The Nazism taboo in America is broken

In a year defined by President Donald Trump’s attempt to turn our nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy, one of the most disturbing events of the year was not a reactionary policy or a speech, but in fact the results of a focus group which were published Friday.

City Journal, which is published by the influential right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, conducted a focus group of 20 “mostly Trump voters, overwhelmingly Christian, a mix of college and non-college, ranging from late teens to twentysomethings edging into thirty,” based in and around Nashville, Tennessee. The discussion, designed to examine the attitudes of Gen Z conservatives, covered lots of questions, ranging from the economy to feminism to foreign policy. But the most striking answers were related to questions about white supremacist figures — and demonstrated how many young people on the right are marinating in a media atmosphere of the most noxious, racist extremism imaginable, with no obvious pathway back to making such bigotry taboo again.

In today’s right-wing political culture, Trumpism is growing contiguous with Fuentes-ism.

When the moderator asked how many of them knew Nick Fuentes — a white supremacist livestreamer who has, among other things, called Adolf Hitler “really f**king cool,” described Chicago as “n—r hell,” argued in favor of a return to racial segregation, doubted the Nazi Holocaust, opposed interracial marriage and said women shouldn’t have the right to vote — more than half of the respondents raised their hands based on Fuentes’ name recognition alone. Several participants, identified only by their first names, described him in approving or ambivalent terms.

George said, “I agree with a lot of his points. He definitely doesn’t care about how it’s gonna be reacted to, which I respect, but I also think it can be kind of dangerous.” Another, Ally, said, “At its core I believe a lot of what he says, but I think the delivery is kind of poor.” Atticus said, “I dig him… He’s definitely going after more of the shock value with some of his stuff. But as far as general beliefs or values, I sort of agree.”

Andrew, who elsewhere in the focus group said he “really liked” Fuentes, attempted to defend Fuentes as “joking” much of the time, but also expressed earnest support: “I feel like his viewpoints would have been mainstream not that long ago. If he’s saying something like most women want to be raped, well, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ sells like hotcakes to women, so I feel like that’s just a fact.” Ethan described Fuentes as overly polarizing, but said “He has some interesting opinions, I think specifically about race.” Colin said, “I think he reminds me of the Andrew Tate Republican Party, where he’s really good at addressing a common problem, but the solutions aren’t the solutions to go by.”

There were a few notes of disapproval. Brice said Fuentes “is very dangerous for our side of things,” and Ashley said “I think being too radical pushes people away and makes them look for truth elsewhere.” Notably, neither of these comments contained substantive condemnation, appearing more strategic instead. (Note: City Journal said the transcript it provided was partial, which means other comments might have been excluded.)

The focus group became even more alarming when the moderator asked, “What do you think of Adolf Hitler?”

Ashley said, “I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.” Andrew said, “I think we should have a stronger executive branch. I don’t think we should be killing people or doing mass genocide, obviously, but I do think we should have a strong executive….. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.”

Brice, who described himself as Jewish ancestrally and Christian by faith, said, “I’ve actually read ‘Mein Kampf.’ The end conclusions that he came to: absolutely abominable. But I strangely understood where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.” Only Lauren offered full-throated condemnation: “He made all of those people suffer, and I want to do ungodly things to people who do things like that.”

The moderator followed up by asking how the group felt about Jewish people.

Atticus said, “They’ve got Hollywood on lock.” George queried, “Don’t they own, like, a ton of the media, and, like, just kind of everything?” Andrew said, “I would say a force for evil.” Only Brice diverged, saying he believed Jewish people were “No different than black people, Asian people, or any other people here today.”

After the moderator asked Andrew to clarify his comments on Jews being “evil,” he doubled down, and then the moderator asked others to respond, prompting a bit of pushback: Ashley said Jews and Christians were similar, biblically speaking; Ally rejected “any classification of a whole people group,” adding, “I just don’t think you can say this entire people group is bad.” But Lauren raised what appeared to be an antisemitic trope about sexually corrupting Jewish cabals: “Israel has a lot of connections to sex and human trafficking, and that doesn’t sit well with me.”

Some of us may have been underestimating how much fascistic energy has bubbled up from more grassroots quarters of American political life.

I was blown away reading this transcript. The venomous Fuentes appears to be just another right-wing pundit who maybe rage-baits a bit too much. Jews are described as sly puppeteers. Hitler is not seen as the apex of genocidal barbarism, but rather a nationalist leader who can be at least partially empathized with.

We’ve known for a long time that the right has been growing more extreme, but this focus group really made it sink in: in today’s right-wing political culture, Trumpism is growing contiguous with Fuentes-ism, and the long-standing taboo against Nazism in America is broken.

Here’s another way of thinking about it: For a long time American scholars and journalists have been debating whether or not Trump matches the definition of a fascist; but some of us may have been underestimating how much fascistic energy has bubbled up from more grassroots quarters of American political life. And with the overwhelming majority of participants describing themselves as getting their political news from social media, independent podcasts and YouTubers — and hardly any professional institutional media — it’s difficult to see how to guard against it getting worse. Trolls, demagogues and grifters are whispering into the ears of our youth (and not just on the right), and sabotaging our capacity to adhere to democracy.

Let’s be clear that a focus group is not a poll — we cannot quantify how widespread these attitudes and behaviors are. The point of putting them together is to get a snapshot of a specific subset of the population to gauge the more complex elements of their belief systems that surveys cannot capture. But what these young red state conservatives said doesn’t defy what we know about what’s happening on the right, it confirms it.

Data points supporting the idea that the Nazi taboo is broken are everywhere. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — whom multiple focus group participants said was a media figure who best represented their views — recently conducted a softball interview with Fuentes which allowed Fuentes to present himself as a more innocuous pundit than he is. That interview has in turn roiled the American right, rocking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation as they have struggled to figure out how close of a relationship they should hold with Carlson. The Trump administration employs a man who described himself as having a “Nazi streak” in a text message. In October Politico obtained leaked Telegram messages showing young Republican leaders describing Black people as monkeys and sharing messages that include “I love Hiter.”

A number of prominent right-wingers are openly acknowledging that something has gone rotten. Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, recently described a trip to Washington, D.C., in which he said a “D.C. insider” told him that he estimated that between 30% and 40% of Gen Z Republicans in Washington are Fuentes fans and reported that other young Republicans agreed with that estimate. The point isn’t whether that number is accurate — there’s no way to confirm it on the record — but rather that it reflects a perception within the right that Fuentes is ascendant. Vivek Ramswamy, who ran for president in 2024 and is running for governor of Ohio in 2026, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times recently decrying Fuentes’ growing influence on the right.

The presentation of this focus group by The Manhattan Institute — the group that employs the right-wing disinformation agent Christopher Rufo — should also leave us feeling concerned.

In the introductory synopsis to the focus group findings, the author, Jesse Arm, writes “moral stigmas — racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny — no longer reliably do the work they used to.” But he appears to put the blame for those things on the left, saying that, “After a decade of hearing the same accusations leveled at everyone from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, some see allegations of bigotry as table stakes.” Arm also downplays the extent of extremism surfaced in the focus group by saying there was “one true believer who agreed with Fuentes’ worldview and espoused explicit authoritarian and anti-pluralist views” who was “an outlier.”

The Manhattan Institute is not endorsing the participants’ worldview, but it was also clearly not trying to sound the alarms. It did, however, seem confident that the group was an authentic representation of the state of today’s right-wing youth — a group of Americans who increasingly are intrigued by the most vicious and destructive among us.

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