It helps to stock up on lightweight concepts for the less-than-Nazi versions of the things you don't like.
For example, "xenophobia" vs. "demographic anxiety." It's pretty normal for people to feel some anxiety when their neighborhood is gentrified, or when they become a minority in their town and lose certain network goods. That doesn't mean they hate the newcomers.
Of course, they might *also* hate the newcomers. "Poisoning the blood" etc. -- but this is something far more sinister than wanting neighbors who speak your language.
We should remember that the folks living in the United States do not speak English are the ones disadvantaged by that fact— not us native born speakers.
It is interesting that Americans will pay big bucks to go to countries where virtually no one speaks English, and then stay in Hilton hotels just so they can hear English.
as noted by Thomas Schelling, though, mere desire to be in the ethnic majority group (i.e. >50%) for your local neighborhood predictably tends to produce de facto ethnic/racial segregation, ethnic enclaves and/or ghettoes, etc. IMO we should not treat it as a harmless preference, but rather as a regrettably near-universal inclination that people should be made to feel at least a little ashamed for indulging.
I'm in the "*very* tired of never hearing English on the buses and at fast food restaurants anymore" camp. I definitely consider myself a xenophobe, but not a genocidal one.
Me too! Those willing to kill non-English speakers are generally willing to kill a few English speakers as well. Kevin Roberts warned us: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be."
I would characterize him as demanding the left submit to a new social order with the alternative as violent suppression, but probably not extermination.
I was thoroughly disgusted with the interview which I listened to in part. Darryl’s claim that “challenging the official narrative is illegal in Europe” is particularly deplorable. What he’s referring to, undoubtedly, is Holocaust Denial. And yes: Holocaust Denial is bad Darryl! And the fact you don’t say that out loud is because you KNOW it’s bad and don’t want to defend it.
Most people, I would guess, won’t catch that part. But it was so clearly there I cringed with rage.
Carlson was always a bottom feeder but this is a new level of deplorable
He's probably referring to what he said. In theory, German law does forbid only holocaust denial. In practice all kinds of speech and political organization is being punished and oppressed there under the guise of preventing the rise of Nazis, all of which has nothing to do with the Nazis and everything to do with killing off ordinary political opposition.
What he said was, in reality, at best an "anti-anti" Nazi diatribe of historical mistruths and exaggerations. At worst it was a Nazi-Apologist history (I lean towards the at worst side of the argument).
"Liberals and progressives obviously don’t agree with conservatives on much, and they may even despise them, but at the end of the day we all need to come together to defeat the totalitarians of the world."
I recently rewatched John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" for the first time since I was a kid, and was struck by how that's essentially the whole point of the film. Jimmy Stewart's idealistic young lawyer is the liberal, John Wayne is the traditional conservative, and Liberty Valance is the violent authoritarian. Stewart and Wayne end up teaming up to defeat the greater threat that shares none of their true American values.
Great comment. I do wish that Noah would take the totalitarians on the left more seriously. I’ve listened to MS-NBC, (definitely speaking to not a tiny niche on the left) host full-blooded advocates of limiting free-speech to their speech. I’ve read Matt Taibbi’s accounts, naming prominent members of Democratic administrations proposing what is effectively the same position, calling it suppression of lies, misinformation, or worse, malinformation (essentially any speech that gets in the way of their objectives) rather than the true, ugly word, censorship. One need not be a Nazi to be a totalitarian
I cannot believe I just read a serious post about how prominent figures within the Conservative movement are playing footsy with literal Nazis, and the conclusion is “progressives need to work harder to be nice to conservatives.”
With due respect: F that.
If conservatives have a Nazi problem, it is 100% on them to fix it. They should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but they should also do it because this weird alt-right edgy maybe-Nazi-adjacent stuff is electoral poison. Republicans keep losing winnable elections and may lose another soon, and — more critically — they’re long-term losing the electoral support of an entire rising younger generation. Trump is a big part of that, but the party’s openness to edgy creeps is definitely a contributor. It is not on progressives to fix this, it is not on progressives to save conservatives from their own moral failures. At this point it is on progressives to win elections, and they’ve been doing that relatively well.
If telling Conservatives that they’re acting like Nazis “causes them to be more tolerant of Nazis” then this isn’t some tender sensitive spot that progressives should be gentle with, lest they force conservatives to be tolerant of Nazis. Nobody should be tolerant of Nazis. It is entirely on conservatives to keep those voices out of mainstream political relevance, in the same way that the Dems have fought hard to keep Chavez fans mostly irrelevant in mainstream politics.
No. They're almost 100% progressives. They're of the Left not the Right. Which is Noah's point as well.
As a side note, I'm not sure conservative actually means anything in the West today. It certainly doesn't mean what Edmund Burke or Milton Friedman or William F. Buckley meant when they used it. That conservatism (a bias toward preserving existing institutions) is dead because it didn't manage to conserve anything. Donald Trump is not conservative; he's a radical disputor. Trump is a "liberal" in a Shakespearean sense: an agent of chaos.
Because of this linguistic problem, many on the Right are adopting the label postliberal despite its ambiguity, because they see conservatism as a failed ideology. Like the Left, they view themselves as radicals trying to create a better society than as reactionaries "standing athwart history yelling STOP!" to use Buckley's famous phrase.
I didn’t see many of those people at the DNC, except possibly locked outside among the protestors. Such people exist in the US (though let’s not be stupid and pretend everyone objecting to the war is one), but their biggest complaint is that the mainstream Democratic party can’t stand them.
Well antisemitism was branded the "socialism of fools" during the 19th century!
Perhaps the update of that saying today would be to say that anti-Zionism (which is now understandably conflated with antisemitism given that close to half of the world's Jews are now Israelis) is the anti-imperialism of fools?
(Incidentally, is it not kind of odd that supporters of the Palestinian cause portray it as an anti-imperialist cause, but their notion of the borders of "Palestine" was defined by the British Mandate?)
If progressives believe this, they could show it by not calling pretty much all conservatives Nazis, racists, bigots, etc... They've been calling us that for my entire adult life.
Look at what's going on in the UK today, or the Canadian response to the trucker protest. The liberals are looking increasingly totalitarian.
