something truly unprecedented: an empire bound not just by force, but by law, conscience, and, eventually, moral self-restraint, and this is what made the British Empire unique.

One of its colonies, outraged by taxation without representation, sent a letter to the King containing a line the world had never seen: “All men are created equal.” King George wasn’t impressed, but that line was not an invention so much as an echo, falling in line with what the Magna Carta first expressed: that no man, not even a king, stands above the law. That’s a sticky idea that just wouldn’t go away.

Prior to the Magna Carta, England had no First Principles. “God Save the King” is not a philosophy. But, with the Magna Carta, the English-speaking world began to organize its laws and customs around liberty, equality before the law, and the moral limits of power. It was not the first time a ruler had been constrained by law (that distinction belongs to Hammurabi) but it was the first time a global empire was governed by a tradition that required the sovereign to bow to a set of principles higher than himself.

It is common today to condemn the British Empire in sweeping moral terms and to blame “the white man” for slavery, but the truth is far more complex. Slavery was a global institution. When Jefferson penned the phrase “all men are created equal,” slavery was a global norm, practiced on every continent. There were more white slaves in the Middle East than black slaves in the Americas, and more black slaves were sent to Islamic lands than to the New World. European powers purchased slaves from African slave traders, most often on the north and west coasts of Africa, who sold their own people into bondage.

If we take the Magna Carta as the moral foundation of the British Empire, then it was Britain’s eventual faithfulness to those First Principles that led it to do what no other empire in history had done: abolish slavery across its domain, and then use its military power to pressure others to do the same. The British Empire, more than any other force on Earth, is responsible for ending the global slave trade. That is not moral evasion, but historical fact.

So where does Britain fit into the civilizational arc?

It rose on conquest, reformed itself through conscience, and reached its peak not in expansion but in moral clarity, when it began to apply its own principles universally. It did not collapse. It handed the world to its own children.

Today, its decline is not one of exhaustion or defeat. It is a decline of memory. Modern Britain no longer celebrates its principles. It apologizes for them instead, and, like every other civilization in this essay, its future will depend not on its guilt, but on whether it remembers the good it once carried, and chooses to carry it again.

Unless Britain returns to its First Principles, it will not endure. The same is true of Canada, and much of Western Europe. These are nations drifting not from exhaustion, but from amnesia.

America: The Choice to Rise, Every Time

The British Empire, in decline, handed the world to one of its children: the United States. As Britain stepped back, we stepped forward as the world’s police force.

England took the Enlightenment and adapted it to monarchy. America, uniquely, built a nation on it from the ground up.

If someone had told General Cornwallis during the American Revolution that, within just over a hundred years, the United States would not only surpass England’s economy but that of all Europe combined, he would have laughed, yet it happened.

America’s history is not a straight line upward, but a series of reckonings. We had our moments of moral, political, and institutional failure, followed by conscious return to First Principles.

The contradiction of slavery gave way to civil war and the constitutional amendments that redefined liberty. The corruption of the Gilded Age yielded to progressive reforms that reasserted fairness and accountability. The Great Depression nearly broke the economy, but it led to a reinvestment in national cohesion. Jim Crow segregation collapsed under the weight of a civil rights movement that insisted America live up to its founding creed. Even after political scandal and economic malaise in the 1970s, the country found its footing again by recalling rather than replacing its purpose. Over and over, America has faltered, and over and over it has chosen to rise, not by rewriting what it was, but by remembering what America was meant to be.

We often get our birthday wrong. We declared independence as thirteen colonies on July 4, 1776, and were loosely united under the Articles of Confederation, but our true national birth came on March 4, 1789, when the Constitution took effect, transforming a loose alliance into a moral and political union.

America was never perfect, but it came closer to the ideal than any society before it. Its founding ideals were not compromised by their imperfection in practice. They were defined by the aspiration to practice them more fully. Just look at the preamble:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

People don’t talk like that. Only nations do.

The Constitution is both a grant of power and a restraint upon it. It defines what the federal government can do, and, if we followed it faithfully, it would do nothing more. The Bill of Rights, in turn, defines what no government may do, even in pursuit of its proper goals. The two work together: authority on one hand, boundaries on the other.

The Constitution not only empowers the federal government, but also affirms that all other powers remain with the states and the people. By rejecting monarchy, America rejected aristocracy, thus refusing a caste system.

The exception, of course, was slavery, and it was a grave exception. In retrospect, the very compromises that made forming a nation possible may also have lead to its downfall.

It’s worth remembering: all of America’s per capita economic growth came from free states. The Antebellum South experienced no per capita GDP growth at all. That wealth gap still lingers, not as a legacy of exploitation by the North, but of the South’s own delayed participation in the American experiment.

The fastest rise in living and working conditions for ordinary people in recorded history occurred in the United States between 1789 and 1913, even though the South contributed no per capita growth until 1889.

The American Republic was built with eyes wide open. Its founders studied Rome’s collapse and Britain’s excess. They combined Christian ethics, Enlightenment ideals, and hard-won colonial experience into something new.

America was never perfect, but it was principled, and, when it strayed, it corrected. After slavery, we fought for civil rights, and, after depression, recovery. After scandal, we found reform, and, after being attacked, we found resolve.

But, today, that pattern is faltering. America is forgetting that rights come from God, not government. We forget that liberty requires virtue and that history matters, not for narrative, but for truth.

America is in crisis, but it is not economic.

It is spiritual.

Even now, rebirth remains possible, but, like before, renewal has to be chosen.

The Exception That Breaks the Rule: Communism

There is one ideology that breaks the cycle. It does not lead to greatness, decline, and rebirth. It leads not to renewal, but to ruin.

That ideology is communism.

The economic pessimism underlying communism owes more to Thomas Malthus than to Karl Marx.

Thomas Malthus was born in England and became the world’s first full-time economist. His seminal work, An Essay on the Principle of Population, argued that population growth would always outpace food supply, leading to inevitable cycles of famine, disease, and decline, unless checked by moral restraint or catastrophe.

Ironically, this was written at about the same time Adam Smith noticed that, in both England and the United States, food supplies were outpacing population growth, and by a wide margin. Adam Smith wrote A Treatise on the Wealth of Nations to examine what was different in England and the United States that allowed them to break out of the Malthusian rut.

That Marx ignored Smith’s optimism in favor of Malthusian scarcity may be one of history’s most consequential misjudgments, as Marx, trained as a philosopher rather than an economist, made the faulty assumption that he could change all of the rules and incentives and production would not suffer. Marx offered a radical solution to a problem that free markets were already in the process of solving.

The problem, of course, is that there is nothing to share unless something is produced, and, under communism, the incentives that drive production disappear.

Every society that has adopted communism has seen this collapse: the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela. Every single one. There is no reform in communism, as communism is the reform. There are no renewals in communism, as communism is the renewal.

The only thing communism has reliably produced is ruin.

Some will say that actual communism has never been tried, and that is true. Actual communism is not possible, which is why every attempt stalls in the dictatorship of the proletariat and goes no further.

Yet communism persists, not because it works, but because it adapts to infiltrate other nations, even as it fails. It behaves as a virus, killing its host as it spreads.

Cultural Marxism: Subversion by Design

When Marxist revolution failed in the West after World War I, theorists pivoted. The working class didn’t revolt and, in fact, it became prosperous and patriotic.

The war had been the perfect breeding ground for communist thought as it represented war at an industrial scale. The officers came from the royalty and the enlisted men were commoners, a narrative framework that cast elites as villains and war as their instrument. The masses were supposed to revolt against the whole system, uniting into a brilliant Marxist utopia under the phrase “Never again!”

According to Marx, only countries that had already gone through the industrial revolution should become communist. Ironically, the first successful communist revolution occurred in Russia, a nation Marx himself believed was not yet economically ripe.

The Frankfurt School analyzed this failure and concluded that Western wealth and culture had to be dismantled, shifting their focus from the factory to the classroom.

Economic Marxism became Cultural Marxism. Oppressor and oppressed were redefined not by wealth but by identity: race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, even body type. The goal was not liberation. It was fragmentation.

Critical Theory emerged, and from it, Critical Race Theory. Critically, both in name and design, the “theory” is not that oppression is the driving force of man, but that, if you can fracture a society into identity groups and turn them all against the whole, that society will rip itself apart.

The real enemy wasn’t capitalism but Western culture, the Christian ethic, the nuclear family, patriotism, faith, and stability. All had to go, and when the working class refused to cooperate, it became the target. Their prosperity had to be reversed for the narrative to succeed.

This is why fossil fuels remain a target, even when carbon emissions can be sequestered. It’s not about the environment; it’s about control.

Saul Alinsky and the Bureaucratized Revolution

Saul Alinsky wrote the tactical guide. In Rules for Radicals, he advocated not open revolt, but strategic infiltration, using the system to destroy itself while exploiting its language to turn the system’s strengths into weaknesses.

Alinsky’s most famous disciple was Hillary Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on how Alinsky’s tactics would work better from inside the government.

Hillary Clinton never became president, but Barack Obama advanced the same strategy with remarkable effectiveness, bringing the United States to where it is today. Other world leaders have used the same strategy in other nations as well, from Merkel in Germany, to Trudeau and now Carney in Canada.

Today, every major Western institution, from universities, to media, and even to corporations, has adopted the vocabulary of grievance and the machinery of control. Bureaucracies preach equity and schools push ideology, while corporations enforce conformity.

What began as revolution from below has become subversion from above.

We Still Have a Choice

I listed five civilizations, and some may argue that my call to return to First Principles fails to define what those principles are, but the truth is, every civilization is founded on something. We can debate which sets of First Principles are best, but the pattern remains: growth and renewal come from remembering them; collapse follows when they are forgotten.

Some may note that I spoke of colonialism in a positive tone, which is no longer the cultural norm, but I also spoke of it in a very negative light. History is neither simple nor clean, and there is room, especially in the case of the British Empire, to view it through both lenses. It was both.

Every civilization before us faltered, but most recovered more often than they collapsed.
Israel rose through repentance, Rome endured through reform, the Church survived through truth, Britain adapted, and America, so far at least, has always chosen to rise again.

But communism offers no return.

There is still a hungrier tribe in the bush, but now it wears a bureaucrat’s badge. War paint has been replaced by credentials. The hungrier tribe no longer burns books; it rewrites them instead, and, if we forget who we are for too long, we will not rise again.

Collapse, however, is not the rule. Collapse is only what happens when we forget to renew.

Renewal begins with a new national commitment to First Principles.

There is an old saying: “Those who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it,” but, more often, those who do learn from history are doomed to repeat it as well because of those who don’t.

The choice before us is not mine to make alone. It is a choice we must make together.

