The Ideal Number of Racists in Your Political Movement Should Be Zero

The right and center-right just won’t admit they’ve got a problem, even though they keep elevating bigots to positions of prominence and influence.

“The Right Needs to Ask: ‘Why Do These Racists Keep Getting Hired by Us?’”

That’s the headline for my latest piece at The Daily Beast, homing in on an issue that’s vexed me for a long time, one that should be plainly obvious to the people with the power to actually do something about it: There are too many racists elevated to prominence in the right-of-center commentariat.

And I’m not just talking about the obvious, caliper-wielding, far-right chuds at places like Breitbart or American Greatness or any number of podcasts and YouTube shows.

I’m talking about the Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship winners, the Newsweek contributors, the Tucker Carlson show regulars, the Peter Thiel-endorsed “thought leaders,” the relatively youthful upstarts who get quoted in (and sometimes get to write for) The New York Times and The Washington Post. The mainstream right-of-center media climbers.

My Beast essay explores the rise and (probably only temporary) falls of:

- The former Ron DeSantis staffer and rising right-wing media star who was fired for putting Nazi shit in an online campaign video.

- The frequent Tucker Carlson show guest outed for a second time as an antisemite that regularly contributed to overtly racist group chats.

- The race realist public intellectual—previously well-regarded in center-right, libertarian, and heterodox circles, and heavily promoted by politically active right-wing billionaires—who was revealed to have written even much more overtly racist stuff than he does now. And he did it for white nationalist sites, over the course of years.

My pessimistic take on the whole thing:

I don’t expect many of the high-profile political campaigns, think tanks, publications, cable news shows, and thought leaders on the right to ask, “Why is it that racists, antisemites, and alt-right types keep finding themselves in influential positions in our movement?”

Extremely normal content created by a rising mainstream conservative star for the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign.

But the problem goes beyond just the right’s poor instincts for weeding out racists in the people they hire and promote at their publications, activist groups, and idea-incubators. There’s also the edgelords who artfully dodge serious scrutiny from their own side by using the “I’m just being ironic, lol you’re so triggered snowflake” deflection. Wherever their true principals lie (beyond online popularity and profit), they are typically more comfortable with overt racists and psychotic hustlers like Alex Jones than they’d be in the company of any random CNN host or milquetoast Democrat. And they’re the popular merry pranksters of the right.

The elephant in the room is the fact that in many right-of-center tribes (including the ostensibly “politically tribeless” that rarely has a kind word to say about the left), there is a disincentive to forcefully dissent against the whitewashing (or outright promotion) of racists and their allies:

There was a subset of us on what was heretofore known as the center-right who, pre-November 2016, warned our erstwhile allies and colleagues of what was likely to come.

We argued that the calls for violence, the unabashed racism, and the “oh-they-don’t-really-mean-it” footsie-games with dishonest, edgelord provocateurs would swallow anything positive and righteous. And besides, these things were simply wrong, against our stated principles, and it’s the height of cowardice to whitewash horrible ideas just because they’re coming from people that are popular with the same uber-wealthy donors who keep the lights on at almost every right-of-center journalistic outfit, think tank, and university center.

For the most part, we dissenters were waved off as overwrought tools of “the Cathedral” or squishes desperately seeking the approval of the “woke.” But we learned that pissing off the right’s big-money donors for writing too stridently about Trump’s racism could cost you your job. While reporting from the 2016 Republican National Convention, I was expressly forbidden from writing for a libertarian outlet about a notoriously racist and Islamophobic pro-Trump event—where “friendly” donors and fellow travelers just happened to be lounging in the VIP area.

As the rise of right-wing media stars like Hochman, Gonzalez, and Hanania has shown, there are career-enhancing incentives to blur the lines between “just lol trolling” and overt racism and antisemitism—just as there are incentives to crying “cancel culture” and “wokeness run amok!” when those tendencies are exposed. (Likewise, there is a disincentive to forcefully oppose what’s popular among the in-group.)

As my former colleague and current UnPopulist publisher Shikha Dalmia—who knows a thing or two about getting cancelled by the anti-cancel culturers for being a little too loud about Trump’s racism finding its way into U.S. government policy—noted in a Twitter thread:

Even the respectable right draws racists because those who are vocal against them cost donors and traffic and are squeezed out.

But those who play footsie w/ racists do so in the name of some faux principle—free speech—that supposedly trumps ordinary morality. This offers plausible deniability while drawing traffic and donors. Over time, the right gets depopulated of objectors and populated w/ those indifferent to racism.

I’m sometimes asked “What happened to you?” by disappointed former well-wishers—often the same people that should be asking, “Why Do These Racists Keep Getting Hired by Us?“—who are certain I’ve sold out to Big Democratic Party or otherwise “gone woke” as a result of my mind being broken by Trump Derangement Syndrome.

There’s a long answer to that question that might be worth exploring at some point, should anyone even care, but the simple and rather boring answer is:

Not much has happened to me. My politics and specific policy interests are basically the same, and I still don’t reflexively carry water for any party, politician, or political movement. I basically went from center-right to kinda center-left (by default) after calling out a lot of hypocrisies and failures on the right during the Trump era, and a good number of people never forgave me for committing such thought crimes against the tribe. I also admittedly held my nose and voted for Biden—for whom I have never held any particular affection or admiration—when the alternative was Trump.

If that’s selling out to the left, it wasn’t a particularly lucrative grift.

For now, my latest Beast column can serve as a brief introduction of a long answer to a bad faith question: Read the whole thing here.

Should you fancy some other recent writing that pissed off many of the same heroic, fearless freethinkers, check out my essays, “Defending RFK Jr. Is Boring—Not Brave,” and “Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and the Apocalyptic ‘Centrists’”

Finally, if you’d prefer some lighter Fisher fare, here’s my deep-dive into becoming a mid-life Deadhead, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grateful Dead,” and my review of the new book Quantum Criminals, “The Steely Dan Book That’s as Darkly Funny as Their Songs.”

Thanks for reading! Hopefully back here soon.