Wait, what? This is satire. Must be. Progressives are better at seeing the Marxists and extremists than conservatives are at seeing Nazis? That's laugh out loud nonsense. There are camps and daily marches throughout the US calling for the destruction of a sovereign nation and ally of the US, and the leftist reaction is, "Meh". There are calls to tax unrealized capital gains and put in place price caps, and the leftist reaction is, "Oh yeah good call!". The overwhelming reaction of conservatives- the actual kind, not the Tucker Carlson fanatics- to that nonsense was to call it exactly that - nonsense. Carlson is playing out his own twisted fantasy of trying to couple in his followers' minds Churchill and Netanyahu. By planting the seeds of Churchill as the monster who refused to stop WWII, he can then smear the Israeli leader with the same swipe. It's calculated and plays into the worst leanings of some of his followers. He's gone full Candace.
Tax on unrealized capital gains is an old and tired socialist scam. Though the Third Reich and the Soviet and Maoist socialists deserve their share of villainy, the socialists killed far more people than Germany. So yes in those terms anything that edges us toward more socialism deserves the same treatment as anything that takes us closer to nazism.
Part of the problem with your statement is that Nazi’s were a creature of the right wing, not the left. Hitler hated the left, and would have hated Mao. The “Nationalist” was the driver, not Socialist, and Mao was a Communist, which is not the same thing as Socialism.
Hitler was more of a fundamentalist Social Darwinist than a nationalist: the Nero-Befehl shows that at the end of the day he regarded even German lives as having negligible real value.
Not more of, perhaps all of a piece but that’s quibbling. One thing he has in common with all strongmen (who can be left or right) is a fanatical disregard for human life in bringing about their utopian vision.
It could be argued that the Nazis were different from other totalitarians (such as communists or Islamists) precisely in that they were NOT internally motivated by a utopian vision, even if they did project such in their propaganda.
"Hitler saw any such promise of universalism or a utopian/millennial end to history and the elimination of suffering as itself the enemy. The idea that human beings were any better than animals and could ever escape, even with the help of God, the war of all against all that was the fate of animals, Hitler thought, was a lie brought into the world by the Jews who had used it to achieve dominance over more naturally powerful peoples."
"What Hitler sought was the undoing of what he considered to be the distortions found in every humanistic, progressive or millennialist way of thinking. For him, the only true freedom was the freedom to submit to the eternal dictates of nature, dictates which had been discovered by science, especially in the form of Darwinism, but which neither technology, nor human made law would ever permit us to escape. Hitler thus subsumed politics under his limited understanding of nature as an eternal, and necessarily pitiless evolutionary struggle."
"Hitler’s philosophy was the penultimate form of Malthusianism and the opposite of techno-progressivism in the sense that he believed scarcity to be unsolvable by technical means and resource security- especially in terms of food- something that could only be obtained through conquest."
That's a great link, except the article states that "communism" is at the end of the spectrum of...socialism, and despite what Mao may have claimed, it also says, "It's kind of important to understand, I think, that there aren’t any currently existing communist countries, there (arguably?) never have been any communist countries, and all the countries that we call communist countries, or who call themselves that, are just claiming communism is their long term goal. ". So, I return to my statement.
Yes, I guess my point was that in liberal democracies that have a capitalist economic system, like the US, providing for the common welfare is done through democratic means set forth in the Constitution (Federal, State, municipalities (although that would be by charter). Laws are passed. Corporations themselves exist because State law allows them to. Congress passes laws. States pass laws. Cities and Towns pass laws. These public services are chosen. Taxes on income - from whatever source - are Constitutional powers granted to Congress. Nazism and Maoism are not that. 😊
He certainly didn't hate left wing principles. The first thing he did on taking control of the German Workers Party was to put "National Socialist" in front of it. The manifesto they ran on wouldn't look out of place in a social democratic party platform today. He hated "the left" only the extent that left wing authoritarianism requires there be a single source of power, which he wanted to be himself and not Moscow.
He hated liberalism and embraced socialism (state ownership of the means of production) but he was completely far-right politically. Policies providing for the common welfare exist in all capitalist democracies — that is not socialism.
I'm not a fan of the idea myself, but asked "Do you support or oppose the following government policies to reduce inflation: Prosecute companies for price-gouging and price-fixing", 67% of Trump voters selected "support". Are they Communists?
I think free market advocates need to grapple with monopoly being more than “low prices” for consumers, it’s also anticompetitive and ultimately depresses innovation. Price gouging happened - corporate America was not secretive about their desire to recoup profits from previous years. When only a handful of entities control the food and gas markets, well….
Actually monopoly power results in _higher_ prices for consumers: the kind of corporate power whose apologists cite lower consumer prices as its justification is _monopsony_ power, which is exerted at the expense of suppliers and employees.
Price fixing (collusion amongst competitors to set prices) is already serious jail time if you're caught. Price gouging is also illegal in many states already. It's no surprise that the actual illegal manipulation of pricing would be disliked by just about everyone. Raising prices due to the skyrocketing costs of business inputs like shipping and personnel costs feels bad for consumers, but isn't gouging. I will believe any political party is serious about fixing competition issues when they address why it is that you can get ATT high speed internet in some markets, but strangely not Verizon or Cspire, etc.
Funny how everyone here went off about your comments about capital gains taxes and ignored your larger point that progressives have (at a minimum) ignored and (I suspect) abetted the antisemitic wave that have inundated the Western world in the last year.
Yeah, our host often has a blind spot for the cultural end of immigration too. My degree is in econ, so I know well how it turns you into a hammer looking for nails. I'm not sorry I have the training at all, but it did take me about a decade to develop a more well-rounded toolkit with which to analyze the world.
I find the upsurge in antisemitism in English-speaking countries one of the worst things to happen in recent years, and even confusing to be honest. For the first fifty years of my life it seemed like a historical artifact and I never dreamt it would come back (clearly not a Jew, right, because I'm aware of the naiveness of that assumption). Maybe it's emanating from Russian bots in the dark corners of the internet, who knows? I wish people would stop being so gullible - but that's a highly unfixable problem.
The antisemitism emanating from the Left will die down as soon as Netanyahu ends the nearly year-long war in Gaza, with its constant stream of new Tik Tok videos that generate outrage by showcasing Gazan children freshly killed in airstrikes. For the Left to truly calm down, Israel must also end--or at least greatly reduce--its ongoing ethnic cleansing project in the Occupied Territories, which could be a very hard sell with the Israeli Right.
