Dress Rehearsal for a Purge
Several weekends ago, Fox News celebrity Mark Levin addressed the Republican Jewish Coalition leadership conference in Las Vegas, where he delivered a tirade that in its blustering style could have been given by a Latin American jefe. Levin denounced “that bastard Tucker Carlson” for allowing anti-Semitic demagogues like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens onto his podcasts; he also praised the conservative movement for dumping, decades ago, other supposed anti-Semites, including Chronicles columnists Pat Buchanan and Joe Sobran.
Perhaps we should remember that Levin, who has hardly distinguished himself as an orthographer, wrote a book titled American Marxism about the “Franklin School,” which was his unique Philadelphia spelling for the “Frankfurt School.” Levin also mentioned in his rambling diatribe other putative anti-Semites, “Churchill-haters,” and less definable miscreants, like the Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, who irritated him and other neoconservatives by questioning U.S. aid to Israel, among other no-nos.
Although Levin’s bluster is the most pugnacious attack on the anti-Israeli right that I’ve encountered, it was far from the only broadside against Levin’s multifarious enemies. The gunfire against them has continued for weeks from the Murdoch media empire and its richly paid servants. Moreover, some of this fire has been aimed at Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, who defended Tucker Carlson’s right to deviate from the authorized pronouncements of Conservative Inc.
For his defense of his friendship with Carlson, Roberts has been dragged through the mud, partly by his own staff slavishly deserting him in obedience to their real masters, the neocons. If Roberts decided to defend Tucker against the charge of anti-Semitism and to note “the venomous coalition” aligned against his friend, then he should never have apologized for his statement. Once he took his bold stand, he should have known the neocons would come after him, with vengeful intent. Either Roberts should have stood his ground or refrained from making his defense.
A few days later, Stephen Moore, a not-very-interesting libertarian, quit his position at Heritage in a way that was supposed to remind us of his unhappiness with Roberts’s heretical defense of Carlson. Roberts, from a historical perspective, is indeed an outsider, because the president with whom Heritage was long associated, Ed Feulner, was an obsequious supporter of the neoconservative cause. In my books on the conservative movement, I show to what extent Feulner, who was very much dependent on neocon largess, served this master class.
Despite the way Con Inc. dependents fawn on their superiors, I see no need to support their targets unconditionally. Nick Fuentes, for example, did himself no favors by behaving like a shock jock on Carlson’s program; another Carlson guest, Candace Owens, sounds like what we used to call a “space cadet” with her unfounded conspiracy theories. Tucker Carlson seems to be cultivating an odd assortment of friends these days. More than once, I’ve heard his interviewees explaining that Hitler was a misunderstood hero; Fuentes, perhaps to his credit, tried to balance the defense of mass murderers by putting in a good word for Stalin as well as the German Führer.
Nor will I hide my annoyance with Tucker, who, after being forced out at Fox News for bravely upholding his paleoconservative convictions, has allowed his podcasts to become less credible intellectually. Tucker is one of the few voices outside of the neoconservative consensus on the right with any prominence. It would be a good idea to have only serious people on his podcasts, rather than those pushing dubious stories about chemtrails, demons, and aliens.
That said, it is impossible for me to sympathize with those who are assailing Tucker. I’ve seen neocon hit squads in action for decades; and as a one-time victim of these nasty pieces of work, I can vouch for their malice. The neoconservatives attract bullies like Levin, sniveling cowards who serve the bullies, and above all, powerful donors. Let me make one point completely clear: The uproar over Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes is not an isolated event. It is the latest bloodletting in a conservative movement that has witnessed many purges, and which may well be defined by them.
Please note how Levin celebrates “the canceling” of undesirable people by Conservative Inc. Although quite thuggish in the way he expresses himself, Levin is honest enough to tell us what his movement has accomplished through its recurrent purges. If his fraternity hosts a big tent, then the only ones it lets in are those Levin approves. Purges are directed towards interlopers who offer views that neither Levin nor neocon donors want expressed. If intruders somehow crash the tent, then it’s a damned good thing, according to Levin, that they’re getting canceled.
These intrusions are likely to grow worse for those inside the tent because the possibilities for expressing dissent on the right have expanded exponentially with the internet and podcasting. This doesn’t mean that those availing themselves of these resources can take over the Con Inc. media and organizational complex. But it does mean that outsiders can hang around indefinitely and taunt the neocon power elite. Running podcasts and Substacks on the cheap and turning up on X and myriad social media platforms does have strategic value.
Levin and his friends in the Murdoch media empire can’t do to Tucker Carlson what they did to me and others 40 years ago. They can rail against him and make sure Tucker never again finds employment in their sector of the economy. But purging him or taking away Fuentes’s livelihood will not be as successful as the wars against others that the neocons waged before the present technological revolution.
Still, the neocons and their lackeys will keep up the pressure as long as they can, because that’s just what they do. Ben Shapiro recently appeared on CNN complaining about the “anti-Semitic right,” and the New York Post featured the very leftist ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt on Nov. 8 as an expert commentator on anti-Semitism (see more about Greenblatt and the ADL in this issue’s lead feature, by Mary Grabar). The neocons are repeating their modus operandi from the conservative wars of the 1980s by calling on their leftist friends to help them defeat enemies on the right.
This is how the neocon-funded conservative establishment works. It cultivates alliances with the left to combat anything to the right of itself. And by “the right,” we’re not speaking primarily about people who minimize Hitler’s or Stalin’s crimes or who inveigh against Israel. We’re speaking about any person or movement that doesn’t fit the neoconservative grid of the politically acceptable. Quite often, the neocon enforcers swing away wildly, as when they went after me for having said something ambiguous but hardly derogatory about supporting Israel. From my hesitations or nuances, it was assumed that I was “not reliable” on that all-important country in the Middle East.
Ray Welder, chairman of the Chronicles board, may be right when he tells us that what we’re observing may be aimed at long-term goals, namely restoring Heritage as a neocon-dominated foundation and possibly obtaining the Republican presidential nomination for Ted Cruz, who represents unfailingly neocon talking points.
In the meantime, the usual suspects will go on playing up the crisis, for example, warning us in this Sunday’s New York Post that American Jews are now endangered by both “right and left extremes.” A few months ago, that was the fallback position of the ADL, when that historically leftist organization reluctantly had to admit that American Jews face enemies on the left as well as the right. Conservative Inc. assumes the same rhetorical stance when it welcomes back its old leftist ally on the Post’s editorial page. The neocons and the ADL are well-suited partners.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/editorials/dress-rehearsal-for-a-purge