There was a big flap in conservative media last week in the wake of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes. Both men are anti-semites and both are beyond the pale, according to The American Spectator, Powerline, and National Review. And both of them should really be deplatformed. Problem! They were already deplatformed. For Fuentes it was way back when Ben Shapiro kicked him off The Daily Wire, and for Tucker when they eased him out of Fox News.

Today, both Fuentes and Carlson operate on their own independent media and don’t answer to anyone.

According to Richard Hanania on Substack, the Fuentes flap indicates “Groyperization Accelerating.” He compares Fuentes’ Groyper supporters to the wokeness culture “and why Groyperization might actually be much more powerful and long lasting in the end.” Wokeness, he reckons, was “astroturfed” but the Groyper world is outside institutional control.

For Hanania, the Left’s enthusiasms are safely controlled by “elite institutions, like universities and major media outlets, in addition to labor unions, professional associations, and nonprofits.” But far-right “[i]ndividuals like Owens, Fuentes, and Carlson -- in addition to countless lesser influencers -- get their power directly from the audience and, as a result, place real pressure on politicians.” Trump and Vance can’t control the Groypers because “Fuentes is… the undistilled version of what they’re selling, which is white grievance, showmanship, and anti-liberal posturing.”

But Shutdown Chuck Schumer controls Mamdani. Right?

I know: let’s compare Fuentes with Mamdani.

Nick Fuentes comes from a white working-class family in suburban Chicago. He dropped out of Boston University and got connected with Right Side Broadcasting Network and, after getting deplatformed for anti-semitism, started an online show in his parents’ basement, setting himself up as an ethnonationalist.

Zohran Mamdani is the son of a college professor and a film-maker. He went to the private Bank Street School near dad’s academic job at Columbia. He majored in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and co-founded the Students for Justice in Palestine chapter there. Bless his heart. After college he got into activism with Change Corps, worked as a housing counselor, and then got into political campaigns.

Funny thing, but I haven’t heard a whisper from our noble liberal friends about the vile anti-semitism of Zohran Mamdani, while all the respectable world is outraged over the anti-semitism of Fuentes and Carlson. Now, Fuentes and Carlson may be as guilty as sin, but I haven’t yet heard of them setting up activist groups for Justice In Palestine.

Now, let me be clear, as a U.S. president once said. We have Nick Fuentes, an “enthonationalist” appealing to Groypers, a “white nationalist, antisemitic, and homophobic movement.” In other words, he is riling up low to middle-class whites who have been the butt of U.S. politics since the Civil Rights era. And we have Zohran Mamdani riling up twenty-something college graduates struggling to make it in super-expensive, super-liberal New York City.

Do you see the connection? The white working class has been struggling for decades through all kinds of government-created minefields, from anti-white racism to the offshoring of manufacturing to the tsunami of drugs to the competition from a tsunami of immigrants. And it is angry. The young white college class is presently struggling because it went to college and racked up eye-watering Federal Student Loans while earning a useless Africana Studies degree. And it is angry.

And both are anti-semitic.

I say: Houston We Have a Problem. But what should we wise ones do?

Back in 2021 I wrote a deeply philosophical piece on politics that I titled  “Which Enemy is Best?” where I proposed four kinds of wars. The best kind of war was:

unite most of the country against a small minority for a witch-hunt.

Also check my “Four Kinds of War.”

So, like Mamdani, any lefty politician should unite the vast army of helpless college graduates and undocumented migrants against the small minority of robber landlords and price-gouging grocery chains. But, I philosophized, one thing that Literally Hitler inadvertently taught us is this:

Earth to aspiring politicians: Do Not Mess with the Jews. Just sayin'.

Whatabout Fuentes and the Groypers? What should they do instead of Blame the Jews? Bueller? Anyone?

The thing about our liberal friends is that they are all rowing together in their ginormous progressive trireme, lovingly financed by everyone from George Soros to the Tides Foundation. And when Jack Hawkins bellows “ramming speed” they all pull together, just like Charlton Heston and the rest of the slaves in No Kings, er, Ben-Hur.

On the far right, and the Groyper ethnonationalist right, and the armed insurrectionist extreme-right, no triremes. There is a reason for that. We racist-sexist-homophobes don’t believe in politics as a saving faith. The point of voting for a Donald Trump is not to change the world, but to stop liberals from wrecking the lives of people like us with their stupid conceits and stupid ideas and stupid programs -- that Make Things Worse.

But a new Golden Age would be nice.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Yonderboy