Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s13e27 Episode Script
Republican Extremism
1
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight".
I'm John Oliver. Thank you
so much for joining us!
We are back, and we missed a lot
in the last two weeks.
The White House got
and then lost a new press secretary
in five business days,
Melania Trump claimed she'd brokered
a peace deal in Ukraine,
and Kelly Clarkson couldn't buy
a 15,000 dollar bird
at a Brooklyn toy store
and for some reason
it was all anyone
could talk about for days.
Meanwhile,
Trump's been touring the country
to drum up support
for Republican candidates,
and in South Carolina this week, when
he tried to talk up their governor,
things even by his standards
got a bit weird.
He was lieutenant governor,
and I'd say 90% of the reason
I took the governor…
I took the governor and put her
over at the United Nations
because I wanted this guy
to be…
I wanted this guy
to become governor.
I'm sorry, we all heard it.
What was that noise?
Yeah, whatever happened there
wasn't good. It feels like a real
"you need to unplug him and
then plug him back in" situation,
'cause that's not
a human sound.
That's the noise Eeyore
makes when he cums.
That's a fact.
You don't want him to be happy?
But we're gonna dive straight in
with our main, and only, story tonight,
which concerns the Republican Party
narrowly beating out "bachelorette"
as the best type of party to join
if you want to be surrounded by dicks.
Specifically, I'm gonna talk
about a worrying trend
that's been steadily on the rise,
with perhaps the stupidest example
being this bold Veterans Day
post that recently resurfaced.
The Republican candidate for
New York's 19th congressional district
is facing criticism over
a decade-old Facebook post
honoring his grandfather
who fought for Nazi Germany.
In the photo, his grandfather
is wearing a military uniform
with Nazi swastikas.
Oberacker told Politico
it was the only picture
of his grandfather that he has.
Yeah, not great!
And for the record,
"Don't be mad at me,
that's the only picture I have"
might work as an excuse
when the photo is
"family brunch but
Aunt Matilda blinked",
but not when it's "Grandpa Ludwig
in full swastika chic."
If that is
the only picture that you have,
maybe consider
having no pictures of him.
You can sit Veterans Day out!
No one will think that's weird!
But that's just one of many moments
when the Republican Party
has recently found itself answering
some uncomfortable questions
about Nazi references.
In fact, on day one
of Trump's second term,
Elon Musk attracted attention after
thanking Trump supporters like this.
I just want to say thank you
for making it happen. Thank you.
My heart goes out to you.
Yeah, that gesture, and the weird
little grunt that came with it,
are a bit worse than
you remember, right?
Because everything about that
screams "Nazi".
Well, almost everything,
to be fair to the Nazis,
unlike Elon, they at least
looked sharp in their suits.
But it does feel like the Republican
Party's been getting too comfortable
with some, at best,
Nazi-adjacent shit.
This Trump appointee
withdrew his nomination
to head the Office
of Special Counsel after it emerged
he'd said in a group chat that
"I do have a Nazi streak in me
from time to time."
And this congressional candidate
in Texas made a video
in which he showed off a gun that
he called "Hitler's street sweeper"
and which featured him and a friend
goose-stepping to a Nazi song.
And look, let's give the maximum
benefit of the doubt here.
Because you can potentially
write some of those things off
to just an edgy joke in poor taste
or being guilty of loving Grandpa
Ludwig a little a little too much.
And I know Republicans
often complain
that liberals
call them Nazis regardless.
Elon even posted,
right after doing his Hitler howdy,
that "the 'everyone is Hitler'
attack is so tired."
And last July, a Fox panel even tried
to laugh off comparisons
between ICE and Nazis
with this hilarious riff.
This is why the criticism doesn't
matter to us when you call us Nazis.
"Nazi this, Nazi that." I'm beginning
to think they don't like us.
You know what?
I've said this before.
We need to learn from the Blacks,
the way they were able to remove
the power from the N-word
by using it.
From now on, it's, "What up,
my Nazi. Hey, what up, my Nazi?
What's hanging, my Nazi?"
"Nazi, please!"
It's so fun.
I'll be honest, I thought that clip
would peak in unwatchability
the moment he said "the Blacks",
but it somehow got worse from there.
Also, for what it's worth,
I never want to hear the phrase
"what's hanging, my Nazi"
unless it's coming
from one of the executioners
at Nuremburg.
"What's hanging my Nazi? About five,
six feet of hemp, why do you ask?"
But I don't know,
those ICE/Nazi comparisons
don't feel entirely unearned to me,
especially given, as we have discussed,
DHS has put out material like this
ICE recruitment ad with the caption,
"Which way, American man?"
pretty clearly mirroring
"Which Way Western Man?"
a book by a neo-Nazi that's popular
among white supremacists,
and this Instagram post
showing a beach with the words
"America after
100 million deportations",
captioned, "The peace of a nation
no longer besieged by the third world."
And I'm sure the people
behind those posts will insist
they do not know
what I am talking about right now,
to which I'd say,
to borrow a truly cursed phrase,
"Nazi, please!"
But wait, as that's still not all.
Because naked bigotry
from prominent Republicans seems
to be increasingly the norm.
Tennessee's Andy Ogles has posted,
"Muslims don't belong
in American society",
Senator Tommy Tuberville's posted,
"We must immediately ban
all Islam immigrants"
and just last month, Bo French,
Republican candidate for Texas
railroad commissioner,
attracted a lot of attention
after doing this.
Following that big Longhorns win
on Saturday, French posted a photo
of this group of students saying,
among other things, quote,
"Social media is exposing
how many Americans
have been
displaced by foreigners.
It's everywhere and far worse than any
of us could imagine," he said.
One of the students pictured there
is a UT senior from Flower Mound.
To see someone that's running
for a position of power
saying something like that
is just…
That's something that I never
thought was possible.
Yeah, that is awful.
Because it is pretty clear
what made him jump to the word
"foreigner" in that footage,
given everything else about it
is almost offensively Texan.
Wearing cowboy hats at a football
game while doing Hook 'em Horns?
I don't know how that
could get any more Texan,
without them somehow
losing at the Alamo.
And yet, that probably shouldn't be
surprising coming from French,
given he's previously
posted things like,
"I won't rest
until every Muslim is gone"
and a poll asking, "Who is a bigger
threat to America, Jews or Muslims?"
Which might be my least favorite
question ever asked on the platform,
with my favorite still being
when, in 2010,
Kevin Durant asked his followers,
"Getting a massage.
I'm face down and I gotta fart.
What should I do?"
A tweet so good it's still
getting responses 16 years later,
even though I am pretty sure
the question was time-sensitive.
French's post got so much blowback,
even Karl Rove,
the architect of George W. Bush's
presidential campaigns,
announced he'll vote for the Democrat
in French's race this year,
later explaining why.