We are at a fork in the road, and I urge us to take the one less travelled by.

The well traveled path leads to a Chinese-style totalitarian state, perhaps as a vassal to China itself, where technology is not a tool of freedom but a leash of control, and every aspect of life is subject to the will of those in power.

The other path leads back to a more perfect union, one built not by reinventing America, but by completing it. We complete our more perfect union not by tearing down our First Principles, but by finally applying them to everyone.

Not in grievance.
Not in guilt.
But in liberty.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s Substack. Reproduced with permission.

Nick Fuentes has built a digital empire around irony, extremism, and racial nationalism. But there’s nothing ironic about what he means when he says “America First.” It’s not just a slogan—it’s a brand he’s tried to monetize, and a banner he raises while praising Adolf Hitler as “cool” and misunderstood like Vladimir Putin.

This isn’t a distortion of the phrase. It’s a return to form.

When “America First” first entered public consciousness in the late 1930s and early 1940s, it wasn’t a cry for unity or protection. It was a shield for isolationism, anti-Semitism, and fascist apologism. The original America First Committee (AFC), founded in 1940 by Yale students (yes, Yale) and backed by prominent businessmen and public figures, gained a following of over 800,000 members before it was disbanded in 1941—four days after Pearl Harbor (the same day, incidentally, that Hitler declared war against the U.S.).

Among its most famous spokesmen was Charles Lindbergh. In a now-infamous September 11, 1941, speech, Lindbergh said: “The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.”

He warned of Jewish influence in Hollywood, finance, and foreign policy, and accused Jews of dragging America into a war that wasn’t ours to fight. At the time, many mainstream voices condemned Lindbergh’s remarks as anti-Semitic and un-American. But they also revealed the true undercurrents of what “America First” meant to many of its adherents.

This story sounds eerily familiar

Fast-forward 80 years, and a new class of influencers has resurrected the phrase with eerily similar undertones. They use different memes, but the message rhymes: keep the borders closed, trust no outsider, blame the Jews when convenient.

Fuentes is just the most explicit. Others hide it in post-ironic punchlines, white Christian nationalism, and shallow contrarianism masquerading as bravery or “just asking questions.”

What binds them together isn’t strategy. It’s scapegoating.

“America First” then + now: a pattern of exclusion

Why it still matters

When Jewish Americans see “America First” trending again, it’s not paranoia to raise a red flag. History has shown us that when this phrase gets popular, it’s rarely because of actual patriotism. It’s because someone is looking for someone else to blame.

They blamed us then. Some are blaming us now.

How do we defeat it?

You don’t defeat fascism with think pieces or TED Talks. You defeat it with fortitude, clarity, and better memes. With American flags in one hand and tefillin in the other. You do it by being exactly what makes them nervous: loud, proud, sharp, trained, and unashamedly Jewish and American.

You mock their aesthetic. You remix their talking points. You flood the timeline with images of Jews lifting Torah and dumbbells in the same breath while lecturing everyone on the greatness of Ted Williams and Frederick Douglass. You put Jewish dads in plate carriers and young Jews like Shabbos Kestenbaum on debate stages. You remember that every gaslighting post and “red-pill” thread is a paper tiger compared to a people who have outlived empires.

As I wrote in “The Jewish-American Birthright”: being Jewish in America isn’t a compromise. It’s a power-up. And that power doesn’t come from being accepted. It comes from being undeniable.

You don’t fight hate by playing defense. 

You fight it by owning the damn court.

So, the next time someone like the Hodge Twins call you a “damned Jew” while pivoting to the screed of “America First,” smile. And ask them which version? The version of “America First” predicated on ignorance, hate, and believing literally anything you read on the Internet? Or the version of American values first, predicated on freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and personal responsibility?

Because putting American values first does not need anybody’s permission. It just needs a basic understanding of what it means to be American. Something about which the “America First” cadre doesn’t know the first thing.

We’re taking back our country, America, because we—the Jews to whom George Washington sent letters to all the way back in 1790—are as American as apple pie and baseball.If we are going to be Americans—proud, strong, bold—we better learn the full story of who’s been claiming that label. Because, if we don’t name the pattern, they’ll keep naming us.

The division of American politics into two camps of political thought that are opposed to meaningful dialogue is not just unpatriotic, but a precursor to tyranny.

Tucker’s shift into woke identity politics is neither a reaction to losing his throne at Fox nor a clever business ploy but an unveiling of sorts—a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into Tucker’s true self.

As a young man, I was invited to dinner at the home of a senior professor at a respected liberal arts college. A man of conservative views and polished manners, he was cordial and witty. After dinner, he took me into his well-appointed library filled with the volumes that represented glories of Western art and literature from several hundred years. He sat me down for a serious conversation about culture—or, perhaps better put, Culture. Here were the plays of Racine, the Memoirs of General Lafayette, essays by Jacques Barzun, tomes on art history, and gilded 19th century editions of classic works.

The professor was European by birth, spoke a variety of languages, and was well published in history and literature. But, as he warmed to conversation, he suddenly became confidential. This started with questions about how I, as an anthropologist, could explain the fall of once flourishing nations and empires. They really were just the precipice from which he was about to launch his own explanation:

Because of the Jews. It was the Jews who ruined Spain in revenge for Ferdinand and Isabella expelling them in 1492. Contrariwise, England rose to its status as a world power because Cromwell in 1655 readmitted Jews after a 400-year ban. The Jews everywhere pulled the strings, punishing their persecutors and rewarding their benefactors. But even the benefactors eventually suffered from Jewish duplicity.   

I listened, in astonishment for more than an hour of this before excusing myself. It was the first time I encountered such a frank—and highly intellectualized—expression of anti-Semitism. And, for many years, it stood out to me as a singular experience. 

In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr. rose to prominence in a newly refurbished conservative movement. One of his most important steps was to expel the anti-Semitic conservatives, which is why my conversation with the professor in his library struck me as a strange aberration. Late in his life, Buckley drew the same line again when he rebuked Patrick Buchanan for calling American Jews a “fifth column” for Israel and other such Jew-baiting pronouncements.

That was then. Today, the conservative movement has become a tree with many branches. There is no Buckley figure ready to saw off the diseased limbs. So, we find ourselves with figures such as Tucker Carlson, who currently inhabits a space similar to Buchanan’s. Five or six years ago, Carlson was best known for his Fox News show, where he opposed the Black Lives Matter movement, criticized U.S. interventions abroad, and supported Trump. He was seen as a mainstream conservative, at least by other conservatives, and as an “extreme right-wing figure” by the left-wing press. But he was not seen as anti-Semitic by either group. What changed this, cementing his new reputation as an anti-Semite, was his two-hour interview on September 2, 2024, with Daryl Cooper, a Hitler apologist and Holocaust revisionist. Carlson was unctuously complimentary to Cooper, calling him “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper, in fact, is an amateur history writer and podcaster who indulges in strange theories and has never published a book.

Carlson, led by his eagerness to take up contrarian ideas, has waded into the swamp of pseudo-history and pernicious representations that is the vestibule of full-blown anti-Semitism. He has been hanging out there at least since his October 6, 2022, interview with Kanye (“Ye”) West.  The performer indulged in some outlandish fantasies to the effect that:

Black people are the descendants of ancient Israelites and are therefore the true Jews. But the Jews that everyone else calls Jews are a manipulative lot who seek unlimited power and money.

Carlson cut much of West’s unhinged rant from the interview broadcast, but the rant soon found its way into circulation. The Washington Post commented that Carlson sought to present “a very specific version of Ye to his viewers, a Ye that mirrored Carlson’s rhetoric on race and politics and didn’t go much further.” 

Carlson responded to the ensuing controversy by inviting Candace Owens to his show to discuss the “White Lives Matter” shirts that both West and she wear. As Philip Bump put it in The Washington Post:  

[Carlson] wants his viewers to hear that their sense of victimization is valid and that Black Lives Matter is about their own subjugation, not the systemic constraints of race. He wants to present Candace Owens and Ye, Black celebrities, as the faces of such messages.

Somehow, one step led to another. Beginning as an opponent of unrestricted immigration and national policies, by 2024, Carlson was criticizing Israel’s actions against Hamas and attacking Christians who supported Israel’s actions in Gaza. In addition, he disparages American aid to Israel and apparently attributes no value to the vast intelligence and technological partnerships that the United States gains from its relationship with Israel.

Perhaps Carlson’s worst obvious offence is giving a platform to figures such as Cooper, West, and Owens. The most damning thing about Carlson’s verbal maneuvers is that they map out a space where anti-Semitism can flourish, seen but unseen, hidden in the pronouncements of evident cranks.

Candace Owens may be the most problematic of anti-Semitic cranks. Pastor Dumisani Washington, the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel (IBSI), addressed the dangerous impact of Owens’ public anti-Semitism last year in a JNS Top Story interview with Jonathan Tobin:

The danger of someone like a Candace Owens, who has such a large following, who is not careful with her words, who has not disavowed things like her friend Kanye West, what it does is that it normalizes more and more that type of Jew-hatred, especially coming now again from the right and coming from self-proclaimed Christians. 

On March 22, 2024, CNN ran Oliver Darcy’s hard-hitting headline, “Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire severs ties with Candace Owens after her embrace of antisemitic rhetoric.” Darcy pointed out that: 

Since the 10/7 Hamas terror attack on Israel, Owens has repeatedly waded into antisemitic waters as she fiercely criticized Israel, suggesting the Jewish government was committing “genocide” in Gaza and claiming there is a sinister “small ring” of Jewish people in Hollywood and Washington, DC involved in something “quite sinister.” 

Tucker Carlson continues to praise his friend Candace Owens as one of the kindest persons he knows.

A similar double game appears in Joe Rogan’s podcasts. Rogan was a professional comedian and actor before turning, in 2009, to his hugely successful venture of long-form interviewing. Like Carlson, he chose to interview an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, Ian Carroll, who seems to be known only for promoting absurdities. On Rogan’s podcast, Carroll argued that “the Jews did 9/11” and he explained to Rogan that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent whose mission was to trap prominent Americans in blackmail-ready deeds.

Because Rogan gets about 14 million monthly listeners, it behooves us to know what they are hearing. Anti-Semitism isn’t a ubiquitous feature of Rogan’s commentary, but it isn’t hard to find either. Most notoriously, he defended Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s characterization of Jews, “It’s all about the Benjamins,” by declaring:

That’s not an anti-Semitic statement; I don’t think that is. Benjamins are money. The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza, It’s f*cking stupid. It’s f*cking stupid. 

Rogan played to the age-old stereotype of Jews as exceptionally greedy, unprincipled, and materialistic, and he normalized this as just commonsense. This isn’t the anti-Semitism of the professor, or the cultural critic. It is rough-and-tumble street talk projected on a truly mass scale.