The antisemitism from the Right will be tougher to eradicate, as it's become intertwined with White Grievance; as well as racist, xenophobic, and homophobic intolerance. All of which apparently form a core part of modern Neo-Nazi identity. Which is stoked continuously on a daily basis by most conservative media outlets. GOP leadership *is* fully onboard with the AIPAC and pro-Israel Evangelical consensus; but rank-and-file conservative voters are a different matter. Especially the low-information variety who lack the means to recognize Holocaust Deniers and Third Reich apologists for the ridiculous fabricators that they are.
Could it be argued that on October 7th last year the people of Gaza effectively committed "genosuicide by Israel" (the nation-level equivalent of "suicide by cop")?
They succeeded in completely triggering the Israelis--and much of the Diaspora--into a savage response, knowing full well that their death toll would be catastrophic. But that an endless stream of images of dead and dismembered children would severely damage Israel's international standing, and perhaps spur the Diaspora (the only collective body of non-Israeli Jews that can meaningfully shape Israeli policy via its control of US Israeli policy) into something different.
But they also correctly gauged that Israel would only kill at most a hundred thousand or so, and not initiate a total genocide. Despite the genocidal ambitions of Smotrich and others on the Far-Right.
The Russians currently are being accused of genocide for what they are doing to Ukraine, even though the aim of their war is not to physically exterminate the entire Ukrainian population, but "merely" to destroy Ukrainian self-identification and impose Russian language and cultural norms on the population.
This is consistent with the current legal definition of "genocide" (which is somewhat broader than the popular definition which is specifically about physical extermination), but it is arguably something that Israel would HAVE to do to the Palestinians if it wants to experience any kind of safety in the longer term.
The reason is that Palestinians cannot be de-Nazified in the German sense: Germany was already a 62-year-old nation-state when the Nazis took it over, and the sense the Germans had of themselves as a people was centuries older (for example when the Diet of Cologne declared the "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation" in 1512).
By contrast the Palestinian nation was essentially born in violent struggle against Zionism: the first violent resistance to Zionism was the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, in which the rioters pledged allegiance to a Damascus-based Hashemite monarch, implying that even then they still saw themselves essentially as Syrians. Linguistically or culturally there is very little to differentiate Palestinians from Syrians, Jordanians or (Muslim) Lebanese, and their national identity as such is basically that of "Nakba victims".
German de-Nazification was possible because being a Nazi wasn't inherent to being a German, but you can't really be a Palestinian without wanting to undo the trauma of the Nakba (ie to destroy Israel and restore Palestine as an Arab land).
It all comes down to how you want to define Nazism.
Since 1967, 9 million Israeli Jews have kept 5 million Palestinian Muslims sequestered mostly under military rule in mainly a scattered network of ever-shrinking Bantustans and/or open-air camps. Intentionally kept utterly destitute, these increasingly isolated pockets of people lack the stabilizing influence of an entrepreneurial class, and like desperately poor people everywhere seek refuge in fundamentalism. And hate. And procreating. In South Africa, it was called Apartheid.
Ironically treated much the way Jews were treated in Europe for over a millennium, their self-identity has been shaped by Israel's obsessive need to maintain a Jewish ethnostate, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing project to achieve that aim.
The Israelis have laudably so far not engaged in any large-scale population liquidation. Despite increasingly strong calls from the Israeli Right to do so, the ongoing intentional (partial?) starvation of Gaza's population is the closest they've come.
All of this is--all of it--made possible by a fairly small number of wealthy GOP-leaning members of the Diaspora that bankroll AIPAC and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby. Who provide Israel with diplomatic cover in the Security Council, and gift her military $4bn/year; plus larger amounts as needed for emergencies.
Without the cover provided by AIPAC, Israel would've many decades ago shared a similar fate to that of now post-Apartheid South Africa.
But Israel is now a diplomatic and economic albatross around our neck. The wider war they've created has exacerbated global inflation by closing the Suez canal (also depriving Egypt of $9bn/year of income); and sapping both our soft power and treasure at a time when we need all our resources to create a strong China-containment alliance to prevent a 3rd world war that we will likely lose.
The costs of maintaining a Jewish ethnostate is a luxury we can no longer afford.
The ideal solution to the Palestinian question (for Israel) would be for the Palestinians to lose their identity due to being assimilated into other states, but (as you correctly point out) Israel's attempt to protect itself in the short term by deliberately keeping the Palestinians isolated and impoverished (and thus without access to weapons with which to attack Israel) is hurting Israel in the longer term by making it ever less likely that other countries would be willing to take the Palestinians off their hands.
During the 1930s Jews found it very difficult to escape from Nazi Germany because the Nazi regime (desperately short of hard currency for its entire existence due to defaulting on its Versailles obligations) wouldn't let Jews take any wealth out of the country, while other governments, themselves burdened by the Great Depression, were unwilling to take in penniless Jewish refugees.
Contemporary governments (especially the Arab states that would be the most natural candidates) are even less likely to integrate Palestinian refugees, as they are guided not just by economics but also by the likelihood that the Palestinians would be a political menace: this was indeed the case in Jordan (Black September in 1970), in Lebanon (where PLO raids provoked an Israeli invasion in 1982) and Kuwait (where they collaborated with Iraqi occupiers in 1990). Egypt is now unwilling to take in refugees from Gaza because it is ruled by a military dictatorship which came to power in a coup against a Muslim Brotherhood government, and Hamas is essentially "the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine".
Why incidentally are children such a large proportion of Gaza's population?
(Hopefully I won't get the kind of response I got from one of the accounts I'd followed a long time on Twitter, who pretty much instantly blocked me for bringing that up...)
It could be argued they intended what they got, world-wide condemnation of their response as cruel and excessive. It was predictable and therefore could have been planned.
I agree with much of this thoughtful essay, especially the points about negative polarization and the hazards of throwing around the “nazi” epithet too easily. However, I’m not sure I agree the left has more antibodies to extremism as Noah suggests. It’s not the same, but leftwing extremism is in some ways more mainstream and tolerated. My own, evolved position is to be vigilant about authoritarian assholes from both sides of the spectrum. I used to only focus on the threat from the left, but now I see it from all sides.
Thank you. We must all be willing to call out authoritarianism on our own sides especially, since in such a partisan environment, criticism from the other side will always be ignored.
The Jericho March in Dec 2020 showed me just how loony the Right could be. But the antisemitism and extremism on the Left is far more accepted.
Tucker is one of few people with large platforms out there who I think is actually worse than Trump. Tucker can clearly articulate his odious ideas, and therefore that makes him more dangerous.