My party is being infiltrated
by people like Bo French.
Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets
with a bunch of Republican leaders.
This guy is a Nazi.
We've got all these people now
on-getting their little podcasts
and so forth, "We're just
asking questions about the Jews."
We didn't labor in the wilderness
to build a conservative party
that was inclusive and welcoming,
said it didn't matter who you were,
or where you came from,
what mattered was what was in
your heart and what you believed.
I didn't work for that party and see it
taken over by a bunch of bigots.
Okay, let's set aside all that bullshit
about how the Republican Party
used to be so accepting
and come back to it later.
Suffice it to say,
citation needed, Karl.
But you know things
have gone off the rails
when you've lost the moral
high ground to Karl fucking Rove here.
When you've lost the man who
said he's "proud of waterboarding",
that's kind of the whole ballgame.
But it's not just Rove
sounding the alarm.
The right-wing commentator
Erick Erickson has said
that conservative institutions
have been infiltrated by men
who "embrace white nationalism,
antisemitism and Nazi sympathies."
And even the late Lindsey Graham,
rest in power,
felt the need to go on stage
last fall
at a Republican Jewish
coalition event and say this.
But I want to make it really clear,
I'm in the "Hitler sucks" wing
of the Republican Party.
What is this Hitler shit?
I don't know.
Yeah, you know a political party's
in pretty bad shape
when their members have to clarify
that they are not the ones
who love Hitler.
It's like seeing a sign that says,
"In this Cinnabon
we believe in hand-washing."
I mean, that's reassuring, I guess,
but I do now have
some broader follow-up questions
about your larger organization.
So, if multiple Republicans
are raising the alarm
about their party
being infiltrated by extremists,
we thought tonight we'd try
and answer the question
that Lindsey Graham posed
so elegantly-slash-drunkenly there:
what is this Hitler shit?
Specifically, why are we hearing
so much about it right now,
what are Republicans doing about it
and where could it end up taking us?
And let's start with "why now?"
There are a bunch of reasons for that,
but one big one is,
in the wake of Israel's war in Gaza,
and our war in Iran, there's suddenly
a lot more appetite for discussion
about our foreign policy
in the Middle East,
and America's relationship with Israel.
Which is good, and long overdue!
But some on the far right
have seized upon this moment
to elevate antisemitic
conspiracy theories.
And for many, the moment that
dynamic burst into the open
came almost exactly a year ago,
when Tucker Carlson decided
to sit down with the known white
nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.
The tone of Tucker's interview
was suspiciously cordial,
with this early exchange setting
a baseline for the whole thing.
To the extent that I've been taken
out of context over the years,
I'm trying to set the record straight,
and say, you know,
and I appreciate you've given me
this opportunity,
these are my real views, I'm not
one of those haters, let's say.
Yeah! Well, I think people should be
allowed to describe what they think.
I mean, that's, like, a basic
human autonomy question.
If I want to know what you think,
I should ask you and let you talk!
Yeah!
Yeah! It was just two reasonable guys
having a chat in a cabin
that looks like an Airbnb
for serial killers.
Because that place has everything.
Antlers. Swords.
Soundproofing, I assume.
Everything you could possibly want
for a weekend with the guys,
hanging out, discussing race science,
and maybe surreptitiously
vanishing hitchhikers.
In that interview,
Tucker gave Fuentes a platform
to present a pretty polished version
of himself,
while also letting
some fairly loud bigotry slide,
like this moment, when Fuentes
slowly walked into the antisemitic trope
that American Jews have dual loyalty
to the U.S. and Israel.
I guess what I'm saying is that,
if you are a Jewish person in America,
you're sort of, and again,
it's not because they're born,
but it's sort of a rational
self-interest politically to say,
"I'm a minority.
I'm a religious ethnic minority.
This is not really my 'home'.
My ancestral home is in Israel."
There's like a natural affinity
that Jews have for Israel.
And I would say on top of that, for
the international Jewish community,
they're extremely organized.
Many of them are critical of Israel,
or Israel's current government,
or the project of Israel.
But I guess what they have in common,
unlike, let's say, like,
Singapore, for example,
is that they have this international
community across borders,
extremely organized, that is putting
the interest of themselves
before the interests
of their home country.
Okay, accusing Jewish Americans
of putting Israel's interests
ahead of America's
is just absurd.
Lots of people have connections
to other countries
without being sleeper agents
for them.
I was born in the U.K.,
and that freaky little island
has no power over me,
other than I guess making me suffer
at every World Cup
and cursing me to be
the only person in our office
who pronounces
"aluminium" correctly.
Still, what a fun discussion
that must've been
for Tucker's sponsors for that episode,
which included, and this is true,
Vandy potato chips.
And I don't know what's worse there.
If Vandy accidentally sponsored
"Chattin' Jews at the Freak Shack",
or if they were briefed
ahead of time and said,
"We're definitely in, T-bone."
Anyway, I should say, Tucker did
offer some soft pushback
during that over two-hour interview,
although notably,
not when Fuentes blamed
America's problems on, quote,
"organized Jewry" or when he
mentioned Joseph Stalin's birthday
and said he was "a fan",
to which Tucker said,
"We'll circle back to that",
and then, just as Stalin did
when he meant to save millions of
peasants from starving to death,
probably just forgot to.
Now, in the aftermath
of that sit-down,
battle lines were drawn
across the political right,
with many arguing Tucker shouldn't have
given a softball interview to Fuentes,
especially since it gave him
"access to one of the largest
audiences he's ever had."
But the Heritage Foundation,
one of the largest, most influential
think tanks in America,
initially stood by Tucker,
with whom it had recently
had an advertising deal.
In fact, its president, Kevin Roberts,
even put out a video in which he said,
"We will always defend our friends
against the slander of bad actors
who serve someone else's agenda.
That includes Tucker Carlson."
He also said Tucker was under attack
from a "venomous coalition"
and mentioned "pressure
from the globalist class",
both, if you're not aware,
pretty notable dog-whistles.
In the wake of that video, dozens
of Heritage staff members departed,
as did several board members,
and an antisemitism task force
severed ties with the foundation.
Eventually, Roberts admitted
he'd used a terrible choice of words
and addressed his remaining staff
in an all-hands meeting,
in which he tried unconvincingly
to plead ignorance
about the issues
with Carlson and Fuentes.
I don't have time
to consume a lot of news.
I don't mean this as a fake
attempt at lightheartedness.
I consume a lot of sports.
I don't consume a lot of podcasts,
not even ours.
I don't consume a lot of news.
And that ignorance
should've told me, "Ask around."
It is one thing to say you
don't watch a lot of news
if you're a salesperson or an electrician
or a doctor,
it is quite another to say it
as the president
of the leading conservative
think tank in the country.
