Where Have You Gone, William F. Buckley?

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.