Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and the Right’s ‘Groyper’ Problem

Is this the future of MAGA? Tucker Carlson’s interview with the white nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes has caused a firestorm on the right. Carlson and Fuentes’s friendly chat about American Jews — whether they fit into this country or were loyal to Israel above all — was the kind of conversation that for decades would have been unimaginable among mainstream figures in politics. And by crossing that line, Carlson was making a statement — about the power of Fuentes’s movement and the future of MAGA. To help me think through this, I wanted to talk to the political writer John Ganz. He’s studied the roots of antisemitism on the right and has followed the evolution of MAGA closely. He’s behind the newsletter Unpopular Front and the author of “When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.” This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: “Unpopular Front” by John Ganz “Finding Neverland” by John Ganz “Groyperfication” by John Ganz Book Recommendations: Taking America Back by David Austin Walsh Furious Minds by Laura K. Field Prophets of Deceit by Norbert Guterman & Leo Lowenthal Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Ashley Braun. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:31Ezra Klein?

  If by the stroke of good fortune, or just being a normal person, you had not heard of Nick Fuentes until this month, chances are you've heard of him now. Nick Fuentes is odious and despicable.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  He's, well, I would call a racist racist.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Nick Fuentes has said a long list of very vile things.

• 0:49Ezra Klein?

  Big time. He's a booger eating, white supremacist Holocaust denier. The reason everybody's talking about Fuentes is Tucker Carlson, who is arguably at this point, the most significant media figure on the American right. Hosted Fuentes, a person he has feuded with in the past, for a very friendly two hour chat about the problem of Israel, about the problem of American Jews and whether or not they fit in this country, or their loyalties are elsewhere.

• 1:19Nick Fuentes?

  Putting aside the tribal interest for the corporate interest, that's absolutely the case. And that's the only way the country's going to stay together.

• 1:25Ezra Klein?

  Exactly. That's my concern.

• 1:27Nick Fuentes?

  And I absolutely agree with you. I would say though, that the main challenge to that, a big challenge to that, is organized Jewry in America.

• 1:36Ezra Klein?

  It was the kind of conversation you would not have heard among mainstream figures on the American right in recent decades. But something's changed. What we are watching is a very old strain of the right, vying for control of its future. This right goes back to Pat Buchanan. It goes back to Charles Lindbergh. The idea that the right should be an ethno-national coalition, which doesn't have room for immigrants, very much does not have room, maybe for Jews, that is really not comfortable with anyone who's not what they call a heritage American, who doesn't really bow at the altar of that politics

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  and the primacy of white Christians as the people controlling this country.

• 2:25Ezra Klein?

  This has been a logic and an ideology that Trump has broken into the mainstream and that is now following itself to its full expression. If you buy into this, well, it has a place it goes. And now we are seeing more figures on the American right truly going there. To talk about it, I wanted to bring on John Ganz. Ganz is sort of hard to describe. He's become a popular political theorist and historian. He writes The Great Substack Unpopular Front. He wrote the book When the Clock Broke, which is about the politics of the 1990s and Pat Buchanan and David Duke and how they prefigured Trump. But he's somebody who has been tracking these ideas and the way they are taking hold on the right and where they come from in our country very, very closely.

• 3:10Ezra Klein?

  So I wanted to hear what he thought now that they are breaking this far out into the open. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:27Ezra Klein?

  John Ganz, welcome back to the show.

• 3:29John Ganz?

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 3:30Ezra Klein?

  So let's say that blessedly, you've never heard of who Nick Fuentes is. Maybe you've just heard of him in the last few weeks.

• 3:37John Ganz?

  Right.

• 3:38Ezra Klein?

  Who is Nick Fuentes?

• 3:39John Ganz?

  Nick Fuentes, I would say, is the most popular representative of neo-Nazism in America.

• 3:47Ezra Klein?

  Expand.

• 3:48John Ganz?

  Well, by his own story, he comes from a middle-class background in the suburbs of Chicago. He became interested in political activism. He was a fervent Trump supporter. Then he ran afoul, according to him, of some gatekeepers in the conservative movement, namely Ben Shapiro, who accused him of antisemitism when he asked questions about US policy towards Israel. And then, over the years, he assembled a following of other disaffected young men. He launched two campaigns that he called the Groypa Wars to basically pressure mainstream

• 4:33John Ganz?

  conservative figures to move rightward on issues to do with race.

• 4:39John Ganz?

  With LGBTQ issues and with Israel and the subtext being there, the Jewish question, Jews.

• 4:49Ezra Klein?

  So he's not that subtext oriented compared to some people in this movement. I mean, he'll talk about an admiration for Adolf Hitler. He doesn't just talk about Israel. He talks about the Jews.

• 5:02Nick Fuentes?

  We have to go a little bit further than to say something's up with the Zionists or Israel. It's not Israel. It is the Jews. And once again, remember who is responsible for it all. The Jews. They are responsible for every war in the world. It's not even debatable at this point. Hitler was a penophile and kind of a pagan. It's like, well, he was also really fucking cool.

• 5:29Ezra Klein?

  There's something, there are figures here who it feels like they try to keep a mask on.

• 5:35John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Ezra Klein?

  And he doesn't.

• 5:37John Ganz?

  He doesn't. And I think that's a key part of his appeal. I think that his viewers find that refreshing. They find it titillating and they find it to be reflective of their politics.

• 5:50Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned the Groypers.

• 5:51John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 5:52Ezra Klein?

  What's a Groyper?

• 5:53John Ganz?

  Well, let me tell you a story of how I became, I learned what Groypers are. I was writing a piece for The New Republic about five years ago about the right. And I was learning about what were young people on the right like? What were they thinking about? How did they respond to Trump? And what was the future of conservative media and elites in the Trump era? What was going to happen with the Never Trumpers? What would conservatism look like if Trump went away? So I was looking at that. In the course of this, I kind of befriended some young right wing guys and they kept on talking about Groypers, Groypers, Groypers. And I didn't really know what it was. And then I realized that they were kind of a subculture online of trolls and kind

• 6:37John Ganz?

  of marginal figures. And they had often as their avi or their avatar profile picture, this kind of grotesque toad that looked like Pepe the Frog. And it's my understanding that this subculture is larger than Nick Fuentes and not necessarily under his control or direction, but that he speaks for them. He attempts to speak for them and to unite them into a sort of political force.

• 7:01Ezra Klein?

  But what do the Groypers believe? This is a very... Meme-heavy, online, trollish subculture that is endlessly dancing on the edge of, "Oh, aren't we just joking?" And so, pinning it down can be a little bit like trying to pin smoke.

• 7:20John Ganz?

  Right.

• 7:20Ezra Klein?

  Because you focus in on a view, a meme, it's like, "Oh, you have no sense of humor."

• 7:25John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Ezra Klein?

  But it's a classic, first you're making jokes about the gas chambers, then you're thinking about sending your enemies to them.

• 7:33John Ganz?

  It's a little difficult for people to understand because we're accustomed to thinking of politics coming from ideas, coming from intellectuals, elites, media figures that disseminate ideas. And this kind of goes in the other direction. It bubbles up from message boards, it bubbles up from memes, jokes, ironic playfulness. But basically, the text, not the subtext of all of them, is kind of a constant barrage of propaganda that's antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, you name it. And also, a lot of content that is conspiratorial, obviously, that sees shadowy actors running the government, and is also deeply dissatisfied with the state of America and the prospects it has for people like them.

• 8:17Ezra Klein?

  So you write this piece on, actually, you wrote a couple of pieces on the griper vocation of the Republican Party, and you wrote, quote, "Here is the thing to understand: Every single person under, say, the age of 40 on the right is exposed to extremely high levels of griper content every day in group chats, on their social media timelines, in Discord chats, etc. Griperism totally suffuses the cultural environment of the right." And this point about the people under the age of 40, this idea that there is a pretty big difference in what the 20-somethings on the right are like and what the, you know, the 50-somethings are like.

• 8:52John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 8:52Ezra Klein?

  I hear that from the right all the time.

• 8:54John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 8:55Ezra Klein?

  So, for people who do not... Have texture of that cultural environment. What do you describe it? What are they seeing? What does that cultural environment look and feel like?

• 9:04John Ganz?

  Well, I mean, just recently, there were a couple of leaks about group chats. And basically, yeah, it's an environment where there's a lot of sharing of memes and jokes and repetition of memes and joking about the Holocaust, joking about Hitler, joking about blacks and making jokes about slavery. And it's just a kind of anarchic indulgence of a very sedistic id that usually involves, you know, the humiliation of minorities or women.

• 9:34Ezra Klein?

  So a lot of the energy of this and a lot of the way it would get defended.

• 9:37John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Ezra Klein?

  Is that the right in the, you know, late 2010s, early 2020s, its big enemy was the woke mob, cancel culture, the thought police, the gatekeepers.

• 9:50John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Ezra Klein?

  And you would hear this described as joking, but a provocation about that. It is showing that you can say what the cultural enforcers don't want you to say. Richard Ananias, the sort of dissident right figure and intellectual, describes it as like the based ritual where people on the MAGA right get together and keep upping the ante to show.

