Did You Not See What I Saw?

I saw children murdered. Their blood pooled around them. Their brains on a wall.

I saw a woman with a bullet in her head and her body destroyed from gang rape.

I saw families murdered.

I saw grandparents murdered.

I saw body parts and brains spilled out on the floor. I saw blood everywhere.

That actually happened. It was not a dream. It was not a lie.

There was peace. Then there was war on October 7, 2023.

I know the Vice President of the United States was repulsed by this. I know Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation was repulsed by this. But I also know that after it happened, Tucker Carlson suggested Hamas had been mischaracterized and really was not a terrorist organization. I know Nick Fuentes joked about the barbarism. I know Tucker Carlson has elevated and attempted to normalize people sympathetic to Hitler’s case for World War II. I know a progressive trans-activist murdered Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes mocked Kirk’s death and blamed the Jews. So did others in Tucker Carlson’s orbit. Only a short time after a trans activist locked children in a church to gun them down and a trans activist murdered Kirk, suddenly some loud voices on the right, including Fuentes, were blaming Jews instead.

I also know what Kevin Roberts, J.D. Vance, and others are doing as they dance around some of these guys. They want to attract young zoomers to their side, many of them male, and they think the way to do that is to punch back hard at critics, refuse to fold to criticism, and show a high tolerance for inflammatory positions that rile up the left. If they have to accommodate a few closeted gay guys with a Nazi fetish who blame the Jews for everything, they’ll do it and reason that, once they win, they can clean up. But they want to win first.

That is, of course, exactly what the Left did with the transgender militants. They canceled dissent. They used cultural forces to punch back hard. They allowed inflammatory positions that riled the right and the Christians. And they thought they won, until the whole thing collapsed in on itself because it turns out it is hard to police the Chase Strangios of the world once you put them in power.

Roberts, Vance, etc. have adopted the Left’s playbook of no enemies on their side because they think the Left was successful with that strategy. It got eight years of Obama, four years of Biden, and billionaires investing in the cause, heavy emphasis on that last one.

The Vice President, when confronted by a young man in a MAGA cap, about Israel controlling Presidents, did not dispute the presupposition. He just said Trump is different. He let the presupposition that the Jews control other presidents slide.

That is moral cowardice. It’s a large language model processing what the questioner wants to hear without offending.

We saw Tucker Carlson ask tough questions of Ted Cruz. But he also gave exposure to an amateur historian who thinks Hitler was the victim in World War II and Winston Churchill was the monster.

And now Tucker has put on Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist who denies the Holocaust and mocks Jews and Charlie Kirk, and Carlson pulled every punch, allowing Fuentes to moderate his image. Ted Cruz was the monster and the white supremacist who blamed the Mossad for the gay porn that appeared on his internet feed was normalized. Tucker could blast Cruz for not knowing the population of Iran, but never even challenged Fuentes’s praise for Joseph Stalin.

I don’t care who Tucker Carlson has on his program. He bragged about Russia and how awesome it is. He put on the Hitler apologist. He said, not suggested, but said, “I’m not even sure Hamas is actually a radical jihad organization. It seems more like a political organization.”

Ghazi Hamad, Hamas’s leader, said, “We will repeat October 7-like massacres until Israel is annihilated.”

Tucker Carlson can put on anyone he wants, but when 60 Minutes puts on Vladimir Putin, they ask him about the oppression of his people, and when they put on Hugh Chavez, they confronted him with his regime’s murders. Carlson couldn’t muster even a dose of real concern about Fuentes’s accusations about Jews. I think when you decide to interview a pretty nefarious person with a history of, just as one example, Holocaust denial, you might want to push him at least as aggressively as you did a United States Senator who didn’t know the population of Iran.

What the hell is wrong with these people?

I don’t care that the Heritage Foundation is sponsoring a man normalizing white supremacists and downplaying a terrorist organization that killed Americans. It is the Heritage Foundation’s money, most of the organization’s donors are actually dead, and they can do with their money as they will.

But to have the President of the Heritage Foundation attack Tucker Carlson’s critics as a “globalist class” and then tear down straw men without grappling with the problem is actually a real problem. Kevin Roberts could have said nothing at all. But he chose to speak and wave away any criticism about what Carlson is doing.

More richly, you and I know damned well if Tucker Carlson had on Lia Thomas and didn’t push him on how fair it is for him to compete against women, Kevin Roberts, and all the voices on the right giving Carlson a pass would be vocally upset. Except Carlson wouldn’t put on Lia Thomas and try to normalize him. Carlson, instead, hosts Nazi apologists and tries to normalize them, and his friends give him a pass. His choice of interview and his questions are editorial choices designed to advance a narrative his friends are comfortable with.

And I want to be very, very clear here. This line Kevin Roberts chose to use in his video has been used, in similar forms and phrasing, by the antisemites at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Harvard, and by the Democratic Socialists of America, who cheered on the murderer who gunned down two Israeli Embassy staffers in Washington, D.C. The antisemites of the left and right — not the anti-Zionists or the critics of Israel, but the Hamas supporting, laughing at the murdered Israelis, voices of the left and right have used this line:

“Conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

The accusation of “reflexive support of any foreign government” is a signature line of attack from Hamasniks on the Left, and it just got regurgitated by the President of the Heritage Foundation.