"Certainly you have some extremists who try to associate themselves with the political Left, such as Students for Justice in Palestine"
This is where you lose me, Noah. The pro-Hamas protests on university campus were widespread, organized and financed by outside groups, and went on for weeks. Those involved faced few if any actual consequences. Oh, there were noises about disciplinary actions, but these quietly evaporated once the press stopped paying attention. I am unaware of any of the outside groups being charged, despite obvious evidence of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Jewish students.
Now compare that to Charlottesville, the only major actual Nazi rally in recent memory. It was a single day and night involving at most 1000 people (per CNN), and we're still talking about it 7 years later. The guy who killed the counter-protestor is in jail for the rest of his life (as he should be) but the organizers have been convicted of conspiracy and essentially bankrupted by the resulting judgements.
In terms of motivation, I agree that these (Nazis and pro-Hamas) are comparable. But that is where the similarity ends. In terms of scale and response from the elites, the differences are vast.
The crying wolf problem is very real. It's impossible to take this sort of claim seriously. The Martyr Made character sounds like an idiot looking for edgy takes, and his thread about Churchill starts by him admitting that people will think his take is crazy. It then fills up with community notes correcting his factual errors and making him look dumb. But you're talking about one guy on X - the exact same kind of overblown hysteria that has made any claim of "Nazi" by the left meaningless. One guy isn't anything to be concerned about, even if you think the entire "right" watches Tucker Carlson which obviously it doesn't. How many people outside the US have ever even heard of him?
If you want to watch out for a new generation of Nazis you'd want to watch out for people who:
1. Claim to be socialists
2. View humanity in purely racial terms
3. Are obsessed with the idea of one racial group oppressing another
4. Love censorship, information control and are apathetic towards democracy (at best)
5. Are prone to violence, or supportive of it
6. Hate Jews
7. Are in a position to do something about the above
And sure enough western society (not just America) has huge problems with people who meet that exact description. But they're primarly (not exclusively) on the left, and busy loudly proclaiming "we're totally different to the Nazis!". If you actually care about a resurgence of Nazi-ism then you watch people who meet the above criteria, and if you do then the warning signs are blinking bright red.
Noah seems to have missed the extensive and serious discussion of whether Trump and the MAGA movement can properly be classed as "fascist", as Biden and others argued. In this context, "fascist" is not a term of generalized abuse, but a reference to a real and dangerous type of political movement. MAGA is similar in important ways to the fascists of the 1930s, dissimilar in others. It's common ground in this discussion that the Nazis are the least useful analogy.
Unlike with outright Nazis, it's impossible to dismiss the fascist tendencies of Trumpism as some kind of lunatic fringe.
I've got news for Tucker Carlson: Gypsies have been present in America for at least 50 years when a member of my family had an interesting encounter. It's really interesting that rather than the sky falling, we Americans we continue to die of diseases of prosperity. (eg. overeating).
The Nazis are gone . Confined to the dust bin of history . They don’t exist anymore unless you’re obsessed with them . I learned about them and I say don’t let that happen now . Learn from it . Unfortunately , it still occurs . Calling someone a Nazi today demeans those who really suffered in the past . As for the real old Nazis of the 30s , I’d charge them rent for taking up too much space in my mind . Let’s deal with today’s problems .
Elon and Tucker going full mask off, I see... That said, while someone may not be a Nazi. What if they are just okay if Nazi's win, are in positions of power or somewhat not bothered by their positions being mainstream or acceptable? To me being a Nazi sympathizer is almost just as bad. Either way the fact that these people are getting so much visibility is a problem. I do hope that the people who are right wing are as outraged about Nazi's as they pretend to be about every other culture war topic.
"today there are probably a few progressive figures who harbor quiet sympathies with the likes of Hugo Chavez"
The sympathies with the actually existing Chavez were sufficiently loud back when he was alive (I was around and an adult in 1992, but I don't _recall_ too much sympathy for him from the celebrity left after his coup attempt, only after he [legitimately AFAIK] won election in in 1998).
I read that the DSA official account briefly X'd congratulations to Maduro on his "victory", but then soon took the tweet down. The only thing I could find screenshotted was the DSA International Committee
Ya. Darryl is absolutely not a Nazi or a Holocaust denier. There is absolutely no way you can listen to or read his podcast/Substack and come to that conclusion honestly. Unfortunately, I can’t say I blame people like Noah for assuming that he is based on his purposefully inflammatory behavior on Twitter. He produces top shelf, nuanced, empathetic deep dives on complicated subject matter, second only to Dan Carlin in my opinion. It is a real shame that he is being reduced to a caricature, even though it is largely his fault. I don’t blame people like Noah for assuming what they are assuming. It’s a shame.
Agree 100%. I don't know what the fuck he's on about with this "Churchill is the villain" shit and the weird Nazi tweets, but I sure wish he'd come off it and go back to being the dude he is in 95% of his audio content.
Maybe he's just become more extreme in the last year. October 7th set loose a whole host of demons back into the Western body politic across the political spectrum.
It helps to stock up on lightweight concepts for the less-than-Nazi versions of the things you don't like.
For example, "xenophobia" vs. "demographic anxiety." It's pretty normal for people to feel some anxiety when their neighborhood is gentrified, or when they become a minority in their town and lose certain network goods. That doesn't mean they hate the newcomers.
Of course, they might *also* hate the newcomers. "Poisoning the blood" etc. -- but this is something far more sinister than wanting neighbors who speak your language.
We should remember that the folks living in the United States do not speak English are the ones disadvantaged by that fact— not us native born speakers.
It is interesting that Americans will pay big bucks to go to countries where virtually no one speaks English, and then stay in Hilton hotels just so they can hear English.
as noted by Thomas Schelling, though, mere desire to be in the ethnic majority group (i.e. >50%) for your local neighborhood predictably tends to produce de facto ethnic/racial segregation, ethnic enclaves and/or ghettoes, etc. IMO we should not treat it as a harmless preference, but rather as a regrettably near-universal inclination that people should be made to feel at least a little ashamed for indulging.
Great point.
Also: Schelling reference --> instant like.
I'm in the "*very* tired of never hearing English on the buses and at fast food restaurants anymore" camp. I definitely consider myself a xenophobe, but not a genocidal one.
Well...I'm glad to hear you're not genocidal.
Me too! Those willing to kill non-English speakers are generally willing to kill a few English speakers as well. Kevin Roberts warned us: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless, if the left allows it to be."