• 10:14John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 10:14Ezra Klein?

  That they are not part of the establishment, they're part of this counter revolutionary force. How do you think about the interplay between whatever that was? Because I take it as there was a sort of culture that emerged in response to censoriousness. And then the movement into actual belief.

• 10:34John Ganz?

  Well, yeah, I think that that was a way that people could justify to themselves what they were seeing on an everyday level. And some people could say to themselves and to others that basically they were participating in a cultural revolt against this censorious state of affairs. And that was their interest, which was to tear down those norms and to open a space of freedom. Freedom to do what is the question? Is it just to say and do racist things? I don't know. So I think it created a structure in which, you know, these memes spread rapidly and made it so people who may have been uncomfortable with it or may have found it at variance with the way they were raised to kind of look the other way and say, you know, we are in a sense, playing around.

• 11:18Ezra Klein?

  The first thing that does, it seems to me, is you're breaking down an immune system that people have.

• 11:25John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Ezra Klein?

  And you can't extricate this, in my view, from Trump.

• 11:29John Ganz?

  No.

• 11:30Ezra Klein?

  If you have any hint left of that attachment to old norms and mores and courtesies.

• 11:39John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Ezra Klein?

  Well, then you can't be a true Trumpist because he doesn't attach to any of that.

• 11:44John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Ezra Klein?

  And so you begin demonstrating a cultural affinity to that kind of politics of provocation and politics of no rules. Once you've done that, then you actually don't have that immune system anymore. And so the question, you don't believe in the establishment and you don't believe in any norms. So how do you decide what to believe? Because you're breaking down the immune system that was supposed to protect against people like Donald Trump himself.

• 12:08John Ganz?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think your point about Trump being the originator of this is important. When Trump appears, and people seem to forget this for some reason, in 2016, 15, there was a lot of talk about the alt-right, a term that's not used very much anymore. But these people, you know, who had previously been on the fringes of American politics, greeted the arrival of Trump basically with rapture.

• 12:30Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, ecstatically.

• 12:31John Ganz?

  Ecstatically. And they knew that this was their kind of guy. They knew that the things that he said would open a space for them. If he wasn't precisely a perfect vehicle for their politics, it was a real big breakthrough. So they saw it and they said, okay, you know, this is our chance. And then we have a first wave, just after Trump is elected, where you have these people crawling out of the woodwork. You have Richard Spencer. You have the Charlottesville riots. And then there is kind of a backlash and those people seem to sort of get pushed out. There's not that much talk about alt nationalism, the alt-right anymore. And Trump also doesn't really seem to be adopting some of their preferences in foreign policy and also not,

• 13:15John Ganz?

  he makes some very tasteless remarks about Jews, but not an ideological antisemitism that they would want him to do. So this thing kind of goes on the back burner, but it's very much suffusing the culture of young right-wingers who are not, you know, They're in the intermediate and lower ranks of the various bureaucracies, the various staffs of conservative institutions. And yeah, it never really fully goes away.

• 13:41Ezra Klein?

  But then something else happens, which is that as weak as the gatekeepers are in this modern era, there are still people with keys to various gates. And by the end of Trump's first term, Trump is banned on most of the major social media platforms. Certainly, a lot of these figures are banned on them. And as Trump makes his return, and then very specifically, when Elon Musk buys Twitter, renames it X, takes off, functionally, all of the guardrails, then the ability of all this to flood into the conservative nervous system really changes. I want you to watch a clip from Tucker Carlson here that I think is interesting.

• 14:21Tucker Carlson?

  Unfortunately for the guardians of the old system, the old Republican Party, people have been allowed to describe it accurately, mostly because Elon Musk opened up X. And you know, when he did that, you get all kinds of filth and nonsense and lies, but you also get some truth, actually quite a bit of truth. And one of the main things that people are telling the truth about that they didn't tell the truth about before is that our foreign policy really doesn't have much to do with what's good for the United States. And once those words have been uttered, they can't be taken back.

• 14:51Ezra Klein?

  So Carlson here is talking about Israel. I'd say maybe he's not entirely talking about Israel, but that dynamic he's describing, that Musk taking over X is a hinge point, seems true to me. Does it track for you?

• 15:08John Ganz?

  Absolutely. I mean, all of these, these figures reemerge when they, they had been pushed out and they created a media ecosystem that is suffused with these ideas. So, first of all, yeah, there is a, you know, a lot of people online are looking for information. They're looking to understand an extremely complicated world. And they have a sense that perhaps the establishment views are either misinforming them or are just flat out boring. And then they discover a narrative about things that's more appealing, simplifying, seems persuasive.

• 15:45Ezra Klein?

  Exciting.

• 15:45John Ganz?

  Exciting. And also, it cannot be discounted that X Fuentes, in particular, is extremely entertaining. And they gravitate towards these crackpot ideas. Look.

• 15:57John Ganz?

  The United States, its support of Israel is a perfectly legitimate topic to dispute and to have differing views about and to criticize. And more and more people are coming around to that position. They saw what was happening in Gaza and they were deeply upset by it. And they look for commentary and opinion on that. And the commentary and opinion on that that they get is not what the New York Times is saying, or what the New Yorker is saying, or even left-wing outlets like The Nation or something like that. They get Nick Fuentes, they get Candace Owens, they get all these kind of crackpot views about it, which take that discussion about real-world issues and a mixture of rational

• 16:39John Ganz?

  discussion and, you know, commentary that's actually somewhat sophisticated, I would say, in Fuentes's case, and then channel that into propaganda for antisemitism. And I think it's important to realize, again, back to your question about ideas and the diffusion of ideas, that not everyone is aware that they're being propagandized, right? They are in an information environment where this is what they see and it becomes normal. And in a sense, they get captured. People love to talk about the liberal bubble, liberal elite bubble. There is an equivalent bubble of the hard right.

• 17:18John Ganz?

  So, yeah, that brings this kind of deformed version of the public sphere that must allow to happen, and I think one could argue intentionally.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  I want to get at a bit of backstory here before we get into the Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes interview. Because this is not the first time Nick Fuentes has broken through to the mainstream of conservatism. There's a very famous dinner at Mar-a-Lago, I believe, where Donald Trump is dining with Kanye West, noted antisemite, and Kanye brings Nick Fuentes.

• 17:51John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 17:52Ezra Klein?

  At the time, Trump looks like the past of the party. People think, you know, he's like on his way out, it's gonna be Ron DeSantis in 2024 or someone like that.

• 18:00John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Ezra Klein?

  And I think they also buy the idea, which Trump says afterwards, and I take as even plausible, that he doesn't really know who Nick Fuentes is. I think people buy with Trump that he talks to a lot of people. And one reason I think this is breaking through in the way it is is twofold. You don't have any of that deniability on Carlson's side.

• 18:22John Ganz?

  Right.

• 18:22Ezra Klein?

  And now, everybody understands that the future of Trumpism is up for grabs. How would you describe the role Tucker Carlson plays on the right now?

• 18:33John Ganz?

  I think that he strives to be a person of great influence in directing the policy, staffing, messaging of the Republican Party. And to a certain extent, he is, you know? He has deep ties to people in the administration.

• 18:49Ezra Klein?

  Helped get JD Vance named Vice President.

• 18:51John Ganz?

  Absolutely. I would say it is more helpful to interpret him as a politician.

• 18:57Ezra Klein?

  I agree with this.

• 18:57John Ganz?

  Yeah. I think that he basically understood the direction of the Republican Party and remade his entire image and self to fit in with it. And he has been very smart about that. And he realized the old institutions ain't what they used to be. Does it really matter that he's on Fox anymore? Apparently not very much. So his creation of a new persona really is the story of the transformation of the Republican Party.

• 19:26Ezra Klein?

  So at this point, how would you describe what Tucker Carlson's politics are? Like, what poll of right-wing ideology does he seem to hew to and represent?

• 19:39John Ganz?

  He represents a tradition that's sometimes called isolationist, which views America's entanglement with foreign alliances and interventions in other countries to not necessarily be in our interest. Not necessarily dovish, but definitely, United States should apply force when it wants, when it needs to, in its own very direct self-interest. He calls himself a Christian. I believe he represents a Christian nationalism, which is non-Zionist or anti-Zionist. Again, there are some roots in that and the old right that goes back for the pre-war. He is very hostile to immigration. He seems to have a very strong sense of white ethnic identity and thinks that, believes

• 20:22John Ganz?

  that, you know, it's a problem for the country if there are too many non-white immigrants.

• 20:26Ezra Klein?

  Forgive me if I'm misremembering this. Didn't you do an interview with, like, The Sun? Of a Ku Klux Klan member?

• 20:32John Ganz?

  Oh, my God, I'm so glad you brought that up. So I was working on a piece in 2020 about the conservative movement. And Tucker was a big part of it and his kind of transformation into a right wing populist. I got a remarkable quote from someone who was the child of Don Black, a Ku Klux Klan leader and a big figure in the white nationalist movement. The person I got the quote from, just to be clear, left the movement and was highly critical of it. But here's what they told me. "From the perspective of my family, Tucker's making the same points they've been trying to make their entire lives, but much better. He's found a wider audience and the ideal method of expression for many of the same ideas.

