Zohran Mamdani, Nick Fuentes, and Weimar America

Twenty-four years ago, I stood as a journalist on the Brooklyn Bridge, and watched the south tower of the World Trade Center fall before my eyes. I staggered back to my home in Brooklyn literally in shock, with a layer of dust covering me. My wife, who could not reach me by phone, thought I had been killed in the collapse.

New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, was a true hero in those dark days in America’s most important city. If you had told me that the day would come when New York would elect a socialist Muslim to fill Rudy’s shoes, I would never have believed it. Yet here we are. Life comes at you fast.

It was a bad day across America for Republicans—and, I fear, worse days are to come. A week before the election, an unprecedented crisis erupted on the Right. It has not received much media attention, but it threatens to destroy everything Donald Trump and JD Vance have accomplished, and that a President Vance might do.

The extreme Right is rising in America, and its leader is a short, weird livestreamer named Nicholas J. Fuentes. Fuentes, only 27, is an open admirer of Hitler, a Holocaust denier, an antisemite, a misogynist (he has said that women want to be raped), and a white supremacist. These are not accusations leveled at him from the Left. He takes transgressive pleasure in saying these things.

The Jewish conservative commentator Ben Shapiro collected some of Nick Fuentes’s “greatest hits” in this video. Watch it for a sample of what Fuentes actually believes. Now, imagine that, as a political insider friend tells me, that between 30 and 40% of Republican staffers in Washington under the age of 30 are followers of Fuentes.

This is a cancer growing fast within the conservative movement. If it is not stopped, and stopped soon, it will be a complete disaster for Republicans. It is still the case, thank God, that most Americans hate Nazis, racists, and antisemites. But if Democrats can successfully tie neo-Nazis to the MAGA movement, then Republicans will lose badly. The greatest threat to a Vance presidency is not the Democratic Party—which, despite its big victories in local elections, remains very unpopular nationally—but Nick Fuentes and his right-wing Leninist movement.

Fuentes was a fringe figure until the popular and influential online host Tucker Carlson, the most powerful conservative media figure in America, brought him on to his show for an interview on October 27. This reckless act gave Fuentes instant credibility, and brought him into the mainstream. That might have been defensible had Carlson conducted a critical interrogation, but instead, he gave Fuentes a two-hour tongue bath.

As of this writing, the Carlson-Fuentes interview has had 5.4 million views on YouTube. This will have been the first time most ordinary Americans saw and heard Fuentes. If that’s all they knew about Fuentes, they would have thought he is a relatively normal man—maybe a guy with a strange fixation on Jews, but basically okay. Overnight, Carlson made Fuentes, a man who once said, “Hitler if f**king cool!”—palatable for middle America.

Though a number of prominent Republican lawmakers—not including President Trump and Vice President Vance, note well—denounced Fuentes and Carlson, they really don’t matter. The gatekeeping authorities in American politics no longer have power, not in the age of the Internet. I am reliably told that one can walk through the White House’s West Wing and hear the podcast voice of Fuentes and his Jew-hating livestreaming colleague Candace Owens coming from the desktop speakers of some staffers.

Antisemitism and white supremacy has gone from the Internet fringes into the heart of American power. Nobody thinks that Trump or Vance are antisemites or white supremacists. Trump has Jewish grandchildren, and Vance is married to a woman of Indian descent (a fact that Fuentes has mocked, publicly calling Vance a “race traitor”). But for some reason, they have been unwilling to condemn these villains.

I suspect it is because the president and the vice president fear their growing power. What Trump and Vance must be made to understand is that this militant vanguard of white nationalism is the greatest threat to American conservatism—not Zohran Mamdani, the next New York mayor.

It’s like this: if ordinary Americans are forced to choose between a Republican Party that, at its highest level, de facto accepts neo-Nazis as part of its coalition, or a Democratic Party whose most prominent public face is a socialist Muslim, they will be tempted to take their chances on the Democrats. After all, most Americans already think of New York as insanely liberal, and will view Mamdani as a local problem.

Yet it is not enough simply to denounce Fuentes and his followers. Conservatives will get nowhere until and unless they address the root causes of why so many right-wing white men under the age of 30 drink Fuentes’s poison like beer at Oktoberfest. It’s actually not so hard to explain.

If you are a young white heterosexual man of the Zoomer generation (that is, under 30), you have grown up in a country in which the dominant liberal culture has scapegoated you for all the problems in the world. When identity politics took over the Left, and groups like Black Lives Matter, and LGBT activists, saw their illiberal politics go mainstream, people like you were told that you are bad, and that discrimination against you was morally correct.

And the Republican Party did little or nothing to defend you, at least not until Trump’s second term.

If you are a Zoomer, you grew up in a country in which all the major institutions had failed. Thanks in part to globalism and the structural economic changes it brought, you were destined to live less well than your parents’ generation. In fact, you would probably never be able to buy a house, which has long been considered the cornerstone of the American dream.