Nor were the Carroll and Omar episodes the whole of Rogan’s flirtation with anti-Semitism. He hosted a series of figures who attacked Israel’s conduct in its war with Hamas. On April 10, 2025, Rogan hosted both Dave Smith, a harsh critic of Israel, and the British commentator Douglas Murray who supports Israel. Murray lit into Smith for pronouncing opinions uninformed by any personal observation of the facts, and also confronted Rogan for allowing his enormous media platform to tilt in favor of people like Smith, who opined about a complex situation from a position of ignorance. Murray was in turn attacked by Rogan supporters who found his views “elitist”—a verdict Rogan endorsed. In effect, Rogan took a stand that confused willful ignorance with authenticity, and distanced himself from basic standards of truthful journalism on the grounds that “old media” are irrelevant to his audience. Apparently, actually knowing things about Israel or Jews disqualifies an observer as disconnected from “real” people.

Carlson and Rogan are well-known media figures. If one goes searching for anti-Semitism on the political right, the path gets slippery and the figures stranger. One figure who stands out as especially bizarre is Nick Fuentes. He actively promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, denies the Holocaust, and seeks a “holy war” against the Jews—and has assembled a cult following who call themselves the “Groypers” or the “Groyper Army.” The name refers to a green cartoon toad that the movement uses as an insignia. The movement is usually characterized as “alt-right” and it bundles anti-Semitism together with other fringe causes. Fuentes is a self-proclaimed “incel” who calls on young men to avoid heterosexual relations. He presents himself as a “Christian nationalist” and a “white nationalist” who favors an “integralist” approach that would impose the Catholic faith on all aspects of society. And he is the leader of an organization called the America First Political Action Conference (AFAPC).

It can be a bit difficult to say what AFAPC stands for, as its agenda shifts with Fuentes’ fluid crazes, but the Anti-Defamation League offers this summary:

Fuentes and his America First adherents vocally support the closure of the U.S. borders to immigrants, while opposing “liberal” values such as feminism and LGBTQ+ rights. Fuentes views these societal changes as the “bastardized Jewish subversion of the American creed.”

Fuentes tries hard to gain traction among other conservatives by attending mainstream events and inviting prominent figures to attend his own events. He also picks fights with public figures such as Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, for failing to espouse his particular causes.

A clever opportunist, Fuentes has found a political and social niche by appealing to lonely, alienated young men by giving them an imaginary world in which they can feel powerful and united to a cause—berating anyone Fuentes designates as an enemy of the Groypers. This movement of social misfits would be easy to set aside as merely sad, but doing so would underestimate both the damage the movement inflicts on young men and the currency it gives to virulent anti-Semitism.   

Fuentes has found that anti-Semitism plays well for him. At a 2024 event in Detroit, according to The Intercept, he warmed up the crowd with the declaration, “‘Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off, Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn.” The crowd ate it up, chanting back ‘Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew [sic].” Fuentes shook his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!” He went on to explain that his real goal is a version of “America First” that demonizes Israel.

Despite their boldness, Fuentes and his crew have since then come under withering criticism. Substack essayist Christopher Brunet posted a “33,000-word exposé” that: 

draws on leaks, public records, and interviews with ex-girlfriends, ex-employees, streamers, FBI informants, catboys, police chiefs, and a Catholic priest, to uncover 50 interconnected Groyper scandals ranging from grooming, child pornography, revenge pornography, and pedophilia to swatting, doxxing, drug trafficking, crypto scams, tax fraud, rape, brainwashing, mental illness, mass shootings, election interference, foreign interference, and domestic terrorism. 

Verdict: Fuentes is a menace, albeit not likely one who will grow much beyond the nasty alcoves of the Internet where he currently resides.

Another figure in the world of “social influencers” who dislikes and degrades women, attracts a cult following of confused young men, and has found a place in his repertoire of crudities for anti-Semitism, is the British-American kickboxer Andrew Tate. He appeals to much the same audience as Fuentes, but on a vastly larger scale. He is said to have some 10 million followers. (The number of Fuentes’s followers is obscure but perhaps resides in the range of a few tens of thousands.) Whereas the part-Mexican Fuentes parades as a white supremacist, the bi-racial Tate focuses most of his rhetorical fury on women. He is an apostle of rape—and a practitioner. In Romania, he is under several criminal investigations, including human trafficking, trafficking of minors, rape, and sexual intercourse with a minor. In the United Kingdom, Tate is facing charges of sex crimes and sexual misconduct.

How this led him to anti-Semitism is unclear. In October of 2022, Tate claimed to have converted to Islam. After October 7, 2023, Tate came out as a supporter of Hamas, especially its “masculine spirit of resistance.” He also expressed his doubts about the Holocaust: “If they lied to us about Gaza and Israel… Do you think they lied about [the Second World War]?”

Calling Tate a “conservative” stretches beyond my bounds of how that word should be defined, but he plainly belongs to the universe of the “alt-right.” Or perhaps better, the alt-alt-right. The alt-right itself focuses on white identity, but, in a looser sense, it is a cluster of extremist beliefs centered on group identity and rejecting traditional standards of law and morality. The alt-right has no use for the concepts of ordered liberty and respect for the rights of others. Tate’s alt-alt-right carries this to an outright embrace of barbarian sensibility. Fuentes and Tate exist in a world far from mainstream conservatism but not all that far from figures who have a more mainstream presence.

The public figure who most reminds me of the professor in his book-lined study some fifty years ago is Ron Unz. Unz is a wealthy technology entrepreneur, a one-time candidate for governor of California, former editor of The American Conservative (2007–2013), and current publisher of The Unz Review. While born to a Ukrainian family of Jewish descent, he is as ardent a supporter of anti-Semitic causes as can be found anywhere in American arts and letters short of Kanye West.

Not surprisingly, Ron Unz is a Holocaust denier. As reported by MEMRI:  

American writer Ron Unz said in an interview aired on Channel 4 (Iran) on January 18, 2023, that “Holocaust worship,” which he said is also known as “Holocaustianity,” has replaced traditional religion in American society. He said that “Jewish-dominated” Hollywood is partly responsible for this, and when asked by show host Arash Darya-Bandari (also known as Blake Archer Williams) about how many Jews “actually” died in the Holocaust, Unz replied that the number was no more than a “couple hundred thousand.” He also said that once the American people start to doubt the Holocaust, they will start to doubt other things that were “suppressed” by the media, such as the JFK assassination or the events of 9/11.

Unz is a ready publisher of the view that Israel orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, and a proponent of such views himself:

The vast weight of the evidence clearly points in a single direction, implicating Israel and its Mossad intelligence service, with the case being overwhelmingly strong in motive, means, and opportunity.

He also denies the mass murders committed by Hamas in Israel, suggesting instead:

As few as 100-200 unarmed Israeli civilians may have been killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently, while all the rest died at the hands of Israel’s own trigger-happy military.

In his view, Orthodox Judaism takes the position that “Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications.”

Unz is a prolific writer on topics other than Judaism, but his pronouncements on Judaism are especially bitter and very frequent. I suppose the most important points are that he writes well, he controls his own well-financed press, and has gathered a stable of other quite capable anti-Semitic writers to amplify his themes. He lacks the mass audiences of Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan and the cult followings of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. He lacks the weird appeal of goofball politicians such as Ilhan Omar and Marjorie Taylor Greene. But he brings something far more insidious: a cogent form of anti-Semitism that presents itself as the product of reason and skeptical examination of the evidence.

Only someone willing to go deep into the details can mount the arguments needed to refute Unz’s rationalistic anti-Semitism, which he presents as a defense of Western civilization. Though his audience may be relatively small, I would not want to underestimate the power of his narratives to seduce intellectuals and academics. Some of what he writes is framed as faux sympathy for the Jewish people:

European Jews have been prone to paranoia, perhaps the inevitable outcome of having spent more than a thousand years living as small, often highly exploitative minorities among generally hostile host populations.

These sorts of deeply-rooted paranoid tendencies can quietly simmer beneath the surface, then suddenly erupt into uncontrollable spasms of terror and rage, ignited by a large or small spark. Many of these agitated individuals may be completely unaware of the true facts of the situation that had provoked them, let alone the underlying historical circumstances.

This becomes, in the course of six further paragraphs, a full-on attack on Zionism:  

And given their apparently wholehearted support for Israel and the cause of Zionism, I think that’s a good place to start.

It is an absolutely undeniable historical reality that without the crucial patronage of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, the Zionist enterprise probably would have failed. The Nazi-Zionist economic partnership of the 1930s was vital for Israel’s creation, and even after World War II began, one of the smaller right-wing Zionist factions led by a future prime minister of Israel repeatedly sought to enlist in the Axis Powers, seeking to join the military alliance led by Hitler and Mussolini. 

This is the anti-Semitism that has taken root in in some quarters of American conservatism that are perfectly content with the left’s pro-Palestinian symphony of Jew-hatred.

Anti-Semitism in present-day America is largely an enterprise of the radical left and is conjoined with its hatred of the West. But the right has its own anti-Semites, and they shape their hatred to fit a variety of psychological and moral frailties.

Anti-Semitism is a social pathology that takes many forms and has been subject to a great deal of analysis. Robert Spencer’s recent Antisemitism: History and Myth offers the latest overview of “the world’s longest hatred.” My concern in this essay has been to put only a small piece of it on the table for inspection, but even that small piece shows considerable variety. There is the anti-Semitism of the professor and the anti-Semitism of professional entertainers, pundits, politicians, and ideologues, all of whom claim some kind of identity as conservatives. The common thread, if there is one, is their need for scapegoats. Jews are often more a target of convenience: a category on whom it is “safe” to project fury. Certainly, that seems to be the case with the legions of “anti-Zionist” college students post-October 7. The mere thrill of being part of a mass movement that revels in self-righteous hatred of the “other” is enough to turn blithely ignorant undergraduates into a violent mob. All these other forms of anti-Semitism are mere tributaries, since the fury of these mobs is more directly a leftist efflorescence.

Most American conservatives recognize Israel as a vital ally of the United States and would never think of abandoning it. But it is important to realize that anti-Semitism is a seed that can take root almost anywhere. Parts of the contemporary conservative world in the U.S. have proved fertile soil for it.

A version of this article was first published at Doc Emet Productions’ blog section. Reproduced with permission.

I. Politics and Power

In state theory, a revisionist country is one that seeks to change the status quo balance of power between nations. In the context of the international system, to revise is not to ponder or to ask questions, but to alter power relations.

What power is Tucker Carlson trying to revise?