• 21:14John Ganz?

  My father's a little baffled still that it's Tucker Carlson, someone who he always never liked because he saw him as a shill for the Bush administration and the Iraq war, that's bringing white nationalist ideas to the Fox audience." I'm not a very experienced journalist at the time. This is the beginning of my career. I got this quote, and I brought this to my other sources for the story, who are young people on the right. And I thought I had something dispositive. I thought I had something that showed Tucker Carlson's playing around with things that you really shouldn't, that he's moving in a very disturbing direction. They shrugged. They didn't care. And I found that to be shocking and disturbing. And I think that anecdote says a lot.

• 21:58Ezra Klein?

  I also think, and I think this is very important to understanding Tucker and the role he plays, is he understands something Trump understands, but not everybody does, which is the modern right, even more than the modern left, is driven by attention. Trump has remade it around an attentional economy. And there isn't somebody behind Trump as good at attention as Trump is. J.D. Vance certainly isn't. You don't have to be the president. To be the leader of MAGA. That it is very plausible to me that you would have a JD Vance nomination, but actually the next leader of MAGA is Tucker Carlson. I think what Tucker Carlson is trying to be is the authentic voice of MAGA.

• 22:43Ezra Klein?

  Who, because he doesn't have to do all the political coalition work.

• 22:46John Ganz?

  Right.

• 22:47Ezra Klein?

  He can be purer than someone like JD Vance, who I think fundamentally agrees with Carlson at this point.

• 22:54John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Ezra Klein?

  But has to maintain or attempt to maintain viability in Michigan.

• 23:00John Ganz?

  Yeah, I think Carlson views himself in that role for sure. You know, Tucker Carlson was sort of the median conservative Republican to a certain degree. Kind of toed the party line on most issues, Iraq, American phone.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  He was on MSNBC.

• 23:13John Ganz?

  He was on MSNBC. He was also tried to present himself as a kind of reasonable.

• 23:17Ezra Klein?

  He was like a good time libertarian rich kid.

• 23:20John Ganz?

  Yeah, there's that too. And it's interesting, he takes that bow tie off. You know, there's a degree that there's costume changes here, you know? He takes the bow tie off. He now has this more folksy look, check shirts and so on and so forth in this cabin, et cetera, et cetera. He's cultivating an image of himself as down to earth and folksy and not part of the establishment. And it's, you know, it's hard to take when you realize he's the product of it. But there's something important to understand about Tucker Carlson's turn, I think, to antisemitism in particular, right? I believe that antisemitism functions as an epoxy for elites that don't really want social changes that would affect their prominence and in fact want to shore up their prominence and need mass support and need a target

• 24:05John Ganz?

  and need a story about economic dispossession, a world that doesn't seem to make sense, that serves their interests. You see this in a lot of different places. You see it in Russia, the Tsarist regime.

• 24:22John Ganz?

  Kind of invented antisemitism for this purpose. They, the protocols of elders of Zion are created in this regime of, that's feeling the pressure of a mass population that's becoming dissatisfied with it, creates antisemitism as a way to re-channel that energy. You see this in France, where you have an aristocracy, a clergy that is kind of pushed into old institutions, sees its prominence in the society losing out, it's sort of losing its world. And then it needs to find a mass politics, a way to attack its enemies. And antisemitism becomes very useful for that.

• 25:04John Ganz?

  So antisemitism always works to create a kind of coalition. There's a street gutter, crackpot antisemitism. And then you have what you could call more respectable antisemites. Charles Lindbergh, right? A person who was highly respected, respectable person, you know, a great hero to many Americans, had a racial view of the world and found antisemitic ideas persuasive.

• 25:30Ezra Klein?

  Henry Ford.

• 25:31John Ganz?

  Henry Ford. So you had these respectable antisemites and crackpot antisemites, and they're coming together, I would say is the creation of an actual antisemitic politics, right? And this interview between Fuentes and Carlson is almost textbook. You have the antisemitism of the gutter, Fuentes, and you have the antisemitism of a declining aristocracy, right? Tucker is this kind of comes from this preppy background, father was an ambassador, stepmother is Swanson, and, you know, sees an America that's not the way he wants it to be, that's declining, that doesn't look the way he looks like, that has norms that he doesn't share.

• 26:16John Ganz?

  And you have Fuentes, who comes from, you know, he didn't go to college, he dropped out of college, comes from a modest background. He is dripping with resentment to a world that he feels doesn't have a place for him in his.

• 26:27Ezra Klein?

  A self-described proud incel.

• 26:29John Ganz?

  Yeah. And also very interesting. Thing that he does not try to hide it or pretend that he is not, you know, socially maladjusted in some way, and that lends him authenticity and makes people gravitate towards it. This, this meeting with, between Tucker and Fuentes symbolizes the kind of recognition between these two groups. So, yeah, that is the, in that interview, in that moment, the most perfect encapsulation of antisemitic politics. Declining aristocracy, held down, dissatisfied kind of mob. Bringing them together and you have a kind of coalition itself.

• 27:32Ezra Klein?

  Let's get into that interview. I want to play a clip for you that almost felt to me like the heart of it.

• 27:37Nick Fuentes?

  Israel is unlike every other country in the sense that because the Jewish people are in a diaspora all over the world, there are significant numbers of Jews in Europe, but also in the United States. And because of their unique heritage and story, which is that they're a stateless people, they're unassimilable, they resist assimilation for thousands of years, and I think that's a good thing. And I guess what I'm saying is that if you are a Jewish person in America, you're sort of, and again, it's not because they're born, but it's sort of a rational self-interest politically to say, I'm a minority, I'm a religious ethnic minority. This is not really my home. My ancestral home is in Israel.

• 28:22Nick Fuentes?

  There's like a natural affinity that Jews have for Israel, and I would say on top of that, for the international Jewish community. They have this international community across borders, extremely organized, that is putting the interests of themselves before the interests of their home country. And there's like, there's no other country that has a similar arrangement like that. No other country has a strong identity like that, this religious blood and soil conviction, this history of being in the diaspora, stateless, wandering, persecuted, and in particular...

• 28:58Nick Fuentes?

  The historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans. They hate the Romans because the Romans destroyed the temple. That's why Eric Weinstein goes to the Arch of Titus and gives it the finger and takes a picture. We don't think like that as Americans and white people. We don't think about the Roman Empire in 2,000 years ago. They do. And I don't think that's me saying the Jews, the Jews, the Jews. I don't think that's me being hateful. I don't think that's me being collectivist. I think that's understanding that identity politics, whether you love it or hate it, whatever you feel about it, it's a reality that we live in a world of Jews and Christians, of whites and blacks. These identities mean something to us and they mean things to each other. And we can't sort of wish them away.

• 29:41Nick Fuentes?

  And it feels like white people and Christians are the only ones to do that.

• 29:45Tucker Carlson?

  There's no question about that, your last point, for sure. One of the reasons they do that is because they've been taught to hate themselves, of course, since the Second World War.

• 29:54Ezra Klein?

  All right, that's what you might call a rich text.

• 29:56John Ganz?

  Yeah, sure.

• 29:57Ezra Klein?

  How do you read it?

• 29:58John Ganz?

  Well, I mean, you know, he's an extremely talented rhetorician and communicator. And he does a few things. He presents a vocabulary that does not sound shocking to people, that uses words and terminology that wouldn't frighten people. Sounds like a rational discussion of politics, rational comment on politics. And then weaved into this is all of the material of classic antisemitism. The Jews are an unassimilable group, self-interested, internationally organized very tightly and all talking to each other and kind of working as one mind, who don't have the interests of their host at heart,

• 30:40John Ganz?

  have their own interests at heart, and are animated by a deep hostility to the people that surround them, to the societies they find themselves in, hatred towards Christians, towards white people, so on and so forth. That is classic antisemitism. But he keeps on saying things like, and that's a good thing, or something like that, or it's not really, I'm not trying to be hateful. You know, he presents it as if he's having a discussion of politics like any other.

• 31:07Ezra Klein?

  And the other move in there, in addition to the Jews are obsessed with the Romans, which I have to say, I don't feel very obsessed by the Romans.

• 31:14John Ganz?

  I kind of like the Romans.

• 31:16Ezra Klein?

  But the other move in there, which you see a lot on the right and a lot on the white identity, right, let's call it, is, look, the Jews are just practicing their identity politics. Don't we just have to practice ours? And that final move, which is the one where Tucker says, well, there's no doubt about that, we white Europeans, the heritage Americans, we're taught to hate ourselves, there's been no rational self-interest since World War II. That is, I think, a very fundamental move of Trumpism. That's the bridge of antisemitism to Trumpism. This MAGA right has spent years saying, look, the whole left place identity politics, it's time for white people to stand up for themselves.

• 32:00Ezra Klein?