It's like George R.R. Martin saying,
"I'm sorry I misspoke about
medieval royal sibling-fucking.
I don't consume
a lot of incest fantasy."
Brother, you are the main reason
we know what that is.
And to be clear here:
Nick Fuentes is famously a bigot.
And while, I admit, he's also
very much a troll,
and you may've seen clips online
of him where he comes across
as an edgelord
just trying to shock,
it is worth seeing what he's like
when the mask fully comes off,
because it's truly heinous.
You know who built everything?
Planes, railroads, cars, the radio,
the telephone, the telegraph, whites!
Television, everything, whites.
Jews are money-changers,
bullshit artists, psychopaths,
charlatans, grifters,
manipulators.
Why do you think
they're so obnoxious?
Why do think
they're so fucking obnoxious?
They have no manners because
they come from the third world,
they come from the literal ghetto.
Yeah, that's pretty
unambiguous, isn't it?
And it makes it all
the more laughable
that Tucker made such a show
of offering Fuentes,
a man who's literally spent thousands
of hours on the internet
saying whatever he wants, the chance
to "finally say what he thinks."
You really didn't need to invite
Fuentes to your Antlerdome
to find out
what makes him tick.
Just Google him,
you boat-shoed bitch.
And the worrying thing is,
it's not just Tucker.
Fuentes has been inching
closer and closer
to mainstream
Republicans over the years.
Congressman Paul Gosar gave
the keynote speech
at Fuentes' America First Political
Action Conference in 2021,
and Marjorie Taylor Greene
did the same the following year.
And I do have to tell you, she later
denied knowing who Fuentes was.
As, by the way, did Donald Trump,
after he famously dined with him
at Mar-a-Lago.
Although I will note that the person
who brought Fuentes to that dinner
was Kanye West, who just
a month earlier had tweeted
he was going
"death con 3 on Jewish people",
so I guess Trump is claiming there
that he only knew one
of the antisemites at that dinner,
which, to be clear,
doesn't make it half okay.
And in the wake
of that Tucker interview,
Fuentes took a victory lap,
saying,
"I am no longer the radical
on the outside,
I'm actually the leader
on the inside."
And on his show, he put the current
situation in some pretty chilling terms.
You can call me a Nazi.
You better be careful.
Because if I'm a Nazi,
then there's millions of young people
that are following a fucking Nazi.
Right. Yeah.
No,
that's the fucking problem here.
Because Nazis gaining power doesn't
historically bode well for anyone,
including, for what it's worth,
Nazis,
who didn't exactly have
the best 1945.
Just go ahead and ask Grandpa Ludwig!
Look, I don't know if Fuentes truly
has "millions" of followers,
or as they call themselves,
"Groypers."
He has an incentive
to exaggerate his importance,
and there's not a lot of data on how
many Republicans support him.
But the glimpses aren't great.
At CPAC this year,
one young attendee said,
"I'd say at least 60% of the young
people here are fans of Nick."
And Ted Cruz recently
complained about their prevalence,
saying it was difficult to avoid
staffing them in his office,
and that "the Groyper
problem is real."
And data suggests many Republicans,
especially younger ones,
are getting a lot more comfortable
with things like Holocaust denial.
The right-leaning Manhattan Institute
recently conducted a survey
that found "nearly four in 10
in the current GOP
believe the Holocaust
was greatly exaggerated
or did not happen
as historians describe",
with that number jumping
to 54% among men under 50.
And a focus group
they ran of Gen Z Republicans
offered up alarming opinions, like
when they responded to the question,
"What do you think of Adolf Hitler?"
with, "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."
Which is a real compliment
sandwich there, isn't it?
Critical while constructive.
If I was Hitler,
and to be clear,
I'm very much not!
I'd be pretty happy with that
feedback from a manager who cares.
That focus group also asked,
"What do you think of Jewish people?"
and one respondent said,
"I would say a force for evil."
And remember, that is what they
were willing to say on the record.
Behind closed doors,
it unsurprisingly gets even worse.
New fallout tonight from a racist
and violent group chat
involving leaders
of some young Republican groups.
The chat includes antisemitic
comments and racial slurs
against Black, Latino, Asian people,
and other epithets
used more than 250 times,
according to Politico.
The outlet says one person,
after being told backers would support
the most right-wing candidate
for a leadership role,
responded, "Great. I love Hitler."
At another point,
someone writes,
"If we ever had a leak of this chat,
we would be cooked."
Yeah, you probably would!
And guess what, guys?
Here we are!
And there was
some nasty stuff in that chat,
with one member
repeatedly using the N-word,
and another referring to Black people
with these slurs
that I'm gonna take a hard pass
on saying out loud.
And that wasn't even
the only group chat that got leaked.
Another one, among campus
Republicans in Florida
was also filled with racist slurs,
and at one point was named
"Gooning in Agartha",
with Agartha being a reference
to a mythical white civilization
promoted by Heinrich Himmler,
and "gooning" being a reference
to, you know what?
Look that one up yourself.
I will let that be a fun
surprise for you.
And look,
there are some who will say,
"Look, calm down, this seems to be
a bunch of kids and shitty streamers,
you can just ignore it."
But let's take those one at a time,
starting with "it's just kids."
That's actually something
JD Vance has tried to argue,
when he was asked about that group
chat with over 250 slurs in it,
and he said this.
The reality is that kids do stupid
things, especially young boys.
They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
Like, that's what kids do.
And I really don't want us to grow up
in a country
where a kid telling a stupid joke,
telling a very offensive, stupid joke,
is cause to ruin their lives.
Okay, first, set aside that that's
a wildly forgiving attitude
coming from the VP
of an administration that,
as we have discussed
repeatedly before,
has gone apeshit over any perceived
antisemitism on college campuses.
But in the abstract there,
I guess I agree that kids should be able
to make mistakes
without it ruining their lives.
But it feels important
to mention:
the people in those chats
weren't actually kids
so much as "full-grown adults"
in their twenties and thirties.
In fact, the guy who posted
those heinous slurs
was 31,
one of the least cute ages.
There are no 31-year-old scamps.
One of our writers is 31,
and she's so fucking annoying!
Meanwhile, another member
of the chat
was actually in the Vermont
state legislature at the time,
and yet another had apparently
been in line
to manage Republican Peter
Oberacker's campaign for Congress
before the chats came out.
And if the name "Oberacker"
is ringing a bell at all for you,
it's because he's the guy who
"thank you for your serviced"
his dear departed
grand-Nazi on Veterans Day.
Now, I should say, those three
not-remotely-young boys
have since either apologized or claimed
that their posts were just jokes.
And, okay!
But what that all shows is that,
in politics,
people in their twenties
and thirties can rise fast.