Kevin Roberts is making demands to the left to submit to genocide.
I would characterize him as demanding the left submit to a new social order with the alternative as violent suppression, but probably not extermination.
Whatever Roberts' intent was, his choice of rhetoric to invoke violence put the ball in play.
I live in Italy, the “facist” label gets used a lot as a shorthand insult for politicians, people
/groups you don’t like, etc.
I was thoroughly disgusted with the interview which I listened to in part. Darryl’s claim that “challenging the official narrative is illegal in Europe” is particularly deplorable. What he’s referring to, undoubtedly, is Holocaust Denial. And yes: Holocaust Denial is bad Darryl! And the fact you don’t say that out loud is because you KNOW it’s bad and don’t want to defend it.
Most people, I would guess, won’t catch that part. But it was so clearly there I cringed with rage.
Carlson was always a bottom feeder but this is a new level of deplorable
He's probably referring to what he said. In theory, German law does forbid only holocaust denial. In practice all kinds of speech and political organization is being punished and oppressed there under the guise of preventing the rise of Nazis, all of which has nothing to do with the Nazis and everything to do with killing off ordinary political opposition.
What he said was, in reality, at best an "anti-anti" Nazi diatribe of historical mistruths and exaggerations. At worst it was a Nazi-Apologist history (I lean towards the at worst side of the argument).
"Liberals and progressives obviously don’t agree with conservatives on much, and they may even despise them, but at the end of the day we all need to come together to defeat the totalitarians of the world."
Hell yes.
I recently rewatched John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" for the first time since I was a kid, and was struck by how that's essentially the whole point of the film. Jimmy Stewart's idealistic young lawyer is the liberal, John Wayne is the traditional conservative, and Liberty Valance is the violent authoritarian. Stewart and Wayne end up teaming up to defeat the greater threat that shares none of their true American values.
There should be a remake!
Great comment. I do wish that Noah would take the totalitarians on the left more seriously. I’ve listened to MS-NBC, (definitely speaking to not a tiny niche on the left) host full-blooded advocates of limiting free-speech to their speech. I’ve read Matt Taibbi’s accounts, naming prominent members of Democratic administrations proposing what is effectively the same position, calling it suppression of lies, misinformation, or worse, malinformation (essentially any speech that gets in the way of their objectives) rather than the true, ugly word, censorship. One need not be a Nazi to be a totalitarian
Censorship is ugly but I'd stop short of calling it totalitarian.
_Authoritarian_ regimes censor the media, while totalitarian regimes take over the media entirely and turn it into an arm of the state itself.
I cannot believe I just read a serious post about how prominent figures within the Conservative movement are playing footsy with literal Nazis, and the conclusion is “progressives need to work harder to be nice to conservatives.”
With due respect: F that.
If conservatives have a Nazi problem, it is 100% on them to fix it. They should do it because it’s the right thing to do, but they should also do it because this weird alt-right edgy maybe-Nazi-adjacent stuff is electoral poison. Republicans keep losing winnable elections and may lose another soon, and — more critically — they’re long-term losing the electoral support of an entire rising younger generation. Trump is a big part of that, but the party’s openness to edgy creeps is definitely a contributor. It is not on progressives to fix this, it is not on progressives to save conservatives from their own moral failures. At this point it is on progressives to win elections, and they’ve been doing that relatively well.
If telling Conservatives that they’re acting like Nazis “causes them to be more tolerant of Nazis” then this isn’t some tender sensitive spot that progressives should be gentle with, lest they force conservatives to be tolerant of Nazis. Nobody should be tolerant of Nazis. It is entirely on conservatives to keep those voices out of mainstream political relevance, in the same way that the Dems have fought hard to keep Chavez fans mostly irrelevant in mainstream politics.
The people actually chanting "death to the Jews" in the streets of America and especially Europe are not conservatives.
They aren't conservatives but they are Conservatives.
No. They're almost 100% progressives. They're of the Left not the Right. Which is Noah's point as well.
As a side note, I'm not sure conservative actually means anything in the West today. It certainly doesn't mean what Edmund Burke or Milton Friedman or William F. Buckley meant when they used it. That conservatism (a bias toward preserving existing institutions) is dead because it didn't manage to conserve anything. Donald Trump is not conservative; he's a radical disputor. Trump is a "liberal" in a Shakespearean sense: an agent of chaos.
Because of this linguistic problem, many on the Right are adopting the label postliberal despite its ambiguity, because they see conservatism as a failed ideology. Like the Left, they view themselves as radicals trying to create a better society than as reactionaries "standing athwart history yelling STOP!" to use Buckley's famous phrase.
I didn’t see many of those people at the DNC, except possibly locked outside among the protestors. Such people exist in the US (though let’s not be stupid and pretend everyone objecting to the war is one), but their biggest complaint is that the mainstream Democratic party can’t stand them.
Well antisemitism was branded the "socialism of fools" during the 19th century!
Perhaps the update of that saying today would be to say that anti-Zionism (which is now understandably conflated with antisemitism given that close to half of the world's Jews are now Israelis) is the anti-imperialism of fools?
(Incidentally, is it not kind of odd that supporters of the Palestinian cause portray it as an anti-imperialist cause, but their notion of the borders of "Palestine" was defined by the British Mandate?)
If progressives believe this, they could show it by not calling pretty much all conservatives Nazis, racists, bigots, etc... They've been calling us that for my entire adult life.
Look at what's going on in the UK today, or the Canadian response to the trucker protest. The liberals are looking increasingly totalitarian.
Wait, what? This is satire. Must be. Progressives are better at seeing the Marxists and extremists than conservatives are at seeing Nazis? That's laugh out loud nonsense. There are camps and daily marches throughout the US calling for the destruction of a sovereign nation and ally of the US, and the leftist reaction is, "Meh". There are calls to tax unrealized capital gains and put in place price caps, and the leftist reaction is, "Oh yeah good call!". The overwhelming reaction of conservatives- the actual kind, not the Tucker Carlson fanatics- to that nonsense was to call it exactly that - nonsense. Carlson is playing out his own twisted fantasy of trying to couple in his followers' minds Churchill and Netanyahu. By planting the seeds of Churchill as the monster who refused to stop WWII, he can then smear the Israeli leader with the same swipe. It's calculated and plays into the worst leanings of some of his followers. He's gone full Candace.
The Third Reich = taxing unrealized capital gains…got it.
