The Weirdo Right

The Revisionist Right rears its ugly head against the memory of Churchill. Plus, the election draws nearer.

By the time you read this, the debate will have happened last night. Given our filing deadline, the debate is still in the future as I am writing this. I could write up some pre-debate commentary and predictions, but by the time you read them, any predictions I make would already be obsolete. Instead, I’m choosing to counterprogram, to focus on last week’s punditry topic while ignoring the debate. I’ll have something to say about the debate next week, after it has become old news.

The Weirdo Right

The Harris campaign has been making pains to brand Donald Trump and J.D. Vance as “weird.” For their part, Trump and Vance have been doing their best to make the Harris campaign’s case for them.

Last week, three developments converged to make for one weird week for American right-wingers. First, we that Tenet Media, which hired Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and other influencers to create anti-Ukraine videos (something they were already doing) was funded by… RT (formerly Russia Today), a propaganda arm of the Russian government.

Rubin and Pool were being offered $400,000 a month for four videos. Well! They say one should never look a gift horse in the mouth, but only a fool would believe free lunches like this one just lie around waiting to be eaten. Each of these influencers was taken for a ride. As far as we know, they are sincere in their protests that they had no idea who was paying them. But for folks who claim they like to ask hard questions, their innocence betrays deep and pervading gullibility.

What does this say about the broader anti-Ukraine right? Nothing good. I don’t think all of the anti-Ukraine sentiment on the right is created by Russian propaganda. Nor does all of it stem from Donald Trump’s “perfect call” with Volodymyr Zelensky, or Hunter Biden’s deal with Burisma, or the Russia collusion narrative from 2016. It doesn’t even all come from a belief that the enemy of our enemy is our friend, and therefore whatever the Democrats are for, the Republicans have to be against.

But a lot of it does come from those sources. Yes, there is propaganda out there. The left has a great deal of blindness toward the propaganda coming from Iran, Hamas, China, the Taliban, and various militant groups throughout the developing world. On the right, there’s a great deal of blindness towards propaganda coming from Russia. Tenet Media is probably only the tip of the iceberg.

Much of the anti-American, anti-West propaganda coming from Iran and Russia is obvious and not well hidden. It doesn’t have to be. As with any successful con, the marks want to be conned. The anti-Americanism comes first, and the willingness to fall for our enemies’ propaganda comes second. It was true when our enemy was the Soviet Union. It was true when our enemy was Nazi Germany. And it is true today. Some people look for a reason to hate America and the West. They will latch onto any reason at hand.

This brings me to the second weird development on the right last week: Tucker Carlson’s interview with Darryl Cooper. If we were being charitable toward Cooper, we might describe him as a contrarian and a crank. If we weren’t, we would describe him as a Holocaust denier. Contrarianism isn’t created equal, and some unanimous opinion is worth keeping unanimous. Tucker’s schtick is that he’s dark and edgy, willing to interview “the people the mainstream media don’t want you to listen to.” He especially likes to “explain” how popular villains are merely misunderstood. Putin. Orban. Erdogan. Sauron.

Just kidding about that last one.

His latest is Adolf Hitler. According to his guest, the real supervillain of World War II was Winston Churchill. If you were rooting for the Nazis to win, this is true. For the rest of us, Churchill is the great hero of the Second World War.

Not all revisionist WWII historians who sound oddly sympathetic to Hitler are closet Nazi sympathizers. But a lot of them are.^[1]

The problem with anti-American contrarianism is that it’s like a drug. The first forbidden high is elating and euphoric. Ever after, one needs greater doses to get the same rebellious feeling. That’s a dangerous path, a path that can only lead to darker and darker places in a constant quest for greater edginess. Tucker seems to have gone all the way.

One of my problems with paleoconservatism has long been that its antiwar schtick so often moves into anti-Americanism. Interestingly, while many pacifists are moral objectors, there’s a surprising amount of anti-patriotism among antiwar movements throughout history, including in other countries. One sad through-line in much of paleoconservatism has been a sick fascination with America’s enemies, sometimes bordering on rooting for the other team. Tucker hails from that wing of the conservative movement, and he isn’t the first to revisit World War II. Soon enough, no doubt, he will be on to the Civil War, telling us that Lincoln was the greatest villain of the nineteenth century (the unstated subtext being that Lincoln’s greatest crime was ending the South’s “peculiar institution”).^[2]

Speaking of anti-Ukraine sentiment and paleoconservatism, the final development of the week came from J.D. Vance. Vance was asked about Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, and he offered up this:

“This is a person whose entire career has been about sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts and her ridiculous ideas that somehow we were going to turn Afghanistan, a country that doesn’t even have running water in a lot of places, into a thriving liberal democracy, and for that, Liz Cheney was willing to kill thousands of your children. Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney make very, very interesting partners. They get rich when America’s sons and daughters go off to die. They get rich when America loses wars instead of winning wars. And they get rich when America gets weaker in the world.”

Let’s be clear. Vance is regurgitating a vulgar Marxist lie repeated on much of the American left during the Bush years, that Dick Cheney got us into the Iraq War so that Haliburton would make money. Since Vance knows his audience won’t know the difference, he claims that Liz Cheney profited off of the wars in the Middle East, and that Liz – who wasn’t in Congress until 2017 – sent American troops to die so that she could make money.