The distance
between "college Republican"
and "communications director"
can be just a couple of years.
Now, as for the whole, "they're
just shitty streamers" argument,
these days, streamers can be
a lot closer to the center
of power than you might think.
For instance,
here's one named Stew Peters,
bragging about how he's been
able to "J-pill" his audience,
an antisemitic term for showing
the malign influence of Jews.
I'll warn you: this next video sucks
pretty hard, but if you stick with it,
you do get to see him take
some increasingly wild swings.
As everybody knows, "The Stew Peters
Show" and this network
broadly have been and still are
to this day
at the forefront
of J-pilling the American people.
If societal ills were a bunch of stones
in the middle of a field somewhere
and all of us got together,
walking around,
turning up the stones
to see what's underneath them,
under every single
one of these stones,
you would find a little Jew man,
grubbing his hands, smirking,
wearing his tiny hat,
trying to get over on the goyim.
Trying to kill the goyim
when it really comes down to it.
Just think of all that these people
are responsible for: usury,
central banking, communism,
Bolshevik communism,
the Holodomor,
the transatlantic slave trade,
transgenderism,
the normalization of homosexuality,
the normalization of pedophilia,
transgenderism for kids,
open borders, white replacement,
white genocide,
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,
AIPAC,
the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy,
the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
abortion, which is just a modern-day
Molochian sacrifice ritual.
I'll say this:
that man is thorough.
The problem is, that sounds
less like a coherent conspiracy
and more like what Alex Jones
would say
after being kicked in the head
by a horse.
And while I know that guy
sounds completely insane,
what's even crazier is,
guests on his show
have included these three
sitting Republican congressmen,
Kari Lake, and, oh yeah,
the director of the FBI, Kash Patel,
who appeared on Peters' show
eight times from 2021 to 2022.
And look, maybe they all
actually like Stew Peters.
Or maybe they just thought
that they could pretend to,
in order to keep his audience
aligned with their party.
And you may be thinking,
"What's the real difference there?"
To which I'd say, "For sure."
Because here's the thing: while
Karl Rove might want to pretend
this is some anomaly in a party
lovingly hand-crafted over the years
to be inclusive and welcoming, that
is some deeply revisionist horseshit.
The far-right fringe currently rising up
in his party is not remotely new.
From the John Birch Society, through
Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan,
the Republican Party's always
left its door ajar for bigots,
cranks, and conspiracy theorists.
Have you ever listened
to the Nixon tapes?
They would do numbers
on Rumble today!
Sponsored by,
who else but Vandy potato chips!
The chip for the truly
discriminating consumer.
Anyway, the party's
"big tent" philosophy,
sometimes summed up
as "no enemies to the right",
has long meant it's been reluctant
to fully disavow someone
for being too extreme.
And while gatekeepers
in conservative media used to be able
to keep the racist dog whistles
just below audible levels,
thanks to the rise of the internet,
right-wing influencers like these two
are now fully off leash, with every
incentive to get more outrageous,
in order to draw more eyeballs
that they can then monetize.
And that brings us
to our second question:
what are Republicans
trying to do about it?
Well, the truth is, as little as they
think they can get away with.
Because the rise of the online right
was one of the key things
that helped push Trump into
the White House a decade ago.
And at the time, a lot of establishment
conservatives went out of their way
to overlook the fact their candidate
had just been endorsed by David Duke
and had the support
of the literal Ku Klux Klan.
It's worth remembering that Trump
himself was asked about
the fact that he had David Duke's
support, and this was his response.
Will you unequivocally condemn
David Duke and say that you don't want
his vote or that of other white
supremacists in this election?
Well, just so you understand,
I don't know anything
about David Duke, okay?
I don't know anything
about what you're even talking about
with white supremacy
or white supremacists.
Honestly, I don't know David Duke.
I don't believe I've ever met him.
I'm pretty sure I didn't meet him.
I just don't know anything about him.
Yeah, after you get over
the initial shock there
of seeing a glowing, baby-faced
Trump who is able to speak
without sounding like he has
an extra couple of flaps in his throat,
you have time to process what
a truly terrible answer that was.
And while, under pressure,
he did eventually disavow Duke,
he and other leading conservatives
still seem compelled
to try and have it both ways.
At the height of the controversy
over Tucker's Fuentes interview,
at a Turning Point USA conference,
Ben Shapiro, annoying boy emeritus,
called Fuentes a "Hitler-apologist, Nazi
loving, anti-American piece of refuse"
and called Tucker interviewing
him "an act of moral imbecility".
But when JD Vance took the stage,
he very pointedly said,
"I didn't bring a list of conservatives
to denounce or deplatform",
and got pretty sanctimonious
about it.
President Trump did not build
the greatest coalition in politics
by running his supporters through
endless self-defeating purity tests.
We have far more important
work to do than canceling each other,
we have got to build,
and President Trump is a builder.
Okay, I'll say this:
no one takes a stand
about not taking a stand
quite like JD Vance.
"You know what? Given a choice
between Nazis and non-Nazis,
let me unequivocally state,
boldly, and clearly,
that I would like to talk
about something else please."
And while, to be fair, Vance has
publicly condemned antisemitism,
and when asked directly,
has condemned Fuentes,
even saying at one point
he could "eat shit",
it is noticeable the extent to which
he's paired that condemnation
with attacks on affirmative action,
or immigration,
issues where he and Fuentes
have some common ground.
At one point, he even
told an interviewer,
"If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes
should occupy a second of your focus.
And the people
with actual political power
who worked so hard to discriminate
against white men
should occupy many hours of it."
In fact, in that Turning Point
speech, he had some notable lines
that really wouldn't feel out of place
in a Fuentes rant,
from mocking "Soros DAs"
and Jasmine Crockett's "street girl
persona" to telling this fun joke.
Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar's candidate
for mayor of Mogadishu!
Wait, I mean Minneapolis.
Little Freudian slip there.
What a fucking cunt.
Sorry!
Sorry, little Freudian slip there.
What a fucking cunt.
It's no wonder
Fuentes himself has said,
"JD Vance panders to the far right
but simply doesn't want the baggage
of associating with the far right."
And it's not just Vance
trying to have it both ways.
A year after Kevin Roberts condemned
that Fuentes-Carlson interview,
he attended
a "national conservatism" conference,
where he noticeably
declined to even say their names,
instead proposing
a different approach.
I'm sometimes asked
about one or two
of these podcasters in particular.
Let me say here
that as idiotic and absurd
as their rhetoric
and conspiracy theories can be,
that they are irrelevant
to the conservative coalition
we are building in America.
What I've learned is that
the worst thing you can do
is to engage with them.
Because speaking
as a parent of four,
when you have a toddler
who's misbehaving,
you just need to ignore them.