When, in 2023, Carlson decided to host on his show a toothless former crackhead and convicted con artist who told unverifiable stories about having sex with Barack Obama, that was not a case of “following the leads” or considering alternative history. It was a political statement. Carlson’s interview took place the month after Tablet published a blockbuster interview with Obama biographer David Garrow that exposed, as one detail in a lengthy exposé, Obama’s confession in a letter to a college girlfriend that he had recurring fantasies of sex with men. A national media cycle ensued and, at that point, Carlson jumped in.

The Tablet interview, like the biography that inspired it, was revisionist. It revised the standard account of Obama’s character and motivations in a way that challenged the reigning state ideology and its leader’s control over the Democratic Party. Carlson, however, chose not to interview the Pulitzer-winning biographer Garrow or the journalist, David Samuels, who had done the work that put Obama back in the news. Instead, he gave a national audience to an unreliable and easy-to-dismiss ex-crackhead whose three-decade-long rap sheet is littered with crimes of deception like fraud and forgery. The lurid stories of drugs and gay sex aired on Carlson’s show were not flattering to Obama, but they merely insulted the former president; they did not challenge Obama’s power.

It is an obvious lie that Carlson’s decision to promote a revisionist podcaster’s claim that Winston Churchill is the chief villain of the Second World War has anything to do with “history” or “free speech.” Carlson did not rise to become the most popular media personality in the U.S. by engaging in scholarly inquiries or by remaining oblivious to the political implications of his own segments.

So what was the point?

One theory holds that Carlson aired the show so close to the presidential election because he wants Donald Trump to lose and expected to cause a scandal that would hurt his campaign. This may overstate the case. Rather than trying to sabotage Trump (and certainly there are more effective ways if that was the intention) it’s more likely that Carlson, the most influential Trump-aligned media figure in the country, was trying to establish a new normative politics for the Trumpist movement.

If Trump were to win, Carlson would have made it so the White House would be intimately connected with someone who advocates greater sensitivity to the German cause in WWII. Having placed Trump and his associates in a compromising position—condemn him now and make him a martyr or refuse to do so and signal tacit acceptance—Carlson would gain leverage to pursue other goals and a unilateral power to dictate what is acceptable within Trumpist politics. If, on the other hand, Trump were to lose, then Carlson’s “brave” willingness to reject the sinister post-war consensus and “ask questions” would set him up as a successor and voice of the true, suppressed MAGA movement.

This is not so far-fetched in light of the private texts Carlson sent disparaging Trump in the months around the 2020 election that were later made public in the lawsuit against Fox. For instance, these are the messages Carlson texted to his staff on January 4, 2021:

• We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait.
• I hate him passionately.

“No,” say people who know Carlson, “he is not so calculating as all that.” And they offer an alternative explanation for his revisionist turn. They say that, at heart, Carlson is still a prep school kid and a dilettante. He chases new ideas and attitudes and then gets bored and moves on. These very qualities made him stand out as a magazine journalist with a flair for profiles of rogues. But something changed after Carlson was fired by Fox. His impishness and lack of discipline, which once seemed inseparable from his willingness to challenge the establishment, became more erratic and embittered. With new funding sources backing him, the independent Carlson’s revamped show on X left one media ecosystem but entered another, where it focused on new villains—villains he avoided naming but began to circle. In this view, Carlson is not a calculating Machiavellian plotting against Trump by promoting cryptofascist memes. He’s only following his undisciplined instincts and that latest thing to catch his attention. In which sense, it might be true to say that Carlson is just having conversations. Freed from the restrictions imposed by a corporate boss, his conversational instinct is to keep insinuating that there is an arch-villain behind every evil, one who he is too coy or too cowardly to name.

Perhaps both versions contain elements of truth. What is glaringly obvious is that none of the relevant interview has anything to do with the subjects it is supposed to concern, such as “history,” “censorship,” “freedom of speech,” and “Winston Churchill.” To pretend that what is going on here is an “historical debate about WW2” is to prop up a fiction on a level with other obvious and destructive lies such as: Joe Biden was running the U.S. government during his presidency.

It follows, unfortunately, that the well-intentioned efforts to correct the historical record by debunking the revisionist claims risk reifying the political aim of the phony debate. No one who needs to be convinced that Churchill was not worse than Hitler will be swayed by a recitation of historical evidence.

As part of their charade, Carlson and his guest, whom he introduced as “the most important popular historian in the United States,” discussed the Weimar period in Germany as if it were a forbidden subject. One of the great books on the period is Walter Laqueur’s Weimar: A Cultural History. Laqueur describes a culture on the inter-war German right that was unmoored and undisciplined. Beset by defeat, humiliation, rapid social and economic change, the Weimar right turned against reality by spurning primary distinctions. This made it prone to indulging blatant fraud and chicanery, which it confused for wisdom and bravery. It was “fragmented,” Laqueur writes, by “right-wing sectarians [who] were profoundly convinced, like some sixteenth century alchemists or astrologers, that they had discovered the philosopher’s stone.”

Carlson’s revisionist has also unearthed that philosopher’s stone that explains all things. It can be distilled to a simple formula: The Nazis were not so bad and the Zionists are the real Nazis. Contained within this meme, an entire implicit worldview can be gleaned. For instance, why do decent Western people believe the absurd Churchill fairytale and accept the wicked slander about Germany’s guilt in WWII? Because they have been tricked into believing it by The Zionists. And look! When you peel things back, it was the Zionists who started the war in the first place by financing Churchill. See how it all fits together?

What was the point of this in relation to the American political scene in 2024?

It appears that Carlson wanted to revise Trumpism, a movement over which he exerts real influence, by turning his followers against those members of the Trumpist coalition, Jewish and Christian alike, who support the designated enemy, “Zionism.” It must infuriate Carlson and his revisionist guest that Donald Trump himself continues to uphold the will of the majority of Republican voters—for now still the majority of American citizens—by supporting the nation of Israel. I suspect they believe that Trump, like the mass of his followers, is suffering from a kind of false consciousness that causes him to misunderstand his own movement. True Trumpism will repudiate Israel. No one is saying that Israel has to be destroyed; it will be enough for now to see the Zionists humbled. To make America great, it is necessary to sever the “Judeo-Christian” tentacles and their hold over Western historical consciousness and American foreign policy.

But the American right that wants to revise the U.S.-Israel relationship is in deep denial. It cannot confront the fact that its real challenge comes not from the “Israel lobby” (which, despite its legendary omnipotence, couldn’t even shut down campus protests) but from American voters. Unlike the “based” intelligentsia trying to educate them, Trump supporters in particular remain attached to the broad concept of a Judeo-Christian heritage with all its implications for Jewish-Christian relations, the moral lessons of the Second World War, and the state of Israel.

Do normal American voters care about the Churchill revisionism debate? No, and neither Carlson’s interview nor anything his revisionist guest said had any effect on the popular vote, but that was not their aim. Carlson is not appealing to the reason and common sense of voters by making an argument about the U.S.-Israel relationship. Rather, he is engaging in a more modern form of mass persuasion by repeatedly airing certain memes so that they can ramify through public discourse, and, by propping up characters like Candace—“I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man”—Owens.

The revisionist exercise of power avoids direct argumentation in favor of coy innuendo, emotional narrative, and in-group messaging. It introduces memes—Zionist financiers—to activate ideological cadres and digital swarms while also making gestures of reasonableness (not all Zionist financiers) that they know will have no effect on the swarm but provide the revisionists with a way to deny the obvious meaning of their own actions. The swarm is not a bloc of voters, it is the ultimate pressure group. It harasses and terrorizes both normal people and powerful decision makers who are equally susceptible to its tactics, in an effort to impose, by digital force, a new consensus.

The current status quo balance of power within the Trumpist coalition is surprisingly broad and inclusive. Whatever one thinks of Trump, his support has risen among minority voters who are defecting to his Republican Party in record numbers. Many analysts correctly predicted historically high levels of Jewish support for the GOP candidate in the 2024 election.

Odd, then, that, at the very moment when Trumpism becomes the new home of a broad civic American party, there should be the rise of a highly visible campaign of demonization against American Jews. A number of the leading figures in this campaign—the European atheist pimp reborn as a Muslim America-first spokesman and other wild-eyed charlatans—have been guests on Carlson’s show. Their attacks on “Zionism” and “Frankism” also got louder the closer we got to the election.

Carlson’s revision follows the strategic model of the Obama-era Democratic Party. It aims to make Trumpism more fragmented and sectarian. The Democratic Party-state pioneered the imposition of purity tests on its members. A Jew who wishes to also be a “good Democrat” finds his or her provisional acceptance in the party conditioned on first disavowing Zionism. The revisionist right, visibly frustrated by Trumpism’s refusal to accept the Obamaite view of Israel as the main obstacle to world peace, now seeks to import this model.

Some revisionists may believe their memes about Zionist financiers and Jewish domination are mere instruments to achieve particular goals. Perhaps they see no other way to reform U.S. policy. It doesn’t matter. Sectarianism, as I wrote in another context in 2017, has a logic of its own:

Once you condone and normalize forms of collective guilt and racial original sin you can’t keep them from spreading. It doesn’t matter how many graduate seminars you hold, how many diversity consultants you hire, how many “dear white men” explainers you roll out. It doesn’t even matter if you don’t really mean it and you’re only denouncing those white cis males because it’s a form of social currency among your rich white friends. Once you start to traffic in blood myths you can’t keep them quarantined and they will poison your multiethnic democracy. 

II. History

A number of smart and reasonable people have rallied to support the revisionist podcaster who appeared on Carlson’s show. They insist that he is being smeared and that a fuller accounting of his output reveals an intelligent and sensitive mind. 

One popular defense holds that, despite the glaring moral symmetry between the revisionist’s charity toward Hitler’s forces and his dogmatic hostility to the Israeli army, and despite his repeated public attacks on Jews as demonic, if one only listened to his lengthy podcasts, his enlightened attitude would become so apparent as to invalidate any notion that he is motivated by crass prejudice.

Here the revisionist’s defenders are making a category error that conflates the performance of emotional affect with principles and beliefs. They are enacting what Alasdair MacIntyre describes in After Virtue as the “emotivist” bias of the modern world, which elevates feeling over truth and confuses the subjective feeling of experience with reality. There is no reason to doubt that the revisionist is a talented storyteller who can give his narratives a roundedness that makes them resonant and effective. But the ability to engender sympathetic emotional responses is not the same thing as an idea, much less the truth of a given matter. Nor is general intelligence any indication of genuine historical knowledge.

