Groyperism's Spread Among Generation Z Conservative Apparatchiks Is Real(L to R) Gladden Pappin, Balazs Orban, VP J.D. Vance, PM Viktor Orban, Area Man

I don’t know what you did on Friday night, but I spent about 90 minutes in the vice president’s study with him and the men you see above, talking geopolitics, Hungary, and the survival of Christianity in Europe, among other things. Of course I can’t be indiscreet about the discussion, but it was rich and vigorous. I’m really glad that JD got to experience the actual, living Viktor Orban in person, and to see for himself how wrong the propaganda is. They got on very, very well.

I was able to have a few minutes with the vice president before the PM and his team arrived. I shared with him my views about the threat that Nick Fuentes and Groyperism pose to the country, to the GOP, and to him personally. He listened to what I had to say. And that is all I can say about it, out of respect for his privacy.

It was an intense and busy long weekend for me in the capital city. I learned a hell of a lot about the new radicalism racing through the young Right there. What I’m going to say about it is to inform you. Nobody talked to me on the record. What I say is my impression of a number of conversations I had with people (conservatives) who are directly involved in this world. Every one of them is appalled by what’s happening (well, maybe not one of the guys, but he always plays his cards close to his vest), and all have serious doubts about the ability of the institutional Right to deal with it. It’s easier for me simply to do a mash-up of all the things I heard, rather than try to attribute them to people I can’t quote by name anyway. Remember, this is a diary, not a newspaper.

The claim that I first floated in this space last week, quoting a DC insider who said that in his estimation, “between 30 and 40 percent” of the Zoomers who work in official Republican Washington are fans of Nick Fuentes — that’s true. Was confirmed multiple times by Zoomers who live in that world.

If you think being Christian is some kind of vaccination against anti-Semitism, you’re wrong. Even young Christians — especially trad Catholics, I learned — are neck-deep in anti-Semitism. They even use it as a litmus test of who can and can’t join their informal social groups.

Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, “They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down.”

Then he went on to explain in calm, rational detail why his generation is so utterly screwed. The problems are mostly economic and material, in his view (and this is something echoed by other conversations). They don’t have good career prospects, they’ll probably never be able to buy a home, many are heavily indebted with student loans that they were advised by authorities to take out, and the idea that they are likely to marry and start families seems increasingly remote.

Moreover, they grew up in a country that had lost its common culture. Many of these young men are fatherless. Most of them spent their youths being told that as whites, and especially as white males, they are what’s wrong with the world. Their own speech was policed with Stasi-like ruthlessness for racism and bigotry, while people on the Left routinely slandered whites, males, Christians, and heterosexuals — and were even rewarded for it.

F—k that, seems to be the reaction now. Fuentes is a living, breathing illustration of what Hannah Arendt meant when she spoke of people willing to revel in transgression such that they tear down the pillars of civilization, just for the fun of seeing those who had been gatekept away breaching containment.

After the most insightful of these conversations, I thought that if you really want to know what’s going on among the leading edge of the politically active young Right, you would do better to read Dostoevsky’s Demons than any conservative magazine. And if I were writing a new edition of Live Not By Lies, I would absolutely revise the book to account for the lies that are consuming the Right today.

Hannah Arendt, man: like I’ve been saying, she is the diagnostician of our Weimar moment. I won’t repeat myself here — I’ve been quoting her a lot lately — but after these last three days in Washington, I am more convinced than I have ever been that we are moving towards some kind of totalitarianism — or at best, authoritarianism. It could go either way, Left or Right. Said one source, “They [Groyper types] look at Mamdani’s success in New York, and think, ‘Why can’t we do that?’” — meaning, why can’t we try to get a true radical into power?

I talked to one MAGA Zoomer, a policy wonk who is a person of color. He is beside himself with frustration over the rise of Groyperism in his circles, and within the party. “These idiots don’t understand that they can’t win an election on a whites-only platform,” he said. “They’re delusional. There are a lot of immigrants and native-born members of ethnic groups who are natural Republicans, and whom Donald Trump won in 2024. Take Indians, for example — if you think they are going to stick with a movement whose leader [Fuentes] denounces Usha Vance as a ‘jeet,’ you’re crazy. But that’s how they think.”

