Over at Religion Dispatches, I reported on Elon Musk’s latest foray into white nationalist ideology— perhaps the most unvarnished, blood-curdling of them all.
I must confess that even I have felt burnt out, for quite some time now, reporting on the steady march of white nationalist ideology into the mainstream of the conservative movement. When I began in 2019 (seven years ago, wow), I often felt like analysts of this trend, including myself, were grasping at the slimmest innuendos to make the argument that MAGA leaders were mirroring the rhetoric of their alt-right fringe. Every time Tucker Carlson or a GOP politician said that Democrats are trying to “import” immigrant voters to guarantee an electoral majority, it sparked a major political controversy. Many insisted that the word choice was a dog-whistle for the ‘great replacement’— the idea, at the core of white nationalism, than an elite (usually Jewish) cabal is engineering the demographic extinction of the white race through promoting non-white immigration. While I agreed the racist impulse was essentially the same, I confess that at times I thought that calling this the ‘great replacement’ was a bit of a stretch. As a researcher of the radical Right, I opened my computer screen every morning to look at unvarnished white nationalism— the kind that unambiguously proclaimed that white people, as white people, were being replaced in America at the hands of the Jews. While we were right to highlight the similarities, I also felt it was my role to remind folks of the analytical distinctions, if only to sharpen our understanding of the different sectors of the Right— or in other words, to remind people it could get worse.
And then of course, over time, the difference collapsed. A critique of Democrat electoral strategy shaded into a polemic against cultural decay. ‘American voters’ became ‘heritage Americans’, the ‘founding stock’. ‘Democratic Party elites’ became ‘globalists’ and ‘cultural Marxists’, and pundits like Charlie Kirk gradually felt safe mentioning to his viewers, in passing, that alot of those elites are Jews. As I’ve covered extensively, white nationalist movements like the groypers played no small role in goading this transformation along. The mainstreaming of white nationalism is a complex process— not so much a simple ‘mask off’ as a dynamic and evolving interplay between the MAGA base, social movements, punditry and leadership class, a self-reinforcing radicalization buoyed by neoliberal immiseration, social alienation, male grievance, social media algorithms and more.
Regardless what brought us here, we’ve arrived. What Elon Musk retweeted yesterday is unambiguously what I saw on 4chan every day in 2019. Observers pointed out that the account he retweeted, unsurprisingly, had little use for dogwhistles in naming the ‘elites’ responsible.
Perhaps the Anti-Defamation League will realize there are more important priorities right now than the ‘Mamdani Monitor’. I’m not holding my breath.
Check out my piece at Religion Dispatches for more.
Ben Lorber 
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