  You're getting all this anti-white racism. And here it is, right? The Jews are the danger to that. If they're going to practice their politics, you have to practice yours.

• 32:09John Ganz?

  Yeah, precisely. I mean, look, at the core of the Nazi ideology is a social Darwinistic view of the world divided into almost different species of being who are engaged in an endless war with each other. And the Jews are a particularly important part of that worldview. They are the most threatening of these beings. And trying to launder what is a kind of biological essentialism about the nature of the political through what sounds like, well, normal interest group politics, of course. You know, in America, we have coalitions, we have representatives of different ethnic groups who advocate on each other's behalf.

• 32:52John Ganz?

  Well, you know, there's a Congressional Black Caucus. What's wrong with that? Why shouldn't white people do that? It is a different kind of politics. The idea is that this group is impossible to assimilate. And also, national unity, the success of the nation, its health, is impossible to accomplish without their expulsion. This is the view. And this is the view that Fuentes continually hammers on.

• 33:19Ezra Klein?

  There is a lot here that's tricky to talk about because you're at this endless morass of the intersection of antisemitism and Israel. One move I'm seeing from a lot of people on the right at the moment is why should we be talking about what this rumble influencer thinks about the Jews when the left is electing Zohar Mamdani, right? When there's been these years of debate about antisemitism on the left. I'll say this super clearly. I've met Zohar Mamdani, voted for Zohar Mamdani. I don't think there's anything antisemitic about him at all. But I think you see in the way he has been treated and then also what is happening on the right, a distinction

• 33:58Ezra Klein?

  that is worth understanding, a structural distinction. Anti-Zionism on the left often pushes towards what I would call liberalism, a belief that all people should have equal rights, that there should be universalism. There's a different version of it if you're more socialist and Marxist. Right. But the left tends to push towards a universalism. And a lot of the anger at Israel, which is, I think, much of it merited, is the way it betrays universalism for the Palestinians living under its control. Sure. On the right, it's pushing towards ethno-state politics. Right. That the fundamental argument and a way in which Israel's tried, modern Israel's

• 34:38Ezra Klein?

  tried to create new coalitions is to say, hey, we're all ethno-states here. But once you buy into the ethno-state frame, then the fact that you see Jews as an ethnic other in your society pushes somewhere very different, pushes towards ideas of expulsion, pushes towards ideas that they're a fifth column within, that they are leading your country to betray its actual interests in order to, you know, that they have dual loyalties. Right. But there is this weird thing where it is, there's been a rise of like Jewish figures or Jewish aligned figures who want to embrace ethno-state politics. Sure. I mean, you have like Yoram Hazony, you know,

• 35:23Ezra Klein?

  Jewish lives in Jerusalem, the founder of NatCon, going to the NatCon conference, which he started saying, "Look, you have to like the Jews to be a national conservative."

• 35:31John Ganz?

  Nobody ever said, and I, this is for my Jewish friends, nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Israel. Nobody ever said that to be a good NatCon, you had to love Jews.

• 35:43Ezra Klein?

  And so, one point of anger I have at a lot of people on the right, who I think have been playing footsie with us for a long time, is that once you embrace the ethno-state concept, this is where that leads.

• 35:57John Ganz?

  Well, I certainly am of that opinion. I think, again, let's take this from another angle. Like, the way you're talking is a little highbrow. It's in terms of intellectuals like your Amazoni. But let's look at this from the ground up. You have a conservative movement that has embraced, as you said before, an extremely provocative tone, a tone of open bigotry in certain cases, right? And basically, the deal that the pro-Israel right thought it could make is, we can engage in a good deal of racist demagoguery. We're okay with it, especially maybe directed at Muslims, Islam. But the line that we draw

• 36:39John Ganz?

  is when it happens to Jews, when it turns into antisemitism. That is not a consistent position. That is an extremely self-defeating position. So, when I talk about gripefication, I don't mean to say it's only that people with these extremely specific views about Israel and Jews are taking over the right. It is more that there is a general atmosphere of moral anarchy, of acceptance of extremely hateful and divisive views. There's no immune system, there's no barrier to antisemitism.

• 37:15Ezra Klein?

  Well, that also goes to the, the energy that the modern right, MAGA-Trumpism, generates from transgression. Once you have begun to exhaust the energy of transgression about how you talk about immigrants.

• 37:29John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Ezra Klein?

  Trump comes down the escalator, says they're sending rapists and murderers over here, there's a big outrage. But now, being much more anti-immigrant on the right, I mean, that's DeRogar, who cares?

• 37:38John Ganz?

  Right.

• 37:39Ezra Klein?

  Once you have moved past a bunch of the energy on dancing around racism, right? Once you have moved, you know, on traditional gender roles, right? This is the boss battle

• 37:51John Ganz?

  Right.

• 37:51Ezra Klein?

  of Western speech taboos.

• 37:54John Ganz?

  Right, right, right.

• 37:55Ezra Klein?

  And you have seen, this didn't begin last week or two weeks ago.

• 37:59John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Ezra Klein?

  You saw Elon Musk respond to somebody laying down a conspiracy that it's Jewish elites pushing immigrant voters to take over the country by saying, you've really spoken the truth here. You have a lot of the podcast bro faction that's turned more right, like Joe Rogan.

• 38:17John Ganz?

  Right.

• 38:18Ezra Klein?

  Bringing on revisionist historians.

• 38:20John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 38:20Ezra Klein?

  Who, you know, was Germany really the bad guys in World War II? What have we not been told about that? So you sort of bring these two things together, that you want to build an ethno-state. And you're ideologically opposed to there being anything you can't talk about. And you make your money and your attention on these algorithms. And it's almost a hydraulic process towards antisemitism.

• 38:48John Ganz?

  Yeah, the thing about a kick, getting excitement from it, you know, Sartre said, it's amusing to be an antisemite. Look, Mamdani, for example, who some people say is an antisemite because of his positions on Israel. He's very careful to say, I'm not an antisemite and to express sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

• 39:06Ezra Klein?

  And go to synagogues and, I mean, Mamdani is a liberal.

• 39:10John Ganz?

  Okay, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but, but he also does not, whatever you think is at the heart of his politics, he does not Jew bait. He is not practicing a politics that is based on the enjoyment of the harassment and getting a rise out of Jews, in other words. And Fuentes absolutely does. Tucker does to a more subtle extent. Candace Owens does. And that also attracts people because, you know, people who feel powerless are very attracted to it. Because, you know, you, you know, there's someone you can harass and pick on. And it's part of their strategy to kind of take over the right in their direction. Is to do this in a way, workplace harassment against their Jewish allies, to bait them, to get them to overreact, to unsettle them.

• 39:54John Ganz?

  The other thing you mentioned is that the taboos are breaking down because, you know, World War II and the Holocaust is a long time ago. And the generation that experiences is gone. And the politics that were created out of the consensus that it's created is disappearing. So some of it is just the passage of time.

• 40:17Ezra Klein?

  Again, this is tricky to talk about, but you can't get away here from how much Israel post October 7th, the war in and the flattening of Gaza has destabilized politics around this everywhere. And again, I think the ways in which it has created tensions on the left have gotten most of the attention for the past couple of years. But in fact, it's cracking open the right and you hear it in this Carlson Fuentes interview. You hear it in the questions getting asked of J D Vance.

• 40:51John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 40:51Ezra Klein?

  At various events now.

• 40:53Speaker 06

  I'm a Christian man, and I'm just confused why that there's this notion that we owe Israel something or that they're our greatest ally. I'm just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.

• 41:19Ezra Klein?

  That MAGA on some level, it has really rooted itself in this semi-isolationist, very much America first position.

• 41:26John Ganz?

  Right.

• 41:27Ezra Klein?

  And this young, very online right, one looks at what has happened in Gaza and I think correctly sees it as immoral.

• 41:34John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Ezra Klein?

  But two asks, why are we involved here at a time when we're pushing Europe out on its own?

• 41:42John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 41:43Ezra Klein?

  When we are aggressively insisting that we have no stable alliances, except for what is directly in our self-interest at a given moment. There are ways, many, many, many ways to be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. But there is also a way in which the desire among Jews to say that what Israel is doing never can be connected to anti-Semitism breaks apart.

• 42:12Tucker Carlson?

  And I never quite know how to talk about this, except that I feel like we're all living through it right now.

• 42:17John Ganz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult. I mean, to put my cards on the table, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm on the left side of the political spectrum, and I've been extremely critical of Israel, and especially its conduct in the, in the war, which I, I believe they probably committed to genocide and absolutely extreme war crimes. But what happened also was the creation of an enormous amount of free propaganda for anti-Semitic agitators. And also, a lot of people becoming curious about US foreign policy, history. You know, there is a certain extent to which they're grabbing a lot of people who otherwise would be getting involved in the political process in a really positive way.

• 43:02John Ganz?

  They say, why is American foreign policy like this? Should we be doing this? What's the history behind all this? Like, why are these people fighting? Why are they killing each other? They have legitimate and interesting questions. But instead, that curiosity, that legitimate curiosity, is being picked up by people who have another motivation here. I don't think that Tucker Carlson lost much sleep over the Arabs who died in Iraq.