Well, they do want to burn it all down, I was told. And I came away with the feeling that they are only tenuously dedicated to democratic politics. I told one very smart and decent Zoomercon who despises the anti-Semitic turn in his circles that I’ve been hearing that fascism — actual ideological fascism, not the media’s idea of anybody to the Right of Lindsey Graham — is gaining traction among young white British males.

He said, innocently, “So what’s wrong with fascism?” He meant it, not in a challenging way, but in a way that conveyed the sense of we have to think about this now. He talked about how the disintegration of our culture is accelerating, and liberal democracy seems impotent to stop it. He went on to explain that if he had to choose between living under left-wing authoritarianism or the right-wing version, then that wouldn’t be much of a choice. To be clear, he wants neither, but he fears that the disintegration of our culture is going to put us all in the position to have to reconcile ourselves to one or the other.

We talked about the Spanish Civil War, and how neutrality wasn’t a live option for the Spaniards back then. He brought up Gen. Pinochet in Chile. Not a good man, he said, acknowledging that Pinochet killed tens of thousands. But (said the young man) Pinochet saved his country from communism, and we know very well that communism’s historical record is far bloodier. That is true.

Let me emphasize here that my interlocutor was NOT cheering for fascism. As our conversation went on, I heard real despair — and well-informed despair — that democracy is going to hold in the West, because the conditions that make for a viable democracy are disappearing: the dissolution of a common culture, the collapse of religion in his generation, the material impoverishment of his generation, and so forth.

I tell you, it was dark. But I kept hearing this, over and over, and I concluded that it cannot be dismissed.

The inability of us older people — Boomers, Xers, and older Millennials — to comprehend the world through the eyes of Zoomers is a big, big problem. Another strong theme: while it’s important to take a clear stand against anti-Semitism in the ranks, there is no way to gatekeep our way out of this. You cannot simply point at the Zoomers and say, “Thou shalt not,” and expect it to work. The problems are too deep and complex, and anyway, they have learned to have no respect for authority.

Why should they? The institutions of our society, as they see it, have lied and lied and lied, and still lie. They still lie in many ways about race (e.g., refusing to be honest about black crime), they lied about Covid, they lied about males and females, and they forced the insanity of gender ideology on us all. The military lied about Iraq. The universities embraced and enforced ideologies of lies. The Catholic Church lied about sexual abuse, and the connection to the prevalence of sexually active gay priests honeycombing the institution. They lied about the benefits of mass migration and diversity. They lied about Trump and Russia. The political parties and their corporate allies lied about what globalism would mean for ordinary people.

The media have lied and do lie about most things. This past weekend, everybody was talking about the new report in Blaze media alleging that the mysterious January 6 pipe bomber was in fact a former Capitol police officer — the implications being that the whole event was orchestrated by the Deep State to discredit Donald Trump. Maybe mainstream media are busy trying to validate this reporting on their own. If The Blaze has this wrong, they’re going to be sued into oblivion, and so will other media who amplify a false charge. All I can tell you is that nobody in the MSM are talking about it as I write, even though it is an explosive story.

I could go on — boy, could I — but you get the idea. Trust in the system is gone. Hell, I share most of these conclusions myself! The difference is that I am not a nihilist; I don’t want to tear it all down, but rather reform it. There are no historical examples in which “tearing it all down” produced a better, more just, more functional order. The Zoomers don’t seem to have any knowledge of history, nor do they care about it.

They don’t even take Trump all that seriously, it appears. They see him as an out-of-touch Boomer whose value lies in how he can be used to achieve the system’s destruction. It has not escaped their notice that the ten months into Trump’s second term, the economy is still crap. As an American living abroad in a more affordable country, going to coffee shops, bars and restaurants, I was stunned by how expensive everyday life is in the US. The recent opinion polls showing that by a large margin, most Americans (not only Zoomers) are down on the Trump administration’s handling of the economy — that reflects the good judgment of the American people, I’m sorry to say. If the Republicans don’t get their act together, and fast, they’re going to be shellacked in the 2026 midterms.