Okay, I mean, that's pretty bad
parenting advice in general,
but it also
isn't remotely applicable here.
If your toddler's throwing a tantrum
because you made pasta
in the wrong shape, sure, ignore it,
parent how you want.
But if your toddler hosts
a four-hour podcast
in which he discusses
his favorite Himmler deep cuts,
I'd think about maybe intervening.
Anyway, I am very sorry
for Kevin Roberts' kids,
but congrats to their therapist,
I guess.
It's not often that you have game
tape to analyze during a session.
But as much as Roberts
might want to pretend
that these figures and their views
are irrelevant to his party,
or Vance might insist that they
only deserve a second of attention,
that is a hard case to make, given how
prevalent some of this extremism is.
Because it's not just the candidates
you've already seen.
Ohio Senator Jon Husted recently fired
his 25-year-old political director
for using Nazi soldiers
as his profile photo.
And Georgia's Republican candidate
for Senate, Mike Collins,
has come under heavy criticism
for having multiple ties
to white nationalists, including,
by the way, his own son-in-law,
who is a "pro-white nationalist
and social media influencer."
If you are thinking that that sounds
like a pretty unhinged combo,
you'd be right about that,
as scrolling through his content,
you quickly go from posts like
"why you should eat red meat"
through "you must
stop watching porn"
and "dealing with loneliness",
quick side note:
the hat's probably
not helping there…
To stuff like this Telegram post, whose
caption explains that it contains,
quote, "all of the proof Jews control
our government through finance"
which he said "my wife made",
who, you'll remember,
is Mike Collins' own daughter.
And if you're thinking,
"Well, that is just his kid",
you should know, Collins' former
chief of staff was on a group chat
with famous white nationalists,
including Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
And Collins himself once responded
to an antisemitic Twitter account
that said,
of a Washington Post reporter,
"In case you were wondering,
yes she is", meaning, Jewish,
with, "Never was a second thought."
And while Collins has completely
denied any antisemitic intent,
saying, "Y'all just see stuff that ain't
there," are you sure about that, Mike?
'Cause it sure feels
like there's a lot there to see.
And it's not just Collins,
there are other worrying
candidates further down-ballot,
like Marshall Rawson, who's currently
running for Florida's state house.
He attended the Charlottesville
Unite the Right rally
and marched
with the League of the South,
the racist and
antisemitic neo-Confederate group.
And while he's since tried
to downplay that, saying, quote,
"We arrived late on the second
day after the march,"
not only is that
in no way exonerating,
I'll point out that,
once he did show up,
this video shows him
getting a pretty warm welcome.
Marshall's finally here!
Good to see y'all.
What's up, brother?
How you doin', Mrs. Rawson?
Yeah, they seemed pretty happy
to see ol' Marshall there.
And while it went by kind of fast,
it is worth noting
that that friendly exchange took
place right next to a swastika flag.
And if you have a conversation
right next to a swastika flag
that does not begin, "Hey, the
fuck is that swastika flag doing here?"
I feel like that's already
a pretty good tell.
And it gets even worse.
Because Rawson later stood
among the marchers at the rally,
that is him right there,
and that is the guy who,
not long after,
killed a counterdemonstrator
with his car.
So, condemning Rawson should be
the lowest possible bar to clear.
And yet, when a reporter asked
28 Florida Republicans,
many of whom had endorsed Rawson,
if any of this changed
their mind about him,
only three even bothered
to respond,
with one, Byron Donalds, sending back
a boilerplate condemnation of racism
without mentioning Rawson by name,
and the other two standing by him.
The point here is, far-right views
in the Republican Party
are by no means irrelevant,
and they are way past the point
of being ignorable.
Some of them are literally
on the ballot in nine days,
in an election, by the way, where
the single biggest campaign spender
is this fucking guy, you know,
of the "Adolf aloha" wave.
And some longtime members
of far-right movements
seem fully aware
of these developments.
In fact, when Jared Taylor,
the founder of the white nationalist
New Century Foundation,
was recently invited to speak
at a Maryland university,
he recorded a video afterwards,
in which he both shouted out the guy
that invited him there, Colin McEvers,
who's running for the state
legislature, by the way,
under the slogan,
"It's time to fight for our home",
and pointed to the larger shift
that he saw underway.
The Republican Party is, in effect,
the party of white people.
Look at a Trump rally.
It might as well be a meeting
of the sons and daughters
of the Confederacy.
There's a big difference between old
Republicans and young Republicans.
I can go to a meeting
of old Republicans,
and no one knows who I am.
Young Republicans
treat me like a hero.
And even a few old Republicans
are beginning to see the light.
Voters will decide in November
how well they like Marshall Rawson,
Bo French, and Colin McEvers.
And to all you Republicans
who know what's at stake:
your time to stand up for your people
may come sooner than you think.
I don't like anything about that!
I don't like the way
he pronounced the word "white"
and I especially don't like it
coming out of the mouth of a man
who looks like Carl from "Up"
if he went down some dark paths
after Ellie died.
The one thing
I'll agree with him about there
is that
the time for choosing is here.
Some of the candidates
you've seen tonight,
whether they are running for
the first time or are up for re-election
or a new job,
are currently favored to win.
But even if they all lose,
and I hope they fucking do,
the party that put them
on the ballot still has to reckon
with how it got to this point.
And while I'm sure mainstream
Republicans will keep trying
to dodge this issue,
many are clearly betting
that they'll be able to make it
through the midterms
without having to take a principled
stand that could lose them a vote,
make no mistake: this party
is at a crossroads right now.
Their current leader is, by the
standards of both the Constitution
and even the most generous
cardiologist, on his way out.
And the next iteration of the party
is currently being decided,
amid a rising chorus of white
nationalists, open neo-Nazis and bigots.
And while I know that is a pretty
ugly picture to paint of their party,
if Republicans are not willing
to stand up and do something about it,
then I'm afraid, much like a certain
politician running in upstate New York,
it might soon be the only picture
of it they have fucking left.
And now, this.
And Now: Drive Carefully,
It's Mating Season.
State wildlife officials say
that mating season is underway,
meaning more deer are on the move,
looking for love.
On the move, looking for love.
The fall mating season,
known as the rut,
causes male deer to become more
aggressive and less predictable.
Yeah, it does.
The deer get very, very skittish,
they start engaging in bad behavior.
I'm about to be bad.
Deer mating season is underway,
so it's… what do we say?
It's very active, the deer activity.
Ain't nothing wrong
with a little deer actin' up.
- I actually looked this up.
- Oh, boy.
Because I'm a big nerd. Do you know
what the deer mating call is?
- Do you want to hear it?
- Please.
He's right.
We do say that.
Fall is deer mating season.
And that can mean more deer
crossing your path.
That's stuff that you and I
look at in the morning.