• 43:31Speaker 07

  You know, I'm not defending the war in any way, but I just have zero sympathy for them or their culture, a culture where people just don't use toilet paper or forks.

• 43:40John Ganz?

  And I don't really believe it when he now gets very sentimental about people in Gaza.

• 43:47Tucker Carlson?

  One of the reasons that I'm mad about Gaza is because the Israeli position is everyone who lives in Gaza is a terrorist because of how they were born, including the women and the children. That's not a Western view. That's an Eastern view. That's a non-Christian, that's totally incompatible with Christianity. And so I hate that attitude. It's genocidal.

• 44:06John Ganz?

  I think it's highly cynical. I think when Fuentes expresses some of the most spiteful dismissive attitudes towards human suffering, you can imagine on a show, and then he gets very sentimental about this issue.

• 44:21Nick Fuentes?

  This is just a straight up genocide. These people are starving, they're literally dying. It would be formally called the famine, except that Israel will not let any international personnel inside the Strip to assess this, to make that declaration.

• 44:38John Ganz?

  And, you know, that is to drag people in and to think, well, you know, these people have a heart and they're interested in the same topic as I'm interested in. I think it's highly cynical.

• 44:46Ezra Klein?

  I think one way you can tell if these views are motivated by impartial analyses of American foreign policy, or much more partial views about the Jews, is whether or not they tend to coexist with unrelated anti-Jewish conspiracies.

• 45:05John Ganz?

  Right.

• 45:06Ezra Klein?

  And so in some ways, what I found most telling was another clip from the Carlson-Fuentes interview.

• 45:12Nick Fuentes?

  With OnlyFans, it's like having a TikTok. It's like, here's my link tree, here's my Instagram account, here's my Facebook account, here's my YouTube, and here's my OnlyFans.

• 45:22Ezra Klein?

  Why would any of this be legal?

• 45:25Nick Fuentes?

  Well, there's, like you indicated, maybe there's an intelligence benefit to that.

• 45:30Ezra Klein?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Nick Fuentes?

  Maybe there's a political benefit to that. I think that-

• 45:34Ezra Klein?

  Well, why wouldn't you arrest the people who run something like that?

• 45:36Nick Fuentes?

  They should be, if you had a Christian government.

• 45:38Ezra Klein?

  Or how about just a government that cares about its people? I mean, is Iran a bigger threat, or is OnlyFans? Iran's not turning my daughters to prostitution. So to even parse this clip, you have to know that one of the big anti-Semitic conspiracies of this era is that Jews in general, and maybe the Israeli government in particular, is behind a lot of porn.

• 46:02Nick Fuentes?

  The reason the Jews run the porn industry, I think, is because they're not Christian. And not only are they not Christian, but they're against Christianity. And the people that were the pioneers of porn, they are quoted as saying, this is like a middle finger to God.

• 46:18Ezra Klein?

  Kanye West has talked about this, David Duke has talked about this, and here you have Fuentes and Carlson. Sort of gesturing at this. Maybe there's an intelligence benefit to all this porn we've got out there now. If you had a real Christian government, we wouldn't allow it.

• 46:34John Ganz?

  Right.

• 46:35Ezra Klein?

  And that's where I think you see something else is happening in the soil here as opposed to just old school isolationism on American foreign policy.

• 46:44John Ganz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's every dissatisfaction with the modern world, every social problem, you relate back to that issue. That's the explanation for it. It simplifies every single social issue and it makes an irreconizable enemy responsible for it. That's not new. You know, you have that same thing going back in European antisemitism blaming every single social problem back to the Jews.

• 47:06Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the things that has unnerved me most in the last few weeks was a tweet from Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation and the architect of Project 2025. And Roberts got himself in a lot of trouble, we'll talk about it, for immediately coming out and defending Carlson. But around the same time, he had had Jonathan Haidt, the sort of critic of the internet, at Heritage to talk about porn and digital addiction and other things. And he sends out this tweet. He says, "Thank you, John Haidt, for reminding everyone at Heritage yesterday that tech tycoons like Leonid Radwinski and Solomon Friedman are profiting to the tune of millions by preying on America's young men and women. We are proud to be in this fight with you. It is time to arrest, prosecute,

• 47:48Ezra Klein?

  and convict the sick perverts behind OnlyFans and Pornhub."

• 47:52John Ganz?

  Right.

• 47:53Ezra Klein?

  And the key thing about this tweet is you could have chosen to single out no one. Or if you're going to single out only two people, there are a lot of people you might choose. Like, the CEO of OnlyFans is named Kylie Blair. But Roberts, who is at the center of establishment Republican politics, the head of the Heritage Foundation, he chooses these two people, the very Jewish names. It was very hard for me not to read this as Roberts, whoever's writing for him, is...

• 48:22Ezra Klein?

  Pointing towards some affinity with this part of right subculture.

• 48:27John Ganz?

  I think you're absolutely right to pick up on that. I mean, Pat Buchanan used to do this. What they used to say about Pat Buchanan is he always talks about Goldman Sachs, but not Morgan Stanley. And Pat Buchanan always would say, when he was opposing some US foreign policy thing that had some consensus behind it, he would mention Kissinger, he would mention Richard Pearl, he would mention those guys. Would he mention Gene Kerpatrick? Would he mention Alexander Haig? No, some of those names, not important. So yeah, continually hammering on that is a big part of their politics. I mean, it's the center of their politics.

• 49:02Ezra Klein?

  But it just struck me, and this is true for Robertson, the way he responds to a lot that's happening, where you might think, oh, is this just the attentional side of the right? Is this just the people who are trying to create big events for the YouTube algorithm or for the X algorithm? And maybe it begins there. But when you see it jump these lines, I mean, you then also the Kevin Roberts response to the Carlson-Fuentes interview.

• 49:30Speaker 08

  My loyalty as a Christian and as an American is to Christ first and to America always. When it serves the interest of the United States to cooperate with Israel and other allies, we should do so with partnerships on security, intelligence, and technology. But when it doesn't, 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. We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else's agenda. That includes Tucker Carlson, who remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.

• 50:13Speaker 08

  The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.

• 50:20John Ganz?

  He's in a bit of hot water for that now.

• 50:22Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, he is.

• 50:22John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 50:24Ezra Klein?

  But that was his first instinct.

• 50:25John Ganz?

  Yes, I think that's his first instinct. He wanted to defend Tucker, who I think he views as extremely important part of the of conservative movement or the right wing now and wants to maintain a relationship with him, obviously. But yeah, you know, the Heritage Foundation is essentially part of the nervous system of the conservative movement. It's one of the, you know, important think tanks that comes up with policy, that supports the work of intellectuals and elites and the conservative movement. And yeah, watching that being and watching the institution seem to break in that direction was remarkable. And that caused a firestorm. He has apologized. He has walked it back. His friend Yoram Hazony flew in from Israel to try to sort things over.

• 51:09John Ganz?

  Yeah, it was a very weird video and it struck me as almost coming from sci fi. I was so taken aback by it. And then he falls back on, what they all fall back on now is anti-cancel culture, anti-wokeness, which means like, okay, there's no standards anymore. You know, we don't cancel people.

• 51:27Ezra Klein?

  But there's another interesting part of this, when he says, my loyalty as a Christian and as an Americanist to Christ first and to America always.

• 51:33John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Ezra Klein?

  One of the things that you see when you begin diving into the fissures on the right about this.

• 51:40John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Ezra Klein?

  Is for some time, there's been a fairly close embrace between evangelical Christianity and Israel. And that has in some ways solved this coalitional problem on the right. And what you hear Fuentes doing, what you hear people coming up and asking J.D. Vance questions doing, what you hear in some ways Tucker doing, is really saying, that doesn't make any sense.

• 52:05Tucker Carlson?

  And then the Christian Zionists who are, well, Christian Zionists, like, what is that?

• 52:11Ezra Klein?

  Right.

• 52:12Tucker Carlson?

  I can just say for myself.

• 52:14Ezra Klein?

  I dislike them more than anybody, you know, because like what? Because it's Christian heresy and I'm offended by that as a Christian.

• 52:23John Ganz?

  I mean, look, the attachment of evangelicals to Israel is a particular current in evangelical Christianity, dispensationalism. It's one that some argue has very deep roots in American past because of Calvinist ideas and American Christian Zionism, going back to the founders. And there's something to that, but this emerges really as a mass phenomenon, kind of in the 1970s, right? Where evangelical Christians are looking at what's happening in Israel as kind of signs of the coming apocalypse. And that becomes extremely popular. And Israel is befriended, is cultivated because they think it is about to bring about the rapture and so on and so forth.

• 53:08John Ganz?

  Now, it's true, I think among younger Christians, younger evangelical Christians even, I'm not sure how much of a whole dispensationalism has anymore. It seems to be something that's of like a lot of the things we're discussing of older generations. So I think that that appears to be changing. I agree with you.

• 53:27Ezra Klein?