What about the Jews? This, to me, remains the most puzzling and sinister thing. Douglas Murray gave a talk over the weekend at a Prager U event, in which he reflected on the fact that lots of young conservatives notice that liberal secular Jews are disproportionately involved in organizations pushing mass migration, and draw anti-Semitic conclusions. Murray pointed out accurately that in Europe, by far the most prominent and influential advocates for open borders are the current pope and the previous one — yet few people blame Catholics for the problem. Why, then, do they all blame Jews?

I still don’t have the answer, but I at least came away from Washington convinced that the issue of anti-Semitism on the young Right is much deeper than I had guessed. A couple of people — both of whom reject anti-Semitism — spoke plainly about how a lot of this is reaction to how Jewish organizations like the ADL have policed speech critical of Israel, and of anything to do with Jews, so heavily over the decades that they have caused intense resentment among the Gentile Zoomercons. One man told me that for as long as he has been in politics, any criticism of Israel got you tagged as an anti-Semite, and that was a potential career-killer. So his generation has come to hate that, and to cease caring about the opinions of Jews.

An older friend — another despiser of anti-Semitism — said that we have to find a way to talk about the reality of Jewish influence in American life, for good and for ill. I took him to mean basically this: Jews really are disproportionately powerful in American life, and they are not shy about using that power to advance their own interests, and the interests of other groups they favor. The taboo against noticing that, and talking about what that might mean, is gone with the Zoomers. If we want to fight anti-Semitism, we have to face this seriously.

OK, fine. But one thinks of the black comedian Dave Chappelle’s lines in his 2022 SNL monologue addressing Kanye West’s anti-Semitic rants:

“There are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence, and those words are ‘The’ and ‘Jews.’ I’ve never heard anyone do good after they said that.”

That’s right. If you know anything about history, you know that whenever a small minority has been successful out of proportion to their numbers within a society, the mob may turn on them. The Chinese minority in Indonesia and Malaysia, for example, have repeatedly suffered discrimination and hatred from the majority native population. Why? For one, the European colonizers made them into the tax collectors and moneymen — a caste that will never be beloved. For another, they historically enjoyed success, being good at running businesses. The Chinese are not Jewish, but they were hated by Malays and Indonesians as if they were, because they were successful — and were not allowed by the majority culture to assimilate.

Human nature being what it is, once one notices these things, and speaks of them, it’s not far to leap to scapegoating, and then persecution. This recurs in many societies, though Jews have typically been the archetypal scapegoats.

Why are Jews so dominant in finance? They have been for centuries, because in Catholic Europe, Jews were not subject to the anti-usury restrictions on Catholics. So they became bankers because that profession was open to them as it largely wasn’t to Christians. And they got good at it. Why should they be ashamed of it? Jews traditionally excelled as classical musicians and scholars because their culture valued classical music and scholarship. Why should they be ashamed of their success? I don’t get it.

I guess my question is this, per Dave Chappelle: If we agree to talk openly and even critically about Jewish success and power in American life, where does that conversation lead? What is the point of it? Recently at the Heritage Foundation, before the whole Tucker controversy broke, the think tank’s chief Kevin Roberts noted in a discussion about the porn industry the names of a senior corporate official at Pornhub. He ais Jewish. But Roberts neglected to note that the CEO is a Gentile (Italian), and so is the No. 2 (Arab Christian). Maybe he meant nothing by it … but it was an odd choice. Roberts also brought up Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian Jew who owns OnlyFans. Boo to him … but is anybody blaming Ukrainians as pornographers too? Recall that the most successful mainstream pornographer of our time was one Hugh Hefner, raised in a strict Methodist family.

My point is not to brush aside criticism of Jews in the pornography business. I think everybody involved in the porn business deserves maximal condemnation! If I were dictator, they would be in jail. My point is that if you single out Jews as particularly responsible for porn, you might want to check your motivations.

It is undeniable that Jews hold most of the big jobs in Hollywood. Back in 2008, the Jewish satirist Joel Stein wrote a funny piece about Jews controlling Hollywood. What was funny about it was that Stein was making comedy out of something that is obviously true, but that the ADL had made taboo to say. The ADL freaked out about it, and accused Stein of feeding anti-Semitism. But come on, it’s true!