The kind of person who rises in the present public arena is a skillful manipulator of feelings. This describes quite well Carlson’s revisionist guest whose public persona has been emotive to the point of being histrionic. Wielding moral suasion in a felicitous style, he has pushed a large audience into imagining arguments and knowledge where there is mostly atmospherics, ideology, and emotional blackmail. This is what makes it funny to see the revisionist’s defenders scold his critics for being intemperate. The person they are defending specializes in manipulative hyperbole.

The best account so far of the revisionist controversy was written by Matthew Walther and deals with the subject of history. While history is a subject (that is, a place), it is also a profession and a discipline that was once obliged to follow certain rules, which tended to become corrupt and self-serving but also imposed standards that kept out certain kinds of nonsense. Only now the historical profession has collapsed along with every other domain of expert knowledge. Walther writes that the Churchill controversy is

symptomatic of a larger problem: the epistemic gulf between the current consensus—however broadly defined—of practicing historians on any given subject and the attitudes of the ordinary person of general education. This holds true, as far as I can tell, across all subject areas.

The collapse, in other words, is not only professional but social and epistemic; it affects how we acquire knowledge and form the shared basis of truth. The slow accretion of historical fact in a process of claim, counterclaim, and review, which has been fundamental to the advance of Western civilization is, for the moment, dead. It cannot survive in the crosscurrents of ideological sectarianism and despair. In a word, it cannot survive the Internet.

The infinite “now” of the digital world has no patience for history. It revives a culture of orality that thrived in the Middle Ages before being wiped out by the printing press. Memes such as “the future is female”; “white tears”; “It’s okay to be white”; and “my grandmother is older than Israel” are medieval technologies impervious to print-age liberal reason. The swarms mobilized by the memes are more similar to medieval mobs than to the “masses” of the twentieth century. The culture of orality transposed into a planetary communications network leads to all-consuming propaganda war, which accurately describes the real conditions of both society and historical debate in the present moment.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s Substack. Reproduced with permission.

I. From Revolution to Fashion: The New Mask of Anti-Semitism

Once, it was the face of Che Guevara; now, it’s the keffiyeh scarf. The fashion of rebellion has changed costumes, but, beneath the new fabric, lies an old disease. Anti-Semitism, long thought relegated to the ash heap of history, has returned—not in jackboots, but in hashtags, lecture halls, and pop festivals.

The shift is not accidental. In recent years, anti-Semitism has been repackaged as a flavor of resistance, a badge of anti-colonial virtue. And it is being consumed eagerly—not only by the embittered, but by the entitled. By professors with tenure, by artists with grants, by students whose sense of justice has been curated by algorithms and performance activism.

Once, to be an anti-Semite required either indoctrination or hatred; today, it only requires fashion.

II. The Aestheticization of Hatred

Consider the recent Coachella festival: among the sequins and flower crowns, the keffiyeh was draped not as cultural homage, but as declaration. Not out of solidarity—but of alignment. Its wearer may not speak Arabic, may not know the difference between Hamas and hummus, but they know it “feels right.” The keffiyeh, like the Che shirt before it, has become a symbol emptied of its context and filled with performative rage. The aesthetic of resistance has triumphed over the reality of suffering.

III. Mutation of an Ancient Hatred

But, unlike the Che shirt, which gestured vaguely toward revolution, the new chic flirts with something far more ancient and malignant: the targeted hatred of Jews. To don the scarf in such moments is not merely political theatre—it is a shrug toward the unthinkable. And worse: it is an invitation to repeat it.

This new anti-Semitism is not confined to whispers in art installations or theoretical syllabi—it is shouted from podiums, projected in protests, and celebrated in digital mobs. It no longer hides; it flaunts. It does not need to burn synagogues to threaten their meaning—it can chant openly for their erasure, and be applauded.

What we are witnessing is a mutation. Anti-Semitism is no longer the stench from the past—it is the scent of the moment. It has been glossed in progressive language, swaddled in virtue signals, and given a stage by those who consider themselves too educated to hate. And yet, hatred thrives most easily where self-awareness has been traded for self-congratulation.

IV. Japan and the Global Drift into Nihilism

Even in Japan, far from the geography of this conflict, the echoes are loud. In elite university circles, students who have never met a Jew now take sides in a battle they barely comprehend. They chant slogans like “Stop the genocide, Zionists!” without knowing that Israel is the only country in the region where Jews, Muslims, Christians, and atheists vote in the same election. These students mistake borrowed grief for conviction, mistake clickbait for conscience. And their professors, many of them disillusioned former leftist activists, recycle slogans that once meant something, now rendered hollow by repetition and convenience.

This contamination of thought is not limited to one nation. Anti-Semitism is the extension of anti- humanism, anti-Enlightenment, anti-reason, and anti-Western culture. And, curiously, Japan— though not Western in origin—has long upheld many Enlightenment values: reasoned debate, civil society, scientific inquiry, constitutional democracy. It is precisely because of this philosophical kinship that the current drift is so alarming. Even here, the dark seduction of nihilism has found its way into the minds of the young and the disillusioned. Not through doctrine, but through aesthetics. Not through belief, but through boredom and frustration.

V. Slogans, Memory, and the Collapse of Moral Judgment

Orwell would not be surprised. In 1984, he warned of the way slogans overwrite memory. Today, terms like “Zionist oppressor” serve the same function as “thought criminal.” In the mouths of the fashionable, they erase complexity. They enable the celebration of violence when it aligns with the narrative of the day. The pigs have become the farmers. The scapegoats are chosen not by faith, but by trend.

VI. Cruelty as Spectacle: From Foucault to de Sade

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies offered us a psychological parable for how this happens. The boys on the island do not become savages because they are inherently evil, but because their structures of restraint dissolve; because cruelty is easier—and more thrilling—than ethics. There’s a strange kinship between “fascination” and “fascism,” and, in that echo, we find today’s enthusiasm for collective punishment. What happens to Piggy happens now to Israeli victims. The spectacle of their suffering becomes secondary to the thrill of belonging to the tribe.

Foucault—once lionized for deconstructing power—has been embraced by those who refuse to recognize power when it takes the form of rockets aimed at civilians. His relativism, divorced from ethics, has licensed a new elite: fluent in post-structuralism, blind to slaughter. What began as critique has metastasized into complicity. He gave them the tools to analyze everything—and the license to feel nothing.

Even the Marquis de Sade, whose writings reveled in cruelty as a form of aesthetic and philosophical provocation, did not claim moral superiority. He embraced transgression. But the modern inheritors of this mindset do not confess—they posture. They chant for the destruction of Israel while claiming to oppose violence. They tweet in solidarity with murderers and call it empathy. This is not nihilism in despair—it is nihilism in glitter.

VII. October 7: A Pogrom Celebrated

October 7 was not a geopolitical flashpoint. It was a pogrom. It was not resistance. It was a festival of annihilation. A spectacle of humiliation and extermination, livestreamed with glee. The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—and it was met not only with silence, but with applause.

VIII. The New Orgy of Ignorance

The carnival of hatred has modern DJs now. It has faculty sponsors. It has press releases. The chants of “From the river to the sea” echo not from mosques but from ivy-covered walls. Anti-Semitism, once a shadow, now wears eyeliner and curated playlists. It has a marketing strategy. It has hashtags. It trends.

What’s most horrifying is the ease with which the truth has been unmade. Videos of atrocities are dismissed as propaganda. Survivor testimony is reframed as political convenience, even deliberate disinformation. The intellectual class does not ask what happened. It asks whether the victims deserved it. Statements like “context is everything” now serve not to illuminate but to obscure. They are used to flatten the deliberate torture, mutilation, and murder of civilians into a political abstraction. As if a raped woman or a beheaded child requires footnotes. As if the obliteration of the human requires dialectics.

IX. A Reckoning, Not a Plea

But there are still those who refuse. Who do not trade their conscience for applause. Who do not dress up hatred as solidarity. Who know that the line between speech and blood is thinner than we think.

This essay is not a plea. It is a reckoning. When the keffiyeh replaced the Che shirt, we should have asked: replaced with what?

The answer, increasingly, is cruelty mistaken for conscience. And the cost is being paid—not in discourse, but in bodies.

Never again was not a metaphor. It was a warning. It was meant for now.

X. Standing against the Cult of Death

And those who remember must do more than mourn. They must stand. They must endure. They must answer cruelty not with silence, but with the fierce, unwavering defense of life itself.

Standing today does not always mean grand gestures. Sometimes, it means refusing to chant when the crowd demands it. Sometimes, it means speaking an unpopular truth in a classroom, publishing a poem others wish erased, protecting a memory others would rather see drowned.

It means teaching history faithfully when falsifiers call it a crime. It means defending complexity against slogans, and humanity against mobs. It also means recognizing that the stakes are no longer clever banter; no longer the spewing of facile opinions on superficial podcasts by comedians with their manufactured outrage.

The stakes are life and death: not merely for Israel, not merely for the Jews, but for the very possibility of civilization itself—for a world rooted in life, decency, and responsibility, against the

rising cult of death and the orgy of pleasurable ignorance.

In Tel Aviv, in Tōkyō, in Paris, in New York—wherever the thin light of civilization still flickers—standing is no longer optional. It is existential.

There is a shadow
Of the darkest shade,
Lurking in every corner

Infects my dreams,
Wails from the souls
Sitting shiva with the mourner

This is our lives
Since that Day in October,
And every day after

When instead of consolation
Or condolences,
We heard screams and laughter

Do you know who am I?
What I think?
Or give a damn?

Would you remember my name?
Mock and ignore me?
And feel no shame?

Does my existence bore you?
Annoy you?
Oh, you prefer the silent Jew?

Then you best prepare,
For volume
And judgment

One thing you’ll never grasp,
Our collective soul and
Our strength feeds off your hate

Have you noticed your reflections?
Not what you expected?
I’m just asking questions

So continue on your quest,
It’s haunted by ghosts,
Ghosts of indifference

They’ve always been there: those on the radical right who embrace Christianity—at least on the surface—and try to weaponize it into an extreme movement. They oppose globalist elites, distrust mainstream media, decry nation-building wars, seek to prioritize domestic problems rather than foreign aid, and are skeptical of traditional U.S. alliances—particularly when it comes to Europe and Israel. Many of these figures have held anti-Semitic beliefs, but certainly not all of them.

This grouping of the conservative movement, however, particularly its most radical members, was often seen as something of a fringe aberration—exaggerated by the Democratic Party to smear the MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) movement and Republicans as a whole. Yet, over the past several months, and certainly since February of 2025, something has changed with what has come to be known as the “Woke Right.” Rather than the pendulum-stopping return to common sense that many American voters desired last November, this Woke Right embraces the very grievance-based identity politics it claimed to shun from the Woke Left—posing a grave danger to our democratic republic, and Western civilization as a whole. 