  But this goes to what you're talking about with Roberts. He did have to walk this back. He's apologized. He said he let Heritage down. This has led to a bunch of interesting reporting on what's been going on inside the Heritage Foundation.

• 53:38John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Ezra Klein?

  And one thing you hear in that reporting is that there's a big generational split where older staffers were furious at Roberts.

• 53:45John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Ezra Klein?

  And are standing up in meetings saying, you know, the right, you know, Bill Buckley always knew that you had to eject the antisemites on the right. I see you rolling your eyes. His, it's worth saying that Bill Buckley's, the extent of his war against antisemitism has been overstated. Let's put it that way. But the younger, many of the younger Heritage Foundation staffers are standing up and saying, what did Kevin do wrong here?

• 54:07John Ganz?

  Right.

• 54:07Ezra Klein?

  If there's not room for what he said, is there not room for me? And I think this is getting at just this very big thing, which is, and it's what I sort of understood Roberts is doing.

• 54:16John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Ezra Klein?

  That you have a lot of people on the MAGA right trying to skate to where they think the puck is going.

• 54:22John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Ezra Klein?

  And what they see among their young, among their staffers, among the people they interact with on social media is that where it's going is around this much more.

• 54:35Ezra Klein?

  I would call it like white nationalist energy.

• 54:37John Ganz?

  Yeah, I think that's a good read on this situation. I think Rod Dreher, who is a person of the far right, but is horrified by everything that's going on. He wrote recently that a friend of his, you know, who has connections to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, estimated that some 30 or 40% of of young staffers were Groyper. And I would say to that, well, the other half are, you know, maybe don't go to the last taboo of anti-Semitism, but definitely don't have any problem throwing slurs around and trafficking and nasty ideas about that. That's my own commentary. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. I think that there is a market generation gap that the younger staff of the conservative movement

• 55:19John Ganz?

  are much more open to Fuentes's ideas. And they've also come up in a situation, they've been, since their introduction to politics, they've been suffused. They've come up in an environment that's filled with this. They don't know a world before it. It's their common sense in a way. So, yeah, I think that they are struggling with the fact that they're probably gonna have staffing issues.

• 55:45John Ganz?

  And they already are.

• 55:46Ezra Klein?

  And Trump has not criticized.

• 55:48John Ganz?

  No, he's not.

• 55:49Ezra Klein?

  Like, Trump can weigh in on things when he feels like it. He called Carlson crazy when Carlson criticized him for the Iran bombing. Trump has notably not weighed in on this. Vance has only said he doesn't like the infighting.

• 55:59John Ganz?

  I think, well, there's a lot of reasons for that. I think that the main reason is, look, Trump gets a lot of mileage about seeming out to lunch or in his own world. The fact of the matter is, he's a successful politician.

• 56:11Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 56:12John Ganz?

  He understands, and he's always understood from the beginning, that this extreme right is a constituency that he can't really afford to alienate, that he has to court. I think his administration knows that they can't totally distance him from it. He's never completely.

• 56:26Ezra Klein?

  Also, his administration is full of these people.

• 56:28John Ganz?

  Well, yes, that's true.

• 56:29Ezra Klein?

  But maybe it was not as true in the first term.

• 56:31John Ganz?

  No, and I think they're very interested in what this section of the right has to say. And they realize, you know, this is part of our coalition. We cannot afford to alienate them and attack them.

• 57:04Ezra Klein?

  So there have been conservative figures pushing back.

• 57:07John Ganz?

  Sure.

• 57:08Ezra Klein?

  Ben Shapiro has practically, I think, gone to war.

• 57:11John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 57:11Ezra Klein?

  And has tried to call this out and really try to play the old, at least mythological, William F. Buckley role.

• 57:17John Ganz?

  Right.

• 57:18Ezra Klein?

  Trying to say, no, we don't do this.

• 57:19John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Ezra Klein?

  We don't go to Groypers, we don't go to Nick Fuentes. Like, there are lines in our movement. What have you thought of Shapiro's response, the reaction to it?

• 57:28John Ganz?

  First of all, the thing to remember about, one of the other main figures on the antisemitic right is Candace Owens, right? Who was birthed within the Shapiro Organization. So, think about that.

• 57:39Ezra Klein?

  Well, hired by the Shapiro Organization.

• 57:40John Ganz?

  Hired by the Shapiro, cultivated and turned into a star.

• 57:43Ezra Klein?

  Yes.

• 57:43John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Ezra Klein?

  Part of them trying to skate to where the puck was going.

• 57:46John Ganz?

  Right. To get a younger audience, to get a hipper, in the sense of conservatives, a hipper audience. And Shapiro says, like, we're gonna draw the lines here. And Mark Levin, at the Republican Jewish Conference, says...

• 58:00Speaker 09

  What do you mean, we don't cancel people? We canceled David Duke. Donald Trump canceled David Duke. We canceled Pat Buchanan. We canceled the John Birch Society. We canceled Joseph Sobrin. We canceled pornography on TV. We cancel stuff all the damn time. Hitler admirers, Stalin admirers, Jew haters, American haters, Churchill haters, you're damn right, we're gonna cancel them and deplatform them.

• 58:33John Ganz?

  I mean, it's too little, too late. In my view, the opportunity has passed. Most of the people who saw where the Republican Party was going and didn't like it and were clear sighted about it, went into the Never Trump Movement, which was not politically viable, right? It's a group of people who I consider have kind of preserved their honor, but don't have a mass constituency, the party's not there. These people stayed with MAGA. And everything it represented, the destruction of all these norms and institutions that would prevent something like this. So I just am also extremely angry and frustrated with the pro-Israel and neoconservative right for...

• 59:14John Ganz?

  Looking the other way, when it came to the racist takeover of the right, Zohar Mamdani, perfect example of this. What has happened in the wake of the giant controversies that exploded about Fuentes going on Tucker, the leaks of the chats? You have major figures on the right, who are trying to redirect the conversation about antisemitism back to Zohar Mamdani. They're trying to make him the hate figure. And to- Can't we all come together? Yes, and so Ben Shapiro says, when has Tucker really criticized Zohar Mamdani, right?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  The number of times that Tucker Carlson has mentioned Zohar Mamdani since October 5th on his show is once. And it was in the context of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson talking about the appeal of Zohar Mamdani.

• 1:00:03John Ganz?

  And then Steve Bannon goes, he attacks Mark Levin. He says, these guys aren't really MAGA, and he has a point because they weren't back then. They weren't with Trump from the beginning. And then he attacks Mamdani. Mark Levin, did I run your mouth? What are you doing in New York City? I tell you what we're doing, we're going to denaturalize Mendami. So it directs this energy, this energy of racial hate, really, that seeks to expel a racial other against the safer target, right? That strategy is not working anymore. That ability to keep the coalition by being like, look, just be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want, but it's against, it's designated enemies that are okay. You know, people ask a rational question, well, why are these people off the table?

• 1:00:48John Ganz?

  And then, you know, the answer comes back, it's like, well, because of Christianity, or because Israel represents Western civilization, or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say, that makes no sense to us. And in a certain sense, yeah, why not? If the world is divided into these racial groups, and this is the way you are, and we practice a politics that's based on that, why make an exception?

• 1:01:13Ezra Klein?

  I mean, as you say, these guys started as opponents of Trump in 2016. Shapiro said, Trump is and breeds conspiracism. Conspiracism breeds antisemitism. Trump is happy to channel the support of antisemites to his own ends.

• 1:01:26John Ganz?

  Okay, so Ben Shapiro, not a dumb guy. At that time.

• 1:01:31Ezra Klein?

  If you go back and you read actually a bunch of what he said back then, it's very, very, very prescient.

• 1:01:36John Ganz?

  The other thing is, what's the superpower they're going to suddenly discover that they're going to do that? They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They couldn't stop Donald Trump. They tried, many of them tried. Ben Shapiro was an opponent of Donald Trump. Mark Levin was an opponent of Donald Trump. So they're going to finally discover some new secret weapon in this battle?

• 1:01:55Ezra Klein?

  2024, I don't know where Levin was, but there was clearly an effort from Shapiro and others to make DeSantis the future.

• 1:02:00John Ganz?

  Sure, sure. And yeah, so I don't understand where they suddenly think they're going to find the weapons or the army that's going to support them in this war.

• 1:02:09Ezra Klein?

  Well, this is what I think is frightening when you look at their situation kind of coldly.

• 1:02:15John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Ezra Klein?

  Their kind of last best hope is that they don't believe Trump himself is an antisemite. Their last hope is Trump himself. And I mean, they'll say that, but when I had Shapiro on the show, he was more or less saying that.

• 1:02:27John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Ezra Klein?

  But they're all much more afraid of what's coming next, of J.D. Vance in particular, where I think the view many Republicans hold is that Vance is quietly, functionally where Carlson is. That Vance is core adjacent, let's call it.

• 1:02:40John Ganz?

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 1:02:41Ezra Klein?

  And the, there is still an old line Republican Party to some degree, you know, Ted Cruz.

• 1:02:47Speaker 10

  If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing, then you are a coward and you are complicit in that evil.