The beloved conservative writer and actor Ben Stein, a Jew, once wrote a piece saying that Hollywood is too sprawling to say that anybody “controls” it, but that it is undeniably the case that Jews dominate the film industry … because they built it from scratch! Why were Jews so dominant in the pre-Hollywood entertainment industry (e.g., Vaudeville)? Because that line of work back then was considered too vulgar for proper Christians to do. And it turns out that Jews were really good at producing movies — including all those Golden Age of Hollywood movies that defined the classic American narrative we all cherish. Stein wrote:

I marvel that when people criticize the auto industry for making trucks that catch fire when they are struck and cars that turn over on a turn, no one ever says “the gentile auto industry.” No one calls the pharmaceutical industry sinister or attacks it as alien even though it turns out a lot of pills that addict people. As far as I can recall, Hollywood, and only Hollywood, gets the treatment as being somehow sinister and alien. Other industries are bad--like big tobacco--but only Hollywood is un-American, even though its product kills a lot fewer Americans.

Black folks overwhelmingly dominate US football and basketball. So what? They’re disproportionately good at what they do. Same with jazz, back in the day. Why should we care?

Well, I can think of a reason. If a particular ethnic or religious group gained domination in a profession or field of endeavor, and used that domination to keep people not of that group from participating in it, even if those outgroup members had the skills and qualifications to do so, then yeah, it’s a problem. I believe whites have cause to complain about how the deck has been stacked against them in this way by liberals and progressives who believe it is just to disadvantage individual whites, for the cause of making up for past historical discrimination. If you think white people, or people of any color or religion, are going to accept that forever, you’re an idiot.

I don’t think it’s unfair or inaccurate to note that more than a few liberal secular Jews were happy to promote “affirmative action,” “DEI,” or whatever this anti-white racism was called. But lo, when all of a sudden they got coded as “white” by the Left, to justify discriminating against them, some of them understood then how unfair and socially destructive this kind of thing is.

Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that it wasn’t “the Jews” who created affirmative action, DEI, and all the other programs that systematically excluded whites, especially white men. Some Jews did, for sure, but most of those architects of injustice and enforcers of same were white liberal Gentiles. And on the conservative side, some of the most intellectually powerful and articulate critics of this were neoconservative Jewish intellectuals.

The world is a lot more complicated than haters would like to believe. It is our moral responsibility to resist the easy answers.

In one Washington conversation, a Zoomercon observed that Jews were massively overrepresented in the communist movements in Russia and Europe. This is an undeniable historical fact. But why? In my view, this had a lot to do with the same reason so many Fuentes-sympathetic Zoomercons want to tear down the current system: because it shat on them, and foreclosed the possibility of a good life.

Under Tsarist government, for example, Jews were mercilessly persecuted — a persecution blessed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Younger, secularized Jews of late 19th century and early 20th century Russia saw atheistic communism as the only way they were going to get a fair shake, and stop the pogroms. They were fools, as history later showed, especially after Stalin reverted to standard Russian nativism and anti-Semitism. But they didn’t know that at the time. Moreover, the secular messianism of communism gave the young Jews who had rejected their ancestral religion something to hope for.

My point is that Jewish enthusiasm for communism came from somewhere. I’ve told the story here before about how an Orthodox Christian with whom I dined in Moscow challenged me after I said at his dinner table how I had no idea why the Russian people ever believed in what the Bolsheviks offered. He replied with a short history of hundreds of years of the aristocracy grinding the Russian poor, with the blessing of the Church hierarchy. The man’s point was that the (Christian!) masses were wrong to embrace the Bolsheviks at first, but the Bolsheviks offered them hope that they were finally going to get the aristocracy’s boot off their collective neck.

The Russian-American historian Yuri Slezkine, who is part Jewish, has written extensively on why Jewish intellectuals were a big part of the communist movements in Europe and Russia. I hauled out my copy of his doorstop tome The House Of Government to research, then realized that God hath given us Grok for such tasks. It summarizes Slezkine’s research on the topic, most of which appears in his 2004 book The Jewish Century, thus:

Communism, as embodied by the Bolshevik Revolution, appealed strongly to Russian Jews for several interconnected reasons:

Promise of Radical Equality and Inclusion: The Bolsheviks explicitly rejected antisemitism, abolished Tsarist restrictions on Jews (e.g., the Pale, university quotas), and promoted full emancipation. This contrasted sharply with the pogrom-ridden Tsarist regime and the White forces during the Civil War, who often targeted Jews. Communism offered a universalist ideology that transcended ethnic and national divisions, allowing Jews to escape perpetual outsider status.

