Are we ready to fight it?
Ari Shtein
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On October 26, the Board of Directors of The Harvard Salient, a conservative campus outlet, announced they were suspending the publication. It was the culmination of a weeks-long controversy, kicked off by a passage printed in The Salient’s September edition which had language echoing a speech given by Adolf Hitler in 1939.
In the course of arguing that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” a contributor to The Salient named David F.X. Army had written that “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” and appealed to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” Editor-in-chief Richard Y. Rodgers went on the record back then not to disavow the language used, nor the argument advanced, but only to suggest that he and the piece’s author were unaware of its link to the Führer. (Who once literally assigned “France to the French, England to the English, America to the Americans, and Germany to the Germans.”)
Just days earlier, on October 23, The Atlantic had run a piece by Stanford graduate Julia Steinberg entitled, “The Appeal of the Campus Right.” She wrote about her experience of the conservative scene in Palo Alto—about seeking out open-minded debate in a stifling progressive echo chamber, and finding it at The Stanford Review. The community Steinberg joined there was minimally ideological, it accepted all stripes, it “was full of diversity and contradiction.”
“MAGA diehards, traditional Catholics, anti-Trump neoconservatives, isolationists, anti-identity-politics liberals, Luddites, and techno-capitalists” all got along in anti-woke, free-discourse-lovin’ equanimity, she said.
But the scandal at The Salient suggests that this era of conservative cohesion on campus may be coming to a close.
When Steinberg matriculated in fall 2021, overzealous COVID restrictions still required clubs to meet outdoors, and students to test for the virus weekly. That December, Stanford’s Undergraduate Senate refused to fund, without clear justification, a Stanford College Republicans event with former Vice President Mike Pence. Libertarians and ethnonationalist conservatives could easily agree on the badness of all this, could happily band together to oppose it.
Now, though, the left’s been disempowered, the vibe has shifted, and the right wing—on and off campus—is ascendant. It’s left without a common enemy, without a single unifying fight. And so the intra-coalitional contradictions are sharpening. The divide between normie conservatives and those more open to far-right Nazism—those at The Salient, for instance—has become an especially inflammatory flashpoint.
In fact, much the same dynamic is playing out even more dramatically among conservatives off campus. Only a couple of weeks before The Salient’s fiasco, POLITICO broke a story on group text chains between Young Republicans leadership which exposed somewhat less ambiguous Nazist tendencies. “I love Hitler,” wrote one New York Assemblyman’s chief of staff, to which the chairman of the Kansas Young Republicans responded with a smiley face.
Condemnations rained down from leading conservative figures, but the fringe’s flirtation with fascism would not be deterred. It was the day after The Salient Board of Directors’ announcement that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson posted to his millions of fans a surprisingly chummy interview with Nick Fuentes. A holocaust denier, self-avowed antisemite, and leader of the so-called “Groyper” movement, Fuentes told Carlson all about the “Jewish neocons behind the Iraq war,” and oriented himself against “Zionist Jews … controlling the media apparatus.”
Carlson, much like Rodgers’ response to the Salient story, seemed on-board with the gist of the message, if not its precise form. “I’m not that interested in the Jews, but I’m very interested in the foreign policy question,” Carlson said, and later he cautioned Fuentes, “I feel like going on about the Jews helps the neocons.”
Fuentes’ appearance all but immanentized the conservative reckoning. Cracks, now, are spreading rapidly through the big-tent coalition of disaffected liberals, fusionists, traditionalists, neocons, MAGAs, and alt-right Groyper Nazis which elected a Republican trifecta in 2024. As Carlson and Fuentes, alongside figures like Candace Owens, rebuke the globalist (or occasionally “Jewish”) economic and foreign policy of Buckleyan fusionism, MAGAs and traditionalists are torn.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, representing some unholy hyperpartisan kludge of these two camps, responded to the Carlson-Fuentes interview with near-unconditional acceptance—only to face immediate and fiery backlash from within his own group’s ranks, and from outside commentators, too.
Most of those outside commentators had a confident prescription for any conservative leaders still repulsed by Fuentes’ brand of antisemitic reaction: deplatform him! Expel him! Make like a Buckley, and banish the Bircher!
It’s a good idea—but as Robby Soave writes in Reason, it might not be enough.
Buckley controlled the conservative means of communication. He could excommunicate the John Birch Society because he could drive its people out of newsrooms and broadcasters, he could keep them from their audience. But today the media landscape is utterly decentralized, and Carlson and Fuentes have millions of adoring fans who can’t be cut off.
It’s clearly good and right, on a personal, social, and institutional level, to shun the ideas and figures of the Nazi-sympathizing fringe. But we can’t count on this alone. Fuentes will keep streaming, the Young Republicans will keep texting, and if you try to shut The Salient down, they’ll fight hard to keep publishing.
We’ve got to do a little more: we’ve got to win arguments and change minds, too. I don’t think this should be terribly hard—as attractive as the antisemitically-flavored America First philosophy has proven to be, it’s at root pretty stupid. I find it difficult to imagine a condemnation of “organized Jewry in America” gaining much purchase among Yale’s conservative student body.
Sadly, there can be no doubt that all these loony ideas, now swirling around quite freely in the conservative ether, will soon make their way to New Haven. And I’m sure some students, some threads of our diverse and contradictory conservative tapestry, will become enamored with them. Maybe some already have. But I think that Yale students, and Yale conservatives especially, tend to be thoughtful and reasonable people, who care about the truth and the goodness of their beliefs.
And I hope, not without cause, that when the conservative civil war reaches our campus, it’ll be the good and the true which win out.