Tax on unrealized capital gains is an old and tired socialist scam. Though the Third Reich and the Soviet and Maoist socialists deserve their share of villainy, the socialists killed far more people than Germany. So yes in those terms anything that edges us toward more socialism deserves the same treatment as anything that takes us closer to nazism.
Not every capital gains tax policy change is the second coming of Stalin - just FYI.
Lol. You made my point for me.
Your point being that it is, and the fact that democrats don’t acknowledge that is a problem?
Haven't far more democracies fallen to (either home-grown or invading) fascists, than have fallen to communists?
Part of the problem with your statement is that Nazi’s were a creature of the right wing, not the left. Hitler hated the left, and would have hated Mao. The “Nationalist” was the driver, not Socialist, and Mao was a Communist, which is not the same thing as Socialism.
Here’s a fun econ 101 for you:
https://speterdavis.substack.com/p/nobody-actually-understands-what?utm_medium=reader2&triedRedirect=true
Hitler was more of a fundamentalist Social Darwinist than a nationalist: the Nero-Befehl shows that at the end of the day he regarded even German lives as having negligible real value.
Not more of, perhaps all of a piece but that’s quibbling. One thing he has in common with all strongmen (who can be left or right) is a fanatical disregard for human life in bringing about their utopian vision.
It could be argued that the Nazis were different from other totalitarians (such as communists or Islamists) precisely in that they were NOT internally motivated by a utopian vision, even if they did project such in their propaganda.
https://utopiaordystopia.com/2015/12/31/was-nazi-evil-unique/
"Hitler saw any such promise of universalism or a utopian/millennial end to history and the elimination of suffering as itself the enemy. The idea that human beings were any better than animals and could ever escape, even with the help of God, the war of all against all that was the fate of animals, Hitler thought, was a lie brought into the world by the Jews who had used it to achieve dominance over more naturally powerful peoples."
"What Hitler sought was the undoing of what he considered to be the distortions found in every humanistic, progressive or millennialist way of thinking. For him, the only true freedom was the freedom to submit to the eternal dictates of nature, dictates which had been discovered by science, especially in the form of Darwinism, but which neither technology, nor human made law would ever permit us to escape. Hitler thus subsumed politics under his limited understanding of nature as an eternal, and necessarily pitiless evolutionary struggle."
"Hitler’s philosophy was the penultimate form of Malthusianism and the opposite of techno-progressivism in the sense that he believed scarcity to be unsolvable by technical means and resource security- especially in terms of food- something that could only be obtained through conquest."
That's a great link, except the article states that "communism" is at the end of the spectrum of...socialism, and despite what Mao may have claimed, it also says, "It's kind of important to understand, I think, that there aren’t any currently existing communist countries, there (arguably?) never have been any communist countries, and all the countries that we call communist countries, or who call themselves that, are just claiming communism is their long term goal. ". So, I return to my statement.
Yes, I guess my point was that in liberal democracies that have a capitalist economic system, like the US, providing for the common welfare is done through democratic means set forth in the Constitution (Federal, State, municipalities (although that would be by charter). Laws are passed. Corporations themselves exist because State law allows them to. Congress passes laws. States pass laws. Cities and Towns pass laws. These public services are chosen. Taxes on income - from whatever source - are Constitutional powers granted to Congress. Nazism and Maoism are not that. 😊
He certainly didn't hate left wing principles. The first thing he did on taking control of the German Workers Party was to put "National Socialist" in front of it. The manifesto they ran on wouldn't look out of place in a social democratic party platform today. He hated "the left" only the extent that left wing authoritarianism requires there be a single source of power, which he wanted to be himself and not Moscow.
He hated liberalism and embraced socialism (state ownership of the means of production) but he was completely far-right politically. Policies providing for the common welfare exist in all capitalist democracies — that is not socialism.
I'm not a fan of the idea myself, but asked "Do you support or oppose the following government policies to reduce inflation: Prosecute companies for price-gouging and price-fixing", 67% of Trump voters selected "support". Are they Communists?
https://blueprint2024.com/polling/inflation-poll-06-25/
I think free market advocates need to grapple with monopoly being more than “low prices” for consumers, it’s also anticompetitive and ultimately depresses innovation. Price gouging happened - corporate America was not secretive about their desire to recoup profits from previous years. When only a handful of entities control the food and gas markets, well….
Actually monopoly power results in _higher_ prices for consumers: the kind of corporate power whose apologists cite lower consumer prices as its justification is _monopsony_ power, which is exerted at the expense of suppliers and employees.
Both distort the free market, the “mono” is the problem 😊
Price fixing (collusion amongst competitors to set prices) is already serious jail time if you're caught. Price gouging is also illegal in many states already. It's no surprise that the actual illegal manipulation of pricing would be disliked by just about everyone. Raising prices due to the skyrocketing costs of business inputs like shipping and personnel costs feels bad for consumers, but isn't gouging. I will believe any political party is serious about fixing competition issues when they address why it is that you can get ATT high speed internet in some markets, but strangely not Verizon or Cspire, etc.
Funny how everyone here went off about your comments about capital gains taxes and ignored your larger point that progressives have (at a minimum) ignored and (I suspect) abetted the antisemitic wave that have inundated the Western world in the last year.
Well, to be fair, this is an economist's stack, so their interests would naturally go there first.
Yeah, our host often has a blind spot for the cultural end of immigration too. My degree is in econ, so I know well how it turns you into a hammer looking for nails. I'm not sorry I have the training at all, but it did take me about a decade to develop a more well-rounded toolkit with which to analyze the world.
I find the upsurge in antisemitism in English-speaking countries one of the worst things to happen in recent years, and even confusing to be honest. For the first fifty years of my life it seemed like a historical artifact and I never dreamt it would come back (clearly not a Jew, right, because I'm aware of the naiveness of that assumption). Maybe it's emanating from Russian bots in the dark corners of the internet, who knows? I wish people would stop being so gullible - but that's a highly unfixable problem.
The antisemitism emanating from the Left will die down as soon as Netanyahu ends the nearly year-long war in Gaza, with its constant stream of new Tik Tok videos that generate outrage by showcasing Gazan children freshly killed in airstrikes. For the Left to truly calm down, Israel must also end--or at least greatly reduce--its ongoing ethnic cleansing project in the Occupied Territories, which could be a very hard sell with the Israeli Right.