Alignment with Mercurian Skills: Bolshevik rule rewarded precisely the traits Jews had cultivated: literacy, verbal acuity, professional expertise, and urban adaptability. Jews flooded into cities like Moscow and Petrograd after 1917, dominating fields like administration, education, medicine, journalism, and security apparatuses (e.g., the Cheka/NKVD had high Jewish representation in its early years). Slezkine notes that Jews became the most “modern” group in a modernizing state, overrepresented in the Soviet elite because communism dismantled barriers that had previously excluded them from power.

mosaicmagazine.com

Intellectual and Messianic Resonance: Many secular Jews, alienated from traditional Judaism but steeped in prophetic traditions of justice and redemption, saw Marxism as a secular messianism—a millenarian faith promising the end of exploitation and the arrival of a classless utopia. Slezkine compares Bolshevism to a religion, with Lenin as a prophet figure resolving the “accursed questions” that tormented Russian (and especially Jewish) intellectuals. For young, urbanized Jews in the revolutionary intelligentsia, communism provided purpose, community, and a path to belonging in a russifying yet universalist state.

Here’s what Slezkine means by his coinage “Mercurian”:

Yuri Slezkine, in his book The Jewish Century (2004), argues that the 20th century was fundamentally “the Jewish Century” because modernity involves the world becoming more like the Jews—urban, literate, mobile, intellectually agile, and occupationally flexible. He frames Jews historically as a quintessential “Mercurian” people: nomadic service providers (traders, intellectuals, professionals) living among “Apollonian” food-producing majorities (settled agrarian societies). In pre-modern Europe, Jews were outsiders specialized in Mercurian roles due to restrictions on land ownership and guild membership, which honed skills in literacy, argumentation, and adaptability.

So, the skills that Gentile culture forced Jews to develop by excluding them from society gave them what it took to prosper under modern conditions. In other words, our distant ancestors made them what they are … and today, some of us wish to punish the Jews for it. Put another way, the way our ancestors made them live made Jews especially adaptable to the modern world. You well know that I have a lot of complaints about the liquidity of modernity, but the Jews didn’t force this on us. If anything, Enlightenment philosophers, French revolutionaries, and early industrialists were its chief architects.

Growing up in a small Southern town in the 1970s, there were no Jews, and I never heard a whiff of anti-Semitism … until I found myself in a conversation with some old men of the town, and asked about Julius Freyhan High School. That was the school built in 1912 through the generosity of a successful Jewish merchant of our town. It educated two generations of local folks. The Jews were very good to our town.

In the only time I ever heard an anti-Semitic remark growing up, one of the geezers said, “When times got hard around here in the Depression, the Jews up and left, like rats leaving a sinking ship.” I pointed out to him that all the local Jews were merchants, and those that hadn’t been wiped out by the 1927 flood were wrecked by the Depression. They had to move to where they could make a living (New Orleans, primarily). I remember the old fellow could not make sense of what I was saying. He had been educated in a high school given to the town by a rich Jew! People, man.

Anyway, you can extrapolate from Jewish enthusiasm for communism in Eastern Europe and Russia to their tendency to be enthusiasts for liberalism in America. Remember, it wasn’t until the 1960s or thereabouts that universities and other WASP-dominated institutions began dropping quotas designed to limit or keep out Jews. Why wouldn’t they want to advocate for a more liberal social order, one that didn’t oppress them?

On the Right, many of us gripe about the neoconservatives, the leading intellectuals of whom were Jewish. But we forget that neoconservatism simply was conservatism in the Reagan era. Pat Buchanan was famously not a neocon, but his protest wasn’t so much against right-wing Jews as it was the right-wing mainstream, which was a conservatism that had made peace with post-WW2 modernity.