Not deer mating,
but watching deer.
Whatever your interests are.
You know what my interests are.
Y'all drive careful now.
That's our show,
thank you for watching,
we'll see you next week, good night!
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight".
I'm John Oliver. Thank you
so much for joining us!
We are back, and we missed a lot
in the last two weeks.
The White House got
and then lost a new press secretary
in five business days,
Melania Trump claimed she'd brokered
a peace deal in Ukraine,
and Kelly Clarkson couldn't buy
a 15,000 dollar bird
at a Brooklyn toy store
and for some reason
it was all anyone
could talk about for days.
Meanwhile,
Trump's been touring the country
to drum up support
for Republican candidates,
and in South Carolina this week, when
he tried to talk up their governor,
things even by his standards
got a bit weird.
He was lieutenant governor,
and I'd say 90% of the reason
I took the governor…
I took the governor and put her
over at the United Nations
because I wanted this guy
to be…
I wanted this guy
to become governor.
I'm sorry, we all heard it.
What was that noise?
Yeah, whatever happened there
wasn't good. It feels like a real
"you need to unplug him and
then plug him back in" situation,
'cause that's not
a human sound.
That's the noise Eeyore
makes when he cums.
That's a fact.
You don't want him to be happy?
But we're gonna dive straight in
with our main, and only, story tonight,
which concerns the Republican Party
narrowly beating out "bachelorette"
as the best type of party to join
if you want to be surrounded by dicks.
Specifically, I'm gonna talk
about a worrying trend
that's been steadily on the rise,
with perhaps the stupidest example
being this bold Veterans Day
post that recently resurfaced.
The Republican candidate for
New York's 19th congressional district
is facing criticism over
a decade-old Facebook post
honoring his grandfather
who fought for Nazi Germany.
In the photo, his grandfather
is wearing a military uniform
with Nazi swastikas.
Oberacker told Politico
it was the only picture
of his grandfather that he has.
Yeah, not great!
And for the record,
"Don't be mad at me,
that's the only picture I have"
might work as an excuse
when the photo is
"family brunch but
Aunt Matilda blinked",
but not when it's "Grandpa Ludwig
in full swastika chic."
If that is
the only picture that you have,
maybe consider
having no pictures of him.
You can sit Veterans Day out!
No one will think that's weird!
But that's just one of many moments
when the Republican Party
has recently found itself answering
some uncomfortable questions
about Nazi references.
In fact, on day one
of Trump's second term,
Elon Musk attracted attention after
thanking Trump supporters like this.
I just want to say thank you
for making it happen. Thank you.
My heart goes out to you.
Yeah, that gesture, and the weird
little grunt that came with it,
are a bit worse than
you remember, right?
Because everything about that
screams "Nazi".
Well, almost everything,
to be fair to the Nazis,
unlike Elon, they at least
looked sharp in their suits.
But it does feel like the Republican
Party's been getting too comfortable
with some, at best,
Nazi-adjacent shit.
This Trump appointee
withdrew his nomination
to head the Office
of Special Counsel after it emerged
he'd said in a group chat that
"I do have a Nazi streak in me
from time to time."
And this congressional candidate
in Texas made a video
in which he showed off a gun that
he called "Hitler's street sweeper"
and which featured him and a friend
goose-stepping to a Nazi song.
And look, let's give the maximum
benefit of the doubt here.
Because you can potentially
write some of those things off
to just an edgy joke in poor taste
or being guilty of loving Grandpa
Ludwig a little a little too much.
And I know Republicans
often complain
that liberals
call them Nazis regardless.
Elon even posted,
right after doing his Hitler howdy,
that "the 'everyone is Hitler'
attack is so tired."
And last July, a Fox panel even tried
to laugh off comparisons
between ICE and Nazis
with this hilarious riff.
This is why the criticism doesn't
matter to us when you call us Nazis.
"Nazi this, Nazi that." I'm beginning
to think they don't like us.
You know what?
I've said this before.
We need to learn from the Blacks,
the way they were able to remove
the power from the N-word
by using it.
From now on, it's, "What up,
my Nazi. Hey, what up, my Nazi?
What's hanging, my Nazi?"
"Nazi, please!"
It's so fun.
I'll be honest, I thought that clip
would peak in unwatchability
the moment he said "the Blacks",
but it somehow got worse from there.
Also, for what it's worth,
I never want to hear the phrase
"what's hanging, my Nazi"
unless it's coming
from one of the executioners
at Nuremburg.
"What's hanging my Nazi? About five,
six feet of hemp, why do you ask?"
But I don't know,
those ICE/Nazi comparisons
don't feel entirely unearned to me,
especially given, as we have discussed,
DHS has put out material like this
ICE recruitment ad with the caption,
"Which way, American man?"
pretty clearly mirroring
"Which Way Western Man?"
a book by a neo-Nazi that's popular
among white supremacists,
and this Instagram post
showing a beach with the words
"America after
100 million deportations",
captioned, "The peace of a nation
no longer besieged by the third world."
And I'm sure the people
behind those posts will insist
they do not know
what I am talking about right now,
to which I'd say,
to borrow a truly cursed phrase,
"Nazi, please!"
But wait, as that's still not all.
Because naked bigotry
from prominent Republicans seems
to be increasingly the norm.
Tennessee's Andy Ogles has posted,
"Muslims don't belong
in American society",
Senator Tommy Tuberville's posted,
"We must immediately ban
all Islam immigrants"
and just last month, Bo French,
Republican candidate for Texas
railroad commissioner,
attracted a lot of attention
after doing this.
Following that big Longhorns win
on Saturday, French posted a photo
of this group of students saying,
among other things, quote,
"Social media is exposing
how many Americans
have been
displaced by foreigners.
It's everywhere and far worse than any
of us could imagine," he said.
One of the students pictured there
is a UT senior from Flower Mound.
To see someone that's running
for a position of power
saying something like that
is just…
That's something that I never
thought was possible.
Yeah, that is awful.
Because it is pretty clear
what made him jump to the word
"foreigner" in that footage,
given everything else about it
is almost offensively Texan.
Wearing cowboy hats at a football
game while doing Hook 'em Horns?
I don't know how that
could get any more Texan,
without them somehow
losing at the Alamo.
And yet, that probably shouldn't be
surprising coming from French,
given he's previously
posted things like,
"I won't rest
until every Muslim is gone"
and a poll asking, "Who is a bigger
threat to America, Jews or Muslims?"
Which might be my least favorite
question ever asked on the platform,
with my favorite still being
when, in 2010,
Kevin Durant asked his followers,
"Getting a massage.
I'm face down and I gotta fart.
What should I do?"
A tweet so good it's still
getting responses 16 years later,
even though I am pretty sure
the question was time-sensitive.