Kevin Roberts could have chosen to criticize Carlson as a friend. Kevin could have chosen silence. Instead, he picked the worst possible option of dismissing very legitimate criticism and did so in the most straw-man possible way. And he chose to refashion a line of attack from the Hamasniks of the Left to use against critics from the right of Tucker Carlson for softballing an interview with a denier of the Holocaust. Again, Kevin and Heritage have stopped playing a policy game and are playing a political coalition game. They want the bro zoomers and think they have to show a high tolerance for assholery that they can clean up later.

We have leaders on the right who are dancing around the antisemites because they fear a coalition collapse without them and believe they cannot alienate the rightwing antisemites in their fight with the left.

We were told in 2016 that the right must unite for Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton. Now we’re told we have to unite with the Neo-Nazis? We can clean it up later, supposedly. To hell with that.

This is not leadership. It is followership — captured by an audience and afraid to speak the truth. The President of the Heritage Foundation could have said nothing. Instead, he had to follow the herd to lead the herd.

Ironically, too, by putting out that video, Kevin Roberts distracted from so much unity on the right over the Arctic Frost investigation and the government shutdown. You had much of the right all focused together on those, and Kevin, like Joe Biden used to do, entered the chat and caused an incredibly politically hamfisted distraction.

There are young men in Washington who have convinced themselves that Israel is our puppet master. Some Christian activists are convinced “Christian Zionists” are a menace. They are getting their ideas from Heritage-sponsored content, and the leaders of the nation, including our Vice President, are too afraid of offending evil and poisonous ideas to confront them because they think they can build a coalition and clean it up later.

I know conservatives in D.C. who orbit each other, and they just can’t take a leadership position to call out this stuff. They blast the “D.C. cocktail circuit” and don’t realize they are in one themselves. They don’t want to risk friendships in the small town vibes. They don’t want to challenge those radicalizing with fringe views because they see them every day. They are in group chats together. The conservative movement ghettoized itself, and they don’t want to rock the boat because the ghetto is small, and it would be uncomfortable to cause division. So they settle for complacency, justification, defense, and excuse. After all, they’ll see that guy tomorrow night.

A group of mostly conservative men in Washington who long fought Mitch McConnell and the “Establishment” has become what they loathed and do not even see it or realize it. The old Establishment let in the closeted, the lobbyists, and the rich protected interests. The new Establishment lets in the Qataris, the closeted, and the Neo-Nazis. The movement that killed the earmarks is now the mark for a group that, like a cuckoo, will push them all out once sufficiently warm and hatched.

These people are Swifties too afraid to say the new album sucks because they would lose their own identity.

Again, it is not leadership. It is letting the herd steer you — a hyper online herd steered, in large part, by the paid Twitterati of Pakistan who masquerade as American concern trolls. It is an influence operation that has influenced the President of the Heritage Foundation and the Vice President of the United States.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel. There was peace. Then there was war. And ever since, social media influencers have attempted to poison the right against Israel, to weaken our alliance with Israel.

It is great for Kevin Roberts to condemn antisemitism. God bless him for it. But he is also funding and promoting it and attacking those who raise the alarm as “globalists.”

It’s not globalism, but decency, to denounce those who’d serve as apologists for Hitler and Hamas. It is not an assault on free speech, but the elevation of morality and character to turn away from normalizing this stuff. And, frankly, it is being a friend to say this level of toying with the antisemites is harmful.

It’s great for J.D. Vance to tell a man that Donald Trump is not in Israel’s pocket. But no President has been in Israel’s pocket, and the mind virus infecting that young man could have been eradicated if the Vice President had shown some leadership and love.

I support Israel not because of globalism or because of Christian Zionism. I do not support Israel reflexively, but with knowledge of an area in which I grew up.

I support Israel because it is the only Democracy in the Middle East, is surrounded by regimes that hate you and me and our nation, and when it could have sided with the Soviets in the Cold War, it chose us, putting itself at greater risk. We have been allies, and we should be allies. They are our friends. Hamas murders our citizens and theirs.

The President of the Heritage Foundation and the President of Queers For Palestine sharing talking points is offensive and bizarre. But here we are.

This idea of “no enemies to the right of me” will eventually get people on the right killed.

I am reminded of Iran in 1979. Progressive, Soviet sympathetic Iranians cheered on and helped the Ayatollah’s return. Within a year, 30,000 of them were dead at the hands of the Ayatollah. There were no enemies to the left of them until it was too late.

Students of history need to understand that if you do not police your side, evil will creep in and take advantage of that. It is happening now on the right, enabled by the voices of men entrusted with leadership, who instead have decided to be led by others.

How can you look at college campuses and the Middle East, see the festering antisemitism of the left, and think you can control it on the right? Lip service condemnations will not stop what is festering, and it will come for you.

Bill Kristol, yesterday, endorsed Zohran Mamdani for Mayor in New York — a man who claimed the boots of the NYPD were laced up by the IDF. There are no enemies to Bill Kristol’s left anymore. None of us should be like him.

In 1979, two Iranian socialist activists cheered on the return of the Ayatollah and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. They argued, at the time, that they must be united with the Islamists who promised prosperity for all and an end to corruption. They argued they must set aside their differences with the Islamists to beat the Shah. Within a year, the Ayatollah had murdered the girl on the right. The girl on the left is now an old woman in Sweden, having fled for her life, never to return after the slaughter of her family.

But there were no enemies on their side, only on the other side, until it was too late.