The Woke Right’s main representatives are a host of people from differing professional and ideological backgrounds. Podcast hosts and political commentators such as Tucker Carlson, Darryl Cooper, Joe Rogan, the Hodge Twins, Candace Owens, and Jackson Hinkle. Comedian Dave Smith and various social media personalities can also be added to the list. But one must ask: how could such a diverse array of characters come to represent and broaden such a fringe movement? In particular, how can a former “Bernie bro” like Joe Rogan, a one-time establishment-friendly Fox News reporter like Tucker Carlson, or even a social media attention addict like Candace Owens, embody anything having to do with wokeness? Perhaps it is because some of them came from the Left, yet I think the issue runs deeper. Author Vivek Ramaswamy warned in his 2022 book Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence that a certain segment of the Republican Party was subconsciously embracing woke ideology. This time, however, the perennial “victim” is not a Muslim transwoman of color, but rather straight, Christian white men. Rather than using Woke Left language, such as “my truth” or pronouns, the Woke Right is, as Owens regularly says, “just asking questions.”

Historical revisionism has become popular, too: whether through The 1619 Project or suggesting that the real villain of World War II was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill—let alone that the Holocaust occurred because the SS were “completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war.” Identity politics is another shared worldview, even if from opposing sides. Elements of the Woke Right have taken their opposition to gender ideology to an entirely new level—the rejection of equality for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Radical Christians among the Woke Right have been lambasting gay conservative activists like Dave Rubin, Douglas Murray, and Scott Presler. In place of “black lives matter” or “trust the science,” Woke Right slogans like “Christ is King” and “Deus vult” are used to virtue-signal and harass Jews, liberals, or anyone else seen as an enemy. Rather than being an expression of faith, such people weaponize these words to rally the gang, using these words almost as a tribal chant.

As is the case with the Woke Left, foreign policy is perhaps an oversized concern among the Woke Right. The evildoers for adherents of wokeness on both sides of the political aisle are, of course, “Western imperialism”—specifically NATO, which, according to this narrative, egged on Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine. Another shared feature is an aversion to foreign entanglements and free trade policies embraced by both major political parties for decades. Increasingly, the Jews and the State of Israel are also somehow blamed for the world’s problems. To avert World War Three, both far-left groups like Code Pink and pro-Putin talking heads like Tucker Carlson suggest that Volodymyr Zelenskyy must receive no American support of any kind. The alternative is the threat of nuclear war.

 That the Woke Left would adopt such viewpoints is no surprise—a good section of them are communists nostalgic for the days of Soviet power “resisting” capitalism. Yet it is truly mind-boggling that anyone on the right would support Russia. Ukraine consists of various groups, yes, but it also is a strongly Christian and relatively conservative society. For all the legitimate arguments about Ukrainian corruption, the Kremlin is infinitely more so. Moscow’s constant nuclear threats during the war—none of which have materialized—are still somehow seen as credible, despite the West’s own nuclear deterrence. Russia’s numerous military failures and catastrophic losses on the battlefield are discounted in favor of a lazy narrative that Kyiv is incapable of victory. Somehow, Russia’s declining economy and “no-limits partnership” with China are not to be taken seriously; Kremlin apparatchiks will be a trustworthy, useful ally against Beijing, and should be courted as such. Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator who paid bounties for the deaths of U.S. servicemembers in Afghanistan, has appealed to these America First isolationists by, at varying points, slamming the Woke Left, oppressing the LGBT community, and praising Trump while appearing next to Russian Orthodox patriarchs. Yet Russia has one of the lowest church attendance rates in the world, alongside an incredibly low fertility rate and a very high abortion rate. If the Woke Right wants to emulate a Christian Fatherland, modern Russia is clearly not what they’re looking for. And yet, that is who they are supporting. 

It isn’t just the Russians, though. Tucker Carlson’s bizarre interview with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani was just one noticeable shift toward radical Islam that some on the Woke Right are embracing. This may have started years ago, with Andrew Tate’s promotion of, and conversion to, Islam. Tate, a wanted sex offender, criminal, and misogynist, has espoused anti-Semitic views as he gained more popularity online. Carlson—who warned President Donald Trump not to attack Iran during his first term in the White House—has now done so again, urging diplomacy to avoid a war he believes the U.S. cannot afford and will lose. The details don’t matter; nobody is floating the idea of an American ground invasion of Iran, and Iran’s economic and military capabilities have been seriously degraded with Israel’s destruction of its defenses and decapitation of Hezbollah. 

When it comes to Iran, Carlson’s anti-war rhetoric has to do with promoting Doha’s narrative of avoiding regional upheaval. Carlson designated a large portion of the interview with al-Thani toward advocating against fighting Tehran, then promptly tweeted out his position just as the U.S. was warning of a strike on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. Carlson also suggested that Qatar—which has funded terrorist organizations under the banner of the Muslim Brotherhood while spending billions of dollars buying influence in foreign countries—is unfairly scrutinized by Western media outlets and watchdogs.

Another interview conducted by Tucker Carlson allowed for the intersection of the ongoing Ukrainian and Israeli wars, and the Woke Right’s position on them. Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff praised Qataris as “generous” people, displayed an incredible ignorance and naïveté about Hamas’ terrorist tactics, and whitewashed Russia’s imperial designs on Ukraine. Other podcasters, such as the Hodge Twins and Joe Rogan, have also expressed skepticism about supporting Israel and Ukraine. One of Rogan’s friends and guests, Dave Smith—himself Jewish—likened the Gaza Strip to a Holocaust concentration camp in an embarrassing display of ignorance while debating author Douglas Murray. Indeed, it seems the Woke Right is copying the Work Left by courting “AsAJew”s. 

Candace Owens and Jackson Hinkle, meanwhile, have falsely accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and promoted regular anti-Semitic canards under the guise of “Christ is King” and ancient blood libel. Hinkle—who calls himself a “MAGA communist”—has visited Lebanon and Yemen to pal around with Hezbollah and the Houthis, encouraging them to resist the American “empire.” That is, when he wasn’t too busy mourning the downfall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad or cheering on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Incredibly, Hinkle still claims to be “America First,” but expresses this viewpoint by supporting China in the ongoing trade war with the U.S., encouraging American sailors not to strike the Houthis, and rooting for every one of Washington’s enemies. As disturbing as all these developments are, it could get even worse in the years to come. As foreign policy experts gradually shift their attention to the Indo-Pacific, it is not hard to imagine the Woke Right advocating to abandon Taiwan and other regional allies of the West to the Chinese Communist Party.

There are, of course, some valid points worth bringing up here. Aspects of free trade deals that have been struck between governments have depleted blue-collar industries and impacted scores of Americans. Nation-building initiatives should not be irresponsibly pursued. And genuine diplomacy—though not endless rounds of talks—is almost always preferable to heading to war. The issue with the Woke Right is that it doesn’t “own the libs” by dismantling the Woke Left’s arguments. It simply flips them around like an Uno reverse card.

Rather than embracing true diversity and merit, the Woke Right created a new class of victim. Instead of using diplomacy responsibly, it calls for appeasement and surrender in a cowardly act of betrayal toward American allies. Instead of negotiating fair trade deals or trying to come up with a new economic doctrine, the Woke Right engages in endless arguments only about the failure of the current system. Back in the 2024 election, after economic malaise, perhaps a scandal a week, and woke identity politics from the progressive left, many Americans simply wanted to shut the door on wokeness forever. They wanted a strong, respected country—ruled by common sense instead of nonsense. They wanted to stop the swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other. The danger of the Woke Right is that the pendulum will swing back even harder to the Woke Left. Sadly, instead of learning the lessons of the 2024 defeat, the Democratic Party has seemingly doubled down on radical left-wing ideology. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are empowered and going on speaking tours to rally the activist base. It is true that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party is partly to blame for this outcome, full of ineffective octogenarian leaders who lied about President Joe Biden’s mental faculties and continue defending a failed political doctrine. But the Woke Right empowers the Woke Left even further. It gives fodder to left-wing arguments that “the right is home to the real anti-Semitism,” or that the MAGA movement is hostile toward minorities, the LGBT community, and women. Then, of course, there’s the revival of the “Trump loves Putin” argument. It is true that President Trump has shown far too much lenience toward the Kremlin for avoiding a ceasefire in Ukraine, but the Woke Right’s cheerleading for Moscow gives even more credence to this tired talking point.

There is a more responsible way forward that conservatives, liberals, and MAGA should pursue. Not the complete eradication of elites or experts, but teaching diverse points of views, and including diverse voices in academia, high culture, and government. This means fostering the creation of a new mainstream media, where talking heads and analysts aren’t always getting it wrong simply because they have TDS or are wedded to the politics of 1995 rather than 2025. It means shoring up America’s genuine security concerns at the border through real immigration reform and strenuous screenings. It means encouraging our allies, especially in the West, to contribute more to fair trade, Ukraine, and to collective security without bending over for tyrants like Putin or the CCP. It means knowing when it is time to end pointless conferences, galas, and talks, and start acting if a goal is not achievable by diplomacy. Perhaps, most of all, it means true economic reform and environmentally friendly initiatives that go beyond meaningless platitudes or performative-yet-expensive goals that simply aren’t realistic. The back-and-forth arguments of the woke, on both right and left, only degrade America’s image and potential—while indulging in the worst historical aspects of Western civilization. The pendulum swing only leaves Washington more vulnerable to outside threats, such as radical Islam, which is clearly trying to buy its way into both extremes of the political aisle.

There’s no telling just how popular the Woke Right’s views have become. Surely, some of those on social media are bot accounts, and many influencers have likely been paid off to parrot the tropes of some foreign regime or other. However, there is also good news: many in MAGA, or even beyond it, are challenging the Woke Right. After the homophobic attacks on gay conservatives and amid rampant anti-Semitism by figures like Candace Owens, there was significant pushback and calls for “a new beginning” for conservatives that is genuinely inclusive and friendly to people of all backgrounds.

The sway that Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson may have once held on large swathes of the Republican Party seems to be diminishing, and may yet still further, at least slowly. But common sense requires vigilance; this is a problem that must be nipped in the bud if the American experiment is to flourish and thrive once more. And it’s a problem that the wider West and all civilization needs to squash before the tyrants waiting in the wings can swoop down and pick us off, like a hawk with a distracted rabbit.

