In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”More:
That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.
Haywood himself has repeatedly used a slur for Indians on social media, has argued that the Allies, not the Nazis, were the genuinely barbaric power in World War II, has insisted the war was not much motivated by the horrors of Nazi aggression, and gushed that Tucker Carlson and Darryl Cooper “boil down all my political plans.” Cooper argues that Churchill, not Hitler, was the villain of World War II.Haywood isn't just a random online edgelord -- he has money, and he uses it to steer influential right-wing institutions.
Jason Hart has documented that Haywood’s personal foundation has given the Claremont Institute $390,500 since 2022.... Haywood sits on the publication committee of Claremont’s American Mind, one of four men who do. Claremont let Haywood’s fraternal order get itself incorporated under Claremont’s own nonprofit status. That order is the Society for American Civic Renewal, and Claremont’s president Ryan Williams confirmed he serves on that group’s board.... Hart reports that the president of Claremont, the chief executive of New Founding, and the chief marketing officer of the Blaze are all members.Still more:
Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, [Haywood] wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco.But you won't read this post because I'm about to identify the author: Erick Erickson, who's been a noxious figure on the right for a generation. If you know anything about Erickson, you know he has a nerve writing this without ever acknowledging his own part in pushing the right ever rightward. (He's had kind words for Pinochet himself in the past.) Nevertheless, I still think his essay is worth reading.
Until now, most of the right has tried to turn America into a country where conservatives control the culture and win every election, but their opponents are (mostly) allowed to live their lives. It's still legal to be gay, or heterosexual and childless. You're not banned from certain professions if, say, you're a Democrat or a Muslim.
Haywood is one of many influential figures in the emerging post-Trump right who aren't satisfied with that. They want to control private behavior. They don't believe that anyone can be an American, or that members of certain groups should be Americans. There's quite a bit of overlap between Haywood's thinking and the unabashed bigotry of groyperism, as embodied in the career of Nick Fuentes. Erickson writes:
Running alongside all of this, from a different direction and with different money, is Nick Fuentes. He has never been coy about his ambitions. “There’s groypers everywhere,” he told his audience. “There’s groypers in the administration. There’s groypers at Turning Point USA. There’s groypers at Fox News, at Daily Wire.” He has instructed his followers to infiltrate the Republican Party and Turning Point and change them from the inside, and he has boasted that his people are working their way into the highest ranks of that leadership. In 2023 he wrote that his “White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist” views, once radioactive, were now pounding on the door of the mainstream.Erickson links all this to the possible next president of the United States, J.D. Vance:
Vice President Vance has refused to distance himself from the groyper movement and will not forcefully denounce the antisemites. Rod Dreher, who had been his friend and an early champion of his memoir, went to him last fall and urged him to draw that line. Dreher says Vance cut him off and the friendship is over. Unfortunately, the Vice President keeps all of it within arm’s reach. Haywood’s foundation is a recurring funder of American Moment, the staffing pipeline founded in 2021 with Vance’s support, which exists to place young conservatives in administration jobs.Meanwhile, Politico reports this about Vance:
Vice President JD Vance will hit a key hurdle in his fence-mending effort with Jewish Republicans on Thursday when he hosts a popular conservative radio host at the White House.I guarantee that Vance won't distance himself from Tucker Carlson and will, if he wins the nomination, have the full support of Rosenberg (who now prefers Marco Rubio), because Rosenberg is a Democrat-hater and an Islamophobe:
77 WABC host Sid Rosenberg, a longtime friend and ardent ally of President Donald Trump, has publicly attacked Vance for maintaining a friendship with Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality accused of invoking antisemitic tropes in criticizing Israel....
In an interview Wednesday with POLITICO, Rosenberg said he plans to grill Vance in person about both Carlson and U.S. aid for Israel....
“If he really wants to win in ‘28, he has no choice but to, at the very least, distance himself from [Carlson] if not completely disavow him,” Rosenberg said, adding that he believes the vice president “has pissed off the Jews and many Trump supporters.”
In March, Rosenberg called Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor, an “America hating, Jew hating, Radical Islam cockroach” ... After drawing intense pushback from voices across the aisle, Rosenberg apologized to Mamdani for the harsh remark....I believe Vance is an old-school blood-and-soil neo-Confederate, but I also think that while he's trying to maintain credibility among the groyper/neo-fascist edgelords, he's also determined to reassure establishmentarians and advocates of Israel that he's on their side. Vance reminds me of an earlier racist striver, Richard Nixon, who carefully built bridges both to the establishment and to Goldwater/John Birch extremists in his long march to a presidential victory in 1968.
Rosenberg also came under intense fire earlier this year for calling Mamdani “a terrorist” — and apologized for that remark too. But he later retracted that apology, saying he was “exactly right” to use the term.
Here's the Vance two-step:
... Vance extended an olive branch earlier this month at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s leadership summit in Las Vegas, where he voiced concern about antisemitic hate crimes and said working with Israel is “in the best interest of the United States.” Vance touched on Carlson at that summit as well, acknowledging that “people in this room may disagree” with things he’s said, but the vice president avoided discussing his relationship with him.I don't believe Vance is an Israel skeptic for the right reasons -- he seems bigoted to the core, and also seems extremely eager to keep young neo-Nazis on his side. As for Erick Erickson, I don't think he wants a world I'd like to live in, but he's saying some things that need saying about his tribe. I suppose the best outcome in all this would be a conservative crack-up, but that never seems to happen. It remains to be seen whether the future of the right is bad ... or worse.
Just days after that appearance, however, Vance ignited criticism from pro-Israel Republicans again by saying in a speech that the U.S. cannot allow its Middle East policy approach to be “subservient to the State of Israel.”
No comments:
Post a Comment