“Shut up, Jew.” “Your Jew lies don’t work anymore.” “Yeah, Jew, the truth can be a bitch, huh?” “Jews lie, steal, and murder – it’s their religious duty.” “Less kikes is always good.”
In recent days I’ve been inundated with these and hundreds of similar messages on the X app. The onslaught followed a recent column in which I took issue with Tucker Carlson’s granting of an uncritical platform to a crank historian. Darryl Cooper, an amateur-history podcaster using the pseudonym “Martyr Made”, claims that Winston Churchill was “the chief villain of the Second World War”. There is no point equivocating: the Carlson interview, and the way it has energised swarms of online bigots, are symptomatic of a profound sickness afflicting the American right – particularly the young, online right. The aetiology of the disease is complex, but it would be a mistake to try to locate the causes outside the right, as many of my conservative confrères will be tempted […]
I recently had to spend time in a very rural area with many hundreds of people who were probably 95% ardent republicans. It was very interesting experience and I wouldn’t degrade the majority of them as mentally sick or anywhere near as extreme as the people this article highlights. In fact most of the people I dealt with were wonderful human beings, many extremely intelligent. What cought my attention was the complete lack of any news and social media exposing them to anything that opposes how they have been programmed to think. I say programmed very intentionally, every person I spoke to repeated the same points, people, and events practically word for word like a tape recorder in a way that had a very strange dystopian feeling. I could go on about other strangely consistent observations, but I now view most staunch Republicans as victims and products of an extremely broken information system.