Donald Trump Jr. is touring the country to speak about his new book, Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us, and it’s not going so well.
Writers on the Left couldn’t resist the delicious irony of the president’s son complaining about triggered leftists but then encountering a group of triggered alt-righters at his recent book talk. Pot, meet kettle, right?
But the hecklers who shut down Trump’s talk at UCLA on Sunday are far from the mainstream in the conservative movement, and they don’t belong there, either. Trump’s abruptly truncated book talk had been organized by Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump conservative group that has recently drawn the ire of racists, homophobes, and Holocaust deniers for rejecting their hateful ideologies.
In September, TPUSA fired a brand ambassador for appearing in a photo with alt-right characters including Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and antisemite who attended the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in 2017. When I wrote that TPUSA had made the right call, I was subjected to some pretty nasty backlash from writers claiming to be conservative. I was told that by even admitting that some racists want to be part of the Right, I was siding with leftist smears.
One editor at the conservative journal First Things tweeted, “When conservative columnists operate on the assumption that conservatives have a white supremacy problem in their ranks, you gotta ask, ‘Why do the columnists keep playing the left’s game?'”
But this isn’t a game. It’s a real problem that has to be nipped in the bud. This heckling incident helps illustrate it. Fuentes’s lackeys appeared and shouted Trump down for associating with the annoyingly anti-racist TPUSA. The Washington Post and the New York Times called the hecklers far-right. But during a CNN segment, Brian Stelter called the protesters “a bunch of real right-wing conservatives.”
This is where the alt-right, mostly a negligible force in American politics, becomes a problem, at least in terms of branding, but also of substance. When you let people such as Fuentes stand anywhere near the periphery of conservatism where they can exercise any sort of influence, you’re bound to get fleas.
Fuentes’s unkind words for myself are the least of anyone’s problems, but I think they help demonstrate his intellectual caliber. He introduced a nine-minute rant about me in a recent YouTube video (I’m not going to link it) by calling me “some bimbo retard” and following it up with “f***ing retard,” “stupid bimbo whore,” and “stupid bitch.”
This from a man who has “Catholic” in his Twitter bio. He concluded his “argument” by repeating, “You stupid bitch!” while punching a fist into his other hand. During the same rant, he also said that one TPUSA ambassador was “another black woman who has yet to escape the plantation” and called her a “slave on the GOP Inc. plantation.” Naturally, he couldn’t help throwing in a disparaging comment about Israel, not because he is anti-Israel but because he hates Jews and engages in Holocaust denial.
Is this the sort of thing with which First Things, that highbrow ecumenical journal of religion in public life, wants its brand to be associated? Would the journal’s late founder, Father Neuhaus, be proud? I suspect he would agree with me that there is a value to excluding unhinged, racist, antisemitic jerks from polite conservative society, and I am not alone in thinking this.
More broadly, though, should any conservative want to let Fuentes and his ilk break into the mainstream as they are hoping to do? Some in the left-wing media would be happy to let them if that meant they could use it to “own the cons.” That is just one additional reason why conservatives must denounce them.
The alt-right is not the future of the Right, but to make sure of it, we must push its hateful ideologies back into the dark corner where they belong.