• 1:03:06Ezra Klein?

  Lindsey Graham.

• 1:03:08Speaker 11

  I just want to make it really clear, I'm in the Hitler sucks wing of the Republican Party.

• 1:03:16Speaker 11

  What is this Hitler shit? I don't know. Anyway.

• 1:03:20Ezra Klein?

  But it is the older Republican Party.

• 1:03:22John Ganz?

  Right. I think that they made a deal with the devil in a certain way. And now they're paying for the consequences. Now, another way to read this, obviously, it's all very scary and these are bad things. And the transformation of the Republican Party into this stuff is not good. It wasn't great before, in my opinion, but now it's really something else. The other thing is, it's like, this might be a politics that ends up, when it's exposed to the public, being too weird and too fringe. It has some mass constituency. Will it do well in a primary? Yep, maybe, probably. Will it do well with the rest of the public? I don't know.

• 1:03:56Ezra Klein?

  Well, it's done well in primaries before. I think this actually gets to something important. So your book is very much about Pat Buchanan and earlier strains of this. For those who didn't grow up in the politics of the 1980s and 1990s, or didn't write a bestselling book on it, as you did, who's Pat Buchanan?

• 1:04:13John Ganz?

  Pat Buchanan is a major figure in the conservative movement. He was a member of the Nixon administration. He kind of represented the ideological conservatives, like the Buckley conservatives, the National Review crowd, within the Nixon administration. He then went on to be a very important syndicated columnist, appeared on TV. He was a communications director for some time in the Reagan administration. Important, loud voice on the right. He ran two primary campaigns for the Republican Party. One in 1992, which my book focuses on, which wounded George H.W. Bush's candidacy. So there was kind of a constituency for his type of politics.

• 1:04:54John Ganz?

  He is also probably the person who expressed anti-Semitic views in public, the most notable anti-Semitism in American politics for a very long time.

• 1:05:07Ezra Klein?

  I always think of this clip of Trump talking about Buchanan is worth revisiting.

• 1:05:11Speaker 12

  Now, how about Pat Buchanan? What do you think of that? Now, he seems to be the guy you'd have to battle. Well, it's true. He's anti-Semitic. He's anti-black. He obviously has been having a love affair with Adolf Hitler in some form. And I just can't imagine this guy. I don't want you to hold back. Give me how you feel now. I can't imagine, you know, that Pat is going to be very seriously taken as a candidate.

• 1:05:32Ezra Klein?

  So that's an earlier Trump incarnation.

• 1:05:34John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:05:34Ezra Klein?

  flirting with a third party run for president.

• 1:05:36John Ganz?

  Yep.

• 1:05:38Ezra Klein?

  We often talk about the way Trump has been very consistent on certain things like trade since the eighties, but not on everything.

• 1:05:43Speaker 13

  You know, there was a man, Pat Buchanan, a good guy, conservative guy. And you know, it's not that we're, you know, Pat Buchanan, look at that, good, good guy. Wow, young people, they know him. Pat Buchanan, right? We know Pat Buchanan. He came in second in the New Hampshire primary. And for 45 years, he made an unbelievable career of it. He was a hot item. He was on every show.

• 1:06:08Ezra Klein?

  And it's been interesting watching so many of these figures, Nick Fuentes being one of them, but not by any means alone, Kevin Roberts, all of them, really rehabilitate Pat Buchanan. I think the Republican Party used to pride itself on not going down Buchanan's lane. It went down another lane instead, George H. W. Bush, and then George W. Bush. But it seems like now Buchanan-ism is winning.

• 1:06:29John Ganz?

  That's the thesis of all the work I've been doing for the past decade in my book. Yes, I think that's true. And actually, it was interesting, at the beginning of this presidency, I thought, oh, man, I got something a little bit wrong. It's Pat Buchanan, plus you gotta be nice to Israel, right? So they're like, okay, we can be the trade stuff, the immigration stuff, that, but we're gonna keep in place, in order to keep the coalition together, you know, this reflexive support of Israel, partly to do with Jewish Republicans and partly to do with Christian evangelicals. And then, when this explodes, I was like, oh, well, I guess that never fully went away, and it wasn't totally submerged, and this coalition wasn't that stable.

• 1:07:14Ezra Klein?

  Well, also, it gets to this point that Buchanan-ism has an internal logic. And when you embrace it, it becomes hard to embrace 80% of its logic, but not 100% of its logic. You know, so there's this book Buchanan wrote years ago called The Death of the West. J.D. Vance has said it is the first political book he ever read. How would you describe the Death of the West thesis and how it relates to modern Republican Party politics?

• 1:07:39John Ganz?

  It basically describes a world where the white race is submerged by the invasion of brown peoples, and that needs to be prevented by any means necessary, essentially. It's a work of polite, white nationalism.

• 1:07:55Ezra Klein?

  And there's a tremendous amount about fertility rates in it. I mean, even in the first Trump term, reading it, it was striking to me. How much the modern right had fully

• 1:08:05John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Ezra Klein?

  absorbed this book by this guy who was, you know, pushed out to the margins, or it seemed to be for a long time.

• 1:08:11John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:08:12Ezra Klein?

  But, I mean, now, I think if you're gonna pick a founding text for MAGA, you know, people talk about all kinds of different weird thinkers, but Death of the West by Buchanan feels to me like a pretty fair center of the canon.

• 1:08:25John Ganz?

  Yeah, I mean, look, critics of the right have often said there was a racial subtext to rest Western civilization. And the way Buchanan used it, it's not a subtext, it's what Western civilization means. It means white people. It doesn't mean Homer and Dante and Plato and so on and so forth, or an ideas. It means a certain racial stock that makes up Western people. And basically, the division on the right right now is, are Jews part of that Western white people?

• 1:08:56Ezra Klein?

  So, I guess one thing that part of this conversation then reflects is, how much of this is all the internet and attentional dynamics? And as such, we are moving into this structurally, and there aren't very good political answers to it. I mean, you had this line that one could even say that the internet itself is antisemitic, which also is a kind of provocative line.

• 1:09:21John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Ezra Klein?

  But I'm curious, because you've been writing more, you gave the speech at Chicago where you're talking about the sort of modern version of fascism as a response to the way the internet has destabilized.

• 1:09:30John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Ezra Klein?

  The way we communicate in the political sphere. How much do you see what we're in as a structural feature of the medium on which politics now primarily, certainly political communication primarily takes place? Like, what follows from an analysis like that?

• 1:09:47John Ganz?

  Well, I mean, the comment about the internet being structurally antisemitic, very speculative theory of mine that I cannot defend right now. But, um, yeah, obviously, the change in the way people consume media creates the possibility for new communities to form, right? People who would generally be cranks and fringe people with all a few audience members find mass audiences, right? So there is, there's a component of that. There's also the fact that the internet, it's almost like the birth of cities is the way I think about it. It's almost like urbanization. It creates an enormous amount of what you might call sanitary problems. Like it creates an enormous amount of waste, pollution and stuff like this.

• 1:10:31John Ganz?

  And we haven't come to a way of being like, okay, well, we're going to decide how we govern this new city. It's very interesting though, you know, like where do people get into this stuff? You know, you mentioned pornography, right? It comes from this really seedy underbelly of the internet, the Chan bulletin boards or message boards, A Chan, 4 Chan, et cetera, like that. It comes from a community that consumes porn, very edgy porn, sometimes illicit porn. It came from the same underbelly, the sewage of the internet from the gutter. It is, you know, the favorite ideology of the very people who, you know, sometimes

• 1:11:13John Ganz?

  have addictive relationships to those things and feel entirely disempowered to detach themselves from it. Feel like they have no lives or future. The internet is their only life and future. But it also presents itself as a politics that would solve those problems, right? You know, all of the things that happened because of modernization and the creation of this new, of these new structures, we, we have the answer to fix them all. It's interesting, you know, Fuentes openly says like, I'm one of those guys, right? And he's like, I'm kind of a loser and incel. There's no women in my life, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:11:54John Ganz?

  But the way he does that and the way he attracts an audience and the way he entertains his audiences, when he has their questions come on, he sadistically attacks them, right? He makes fun of them, he teases them.

• 1:12:07Nick Fuentes?

  What do you mean, what do I think? That's your question? So Byron Donalds, some like black Republican benchwarmer gets up at the RJC and says, I love Israel, I support immigration. You say, what do you think about that? What do you think I think about that dipshit? That's your question? The show is like, we hate immigration, we're against Israel. Hey, so this guy says he likes immigration in Israel. What do you think about that? That's your question? What do I think about that? What do you think I think about that? You fucking idiot.

• 1:12:37John Ganz?

  Because essentially, like, that's at the root of this. It's about a certain type of powerlessness that comes to express itself in sadism. There is a degree of self-loathing among these people that it can't also be discounted. There's a degree to which they have accepted their position as being kind of outside of society, as being unrepresented, and they just want to burn it all down.

• 1:13:07Ezra Klein?

