Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

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Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Friday, October 31, 2025 16:17
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Friday, October 31, 2025 10:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up

President for Life

Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.

By J. Michael Luttig | October 28, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/trump-third-term-
authoritarianism/684616/

In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.

Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.

In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Social in which Trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”

We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies.

I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. I have had the privilege of spending much of my career in public service, first in the Ford and Reagan White Houses; then in the Department of Justice; and, finally, appointed by George H. W. Bush, in the federal judiciary. I have never once in more than four decades believed that any president—Democrat or Republican—would intentionally violate the Constitution or a law of the United States. But Trump is different from all prior presidents in his utter contempt for the Constitution and America’s democracy.

The clearest evidence that Trump may subvert upcoming elections is that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shocked the nation and the world when he ordered then–Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the votes electing Joe Biden president, while claiming that the election had been stolen from him by his “radical left” enemies, whoever they are. When Pence refused to yield to Trump’s demand, Trump instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from counting the votes and certifying Biden as his successor.

On January 6, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” further inflaming the crowd that had already breached the Capitol. Witnesses before the January 6 committee testified that Trump expressed support for hanging Pence while the attack was under way. Trump was prosecuted by the United States for having committed the gravest crime that a president can commit: attempting to remain in the presidency after losing an election and thereby obstructing the peaceful transfer of power. Yet he continues to deny that he lost the election. He describes January 6 as a glorious day in American history, not one of its darkest.

Among his first acts after being sworn in again was pardoning or commuting the sentences of every person convicted in connection with January 6. He then set about exacting revenge on the American justice system. He summarily fired dozens of government officials who had tried to hold him accountable for the attack on the Capitol, as well as for his other alleged criminal offenses of removing classified documents from the White House upon his departure, secreting them to Mar-a-Lago, and obstructing the government’s efforts to find and retrieve the documents. He has since replaced those fired officials with loyalists—sycophants committed to him, not to our democracy or the rule of law.

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

For anyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.

On the first day of his current term, he launched a direct attack on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship when he issued an executive order contradicting the clear language of the amendment, federal statute, and Supreme Court precedent.

He has arrogated to himself Congress’s power to levy tariffs, declaring that previous foreign-trade and economic practices had created a national emergency justifying his unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs. When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell predicted that Trump’s unlawful tariffs would cause “higher inflation and slower growth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Later, he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, purportedly “for cause.” The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked Cook’s firing, but it won’t decide until next year whether Trump has the power to fire a member of the independent Federal Reserve. A ruling in Trump’s favor would give him absolute control over the central bank and thus over the monetary policy of the United States.

He has usurped Congress’s spending and appropriation powers by attempting to impound billions of dollars that Congress designated for specific purposes, including for public broadcasting, for Voice of America, and for desperately needed U.S. aid to starving and disease-stricken populations around the world.

He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.

The Supreme Court, too, has largely given the president its imprimatur to continue his power grab. It has either effectively reversed lower-court rulings against the president using the so-called shadow docket, or allowed the administration to proceed until the Court determines the constitutionality of various actions, by which time the damage to the Constitution, the U.S. government, and American society will have been done, as the justices well know. When the Court has ruled against Trump—for example, forbidding him from deporting undocumented immigrants without due process—he has provoked a constitutional crisis by ignoring the order.

The Founders built layers of safeguards into the American system of government to constrain a president, not just the checks and balances by the branches of the federal government. But Trump has run roughshod over these fail-safes, too. In violation of the sovereign rights reserved for them by the Constitution, Trump has commanded state officials to aid him in his purge of undocumented immigrants.

The president has also taken military command of cities across the country—over the vehement objection of the states. When a federal judge held that Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, was unlawful, he circumvented her orders and trashed the judge—whom he appointed—for her ruling, saying that she should be “ashamed” of herself.

Given that Trump has for years pronounced the free press in America “the enemy of the people,” it came as no surprise when media companies were among the first Trump targeted with unconstitutional edicts. In return for his favor, many of the country’s major media institutions have surrendered to him.

Though he claims to be a great friend of free enterprise, Trump has asserted dominion over the economy and insinuated his administration into American capitalism so that our great businesses are dependent on and subject to the government, as they are in communist and socialist nations.