About Israel, as you know I support Israel, but I also agree that criticism of the Israeli government does not logically imply anti-Semitism. Still, it’s rare, in my experience, to talk at length with people of the Left or the Right who have strong criticism of the Israeli government, who don’t elide it pretty easily into noxious views of Jews as Jews. That has been my experience, anyway. One thing that chaps my backside is the double standard lots of Israel critics have for the Jewish state, versus other countries. Any reasonable country in the world who had suffered what Israel did on 10/7, and who faced a religiously fanatical enemy next door whose founding document (the Hamas Charter) explicitly sacralizes the elimination of the Jewish state, would have done what the Israelis did. For us, it’s theoretical; for them, it’s existential.

But then, modern Western people simply don’t understand how pre-modern people think. They simply cannot take Muslims seriously when they talk of jihad — even though this has always been the Islamic way of war. Eating dinner at a bar in Washington on Saturday night, I sat next to a European journalist (I won’t identify his country, to err on the side of protecting him) who has been living in self-imposed exile in the US for some years. He had to flee his native country because his reporting on jihadism earned him multiple death threats. He told me he used to be a standard liberal, but his brutal experience with how liberals in his country, especially his colleagues in the media, refused to take his reporting seriously. They considered him Islamophobic, and a disturber of the peace. Some of the homegrown jihadis he wrote about subsequently carried out one of the most horrific jihad attacks in modern Europe history.

He told me that he could probably go back to Europe safely now, because most of the jihadis who had issued death threats to him had been killed fighting for ISIS in Syria. Still, he’s afraid, and he has a right to be. He too believes that civil war is coming to Europe. He also believes that the governing classes, in both public and private institutions, will not allow themselves to see it, because it violates the way they prefer to see the world. I brought up the French writer Renaud Camus, and how he had been cast out of polite French society. The journalist knew about him, and said yes, this is the kind of thing he experienced too, simply for trying to warn his countrymen what was living among them, and what was to come. (After dinner, I googled this man, and he was exactly who he said he was.)

But see, the Jews are our real problem, right? Come on.

Here in Europe, it’s not Jews that make public life in so many European big cities unbearable. In fact, they were the first ones to experience the special pleasure of Islamic harassment and persecution — an experience that is now far more general. They were the canaries in the coal mine. They so often are. Now some European towns are having to cancel their traditional Christmas markets, because the cost of providing security to stop Muslims from attacking them violently is too great. Check this video out — a Muslim mob marches through a Christmas market in a show of cultural strength. No European Jew ever attacked a Christmas market, or tried to ruin it for others.

In the 1940s, the Germans and their collaborators murdered the bulk of European Jewry, and sent many of those who survived into exile. There aren’t many Jews left in Europe today. After the war, the Christian leaders of postwar Europe brought in millions and millions of Muslims. And now the continent is headed toward an eventual civil war because of it. Last week, French police arrested three young Muslim women who were allegedly planning a terror attack on the anniversary of the jihadi Bataclan massacre. But please, let’s talk about the Jews instead.

OK, enough about The Jews here. I’m running out of space, and I’m very tired from the traveling and the meetings. The main points I want to leave you with, based on what I saw and heard in Washington, are these:

The Groyper thing is real. It is not a fringe movement, in that it really has infiltrated young conservative Washington networks to a significant degree.

Irrational hatred of Jews (and other races, but especially Jews) is a central core of it. This is evil. If postliberal conservatism requires making peace with antisemitism and race hatred, count me out.

It cannot be negotiated with, because it doesn’t have traditional demands. It wants to burn the whole system down. It really does.

At the same time, the gatekeepers of the Right aren’t going to be able to make it go away, because they have less power than ever. Dealing with this is going to require great skill and subtlety, and courage.

This malign movement didn’t just appear from nowhere. There are within it legitimate grievances. And, as I keep saying, it emerged in a culture that, per Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis, is primed to believe totalitarian things.

The Left got there first. This is not a case of “whatabout”; for almost two decades, left-wing radicals have marched through institutions and imposed illiberal, race-based leftist policies that openly intended to discriminate against whites, males, and anybody who dissented. You cannot understand the rise of the Groypers without understanding this first.

Conservatives like me had hoped that Trump’s anti-woke pushback would simply restore the meritocratic status quo. It turns out that the Zoomercons don’t want that. They want revenge.