You grew up in a country in which religion had a declining role in American life; yours is the most secular generation in American history. American Zoomer males are the most fatherless in U.S. history. Feminism told you that everything that makes you masculine was a disease. Pornography was everywhere, and so was marijuana.

And then there’s the Internet, which massively fragmented and polarized the country. Women of your generation moved far to the Left, and considered you to be deplorable if you did not join them there. America today may have no sexual rules left, but Zoomers are having less sex than previous generations—and it’s not because they are religiously observant.

COVID was a radicalizing event. Your education was interrupted by the lockdowns, and so was your social life. Then, after the summer of George Floyd, you saw thousands of doctors, the same people who said you must stay locked in your house, give permission for people to go to mass demonstrations against racism. As black mobs burned down cities, the media continued to say that you, white man, are the real problem in America.

Reader, do you see why so many of these young white men became open to right-wing radicalism?

Look at the macro picture of American society. In her 1951 book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, after studying the rise of Nazism in Germany and Communism in Russia, concluded that a society prepared for totalitarianism has several characteristics. Among them:

• Social atomization and mass loneliness
• Abandonment of trust in hierarchies, institutions, and authorities
• A willingness to believe fictional narratives that satisfy one’s emotions, rather than truth
• A desire to transgress social norms for the sheer fun of it

This has been the case for the United States for most of the 21st century. We didn’t know it then, but when the Twin Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001, something else collapsed in the American soul.

In my 2020 bestselling book Live Not By Lies, I described wokeness—which had conquered every American institution, including the U.S. military—as a form of “soft totalitarianism.” Immigrants to the U.S. from the Soviet bloc saw this before the rest of us Americans did. My book was a wake-up call to all Americans, especially conservatives, to understand that we are facing a radical challenge to our liberty, and the settled American order.

And now, all of a sudden, we have the Woke Right, doing the same thing from the other side. Twenty years ago, when wokeness was beginning its rapid rise on the Left, I wrote newspaper columns warning liberals that they were legitimizing the same thing on the Right. You will call up demons that you cannot control, I said. They dismissed my argument as racist. After all, I was a right-wing white man—what did I know?

In my 2020 book, I did not include another of Arendt’s signs of coming totalitarianism: the rise of modern antisemitism. The scholar said antisemitism trains people to think in terms of scapegoating groups of people for all the problems in the world, and provides a moral justification for persecuting them as the solution. In 2020, antisemitism was not a serious problem in America, either on the Left or the Right, so why write about it?

That seems like a thousand years ago now. Support for the state of Israel has evaporated among young people on both political sides. While ceasing to support the Israeli government does not make one an antisemite, we are seeing in America now that this is a distinction without much practical difference.

What is emerging in America today is the collapse of the center under pressure from the extremes of both Left and Right. Andrew Cuomo, an experienced lawmaker from one of the most important Democratic dynasties, was beaten badly in his home city by a 34-year-old Muslim who has almost no political experience. Voters saw Cuomo as a symbol of an old and out-of-touch Democratic Party.

While it is highly unlikely that Mamdani’s rise will help Democrats running elsewhere in America—if anything, making him the face of the new Democratic Party will hurt them—any advantage that Republicans might get from that will be lost, and maybe more than lost, if they become associated with neo-Nazism and white supremacy in the eyes of voters.

What’s more, though the Democrats as a party are at their lowest poll ratings in history, both Trump and Vance are also suffering high disapproval ratings. A new NBC News poll shows that the American public is very unhappy with the Trump administration’s performance on the economy. What good will it do Republicans to maintain solidarity with its racist Zoomers if it loses ordinary Americans who are being ground down by the cost of living? Plus, Donald Trump won the presidency in 2024 by expanding the GOP coalition to include significant numbers of racial minorities. The ascendancy of the Groypers, as Fuentes’s followers call themselves, will destroy that advantage instantly.

It is now clear that the U.S. is fast becoming a destabilized Weimar America. All year I have been following the European civil war discourse, especially the warnings of British war studies professor David Betz, who says that all of Western Europe—but especially Britain and France—are moving rapidly to open conflict. Betz says the same thing about the United States, but I confess that I found this hard to believe.

Not anymore.

There is still time to stop the march of the Groypers, but it will take immense political courage and skill. To repeat: denouncing them is necessary, but it won’t be enough, and it probably won’t work anyway. Their legitimate grievances must be addressed, and with more than words.

The only American public figure capable of stopping the Groypers is not Donald Trump, who is 79 years old, and will be out of office in a few years. No, the only one who can do this is JD Vance, because he is relatively young, and he spent his childhood living in the same kind of chaos that has caused such nihilistic despair among the Zoomers–and he overcame it.

It is no exaggeration to say that the future of the United States of America as a free and stable republic is on JD Vance’s shoulders. Pray that he stands strong, and finds his courage. He faces dark and powerful forces, originating in America’s disintegration, especially in the Internet age. I believe he was made for such a moment as this. Does he know this? We will see, and soon.