He has extorted the nation’s legal profession, forcing law firms to betray their clients and the law in order to secure his favor. He has bludgeoned the nation’s colleges and universities with lawless order after lawless order. The federal government cannot tell universities how to conduct their affairs or dictate the viewpoints that professors teach. The First Amendment zealously guards such decisions, and the Constitution categorically forbids the president from wielding Congress’s power of the purse to punish these institutions.

Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.

Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.

This is the man who said in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

The man who proposed in 2022 that the “Massive Fraud” he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and who proclaimed, soon after reassuming office, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The man who, when asked the question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?,” answered, “I don’t know.” And the man who, when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, replied, “I don’t know.”

The man who said in August that he can “do anything I want to do,” because he’s president.

The man who has demanded that his attorney general and Department of Justice immediately prosecute his enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

And the man who summoned American military generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, to tell them that “America is under invasion from within,” repeatedly describing that enemy invasion as being by the “radical left,” a term he now seemingly uses to characterize all of his political opponents. He also said at this meeting, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” for fighting the “war from within.”

Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.

On July 4, 1776, nearly 250 years ago, America freed itself forever from the oppression of tyrannical rule by monarchs. There was never to be a king in the United States of America. Never again were the liberties and freedoms of Americans to be subject to the whims of a monarch. From that day, Thomas Paine wrote, “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

The nation has survived great challenges and calamities, including the Civil War. Now it is being tested again. Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can long endure.

If America is to long endure, we must summon our courage, our fearlessness, our hope, our spirited sense of invulnerability to political enthrall, and, most important, our abiding faith in the divine providence of this nation. We have been given the high charge of our forebears to “keep” the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “President for Life.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 1:05 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trump Outrages That Matter Most

Razing the East Wing? Breaking Congress? An unscientific survey of the President's most disruptive, significant, and truly surprising moves.

By Susan B. Glasser | October 30, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trump
-outrages-that-matter-most

In the past few days, as President Trump neared the three-hundred-day mark of his second term, he made what amounted to a royal progress through Asia, negotiating trade deals and basking in gilded palaces. In South Korea, he was presented with a replica of an ancient golden crown. “I’d like to wear it right now,” he said, only eleven days after millions of Americans had gathered to protest his assumption of near-monarchical powers, in hundreds of No Kings rallies around the country. The South Koreans sure knew their mark. During the trip, Trump also announced, via a social-media post, the resumption of nuclear tests for the first time in decades; unleashed another deadly strike on an alleged drug-running boat in what appears to be an undeclared war for regime change in Venezuela; threatened, during a political pep rally in front of the supposedly apolitical U.S. military, to send active-duty troops to American cities; and admitted that he “would love” to remain in office for a third term before reluctantly acknowledging the Constitution’s strict ban on it.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, the U.S. government remained shut down for a fourth straight week, the result of an impasse with congressional Democrats that Trump has seemingly done nothing to resolve—even as thousands of workers go without pay. It was, in other words, just another week in the Trump era. The new normal is forgetting yesterday’s scandals in order to make room in our overcrowded brains for tomorrow’s. Remember when Trump imposed punitive new tariffs on Canada because he got mad about a television ad? When he demanded that the Justice Department pay him more than two hundred million dollars in compensation for the costs he incurred from the Biden Administration’s decision to investigate him? When he circulated an A.I.-generated video of himself dumping poop on Americans protesting him? That was so last week. And last week, in the Trump era, might as well have been an eternity ago. The black hole in which our previous outrage resides is vast.

Which is why I was struck by the visceral and lasting anger that has resulted from Trump’s decision to raze the East Wing of the White House without so much as a single public hearing or permit. A very senior Republican, a repeat Trump voter, told me that it was “disgusting” and “sick.” Polls show that large bipartisan majorities oppose the demolition. It’s been more than a week and people are still stewing about it. Has something finally broken through? Is that even possible anymore?

At a dinner I attended earlier this week, a query about what the worst thing was that had happened since Trump’s return to the White House prompted a chilling array of answers—only one of which was the tearing down of the East Wing. (Can you imagine if a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom just woke up one morning and ordered the smashing of a wing of Buckingham Palace, someone said.) It was the range of responses that seemed most telling to me—from Trump’s politicization of the military and the Justice Department to the unleashing of a new MAGA culture celebrating cruelty.