On economics, Vance is to the left of Elizabeth Warren. On foreign policy, he’s fully committed to the paleoconservative project of remaking the American right in the image of the oikophobic, anti-anticommunist left. Every chance he gets, Vance reminds fusionist, Reaganite voters that we are unwelcome in the Republican Party. Very well, then. We will not vote for him. If he and Trump lose, they should blame themselves for intentionally shrinking the Republican coalition while courting the infinitesimal chud vote.^[3]

Vance had more positive things to say about Tucker Carlson this week than the Cheney family. Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney came out with a statement endorsing Harris in response to Vance.

As he should have. Loyalty to his daughter trumps all other considerations at a moment like this, and when offered insults to his family’s honor, the right thing for Dick Cheney to do was to stand by Liz’s position. And if his endorsement helps ensure Vance’s ticket loses, Cheney will have had the last laugh.

What This Means for Punditry

In a close race, each party needs all the votes it can get, especially from people on its side of the aisle. Vance and Trump appear to be doing their best to give right-wingers a reason not to vote for them. If they lose, it will be their own fault. Harris is a weak candidate, but she is running a good campaign. A DeSantis or Haley ticket might be beating her handily right now.

More broadly, both sides need to police their weirdos. The Democrats should go all in with John Fetterman against the Iran-propaganda-pushing Hamasniks. And the Republicans need to do to the alt-right what William F. Buckley Jr. did to the Birchers.^[4]

Both sides are suffering from the “no enemies to my right” (for the Democrats, this is “no enemies to my left”) fallacy.^[5] Because the other side is so toxic that victory must be won at any cost, the fallacy goes, there needs to be an alliance between everyone on “our side.”

The problem with this is that in a coalition of warring factions united only by hatred of the other side, the principles and ideas your side champions will grow diluted and muddied. There isn’t much in common between Reaganites on the one hand and Churchill-hating, neo-Nazi, “Third Position,” pagans who despise capitalism, America, Christianity, traditional marriage, sexual restraint, and pro-lifers.^[6] Nor is there really much in common between those of us who are rightists on economics (capitalism), foreign policy (pro-American, pro-West hawkishness), and social issues, and those individuals who are culturally conservative, but far-left on economics and foreign policy.

In a way, Vance is policing his side. He wants to get rid of those of us who believe in free markets and who take our own country’s side in wars. If he and Trump lose in November because Reaganites stay home, we may see a brutal fight on the right for the soul of American conservatism and the Republican Party. We can expect that Trump and Vance will blame “disloyal Republicans” for their loss and we will blame them. Reaganite, fusionist conservatives shouldn’t shrink from this fight. We should welcome it. If the Republican Party is to be a conservative party again, it will only happen when Reaganites have retaken it from the “anti-establishment” trolls (the weirdos) – however long that takes.

Coda

If Harris loses, Democrats may point to the existence of Tenet Media as evidence that Russia threw the election to Trump. As with 2016, this will be silly. Tim Pool and Dave Rubin lying about Ukraine being America’s number one geopolitical enemy (or whatever) will not win the election for Donald Trump. Russia did not win the election for Trump in 2016 by posting Facebook memes of a bare-chested, muscle-bound Jesus Christ arm-wrestling Hillary Clinton. Russian efforts are not able to successfully sway American elections.

But they are successfully able to muddy the waters, to cause us to doubt our own side, to cause ordinary people to struggle to know the truth. They have successfully influenced American sentiment towards the war in Ukraine in a negative fashion. This is their true goal, not stealing elections. And sadly, at this goal, they are successful.

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712

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[1] I will leave readers to come to their own conclusions about whether a man who unironically referred to the Germans trying to find an “acceptable solution to the Jewish problem” sympathizes with the Nazis. 

[2] The left loves to castigate the right for being the home of Nazis and neo-Confederates. In many ways, neither National Socialism, nor nostalgia for a centrally-planned society based on chattel slavery are natural fits with much of the rest of the American right. However, because the left (after a long time) eventually drove fascists and segregationists out – and because the right is defined more by opposition to the left than by unifying principles of its own – such people have taken up residence in strange corners of the right. However, make no mistake. They hate the mainstream right at least as much (or more) than they hate the left.

[3] For the uninitiated, chud refers to “cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller,” a reference to the 1984 movie. It’s typically used to refer to basement-dwelling members of the alt-right. Vance isn’t stupid. He is courting this vote intentionally, and it indicates how little he respects the base of the Republican Party that he assumes he and Trump are better off getting the closet white nationalist voter than the reliable Reaganite voter.

[4] For that matter, large chunks of the alt-right (and adjacent to them, the dissident right) are more noxious than the John Birch Society, which was mostly filled with garden-variety conspiracy-theorists, not neo-Nazis and Russia-stooges.

[5] If anything, the center-left is doing a better job policing its side than the center-right – a statement which wasn’t true in 2020 but became true during the last three years.

[6] That isn’t a random list. These are objects of derision in the neo-Nazi, pagan alt-right.