French's post got so much blowback,
even Karl Rove,
the architect of George W. Bush's
presidential campaigns,
announced he'll vote for the Democrat
in French's race this year,
later explaining why.
My party is being infiltrated
by people like Bo French.
Nick Fuentes goes to Dallas and meets
with a bunch of Republican leaders.
This guy is a Nazi.
We've got all these people now
on-getting their little podcasts
and so forth, "We're just
asking questions about the Jews."
We didn't labor in the wilderness
to build a conservative party
that was inclusive and welcoming,
said it didn't matter who you were,
or where you came from,
what mattered was what was in
your heart and what you believed.
I didn't work for that party and see it
taken over by a bunch of bigots.
Okay, let's set aside all that bullshit
about how the Republican Party
used to be so accepting
and come back to it later.
Suffice it to say,
citation needed, Karl.
But you know things
have gone off the rails
when you've lost the moral
high ground to Karl fucking Rove here.
When you've lost the man who
said he's "proud of waterboarding",
that's kind of the whole ballgame.
But it's not just Rove
sounding the alarm.
The right-wing commentator
Erick Erickson has said
that conservative institutions
have been infiltrated by men
who "embrace white nationalism,
antisemitism and Nazi sympathies."
And even the late Lindsey Graham,
rest in power,
felt the need to go on stage
last fall
at a Republican Jewish
coalition event and say this.
But I want to make it really clear,
I'm in the "Hitler sucks" wing
of the Republican Party.
What is this Hitler shit?
I don't know.
Yeah, you know a political party's
in pretty bad shape
when their members have to clarify
that they are not the ones
who love Hitler.
It's like seeing a sign that says,
"In this Cinnabon
we believe in hand-washing."
I mean, that's reassuring, I guess,
but I do now have
some broader follow-up questions
about your larger organization.
So, if multiple Republicans
are raising the alarm
about their party
being infiltrated by extremists,
we thought tonight we'd try
and answer the question
that Lindsey Graham posed
so elegantly-slash-drunkenly there:
what is this Hitler shit?
Specifically, why are we hearing
so much about it right now,
what are Republicans doing about it
and where could it end up taking us?
And let's start with "why now?"
There are a bunch of reasons for that,
but one big one is,
in the wake of Israel's war in Gaza,
and our war in Iran, there's suddenly
a lot more appetite for discussion
about our foreign policy
in the Middle East,
and America's relationship with Israel.
Which is good, and long overdue!
But some on the far right
have seized upon this moment
to elevate antisemitic
conspiracy theories.
And for many, the moment that
dynamic burst into the open
came almost exactly a year ago,
when Tucker Carlson decided
to sit down with the known white
nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes.
The tone of Tucker's interview
was suspiciously cordial,
with this early exchange setting
a baseline for the whole thing.
To the extent that I've been taken
out of context over the years,
I'm trying to set the record straight,
and say, you know,
and I appreciate you've given me
this opportunity,
these are my real views, I'm not
one of those haters, let's say.
Yeah! Well, I think people should be
allowed to describe what they think.
I mean, that's, like, a basic
human autonomy question.
If I want to know what you think,
I should ask you and let you talk!
Yeah!
Yeah! It was just two reasonable guys
having a chat in a cabin
that looks like an Airbnb
for serial killers.
Because that place has everything.
Antlers. Swords.
Soundproofing, I assume.
Everything you could possibly want
for a weekend with the guys,
hanging out, discussing race science,
and maybe surreptitiously
vanishing hitchhikers.
In that interview,
Tucker gave Fuentes a platform
to present a pretty polished version
of himself,
while also letting
some fairly loud bigotry slide,
like this moment, when Fuentes
slowly walked into the antisemitic trope
that American Jews have dual loyalty
to the U.S. and Israel.
I guess what I'm saying is that,
if you are a Jewish person in America,
you're sort of, and again,
it's not because they're born,
but it's sort of a rational
self-interest politically to say,
"I'm a minority.
I'm a religious ethnic minority.
This is not really my 'home'.
My ancestral home is in Israel."
There's like a natural affinity
that Jews have for Israel.
And I would say on top of that, for
the international Jewish community,
they're extremely organized.
Many of them are critical of Israel,
or Israel's current government,
or the project of Israel.
But I guess what they have in common,
unlike, let's say, like,
Singapore, for example,
is that they have this international
community across borders,
extremely organized, that is putting
the interest of themselves
before the interests
of their home country.
Okay, accusing Jewish Americans
of putting Israel's interests
ahead of America's
is just absurd.
Lots of people have connections
to other countries
without being sleeper agents
for them.
I was born in the U.K.,
and that freaky little island
has no power over me,
other than I guess making me suffer
at every World Cup
and cursing me to be
the only person in our office
who pronounces
"aluminium" correctly.
Still, what a fun discussion
that must've been
for Tucker's sponsors for that episode,
which included, and this is true,
Vandy potato chips.
And I don't know what's worse there.
If Vandy accidentally sponsored
"Chattin' Jews at the Freak Shack",
or if they were briefed
ahead of time and said,
"We're definitely in, T-bone."
Anyway, I should say, Tucker did
offer some soft pushback
during that over two-hour interview,
although notably,
not when Fuentes blamed
America's problems on, quote,
"organized Jewry" or when he
mentioned Joseph Stalin's birthday
and said he was "a fan",
to which Tucker said,
"We'll circle back to that",
and then, just as Stalin did
when he meant to save millions of
peasants from starving to death,
probably just forgot to.
Now, in the aftermath
of that sit-down,
battle lines were drawn
across the political right,
with many arguing Tucker shouldn't have
given a softball interview to Fuentes,
especially since it gave him
"access to one of the largest
audiences he's ever had."
But the Heritage Foundation,
one of the largest, most influential
think tanks in America,
initially stood by Tucker,
with whom it had recently
had an advertising deal.
In fact, its president, Kevin Roberts,
even put out a video in which he said,
"We will always defend our friends
against the slander of bad actors
who serve someone else's agenda.
That includes Tucker Carlson."
He also said Tucker was under attack
from a "venomous coalition"
and mentioned "pressure
from the globalist class",
both, if you're not aware,
pretty notable dog-whistles.
In the wake of that video, dozens
of Heritage staff members departed,
as did several board members,
and an antisemitism task force
severed ties with the foundation.
Eventually, Roberts admitted
he'd used a terrible choice of words
and addressed his remaining staff
in an all-hands meeting,
in which he tried unconvincingly
to plead ignorance
about the issues
with Carlson and Fuentes.
I don't have time
to consume a lot of news.
I don't mean this as a fake
attempt at lightheartedness.
I consume a lot of sports.
I don't consume a lot of podcasts,
not even ours.
I don't consume a lot of news.
And that ignorance
should've told me, "Ask around."
