The Financial Times has reported that Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which is the most influential conservative think-tank in the United States, is facing an internal revolt after defending Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview Holocaust denier and prominent misogynist Nick Fuentes. That act of indulgence towards outright neo-Nazism has… Read More »I simply adore the logic here The post I simply adore the logic here first appeared on Tim Worstall.
The Financial Times has reported that Kevin Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, which is the most influential conservative think-tank in the United States, is facing an internal revolt after defending Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview Holocaust denier and prominent misogynist Nick Fuentes. That act of indulgence towards outright neo-Nazism has exposed deep cracks in the American right, and that matters.
So, lots of the right really are not fascists and will have nothing to do with fascists. OK. Good to know.
What we are witnessing at Heritage is not a one-off scandal but the implosion of a movement that has lost the ability to distinguish between liberty and license, or between conservatism and fascism.
Roberts has offered an at best half-hearted apology to staff at the Heritage Foundation for his actions, but it is clear that the damage is done, including them. The façade of discipline that once hid the contradictions within the right – between libertarians and authoritarians, and between oligarchs and populists – is falling apart. Associates and funders are already fleeing from the Heritage Foundation. Its embrace of deep misogyny and anti-Semitic neo-Nazism is the rock on which it is foundering, and which will break it, but with that, the whole far-right will fall apart.
And this matters here in the UK. The British right, located in Tuforn Street, London SW1, imported neoliberalism from the US wholesale: the think tanks, the slogans, and even the contempt for government. Now it is likely that it, and its spawn, Reform UK, will import the same collapse from the USA.
As the moral vacuum of hate at the core of neoliberalism is exposed, it is clear that it does not offer renewal, but rot. Heritage’s embrace of extremism is the logical endpoint of an ideology that worships power and wealth while claiming to defend freedom. It will tear the right apart. The only question is whether democracy can survive the wreckage it leaves behind.
So neoliberals rejecting fascism shows that neoliberals are fascists.
The post I simply adore the logic here first appeared on Tim Worstall.