I decided to continue the conversation, asking a few dozen smart folks to send me their thoughts about the most disruptive, significant, or truly surprising events of these past few months. Answers poured in—thoughtful, anguished, perceptive answers that reminded me that there is value in naming the problem, even if nothing, for the moment, can be done to stop it. It is a response, if an imperfect one, to the sense of being overwhelmed by events to take a minute to pause and assess them, to think about what really matters and what might last from the jarring, undeniably historic moment through which we are living.

Some of my correspondents offered long lists of shocking events. Gary Bass, a professor of world politics at Princeton, listed seventeen examples “off the top of my head,” ranging from “pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists” to “working to rig elections so that this nightmare never ends.” Others focussed on a telling individual moment. Jake Sullivan, who served as national-security adviser in the Biden Administration, said that it was the early capitulation of the law firm Paul, Weiss to Trump’s demands that set off “alarm bells.” It was, he added, the “canary in the coal mine.” Jill Lepore, a New Yorker colleague who is the Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard, and a law professor at Harvard Law, wrote that she was “genuinely surprised when, asked if it was his duty to uphold the Constitution, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ Just a surprising thing to say, given that the oath he’d taken, twice, is to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.’ ” She noted, “It seems a small thing, in a way, but I was struck by the glimmer of honesty here, a sort of shrug that seemed to say, ‘Eh, nah, who knows.’ ”

Several people mentioned the extraordinary command performance of senior military officers at Quantico, where Trump and his self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, lectured them on the need to battle “the enemy from within”—and, Hegseth added, to do more pushups. “When addressing the generals from around the world he summoned to Quantico, he politicized the U.S. military in a single hour of American history,” J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals-court judge who has emerged as one of Trump’s most visible critics, wrote, “trashing our former Presidents and the ‘radical-left lunatics’ of the Democratic Party and announcing that, on his orders as Commander-in-Chief, the United States military will henceforth use America’s liberal cities as ‘training grounds’ for fighting the war against his political opposition, whom he called the ‘enemy from within.’ ”

Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, was struck by the singular ambition of what Trump is attempting in his second term. “The most disruptive thing he’s done is also the most significant: Trump has set out to reverse some of the most prominent cultural and political gains that liberals and progressive movements achieved from the nineteen-sixties on: affirmative action, the legitimacy of public workers’ unions, an openness to immigrants from all over the world,” Kazin wrote. “The effort shows that Trump is the most radical and, if he mostly succeeds, will be seen as the most consequential president of the twenty-first century and perhaps the most consequential political figure in the world.” The only problem with Kazin’s extensive catalogue, which included several more examples, might simply be that it was too limited; others, such as the former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, added a long list of global disruptions, as well.

Taken together, the answers provided a sort of battle-damage assessment of the current moment, the kind undertaken while everyone is still patting themselves to figure out which parts survived the explosion intact. Nearly every respondent nodded to the larger themes that shadow us in the Trump Presidency: the politicization of previously nonpolitical institutions; the sweeping assertions of executive power to justify acts of overreach or outright lawlessness; the reorientation of America’s national-security doctrine away from confrontation with great-power adversaries such as Russia and China in favor of confrontation against “the enemy from within”; the “gobsmacking” self-enrichment of Trump and his family, as they leverage the power of the Presidency in service of their private interests; and the caving of those who could have stood up to Trump but chose not to—from Congress to the Supreme Court to various leaders of civil society.

This last item, I think, has been most stunning for many. Trump, after all, is a known quantity by now. It is as a mirror for the rest of America that he continues to amaze and stun us. “The most surprising—and it shouldn’t have been—was how well intimidation works,” said Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who wrote an anonymous op-ed from inside Trump’s first term, and who has been targeted for investigation by the President in his second term. “Entire sectors of society that stood up to Trump in his first term have been crumpled up and tossed like tissue paper, offering feeble resistance to his power grab and revenge campaign. We were unprepared for it. And it shows.”