The antisemitism from the Right will be tougher to eradicate, as it's become intertwined with White Grievance; as well as racist, xenophobic, and homophobic intolerance. All of which apparently form a core part of modern Neo-Nazi identity. Which is stoked continuously on a daily basis by most conservative media outlets. GOP leadership *is* fully onboard with the AIPAC and pro-Israel Evangelical consensus; but rank-and-file conservative voters are a different matter. Especially the low-information variety who lack the means to recognize Holocaust Deniers and Third Reich apologists for the ridiculous fabricators that they are.
Could it be argued that on October 7th last year the people of Gaza effectively committed "genosuicide by Israel" (the nation-level equivalent of "suicide by cop")?
They succeeded in completely triggering the Israelis--and much of the Diaspora--into a savage response, knowing full well that their death toll would be catastrophic. But that an endless stream of images of dead and dismembered children would severely damage Israel's international standing, and perhaps spur the Diaspora (the only collective body of non-Israeli Jews that can meaningfully shape Israeli policy via its control of US Israeli policy) into something different.
But they also correctly gauged that Israel would only kill at most a hundred thousand or so, and not initiate a total genocide. Despite the genocidal ambitions of Smotrich and others on the Far-Right.
The Russians currently are being accused of genocide for what they are doing to Ukraine, even though the aim of their war is not to physically exterminate the entire Ukrainian population, but "merely" to destroy Ukrainian self-identification and impose Russian language and cultural norms on the population.
This is consistent with the current legal definition of "genocide" (which is somewhat broader than the popular definition which is specifically about physical extermination), but it is arguably something that Israel would HAVE to do to the Palestinians if it wants to experience any kind of safety in the longer term.
The reason is that Palestinians cannot be de-Nazified in the German sense: Germany was already a 62-year-old nation-state when the Nazis took it over, and the sense the Germans had of themselves as a people was centuries older (for example when the Diet of Cologne declared the "Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation" in 1512).
By contrast the Palestinian nation was essentially born in violent struggle against Zionism: the first violent resistance to Zionism was the Nabi Musa riots of 1920, in which the rioters pledged allegiance to a Damascus-based Hashemite monarch, implying that even then they still saw themselves essentially as Syrians. Linguistically or culturally there is very little to differentiate Palestinians from Syrians, Jordanians or (Muslim) Lebanese, and their national identity as such is basically that of "Nakba victims".
German de-Nazification was possible because being a Nazi wasn't inherent to being a German, but you can't really be a Palestinian without wanting to undo the trauma of the Nakba (ie to destroy Israel and restore Palestine as an Arab land).
It all comes down to how you want to define Nazism.
Since 1967, 9 million Israeli Jews have kept 5 million Palestinian Muslims sequestered mostly under military rule in mainly a scattered network of ever-shrinking Bantustans and/or open-air camps. Intentionally kept utterly destitute, these increasingly isolated pockets of people lack the stabilizing influence of an entrepreneurial class, and like desperately poor people everywhere seek refuge in fundamentalism. And hate. And procreating. In South Africa, it was called Apartheid.
Ironically treated much the way Jews were treated in Europe for over a millennium, their self-identity has been shaped by Israel's obsessive need to maintain a Jewish ethnostate, and the ongoing ethnic cleansing project to achieve that aim.
The Israelis have laudably so far not engaged in any large-scale population liquidation. Despite increasingly strong calls from the Israeli Right to do so, the ongoing intentional (partial?) starvation of Gaza's population is the closest they've come.
All of this is--all of it--made possible by a fairly small number of wealthy GOP-leaning members of the Diaspora that bankroll AIPAC and the rest of the pro-Israel lobby. Who provide Israel with diplomatic cover in the Security Council, and gift her military $4bn/year; plus larger amounts as needed for emergencies.
Without the cover provided by AIPAC, Israel would've many decades ago shared a similar fate to that of now post-Apartheid South Africa.
But Israel is now a diplomatic and economic albatross around our neck. The wider war they've created has exacerbated global inflation by closing the Suez canal (also depriving Egypt of $9bn/year of income); and sapping both our soft power and treasure at a time when we need all our resources to create a strong China-containment alliance to prevent a 3rd world war that we will likely lose.
The costs of maintaining a Jewish ethnostate is a luxury we can no longer afford.
The ideal solution to the Palestinian question (for Israel) would be for the Palestinians to lose their identity due to being assimilated into other states, but (as you correctly point out) Israel's attempt to protect itself in the short term by deliberately keeping the Palestinians isolated and impoverished (and thus without access to weapons with which to attack Israel) is hurting Israel in the longer term by making it ever less likely that other countries would be willing to take the Palestinians off their hands.
During the 1930s Jews found it very difficult to escape from Nazi Germany because the Nazi regime (desperately short of hard currency for its entire existence due to defaulting on its Versailles obligations) wouldn't let Jews take any wealth out of the country, while other governments, themselves burdened by the Great Depression, were unwilling to take in penniless Jewish refugees.
Contemporary governments (especially the Arab states that would be the most natural candidates) are even less likely to integrate Palestinian refugees, as they are guided not just by economics but also by the likelihood that the Palestinians would be a political menace: this was indeed the case in Jordan (Black September in 1970), in Lebanon (where PLO raids provoked an Israeli invasion in 1982) and Kuwait (where they collaborated with Iraqi occupiers in 1990). Egypt is now unwilling to take in refugees from Gaza because it is ruled by a military dictatorship which came to power in a coup against a Muslim Brotherhood government, and Hamas is essentially "the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine".
Why incidentally are children such a large proportion of Gaza's population?
(Hopefully I won't get the kind of response I got from one of the accounts I'd followed a long time on Twitter, who pretty much instantly blocked me for bringing that up...)
Gaza is one of the very poorest places on earth. impoverished populations tend to make lots of babies.
Once Israel embraces a One State Solution, and gives the Gazans Israeli citizenship, that high birthrate will come down right quick.
It could be argued they intended what they got, world-wide condemnation of their response as cruel and excessive. It was predictable and therefore could have been planned.
Would be an easier sell if Gazans/Iran/Hezbollah also stopped daily shellings
Guys, I think all he’s saying is that real Nazism has never been tried. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
Almost snorted out my coffee.
I agree with much of this thoughtful essay, especially the points about negative polarization and the hazards of throwing around the “nazi” epithet too easily. However, I’m not sure I agree the left has more antibodies to extremism as Noah suggests. It’s not the same, but leftwing extremism is in some ways more mainstream and tolerated. My own, evolved position is to be vigilant about authoritarian assholes from both sides of the spectrum. I used to only focus on the threat from the left, but now I see it from all sides.
