Greetings and welcome to this 61st staging of the Carnival of Fools! For the baseball-minded (at least those who came of age before the McGwire/Sosa/Bonds era), that makes this an auspicious performance, though we can hardly hope to replicate the spectacle of Game 7 of the 2025 World Series, wherein the juggernaut Dodgers finally crushed the pesky underdog Blue Jays under their grinding wheels. (So much for your national pride campaign, Canada!) We’ll keep things brief today because everybody already knows where the action is going to be tonight.
The Tide Rushes In
There are elections across the country today, and the first thing I will say is that if you are a Republican or a conservative and you haven’t voted yet, do so now. You can read this while standing in line, if you must. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has placed his redistricting initiative on the ballot — vote against it. In New Jersey, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill aims to perpetuate the miseries of Phil Murphy’s gubernatorial administration and speed the plow straight into a shelf of desolate rock — vote against her. In Virginia, pod person Abigail Spanberger and obvious psychopath Jay Jones seek the governor’s and the attorney general’s office, respectively — vote against them. And in New York City, Zohran Mamdani promises to import flyover country’s Brandon Johnson Experience to Broadway, this time with a photogenically anti-Zionist smile — vote against him. (For what it’s worth, Andrew Cuomo didn’t even try to earn the votes of Republicans who justifiably hate him, so I’d vote Sliwa while sporting a stylish red beret, myself.)
But I doubt that it will do much good in any event. Democrats are almost certainly going to romp in (almost) every single major local and statewide race on the ballot, and it is easy to see why. For starters, most of the states that feature important races tonight are distinctly blue-shaded, if not downright azure. In addition, midterm backlash against the party currently in the White House is the most predictable tradition in American electoral politics, and Trump has only supercharged its effects on Republicans as their national coalition shifts from educated (and reliably voting) suburbanites to working-class types primarily attracted to the sui generis phenomenon of Trump in presidential-election years. Next year’s midterms will prove the ultimate test, but tonight we receive a premonition of their outcome. I predict it will look something like a visitation from Jacob Marley’s ghost.
I hold out the most hope for current Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares in Virginia, whose excellent track record during his first term would likely not have saved him under normal circumstances, given the toxic anti-Trump environment permeating northern Virginia. But the revelation — by NR’s own Audrey Fahlberg — of opponent Jay Jones’s repulsive texting history has forced even typical Democratic partisans to tap the brakes. (Seriously, if you live in Virginia and also happen to be the sort of person who would be reading a National Review newsletter on a Tuesday morning, then you have no excuse not to go and cast your vote for Winsome Earle-Sears, Jason Miyares, and decency.)
I have written about how bad I think the Mamdani era of New York will be. I have mocked Gavin Newsom with every oil-based adjective in my thesaurus. But I have no vote today. Maybe you do — if so, use it. Instead, I sit stranded here on the hope-forsaken shores of Lake Michigan with nothing left to do except observe forlornly as the tide rolls in. My advice: Batten the hatches for a blue wave.
What Do Zohranastrians and Groypers Have in Common?
The American left is younger than ever, enraged, and ready to vote for the leftmost plausible candidate presented to them. (Does Graham Platner have a Nazi death’s-head tattooed to his chest? Who cares, he’s “authentic!”) In New York City that happens to be Zohran Mamdani, and all I can say to sensible New Yorkers is vae victis. New York voters are in no mood for “sensible elder” politicians; they are in the mood for fantasies, smiles, promises — and maybe a little bit of revenge.
Maybe a lot of revenge, actually. Mamdani is essentially the “burn it all down” candidate for large numbers of those who will cast a vote for him today: New York isn’t working, it will never work for the younger generation, none of the old pieties apply anymore, so now here’s something completely different.
And in seemingly unrelated news, the American right is currently consumed with a battle I consider elemental, an old evil come round again: the mainstreaming of antisemitism within our political discourse, now in form of Chicagoan Nick Fuentes and his so-called groyper army. You can read National Review’s editorial on the matter here, which I endorse in every particular. I have been reluctant to add to it because it speaks for itself.
But for those unaware of the controversy, I will reduce it to its core elements: Tucker Carlson has in recent years veered ever further into demented territory as part of his anti-American turn. (For some, this began with his manic Putin-sponsored trip to Moscow a year and a half ago, but really it was inevitable once he got fired from Fox News.) I’m tired of psychoanalyzing Carlson and his motives — I could share many scabrous theories explaining his progress, off the record — so all that really matters here is that antisemitism has become yet another arrow in his quiver, as the Jews inevitably enter into his conspiratorial constellation of Shady Actors who work behind the scenes to pervert America and suppress the truths of people like Tucker Carlson.
Carlson is not alone in sensing that this is where a significant amount of dark energy lurks online nowadays. He has his finger on that pulse — he knows his audience, if nothing else — and he craves a piece of that action. Which is why he invited notorious youth antisemite (and former enemy) Nick Fuentes to his show last week, where they kissed and made up and Tucker tongue-bathed him with a two-hour cream-puff interview: The goal was to mainstream him for Tucker’s viewers, much as he mainstreamed Darryl “Martyr Made” Cooper’s pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denying take on World War II by offering Cooper the imprimatur of his show. It’s an “any weapon to hand” philosophy for Carlson, who has a goal of sowing greater ferment and discontent than I think even many of his critics realize.
You already know my opinion about Carlson. Others have discussed the Heritage Foundation’s unfortunate role in this entire mess. I won’t. (I will only say that “No enemies to the [left/right]” is a suicidally stupid political strategy when dealing with people inculcated on the lessons of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political.)
Instead, I am interested in why Nick Fuentes has an audience in the first place, one that Carlson felt compelled to weaponize. Do you ever wonder? Why have young listeners gravitated toward him? My first caution is that a large part of that audience is illusory — do not overestimate the size of his viewership, which is extremely online, artificially inflated by bots, and thus wildly disproportionate in terms of visibility in relation to influence. But I just sat through 45 minutes of the worst, most antisemitic, misogynist, misanthropic “greatest hits” of Fuentes’s podcasting career, and after listening to it I draw two conclusions: (1) Nick Fuentes is a cynically depraved monster, sincere in his moral corruption; (2) his psychological appeal to lost and disaffected kids is easy enough to recognize. Between the rants about Jews and women I heard a comprehensively corrosive skepticism of all things and institutions, emblems of a failed world that people like him and his audience were born into, one that gave them the short end of the stick.
These people are not conservative in the proper sense of the term, and they likely never will be. They have nothing to conserve, no investment in “the system” or the establishment, which has let them down. The idea of respectability itself is a mug’s game to them, one that people are dealt in or out of on the basis of arbitrary political factors — and they are its losers. Fuentes speaks directly to them, and he offers Jews and feminists as an explanation for their helplessness. That is why he is a force for evil. But it would be desperately foolish to ignore why he has drawn his audience: He is tapping into a dark corner of the same “burn it all down” sentiment that is widespread among youth of all political sides. He is drawing on the same slipstream as Zohran Mamdani is — a man who, not at all coincidentally, also smirkingly offers Jews as a convenient scapegoat for the world’s problems. It is the chaotic energy of an entire younger generation whose members are beginning to think that they are out of options.
The barbarians aren’t at the gate, or even inside the citadel — they’re our children.
Until next week.