That is what gets me, too. So many individual decisions have gone into the making of our American monarch. I suppose there’s a perfectly rational reason for South Korea’s President to give Trump a golden crown, and for the leaders of Apple and Amazon and other companies whose services we use every day to contribute millions of dollars to knock down the East Wing of the White House. Republicans in Congress, who have failed to perform their constitutional duty and stand up for their branch of government, may justify their inaction as the price they have to pay to hang on to their positions in a Party whose electorate will not tolerate anyone who defies its leader. Hence, the debacle of 2025: what looks rational for an individual has produced decisions of collective madness. I’ll leave the final word to a college friend, Robbie Baxter, a strategic business consultant and author in Silicon Valley. “I am most astounded,” she wrote, “by the fact that no one is really stopping him.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 1:12 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The president spoke to reporters on Air Force One while en route to Florida for the weekend. His administration has recently conducted a series of strikes on boats. The strikes have killed 61 people, instead of arresting them.

https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-strikes-donald-trump-us-military-at
tack-maduro-10973127

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 3:09 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The GOP’s top think tank just defended an open Nazi

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Hitler was good, says the Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said this about podcaster and antisemitic Nick Fuentes: “Canceling him is not the answer.”

By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 31, 2025, 12:50 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/466905/the-gops-top-think-tank-just-defen
ded-an-open-nazi

On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition.

You might think I am exaggerating. I assure you I am not. The Nazi in question here, podcaster Nick Fuentes, has described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/10/nick-fuentes-texas-meeting/
https://x.com/karol/status/1984244275899728379

And on Thursday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a video defending this person’s inclusion in polite-right politics: describing Fuentes not as a hate-monger to be banished from the decent right, but as a coalition member whose view of Jews-as-evil-traitors should be politely debated.

“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said. “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer.”

This is an epochal moment for American conservatism. In the past, the movement felt the need to hide bigotries — including antisemitism — behind a thin veil of plausible deniability. But with Fuentes, there’s no hidden message: He just says, over and over again, that Jews are evil and the source of America’s biggest problems. If someone like him can be considered one of Roberts’s “friends on the right,” then the movement’s leadership is now conceding that overt antisemitism is a legitimate political position in the MAGA movement.

Now, prominent conservative figures — like the writers Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are aghast, raging against Fuentes’ newfound acceptability. The criticism is getting quite heated.

“The question is not whether one may criticize Israel. It is whether open antisemitism and racism are acceptable in conservative politics,” writes Mike Doran, a leading conservative voice on Middle East policy. “A movement that can’t recognize and reject blatant antisemitism has no moral core and no future.”

Earlier this week, I suggested the GOP might be in the opening stages of a civil war over the status of Jews in American life. I’m now convinced that it is. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

How we got here: Tucker Carlson

To understand what’s happening right now, you need to understand the man who served as the bridge between Fuentes and Roberts: Tucker Carlson.

Carlson and Fuentes had, as recently as August, openly hated each other (Carlson memorably called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid”). But, increasingly, they’ve come to be two sides of the same coin. While Fuentes is openly and violently antisemitic, Carlson has mainstreamed similar ideas more subtly — by, for example, implying the Jews killed Jesus during Charlie Kirk’s memorial and elevating revisionist “histories” of World War II in which the real bad guy was not Adolf Hitler but rather Winston Churchill.

Earlier this week, they buried the hatchet: Carlson released a fawning interview with Fuentes that serves, in large part, to make the extremist look far more reasonable than he sounds on his own show. There was no open support for Hitler, though Fuentes did (to Carlson’s chagrin) manage to say something nice about another mass-murdering antisemite: Joseph Stalin.

The sit-down was, in many respects, a kind of concession on Carlson’s part: Though he once attempted to push Fuentes aside, it seems he has since he realized he didn’t have the muscle to do so. Fuentes’ supporters, called “groypers,” had come to make up a huge percentage of the GOP youth cadres. In his post on the Carlson-Fuentes meetup, for example, Dreher cited a rough estimate from “a big player in conservative politics” that “30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers.”

These people make up a core audience that Carlson couldn’t afford to alienate; their existence explains why he and fellow podcaster Candace Owens have been leaning so hard into antisemitism in recent broadcasts. The young conservatives who watch online shows and streamers like this stuff, and they’re more than willing to pay for it.

But Carlson is more than just part of the online right’s ecosystem: He is one of the MAGA right’s most influential voices, bar none. He spoke in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention and, by all accounts, played a major role in the elevation of JD Vance to the vice presidency. Once he platformed Fuentes, it blessed the “weird little gay kid” outside of the internet fever swamps: making it okay for leading Trump-aligned figures to openly court Fuentes and his groyper hordes.