If MAGA wishes to survive as a movement, and make President Trump’s second term thrive in its “golden age,” more must be done. It is especially concerning that undue influence has been given to isolationists within the administration, such as Tulsi Gabbard and Steve Witkoff. Not only is Witkoff unqualified to serve in the role he does, but had himself admitted to being “duped” by Hamas in the ceasefire-for-hostage negotiations in Gaza. Even more troubling are his personal business ties to Qatar. Not to be outdone, Gabbard has tried staffing the administration with Israel-skeptics who are averse to any armed action against Iran, should it be necessary. Gabbard and Witkoff are among those who are encouraging President Trump to sign a nuclear deal at any cost with the Islamic Republic. Vice President J. D. Vance is also among these people, and it is notable that the vice president has Tucker Carlson’s son, Buckley, among his staffers. Recently, Carlson questioned what an “ally” is when Piers Morgan mentioned the strategic alliance between Washington and Jerusalem. Yet, on Megyn Kelly’s podcast, Carlson claimed that Qatar—both a Muslim Brotherhood haven and direct agent of Iran—is one of the U.S.’ “closest allies.” Both a woman and an ally should be equally easy to define consistently. 

Elsewhere, MAGA has showed enormous disdain for the Canadian Baby Boomers who voted for the anti-Trump Mark Carney to become the next prime minister in Ottawa, mainly because this has consigned future generations to a potential crisis when it comes to quality of life. Yet isolationism brings the same risks—as we have seen countless times throughout history. Signing a bad deal with actors like Hamas, Russia, or Iran, for the sake of “peace and stability,” will only lead to a bloodier conflict in the future that will be shouldered by America’s youth. Should that occur, the legacy of President Trump and his political revolution will be severely tarnished—by the resulting wars.

MAGA must make clear that “America First” does not have to mean “America Only,” or “America Only Now.” It means that America must be strong again, as the president has repeated numerous times.

November 2024, or perhaps January 2025, was supposed to introduce America to a new golden age. But this can only be accomplished by forever shutting the door on woke—no matter from which side of the aisle it rears its ugly head.

The right began to go woke as early as 2010 when the Tea Party ousted so-called “RINOs” (Republicans in name only) from the GOP in the belief that they were crypto-liberals who were conspiring with a closeted Muslim president to unmake America. Still, the GOP gave lip service to traditional conservative values and principles for a few years more. Then, in the midst of a growing birther movement, under the guidance of Steve Bannon, what had been the Tea Party became the MAGA movement—the “home, sweet home” of the woke right.

To be clear, leading figures within the woke right are connected, often in surprising ways, but the woke right, like the woke left, is more a conspiracy theory-laden, post-truth politics than a discrete group of individuals working toward a common and well-defined goal. The goal, for lack of a better word, is to encourage a mistrust of American institutions, particularly those associated with elites, and to engender a level of political chaos not seen since President Barack Obama repurposed the Executive Order(EO) so that it could be regularly used to bypass Congress and even the judiciary.

We can be assured that Bannon saw the partisan power value in Obama’s flurry of largely domestic policy-related EOs (he issued 276 over eight years) and encouraged his boss to blitz the opposition with deregulatory directives. But it isn’t chaos that defines the woke right; no, chaos is simply their preferred habitat. The woke right is made evident by its habit of giving serious consideration to any conspiracy theory that can be used to further invigorate MAGA and radicalize it against institutions that need to be restored, not torn down.

I should point out that no one is identifying as a member of the woke right in the way that Richard Spencer, Andrew Anglin, and their fellows self-applied the term “alt-right.” Still, the woke right is exemplified by a tendency toward “trutherism,” or the promotion of a Manchurian Candidate-like schema for which there is there is little or no evidence. The woke right then uses those theories to justify what MAGA has done and continues to do in the name of border security, combating activist judges, ending the war in Ukraine, etc.

The mother of all woke right conspiracy theories is that the U.S. government possessed advance knowledge of 9/11 and may have even facilitated those terrorist attacks so that they could be used to justify the invasion of Iraq, the global War on Terrorism, and the domestic surveillance that followed. The belief is also that both things were done at the behest of the State of Israel and in service to the “Greater Israel Project”—a separate but related conspiracy theory which holds that Israel is engaged in a project of regional hegemony and conquest. Some may be surprised to learn that 9/11 trutherism is not the brainchild of some Wikipedia-editing basement dweller, but originated instead with Curt Weldon, a 9/11-era Republican congressman. His theories have been kept alive and embellished by the likes of Laura Loomer, a close ally of President Trump. But it was Tucker Carlson, the godhead of the woke right, who did the most to give new life to 9/11 trutherism by hosting Weldon on his show while painting him as a patriot and hero.

Regardless of whether one is contending with the truther journalist shtick of Tucker Carlson or the syphilitic think pieces of Candace Owens, the trope of hidden Jewish control appears again and again in the woke right narrative that has done so much to invigorate MAGA. The danger in all of this is that the woke right will continue to shape the culture of MAGA and, in so doing, will have an increasingly deterministic effect on the policy demands of the MAGA movement. The woke right has already begun to succeed where the alt-right failed in its effort to insert its racial and religious nationalism into the nation’s Overton window. And it could be that the intentional and unrelenting chaos of MAGA has so desensitized us to what the woke right has pushed into the Overton window that we can barely parse out its meaning.

A Tucker Carlson who had just gained his freedom from the censors at Fox News said this of Ukraine’s President Zelensky on Twitter: “Sweaty and rat-like. A comedian turned oligarch. A persecutor of Christians. A friend of Black Rock.” Here, Carlson resurrects an anti-Semitic trope first made popular by the Nazis while making a reference to the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink. Fink is proudly Jewish, enormously wealth, largely apolitical in so far as he does not bend the knee to either major American political party. Therefore, he is, for all of those reasons, the subject of a host of right- and left-wing conspiracy theories—including that Fink promotes “climate alarmism” so that he might then profit from the “greening of the economy” at the expense of the American taxpayer and worker. Another conspiracy theory is that Fink did the most to bring about the 2008 financial crisis and positioned himself to profit from it. The latter theory was promoted without proof by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, who, for that reason and others, belongs to the woke right. 

Speaking of RFK, Jr., the problem is not just that the woke right is quickly replacing the best parts of traditional conservative culture with its siege mentality. No, the real crisis is that said mentality is now deciding national policy. Much attention has been given to Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency or “DOGE,” but few know that both are a puppet and extension of self-described Christian nationalist Russ Vought and his Office of Budget and Management (OMB) inside the Trump White House.

It was Vought who first said that “America’s renewal” is dependent upon the defunding and dismantlement of the deep state. According to Vought, that state within a state is a network of federal departments and agencies whose partisan leaders and staff work tirelessly to undermine the self-government of the people and demoralize them vis-à-via the steady promotion of an amoral and corrosive politics. As corrupt and wasteful as the administrative state may be, Vought’s theory that it is home to a plot against America is no less woke than any theory being promoted by Carlson.

Vought’s schema for this defunding and dismantlement was laid out by him in his contribution to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, blandly titled, “Executive Office of the President of the United States.” In that document, Vought argues that the independence and power granted to “expert authorities” (bureaucrats who lead agencies like USAID) amounts to tyranny. Vought goes on to say that the power wielded by these authorities must be returned to “America’s families, faith communities, local governments and states.” In other words, all be well when America and her government are Christian once more.

While he waited to return to his role as Trump’s chief strategist in a second administration, Vought pursued what he calls a “Christian nation-ist agenda” by writing policy and strategy at the Center for Renewing America, the think tank he founded. The Center’s website describes its mission to restore “a consensus of America as a nation under God with unique interests… that flow from its people, institutions and history….” The following can be found on that same website: “The Center… was created to confront the woke and weaponized agenda of the ruling class and replace it with one that puts God, country, and community at the center of the policy debate in Washington.” 

It should also be said that the woke right is a vehicle for white nationalism due in no small part to the fact that the Christian nationalist movement is a fundamentally white phenomenon that often resorts to racism in response to the racism of the far-left.  Evidence of this can be found in the behavior of another woke member of the Trump White House, Darren Beattie.

Beattie first served Trump as a speechwriter and policy aide, but was promoted to the role of acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of State in 2025. Beattie recently posted these words to X: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.” Beattie also said this of his woke left equal-opposite, Ibram X. Kendi, a black man: “Ibram Kendi needs to learn his place and take a knee to MAGA… Learn his proper role in our society.” Just as concerning is the fact that it is Beattie’s job to advise the president on extremist threats at home and abroad. Because Beattie is able to broadcast his hatred without fear of consequence, it is safe to say that he won’t be shining a light on far-right actors like Patriot Front, America’s most active white supremacist organization, or Generation Identity, the group that appears to be most responsible for the radicalization of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooter.

Just as worrying (albeit more confusing) is a small contingent of Jewish woke rightists who were or are members of Team Trump and who, in spite of their Jewishness, promote anti-Jewish conspiracy theories or the racial nationalism of the far-right, a hotbed of those same theories. Exhibit A: Michael Benz, a member of the first Trump administration who was revealed to be “Frame Game,” a popular anonymous far-right content creator who promoted, among other things, the “Great Replacement Theory,” which posits that powerful Jews are engineering sudden and massive changes to the demographic makeup of the U.S.—all in an effort to turn Anglo-Americans into a minority group. Exhibit B: Stephen Miller, Trump’s current Deputy Chief of Staff for policy who, in emails leaked by a former editor at Breitbart, provided that editor with talking points taken from white nationalist websites, to which Miller linked the editor, and encouraged her to use them in anti-immigration articles being written under the direction of Miller and at the behest of her boss, Steve Bannon.

No discussion of the degree to which right-wing wokeism has shaped the presidencies of Donald J. Trump and MAGA would be complete without touching on the work of Steve Bannon. Bannon is infamous for embracing the alt-right, a conglomerate of neo-Nazis and Christian nationalists, while he was still new to Trump’s inner-circle. To be clear, Bannon didn’t just nod to the alt-right, he actively platformed them on Breitbart News, the network he headed. Bannon’s guiding principle has always been to “flood the zone,” which is to say, blitz his opponents and the general public with messaging, directives, and executive orders and thereby force an acquiescence to those things.

Bannon’s game was then a dangerous one—to push the boundaries of what was politically acceptable while engaging in double-speak with regard to what any reasonable, non-partisan observer would interpret as expressions of support for an anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and ultimately anti-American worldview. In an interview with Bloomberg’s Michael Lewis, Bannon stunned readers by saying, “I don’t think the alt-right is anti-Semitic at all.”  Contrast that with the “race realism” of this article published by Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute and republished by Breitbart:

Immigration is a kind of proxy war [white nationalists believe that lax immigration policies are part of a Jewish conspiracy to replace white majorities with non-white ones]—and maybe a last stand—for white Americans, who are undergoing a painful recognition that, unless dramatic action is taken, their grandchildren will live in a country that is alien and hostile.