Thank you. We must all be willing to call out authoritarianism on our own sides especially, since in such a partisan environment, criticism from the other side will always be ignored.
The Jericho March in Dec 2020 showed me just how loony the Right could be. But the antisemitism and extremism on the Left is far more accepted.
Tucker is one of few people with large platforms out there who I think is actually worse than Trump. Tucker can clearly articulate his odious ideas, and therefore that makes him more dangerous.
"Certainly you have some extremists who try to associate themselves with the political Left, such as Students for Justice in Palestine"
This is where you lose me, Noah. The pro-Hamas protests on university campus were widespread, organized and financed by outside groups, and went on for weeks. Those involved faced few if any actual consequences. Oh, there were noises about disciplinary actions, but these quietly evaporated once the press stopped paying attention. I am unaware of any of the outside groups being charged, despite obvious evidence of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Jewish students.
Now compare that to Charlottesville, the only major actual Nazi rally in recent memory. It was a single day and night involving at most 1000 people (per CNN), and we're still talking about it 7 years later. The guy who killed the counter-protestor is in jail for the rest of his life (as he should be) but the organizers have been convicted of conspiracy and essentially bankrupted by the resulting judgements.
In terms of motivation, I agree that these (Nazis and pro-Hamas) are comparable. But that is where the similarity ends. In terms of scale and response from the elites, the differences are vast.
> the organizers have been convicted of conspiracy and essentially bankrupted by the resulting judgements.
ah, good! and good to know! (
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/23/1058024314/charlottesville-unite-the-right-trial-verdict
)
are there similar lawsuits ongoing against the anti-Israel / pro-Palestine / pro-Hamas rally organizers?
would the charge of "organizers conspired to commit racially motivated violence or whether they had knowledge of it and failed to prevent it" stand? (there was definitely violence, for example at this protest in June https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/24/us/los-angeles-synagogue-palestinian-israeli-protest-violence/index.html )
The crying wolf problem is very real. It's impossible to take this sort of claim seriously. The Martyr Made character sounds like an idiot looking for edgy takes, and his thread about Churchill starts by him admitting that people will think his take is crazy. It then fills up with community notes correcting his factual errors and making him look dumb. But you're talking about one guy on X - the exact same kind of overblown hysteria that has made any claim of "Nazi" by the left meaningless. One guy isn't anything to be concerned about, even if you think the entire "right" watches Tucker Carlson which obviously it doesn't. How many people outside the US have ever even heard of him?
If you want to watch out for a new generation of Nazis you'd want to watch out for people who:
1. Claim to be socialists
2. View humanity in purely racial terms
3. Are obsessed with the idea of one racial group oppressing another
4. Love censorship, information control and are apathetic towards democracy (at best)
5. Are prone to violence, or supportive of it
6. Hate Jews
7. Are in a position to do something about the above
And sure enough western society (not just America) has huge problems with people who meet that exact description. But they're primarly (not exclusively) on the left, and busy loudly proclaiming "we're totally different to the Nazis!". If you actually care about a resurgence of Nazi-ism then you watch people who meet the above criteria, and if you do then the warning signs are blinking bright red.
Thank you, this is exactly right.
Noah seems to have missed the extensive and serious discussion of whether Trump and the MAGA movement can properly be classed as "fascist", as Biden and others argued. In this context, "fascist" is not a term of generalized abuse, but a reference to a real and dangerous type of political movement. MAGA is similar in important ways to the fascists of the 1930s, dissimilar in others. It's common ground in this discussion that the Nazis are the least useful analogy.
Unlike with outright Nazis, it's impossible to dismiss the fascist tendencies of Trumpism as some kind of lunatic fringe.
I've got news for Tucker Carlson: Gypsies have been present in America for at least 50 years when a member of my family had an interesting encounter. It's really interesting that rather than the sky falling, we Americans we continue to die of diseases of prosperity. (eg. overeating).
The Nazis are gone . Confined to the dust bin of history . They don’t exist anymore unless you’re obsessed with them . I learned about them and I say don’t let that happen now . Learn from it . Unfortunately , it still occurs . Calling someone a Nazi today demeans those who really suffered in the past . As for the real old Nazis of the 30s , I’d charge them rent for taking up too much space in my mind . Let’s deal with today’s problems .
Elon and Tucker going full mask off, I see... That said, while someone may not be a Nazi. What if they are just okay if Nazi's win, are in positions of power or somewhat not bothered by their positions being mainstream or acceptable? To me being a Nazi sympathizer is almost just as bad. Either way the fact that these people are getting so much visibility is a problem. I do hope that the people who are right wing are as outraged about Nazi's as they pretend to be about every other culture war topic.
"today there are probably a few progressive figures who harbor quiet sympathies with the likes of Hugo Chavez"
The sympathies with the actually existing Chavez were sufficiently loud back when he was alive (I was around and an adult in 1992, but I don't _recall_ too much sympathy for him from the celebrity left after his coup attempt, only after he [legitimately AFAIK] won election in in 1998).
I read that the DSA official account briefly X'd congratulations to Maduro on his "victory", but then soon took the tweet down. The only thing I could find screenshotted was the DSA International Committee
https://x.com/ShaneDPhillips/status/1818875956284866780 - scroll down a bit
Darryl is definitely not a Nazi. Not close. Trust me, I've listened to probably 40 hours of his content. You read three dumbass tweets.
Ya. Darryl is absolutely not a Nazi or a Holocaust denier. There is absolutely no way you can listen to or read his podcast/Substack and come to that conclusion honestly. Unfortunately, I can’t say I blame people like Noah for assuming that he is based on his purposefully inflammatory behavior on Twitter. He produces top shelf, nuanced, empathetic deep dives on complicated subject matter, second only to Dan Carlin in my opinion. It is a real shame that he is being reduced to a caricature, even though it is largely his fault. I don’t blame people like Noah for assuming what they are assuming. It’s a shame.
Agree 100%. I don't know what the fuck he's on about with this "Churchill is the villain" shit and the weird Nazi tweets, but I sure wish he'd come off it and go back to being the dude he is in 95% of his audio content.
Maybe he's just become more extreme in the last year. October 7th set loose a whole host of demons back into the Western body politic across the political spectrum.