It's Statue-Toppling All the Way Down

Nick Fuentes and the iconoclastic glee of the hard Right

The Tucker Carlson soft-balling of the hard-right, racist, anti-Semitic Nick Fuentes in a recent interview this past week has made this much clear: When it comes to destroying statues, the hard Right is as up for it as the hard Left. We’ve come full circle and it isn’t pretty.

We saw several years of iconoclasm from the Left, with the likes of Black Lives Matter etc, along with infamous photos such as this, in which the old ways and the old institutions were given short shrift:

The problem of course, is that the Left thought that iconoclasm began and ended with itself. Being poor students of history, and probably poorer students of both psychology and of theology, the Left did not predict the equal and opposite reaction.

And what is that equal and opposite reaction? Namely the Nick Fuentes-led hard Right that - like all good pendulums - has swung in an equal and opposite direction.

Perhaps the Left believed that its enemy was conservatism, the movement whose stated aim is to retain the foundations of the past, learn from them, but to build upon them. You know, the ideas that the Left, and its slathering desire for a permanent revolution over the past sixty years, has grown to loathe.

The Left was wrong. Its true enemy - or at least its true alter-ego - is the hard Right, which, as we watch Fuentes and his so-called “Groyper” movement (hey I know it’s a Wiki link, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, yeah?), is not remotely interested in preserving a conservative foundation that they believe has also let them down.

So it’s iconoclasm all the way down. Statues being toppled Left and Right.