  I think I have this theory about Twitter, which is that whichever political coalition is in control of it at a given moment is going to pay dearly for that. The left sort of had the wheel on Twitter, you know, around 2020, and by 2024, a lot of the positions that got taken for that reason, a lot of the culture that emerged on it, ended up proving a profound political loser. And I remember people being terrified on the left when Elon Musk bought it. But what I see is that the right is becoming Twitter poisoned, X poisoned.

• 1:13:38John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, that guy in a basement making fun of his followers claiming to be in incel politics.

• 1:13:47John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:13:49Ezra Klein?

  I mean, I've spent the last week, like, immersed in prep for this.

• 1:13:52John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Ezra Klein?

  You begin to think it's the world, and then you, like, look up and you, like, kind of shake your head, and you remember it's not.

• 1:13:59John Ganz?

  No.

• 1:14:00Ezra Klein?

  And the right seems so hooked in to its own attentional drugs at the moment.

• 1:14:07John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:08Ezra Klein?

  And J.D. Vance, who seems to want to be the future of the right, is very, very, very hooked in to its weird subcultures. And he has said that himself.

• 1:14:18Ezra Klein?

  That, I mean, one thing you hear Shapiro keep trying to say to them is like, this is going to be a loser. And I don't think it's specifically the antisemitism of that, too. But the whole gestalt of craziness like Laura Loomer and Candace Owens, and I mean, there's just so much as they try to absorb this in and Tucker Carlson. And if I were to have some optimistic loss on any of this, and I don't feel great about it, it's that that's a pretty weak politics, particularly after Trump, who has a very particular showman's capability and, you know, role in American culture.

• 1:14:53John Ganz?

  No, I think your point about Twitter being a kind of mixed blessing, or it's extremely useful when you're kind of putting together the campaign and the coalition and about to launch an attack. And when you're in power, you need to have normal democratic tools to understand where the electorate's at. And the types of explanations, ideas, memes on Twitter are a different reality. And it interprets what's going on in the rest of the world in a very distorted way. Right? So an election happens, there's a negative result for your party, a normal political mind would say, oh, maybe some of our messaging is bad, our policies are bad, the electorate is expressing issues

• 1:15:35John Ganz?

  with us. That gets metabolized in Twitter and all kinds of insane conspiracies and so on and so forth. So it definitely distorts what the notion of the rights public is. Now, that's very dangerous because they're living in kind of another reality. But it also, when they're in a democratic society, yeah, it detaches them from the things that they could do to alter course. And yeah, I think that it's still true that a lot of the things that we're talking about are, as they say, very online and attract a kind of subculture. My only warning about that is like, I think that, you know, a lot of young people grew up online. A lot of people are very online. It's not that different from the norm.

• 1:16:14Ezra Klein?

  But what I would say is that I think sometimes we can overstate how badly the young people are doing politically.

• 1:16:22John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Ezra Klein?

  And what I mean by this is the 2024 election scared the hell out of Democrats about what was happening with Gen Z, rightly so.

• 1:16:29John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:16:29Ezra Klein?

  Huge swing towards Trump. And so then when somebody like Nick Fuentes, self-described incel and brain poisoned edgelord comes up and says, I am speaking on behalf of these young men, he has a tendency to say, well, okay, like, I don't understand these young men anymore. Maybe he is.

• 1:16:43John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:16:44Ezra Klein?

  And then I look around, if you look at who Trump has lost support among.

• 1:16:47John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Ezra Klein?

  It's young people.

• 1:16:49John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:16:49Ezra Klein?

  He has cratered among young people. You look at how Zohar Mhamdani did in the election about among young men.

• 1:16:55John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Ezra Klein?

  Like incredibly well.

• 1:16:57John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:16:58Ezra Klein?

  The idea that the center of Gen Z culture is Nick Fuentes is also wrong.

• 1:17:05John Ganz?

  Totally wrong.

• 1:17:05Ezra Klein?

  And I think as a weird way, one thing you often see, I think, is that old people don't understand the young people.

• 1:17:10John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:17:11Ezra Klein?

  And so they are a little bit gullible about anyone arising with some amount of constituency saying, I speak for the young now.

• 1:17:19John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:20Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, it's, like, people care about the cost of living, right? They swing around based on that.

• 1:17:24John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:17:25Ezra Klein?

  There seems to me to be something here that even, I don't think the Republican Party has the pulse of the young. It's that it has the pulse of its online young. And that is a very malformed sense of even the young public.

• 1:17:39John Ganz?

  Yeah, I think there is a lot to that. I think there's a lot to that. I do think, though, it must be admitted that this is a party with mass support and it increasingly has tailored a message to try to get people who feel disaffected with the way things are going. So if there are a lot of other shocks and there isn't some way in which the country gets on a footing where people feel like they can be prosperous, where they can have decent lives, and these pathologies continue, that politics is going to get an additional purchase.

• 1:18:12Ezra Klein?

  I mean, it's one of the big dangers with America's two-party politics.

• 1:18:15John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:18:16Ezra Klein?

  If one of the two parties becomes extreme.

• 1:18:21Ezra Klein?

  Then it doesn't take that much for the extreme wing to come into power, right? You can, you can take over a party.

• 1:18:28John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Ezra Klein?

  With a fairly narrow part of that party being well organized.

• 1:18:32John Ganz?

  Yep.

• 1:18:32Ezra Klein?

  Different candidates split support in the primaries and, and all of a sudden you have Trump in 2016.

• 1:18:37John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Ezra Klein?

  Or, you know, maybe JD Vance loses in 2028. But then there's a big recession.

• 1:18:42John Ganz?

  Right.

• 1:18:43Ezra Klein?

  And Tucker Carlson runs in the 2032 primaries or somebody who's, you know, Tucker pilled or whatever it might be. And the issue you have there is that if the Democratic Party for one reason or another becomes unacceptable to people, then the fact that the Republican Party is run by corporate extremists.

• 1:19:00John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Ezra Klein?

  You make a couple of political moves to the center and, and, and hide it a little bit during the election, then you're in real trouble.

• 1:19:06John Ganz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Ezra Klein?

  I mean, my sense of our politics now is that on the one hand, the Republican Party is weakening itself. And on the other hand, the possibility of 20th century calamity style outcomes just keeps going up.

• 1:19:16John Ganz?

  Yeah, I agree with you, but you know, like, here's the thing about every single election happens and Americans say, this proves our theory of the case, the country is fundamentally changed. Here are the people who are important, here are the people that are not important. This party has shown itself to be totally out of touch with the American people. This party is the wave of the future. And then another election happens, that narrative is forgotten. Era is proven to be false very quickly. We don't really know what the electorate looks like until election day. So we're always kind of guessing and, and saying, oh, well, there's a lot of these kinds of people, a lot of this kind of people. We don't know what messages are going to be successful. Things come out of nowhere, things disappear. Coalitions are never permanent. They're very fragile in American politics.

• 1:20:02John Ganz?

  They fall apart quickly. As you mentioned, the loss of young people, the loss of independents who weren't, you know, watching Nick Fuentes, they were pissed about their groceries. They were pissed about not necessarily being able to buy a house. So I don't think, I'm of two minds of it too. I, I do believe that there is a weakening of the party's mass appeal through its moving towards the other things. But my only worry about that is like, these things have sophisticated techniques of propaganda to get mass support. And Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes are exhibiting those things. They know what they're doing.

• 1:20:47John Ganz?

  They are not the Nazis of yesteryear who were skinheads and put swastikas everywhere and scare people. They know how to deliver this message in a way that's palatable or more palatable. My sense of things in America is that if a message comes along that is, yes, there are problems with the establishment, but we need to make some changes to the way our economy works, and I don't particularly hate or want to kill or harm anybody, that message is going to be a lot more successful with people because I think most Americans are not obsessed with sadistic fantasies of harming each other. So I don't think it's

• 1:21:27John Ganz?

  an inevitability that those politics will take over. But I do believe there are conditions under which they become more appealing and stronger. And it's, you know, a lot of the kinds of social dislocations we're experiencing now.

• 1:21:42Ezra Klein?

  And then always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:21:45John Ganz?

  Okay, so I'm going to recommend two recent books and an old book, and they're about this subject. This is not for reading for fun. One is Taking America Back by David Austin Walsh, which is a kind of history of the right's half-hearted, let's say, attempts to police antisemitism. One is Furious Minds. It's a new book by Laura K. Field, which is about MAGA intellectuals, the new right, and how they justify, explain, rationalize the things that are going on, give arguments for it. And the third one is a very old book and a little bit forgotten. It's called Profits of Deceit: Techniques of the American

• 1:22:22John Ganz?

  Agitator, and it's by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman. And it's an extremely astute, detailed analysis of the techniques of antisemitic agitation and propaganda, especially in the context of the United States.

• 1:22:42Ezra Klein?

  John Gans, thank you very much.

• 1:22:44John Ganz?

  Thanks so much for having me, Ezra.

• 1:22:56Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Isklantos produced by Jack McCordick. Fact checking by Ashley Braun. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassion, Roland Hu, Marina King, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Carol Sabro, Aman Zajota, and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cimuluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times studio audio is Annie Rose Strasser.