Carlson’s decision to do this met with real resistance: Both National Review magazine and Sen. Ted Cruz lit into him over it.

“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing — then you are a coward and complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.

Enter: The Heritage Foundation

This is the absolutely critical context for Roberts’ ultimate intervention. His primary goal in the video was not defending Fuentes per se; it was defending Carlson against these post-Fuentes attacks.

“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said. “That includes Tucker Carlson — who remains, and as I’ve said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Roberts’s video shows why Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Fuentes was so important — ”one of the most dangerous videos ever in MAGA media,” as The Bulwark’s veteran right-watcher Will Sommer puts it.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/one-of-the-most-dangerous-interviews-ever
-maga-media-tucker-carlson-nick-fuentes

When Carlson decided to back Fuentes, he put his own reputation on the line as well. The inevitable attacks on Carlson personally from people like Cruz activated Carlson’s allies in mainstream MAGA world, like Roberts, to defend him.

And there was no way to do that without, implicitly or explicitly, saying that it’s okay to let people like Fuentes into the right’s broader tent.

Thus, Carlson’s choice to sit down with Fuentes had a very real and direct effect: leading the right’s top think tank to admit a Hitler worshipper as a legitimate discussion partner. Fuentes is now, in a very real sense, mainstream himself.

Conservatives need some cancel culture

Now, the Fuentes-Carlson-Roberts axis is waking up Trump-aligned conservatives to the rot in their movement. People like Dreher, a postliberal writer who moved to Hungary in large because he admires Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian-right regime, are calling for a purge. As Dreher writes:

“I simply cannot understand the logic behind treating Fuentes as a normal political actor — even if he has a relatively big following. He is a deeply bad man, with no redeeming qualities. If his mode of discourse, and beliefs, become part of the mainstream of conservatism, we’re done, and we will deserve it. A line must be drawn between us and the likes of Fuentes…because they cannot be reasoned with, don’t want to reason with anybody, and are driven by nothing but the pleasure of hating and transgressing. They will poison anything they touch.”

I wish them well in this quest: Truly, I do. Fuentes is every bit as awful as Dreher says; it is paramount for the safety of my community (American Jews) that people like him succeed in booting Fuentes from the coalition.

But I also wish they would engage in a little self-reflection. Because without it, their quest might be doomed to fail.

The dominant strain of right-wing punditry has been preoccupied with the overwhelming dangers of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” — Dreher published an entire book labeling it “soft totalitarianism.” In doing so, they defended and apologized for bigotry coming from people like Trump and Carlson when they railed against the evils of mass migration, Islam, and urban crime.

In doing so, they elevated anti-anti-bigotry into a kind of defining ideological principle: that accusations of bigotry, and not bigotry itself, is the real problem. The popularity of this attitude makes it exceptionally difficult for the right to police its own; any attempt at saying “this far, and no farther” is met with accusations of wokeness and cancellation.

“It’s not even ‘no guardrails’ — it’s policing to make sure there aren’t guardrails,” as Richard Hanania, an influential writer on the right (and himself a former white nationalist forum poster), put it to me in a recent interview

This is the “no enemies on the right” logic that allowed Vance to dismiss the pro-Hitler texts among New York Young Republicans — and was explicitly deployed by Kevin Roberts in his dual defense of Carlson and Fuentes.

As long as it holds sway in the minds of most Republicans — as long as they believe that the very idea of enforcing standards is the greatest form of political perfidy — it will pose a massive barrier to any kind of effort to excise Fuentes, let alone Carlson, from the coalition.

People like Roberts will be there to defend them, using the language that Republicans have used to excuse every single awful thing Trump and others in his tent have been saying about minorities for years. And it’ll work.

“I’m afraid the campus speech debates of the 2010s dulled the discernment of many conservatives,” Giancarlo Sopo, a former Trump campaign adviser on Hispanic outreach, posted on X. “However depraved the sentiment, criticism becomes taboo, and ostracism unthinkable, so long as one gestures vaguely toward ‘the right.’”

So the current struggle within the right does not just require open confrontation with Fuentes. It requires some soul-searching about what the more mainstream right did to open the door for him.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 4:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut the fuck up.

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For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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