Against Muzzling the Right

Imagine a young man in a small, midwestern U.S. college town, 22-years-old, raised on ‘talk-radio conservatism,’ who opens his phone one evening and discovers that the people who spent his entire childhood promising to defend him now spend their days denouncing him as literally ‘Hitler’ because he laughed at the wrong meme. That young man is not a hypothetical. He is legion. And he is the reason the American—and, to a lesser extent perhaps, European—Right is convulsed once again by what the commentariat breathlessly calls its “final crack-up.”

We have heard the funeral bells before. Every decade or so, someone on our side discovers a heretic whose very existence is said to threaten the entire edifice of ‘respectable conservatism.’ The ritual is always the same: outrage, disavowal, excommunication, followed by triumphant declarations that the conservative movement has been saved by anathematizing the offender. And then the movement limps on, without having learned a thing.

Joseph Sobran was dismissed from National Review (then edited by John O’Sullivan) in 1993 for the crime of commenting on alleged foreign policy patterns that polite company preferred to ignore (editor-at-large William F. Buckley Jr. called his writings “contextually anti-Semitic”). John Derbyshire was ‘disappeared’ from the same magazine in 2012 for writing a column about race and crime that was, whatever its flaws, calmer and more evidence-based than what now passes for casual conversation on certain corners of Telegram. (Today, Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, continues similar analyses, arguing that the high rates of black crime compared to white crime are due to a total breakdown of the family structure, rather than systemic police racism.) Taki Theodoracopulos—long-time contributor at The Spectator in the UK—has spent years as a pariah by the same people who once happily socialized with him or cashed his checks. In Britain, Roger Scruton was sacked as a government housing adviser in 2019 after a journalist at The New Statesman deliberately misrepresented his remarks on Soros and Chinese influence; only a public outcry forced a humiliating reversal. In France, Éric Zemmour has been fined, sued, and condemned by half the French Right for saying out loud what millions whisper in private. Each of these public ‘excommunications’ was meant to be the solution to what observers considered a toxin that required immediate purging. But I believe each ‘purge’ left the conservative movement weaker—and the underlying disease untouched.

I have never had the slightest sympathy for that reflex that today goes by the name ‘punching Right’—i.e., the habit of conservatives to savagely attack their own friends and allies, their own people, simply because someone has stepped over an ever-shifting line of acceptability or cordon sanitaire. I think this is woefully self-defeating, an own goal. Every time the gatekeepers on the Right swing that particular axe and congratulate themselves for keeping the conservative movement ‘clean,’ they hand the dissident or extremist Right their most powerful recruiting tool: proof that the ‘respectable Right’ is indeed a members-only club whose bouncers care far more about their continued invitations to Manhattan or Mayfair dinner parties than about the civilization they pretend to defend.

The latest tremor on the Right of course centers on Nick Fuentes—a repugnant, despicable figure whose rhetoric is laced with outright bigotry and whose fundamental worldview I reject root and branch. Yet his rise and stunning popularity—1.1 million followers on X, and millions of viewers on Instagram, Rumble, TikTok, and other platforms—is not repugnant; it is revealing. 

Fuentes—an America Firster and Christian nationalist—speaks plainly, directly, often with a cruel, sophomoric humor that the bien-pensant class spent decades declaring beyond the pale, off-limits, verboten. But I think I understand his appeal. Millions of young people across the West—exhausted by endless sermons about what may and may not be said, and tired of being told that they are insufficiently diverse, open-minded, or tolerant—hear in his voice a simple message: here, at last, is someone who refuses to beg for permission to speak. That refusal—not the venom of his ideas—is the real engine of his appeal. 

Fuentes does not pose a crisis to the Right; rather, he is a symptom of a profound fatigue and rising anger—the accumulated weariness of a generation or two that has been told, year after year, that its own instincts are immoral, its fears and concerns are expressions of bigotry, and its laughter nothing more than hate speech. When Nikki Haley’s son finds a voice such as Fuentes’ more authentic than the polished evasions of his mother’s establishment, the establishment’s proper response should not be another public ritual of excommunication. It should instead prompt the establishment Right to stare into the mirror and ask why its own language is dismissed or ignored by the very people they claim to represent.

Mind, the demand for ‘edgy’ content did not appear ex nihilo. It is the product of six decades in which working-class communities were hollowed out by trade deals sold as conservatism, in which endless wars were fought in the name of democracy while borders at home were treated as optional, in which every institution—from universities to corporations to the Church—have harangued citizens in progressive pieties while lecturing them endlessly that their entirely reasonable fears about, say, crime, immigration, and cultural genocide were morally illegitimate.

When people are mugged, raped, or murdered and the political class only responds with yet another tiresome seminar on tolerance, resentment does not politely dissipate. It metastasizes. When native populations watch politicians prioritize the comfort of newcomers over their own safety, the social contract frays. When every approved voice insists that nothing can be done and that we just have to adapt to the ‘new normal,’ some people will eventually conclude that the only remaining option is to do something unapproved.

Suppressing the messengers changes nothing. Ban Fuentes and delete every dissident account tomorrow and the audience will simply migrate to the next platform, the next voice, the next taboo (and make no mistake: they will keep pushing the envelope). The anger is not manufactured by a handful of podcasters; it is manufactured by reality—and reality has a way of finding spokesmen.

What the conservative establishment and its elites must finally grasp is that the rise of these dissident, polemical voices is an indictment—of themselves, first of all. The fact that a grotesque fringe can command a larger youth movement than the entire College Republicans apparatus is not proof of moral collapse among the young. It is proof of intellectual and political bankruptcy among their elders. This is what we should be discussing on the Right.

So, the task ahead is not another purification ritual. It is to address—without apology and without illusion—the conditions that produced the growing rage among young people: the betrayal of the working class, the collapse of assimilation and rise in strident diversity programs, the cowardice of institutions that once claimed to stand for permanence, the inability for national governments to truly do what is best for the national purpose or its own citizens. Until the Right offers credible answers to those grievances, someone else who does not abide by the norms by which the rest of us on the Right have been operating will offer less credible ones—and they will be believed and celebrated.

The pot has been left on the boil for 50 years; now the lid is rattling violently. Our job is not to nail it down harder, or to pretend that the water was never hot in the first place, but to find (while a narrow margin of time remains) how to turn down the heat. Something is coming. I feel it the way one feels an approaching winter storm in the countryside: a sudden drop in pressure, a slightly metallic taste in the air, forest animals falling silent. It will not be tidy. It will not be polite. It may not even be fully rational or sane. But it will not be prevented by yet another chorus of conservative gatekeepers insisting that people like Fuentes need to be muzzled, or that the kids these days need better manners, or that we need to go back to the civilized and dignified style of Buckley. That approach is simply not going to work anymore.