This has the potential to destroy conservatism politically. In actual existing America, a white nationalist party that demonizes non-whites who would otherwise be drawn to a conservative message will alienate those voters. Even if all whites voted for the white nationalist party, it still wouldn’t win. But very many whites, including white Christians, will want nothing to do with it.

It also poses the risk of wrecking the new, post-MAGA conservatism, whose natural heir is JD Vance. There will be old-school normie conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz who will do their best to hang Fuentes and Jew-hatred around JD Vance’s neck. There are enough living Boomers and normie Republicans who would rather vote for a suboptimal candidate like Cruz than take their chances with a candidate who, fair or not, has been tarred with the evil of anti-Semitism and race hatred via Fuentes and Carlson.

Anti-Semitism is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation. They’re getting it through online influencers, but apparently their pastors and parents are either not fighting back, or have lost authority in the minds of these young people. This is irrational. For example, I heard from a number of Zoomercon Christians that Zoomer trad Catholics are making antisemitism part of their spirituality — this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church explicitly condemns it. The same phenomenon, I am hearing, exists among Zoomercon Orthodox and Protestants. Putting aside politics, this is total spiritual poison.

I anticipate that the liberal media is going to have a field day with this, in part to distract from the ugly fact that antisemitism is triumphant among Zoomer progressives, and that the new face of the Democratic Party is Zohran Mamdani, a woke young Millennial who has made a career of intense hostility to Israel, bordering on anti-Semitism, if not actual anti-Semitism (I believe he is anti-Semitic, but it’s arguable.)

Conservatives — Jewish, Christian, and agnostic — who support Israel are going to have to think very hard about how to proceed. Support for Israel has collapsed among the young, and it’s not coming back anytime soon. This is the political reality we have to deal with. We can’t wish it away, or cancel it away.

The intra-conservative fight is here, and we can’t avoid it. Nor should we, for the sake of party unity. In The House Of Government, Yuri Slezkine said that the willingness of parents to indulge their radical children played a significant role in the eventual triumph of Bolshevism. Some of these parents comforted themselves with the thought that their adult kids would grow out of their revolutionary fervor. Others may have hated what their kids believed, but didn’t want to risk alienating them, so they stayed quiet, and passively supported them, hoping for the best. VP Vance said publicly last week that this conservative “infighting” is a pointless distraction. I told him personally, and respectfully, in a meeting last Friday that I disagree, and why. And I told him why I think all this is a direct threat to his political future. I stand with Gerard Baker of the WSJ:

This is why Mr. Vance’s breezy dismissal of the struggle to extirpate extremists from the right-wing coalition as “infighting” is a mistake. What he belittles as intramural squabbling is the difficult and necessary work of moral and political hygiene for the conservative movement—and the country. What we saw at Heritage last week wasn’t some distraction from more important work. It was the latest episode in the struggle of good against evil.

I started writing this piece on the flight back, set it down to take a short nap when I arrived back home in Budapest at 11am … then woke up eight hours later. Now I think I’m going to go back to bed. At my advanced age, transatlantic flights take a long time from which to recover. I’ll be back with y’all in the morning. Dark days ahead for all of us, I’m afraid.

How strange it was to be in Washington, a city I loved when I lived there from 1992-95, but that now feels like a charmless hive of scum and villainy. I hate the kind of people who reflexively and thoughtlessly condemn Washington, but I wish I liked it more than I do. It’s not just its ugliness (minus Georgetown); that’s always been there. For me, I think it’s having lost a sense that Washington is a place where noble and idealistic things can happen. It has never been Pericles’ Athens, granted, but it just seems so dispiriting now, the capital of a powerful nation but a declining one.

Is it just me? You been to Washington lately? The smell of pot smoke everywhere, the ranting, mentally ill, homeless people all over. It’s hard to take pride in that.

Still, this was fun, and I’m glad the VP invited me over. Usha, by the way, just glows with grace and interior light. When I was escorted in at the residence on the Naval Observatory grounds, the Vance family was finishing dinner at their big table. The kids were running around, and JD’s cousins from Texas were at the table, dressed like normal working-class folks. Our veep has not lost touch with where he comes from. I like that. I like that a lot.