To that I should add that many of us heard the neo-Nazi and white nationalist chant “Jews will not replace us” for the first time while watching news footage of Richard Spencer’s “Unite the Right” rally—held in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

I remember well the confusion that followed President Trump’s response to that two-day event and to the death that punctuated it. Not to put too fine a point on this, but the rally itself was already the subject of a national news story when one of its participants murdered a young woman who came to Charlottesville to protest against such a blatant show of white supremacy, racial aggravation, and anti-Semitism. Rather than condemn Spencer, his woke following, and their message, President Trump said this to the American people: “What about the alt-left that came charging at, as you say, at the alt-right? Do they bear any semblance of guilt? …[N]ot all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me.… The press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

In retrospect, that response, like so many other things about Trump and the MAGA movement, makes perfect sense in light of what was being planned and what those plans required—namely the support of a woke right political class that had only just begun to find its strength and to sow the political chaos on which Trump’s brand thrives.

Classical liberals and cosmopolitan Jews beware: There are ideological winds whiplashing around you, blowing from opposite directions. Exposure to such elements comes with considerable risk. Just ask Europeans who are fleeing the continent. The politics of extremism and grievance has staked out their positions. And, as per usual, you find yourselves the bull’s-eye of everyone’s resentment.

The woke world has, improbably, widened. Its cultural virus has discovered new pathogens, and even a new host. Strange bedfellows have had their collective consciousness awakened with the same realization that others are to blame for their misfortune. And this awakening has caused them to adopt similar strategies in undoing power structures that are racist to one, and un-American to the other. 

Yes, you read that right: the ultra-nationalist, uber manly, and shamelessly fascistic alt-right has now, suddenly, found its woke groove.

Just in time for summer.

The sick joke about the existence of a more multifaceted woke, manifested in both the extreme left and right fringes of the political spectrum, is that these antagonists have nothing in common other than a shared conviction that liberalism is abundant in elitists and globalists, Jews are irredeemably evil, and Israel is a pariah state that should be no more.

We should have all seen this coming—the revenge of the embittered left and right—but at the same time!? Mainstream Democrats and Republicans—what Bill Clinton once mobilized into a triangulated center—now must contend with legitimate threats from their farthest most fringes. That’s what it means to be “primaried.” David Hogg, the Democratic Party’s vice chair, is threatening his own incumbents with that very thing. It’s what makes Chuck Schumer so spineless while emboldening the ambitions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Both major parties are suffering from separate crises of identity, which, ironically, puts a new spin on the politics of identity. 

So many features of the liberal order have been under attack since Barack Obama’s dismissive eliding of American Exceptionalism. The passing of the progressive torch was reclaimed by Bernie Sanders, who deftly relayed it to AOC who, given this hot potato, tossed it to the Black Lives Matter movement, which put its flame to good use by setting fire to police cars and precincts. The same thing happened to businesses whose owners were made to suffer the consequences of their white privilege.

The politics of nihilism and terror was on, led with violence and fury by the progressive left. Pro-Hamas agitators adopted these now normalized uprisings to magnificent effect—except they now added masks, burning flags, and the takeover of buildings and common areas. Universities and public spaces have never been the same. 

The Age of Donald Trump conjured the MAGA movement. When the 2020 election didn’t go well, its most extreme elements revealed themselves on January 6, flashing their most unflattering features. It put America on alt-right notice after the 2017 Charlottesville reprieve. The January 6 melee fell short of an insurrection but made felons out of 900 Capitol-crashers. That’s more than can be said for the George Floyd rioters, who participated in a larger and more wide-ranging display of anarchy. All of them escaped scot-free.

Now we face a new realization. MAGA Americans may, to some, be nothing more than Red State hillbillies, NASCAR petrol-polluters, and twangy country music fans. But they are not the enemy. They are faithful Trump supporters, but there’s no crime in that even though those red baseball caps have led to its very own derangement syndrome. You might disagree with MAGA Nation, but just because they are socially conservative, God-fearing, patriotic Americans who oppose abortion, marriage equality, and gender-neutral bathrooms doesn’t make them satanic.

I’m not saying there’s no Satan. There’s another faction within Donald Trump’s Roman circus that should worry you. The woke version of America First is raising all sorts of red flags. They are the extreme right of Trump’s base without being card-carrying neo-Nazis.

Out of nowhere they have grown into a critical mass. Easy to miss because they don’t exist at all on university campuses, mainstream media, and corporate board rooms—all falling within the province of the politically correct far left. But online and on social media—and in the depths of the dark web—they are becoming a formidable force. 

We probably should have paid more attention to their mission creep. After all, they are luridly visible and loudly profane. Euphoria over the presidential election crashed open the tribalist, nativist, nationalistic, misogynistic, homophobic, conspiracist, and, of course, anti-Semitic gates that had been locked by respectable conservatives who wore Brooks Brothers suits and sipped martinis at Ivy League clubs. Today, the Ivy League is run by Islamist enablers, and those suits have been swapped for MMA, UFC, and WWE trunks.

After a libelous false start, we have finally discovered the true deplorables. They are a brotherhood of white nationalist, conspiracy peddling, anti-Semitic clowns like Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Candace Owens (an African-American woman), Theo Van, Daryl Cooper, Jake Shields, Dan Bilzerian, Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, Ian Carroll, Nick Fuentes, and Kanye West. Some are familiar. Nearly all are apologists if not admirers of Adolf Hitler. But what they disturbingly all have in common is an extreme right-wing fanbase. 

Most are either podcasters or social influencers who disseminate noxious views while posing, like Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, as the great provocateurs of “expectorating.” Always obsessed with manliness. Fixated on Jeffrey Epstein. Ranting about race, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, feminism, vaccines, immigration, nationalism, religiosity, and of course, elitist globalists, and the sorcerers of Zionism. 

Together they aggregate into a smorgasbord of nihilism, feasting on outrage, stewing on grievance, luxuriating in victimhood. 

Think of it as the populist compulsions of the woke right, generated to shock and terrify liberal elites, feminists, gay rights activists, and cosmopolitan Jews.

How bad is it? Decide for yourself. Tate admires Hamas and stated that he “pray[s] for a death as heroic as Yahya Sinwar.” Bilzerian “believe[s] that Jewish supremacy is the greatest threat to America.” Gaines emphatically proclaimed that “Hitler was right . . . You come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fucking central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community.” Carroll ranted that Israel is a “criminal enterprise” run by “mobsters and terrorists.” Rogan validated that assessment by interjecting, “And what’s interesting is, you can talk about this now, post–October 7.” 

Yes, of course, people never harbored or expressed anti-Semitic, anti-Israel attitudes before October 7, 2023.

Just as the woke left denies Jewish ancestry in the Middle East and decries the very existence of Israel, the woke right rejects that a Holocaust even happened to Jews, and if it did, it surely did not result in more than a few thousand deaths. 

Jews figure prominently in their demented imaginations: the assassination of JFK, the collapse of the Twin Towers, the sinister control of world economies—all masterminded by Jews. Revisionist history is nothing but a tableau of false tales. Here’s one: Leo Frank was properly lynched for raping a young white teenager. Look it up.

In appealing to youthful, disaffected, jobless, and quite possibly dateless males, there is plenty of free time for gym workouts followed by cool down bullying on social media. 

Not unlike their woke left counterparts on college campuses, the idiocy and revisionist history of the woke right is unchallenged, outrageous statements elicit no more than a shrug, all conspiratorial claims go unrebutted. The learned expertise of others is discredited as the handiwork of devious Jews. 

The fact that the woke right is considerably dumber than the woke left isn’t helping matters at all.

All those who cherish liberal values, scientific data, objective standards, free speech, open inquiry, the rule of law, democratic pluralism, and civility in all things, have really taken a hit these past few years from the extreme woke sensibilities of the progressive left and lunatic right.

Where are the classic conservatives and neocons these days? Probably hiding somewhere, possibly alongside the guardians of classical liberalism. Ideologically separate, but temperamentally the same. Those who insist on subjecting all ideas to rigorous thinking and thoughtful debate are fast becoming a silent minority. Alone in celebrating the life of the mind. Elitists, yes—but not for no reason.

The Trump administration surely brought some classic conservatives to the White House. Given what he said in his rececnt speech in Riyadh about neocons and their failed predilections for nation-building, his administration has not sought them out. The choice of his vice president was a harbinger of that neocon avoidance.

That is and was a mistake. Neocons may have been naïve in their belief that all peoples, if given a choice, would select freedom and demoracy over theocracies and Arab royal families, but at their core, neocons are true liberal thinkers in their politics and beliefs. Making an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast is not viewed as a career achievement, and their desire to see a strong and secure ally in Israel is unshakable.

Hopefully Trump will manage to retain the hearts and minds of his hardcore MAGA loyalists who recoil from the woke right, too. There’s always the possibility that Trump’s insatiable neediness will be seduced by the more radical elements within his right-wing base. After all, so many of them first drew blood as actual fighters in MMA matches. Now they bleed red for America First, alone.

What these times portend is that political liberals and American Jews have far more in common with Red State flag-waving MAGA Republicans than they do with the America First woke right. There is a difference between them, and liberals would do well to make common cause with one and be circumspect about the other.

The good news is that, at least for the moment, the woke right doesn’t have its own leader, like earlier incarnations of America First fascists and unrepentant anti-Semites like Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan.

There has long been an intellectual vacuum left unfilled in the conservative movement. Gone are the likes of National Review founder William F. Buckley—erudite, poised, dapper, and known for a very different species of gladiatorial conquests: intellectual sparring matches on his television talk show, “Firing Line.” In those days, roughly 1966-1999, disagreement was welcome, intelligent talk was obligatory, and cursing on the airwaves while wearing a sleeveless muscle shirt was neither a sign of wit nor refinement. 

The coarseness of today’s rhetoric, with its reckless reordering of facts, epitomizes the inherent danger of the extreme alt-right. Shouting down speakers is a sickness of the illiberal, anti-intellectual, and always violence-prone woke—both left and right. There was a time when conservatives didn’t degrade women and swap bench-pressing personal bests. They used to match wits with whatever was on the New Left’s agenda. 

No one on either the woke left or right could capably face Buckley on “Firing Line.” Besides, the woke right, given their penchant for manhood, would more likely choose a firing squad.

The threat Candace Owens presents is tangible. She has millions of followers and has decided that her main targets are the Jews. She is a channel for Nick Fuentes and his call for an America First, Christian Nationalist “holy war against Judaism.”

The Republican Party teeters on the edge of no longer being the party that freed the slaves, made America rich, and crushed Soviet communism.

Candace has shifted the Overton window to accommodate anti-Semitism and, in the process, abandoned one of the most intrinsic conservative values of all: that every individual is a child of God, and thus no one should be discriminated against for immutable characteristics.