It is one thing to say you
don't watch a lot of news
if you're a salesperson or an electrician
or a doctor,
it is quite another to say it
as the president
of the leading conservative
think tank in the country.
It's like George R.R. Martin saying,
"I'm sorry I misspoke about
medieval royal sibling-fucking.
I don't consume
a lot of incest fantasy."
Brother, you are the main reason
we know what that is.
And to be clear here:
Nick Fuentes is famously a bigot.
And while, I admit, he's also
very much a troll,
and you may've seen clips online
of him where he comes across
as an edgelord
just trying to shock,
it is worth seeing what he's like
when the mask fully comes off,
because it's truly heinous.
You know who built everything?
Planes, railroads, cars, the radio,
the telephone, the telegraph, whites!
Television, everything, whites.
Jews are money-changers,
bullshit artists, psychopaths,
charlatans, grifters,
manipulators.
Why do you think
they're so obnoxious?
Why do think
they're so fucking obnoxious?
They have no manners because
they come from the third world,
they come from the literal ghetto.
Yeah, that's pretty
unambiguous, isn't it?
And it makes it all
the more laughable
that Tucker made such a show
of offering Fuentes,
a man who's literally spent thousands
of hours on the internet
saying whatever he wants, the chance
to "finally say what he thinks."
You really didn't need to invite
Fuentes to your Antlerdome
to find out
what makes him tick.
Just Google him,
you boat-shoed bitch.
And the worrying thing is,
it's not just Tucker.
Fuentes has been inching
closer and closer
to mainstream
Republicans over the years.
Congressman Paul Gosar gave
the keynote speech
at Fuentes' America First Political
Action Conference in 2021,
and Marjorie Taylor Greene
did the same the following year.
And I do have to tell you, she later
denied knowing who Fuentes was.
As, by the way, did Donald Trump,
after he famously dined with him
at Mar-a-Lago.
Although I will note that the person
who brought Fuentes to that dinner
was Kanye West, who just
a month earlier had tweeted
he was going
"death con 3 on Jewish people",
so I guess Trump is claiming there
that he only knew one
of the antisemites at that dinner,
which, to be clear,
doesn't make it half okay.
And in the wake
of that Tucker interview,
Fuentes took a victory lap,
saying,
"I am no longer the radical
on the outside,
I'm actually the leader
on the inside."
And on his show, he put the current
situation in some pretty chilling terms.
You can call me a Nazi.
You better be careful.
Because if I'm a Nazi,
then there's millions of young people
that are following a fucking Nazi.
Right. Yeah.
No,
that's the fucking problem here.
Because Nazis gaining power doesn't
historically bode well for anyone,
including, for what it's worth,
Nazis,
who didn't exactly have
the best 1945.
Just go ahead and ask Grandpa Ludwig!
Look, I don't know if Fuentes truly
has "millions" of followers,
or as they call themselves,
"Groypers."
He has an incentive
to exaggerate his importance,
and there's not a lot of data on how
many Republicans support him.
But the glimpses aren't great.
At CPAC this year,
one young attendee said,
"I'd say at least 60% of the young
people here are fans of Nick."
And Ted Cruz recently
complained about their prevalence,
saying it was difficult to avoid
staffing them in his office,
and that "the Groyper
problem is real."
And data suggests many Republicans,
especially younger ones,
are getting a lot more comfortable
with things like Holocaust denial.
The right-leaning Manhattan Institute
recently conducted a survey
that found "nearly four in 10
in the current GOP
believe the Holocaust
was greatly exaggerated
or did not happen
as historians describe",
with that number jumping
to 54% among men under 50.
And a focus group
they ran of Gen Z Republicans
offered up alarming opinions, like
when they responded to the question,
"What do you think of Adolf Hitler?"
with, "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."
Which is a real compliment
sandwich there, isn't it?
Critical while constructive.
If I was Hitler,
and to be clear,
I'm very much not!
I'd be pretty happy with that
feedback from a manager who cares.
That focus group also asked,
"What do you think of Jewish people?"
and one respondent said,
"I would say a force for evil."
And remember, that is what they
were willing to say on the record.
Behind closed doors,
it unsurprisingly gets even worse.
New fallout tonight from a racist
and violent group chat
involving leaders
of some young Republican groups.
The chat includes antisemitic
comments and racial slurs
against Black, Latino, Asian people,
and other epithets
used more than 250 times,
according to Politico.
The outlet says one person,
after being told backers would support
the most right-wing candidate
for a leadership role,
responded, "Great. I love Hitler."
At another point,
someone writes,
"If we ever had a leak of this chat,
we would be cooked."
Yeah, you probably would!
And guess what, guys?
Here we are!
And there was
some nasty stuff in that chat,
with one member
repeatedly using the N-word,
and another referring to Black people
with these slurs
that I'm gonna take a hard pass
on saying out loud.
And that wasn't even
the only group chat that got leaked.
Another one, among campus
Republicans in Florida
was also filled with racist slurs,
and at one point was named
"Gooning in Agartha",
with Agartha being a reference
to a mythical white civilization
promoted by Heinrich Himmler,
and "gooning" being a reference
to, you know what?
Look that one up yourself.
I will let that be a fun
surprise for you.
And look,
there are some who will say,
"Look, calm down, this seems to be
a bunch of kids and shitty streamers,
you can just ignore it."
But let's take those one at a time,
starting with "it's just kids."
That's actually something
JD Vance has tried to argue,
when he was asked about that group
chat with over 250 slurs in it,
and he said this.
The reality is that kids do stupid
things, especially young boys.
They tell edgy, offensive jokes.
Like, that's what kids do.
And I really don't want us to grow up
in a country
where a kid telling a stupid joke,
telling a very offensive, stupid joke,
is cause to ruin their lives.
Okay, first, set aside that that's
a wildly forgiving attitude
coming from the VP
of an administration that,
as we have discussed
repeatedly before,
has gone apeshit over any perceived
antisemitism on college campuses.
But in the abstract there,
I guess I agree that kids should be able
to make mistakes
without it ruining their lives.
But it feels important
to mention:
the people in those chats
weren't actually kids
so much as "full-grown adults"
in their twenties and thirties.
In fact, the guy who posted
those heinous slurs
was 31,
one of the least cute ages.
There are no 31-year-old scamps.
One of our writers is 31,
and she's so fucking annoying!
Meanwhile, another member
of the chat
was actually in the Vermont
state legislature at the time,
and yet another had apparently
been in line
to manage Republican Peter
Oberacker's campaign for Congress
before the chats came out.
And if the name "Oberacker"
is ringing a bell at all for you,
it's because he's the guy who
"thank you for your serviced"
his dear departed
grand-Nazi on Veterans Day.
Now, I should say, those three
not-remotely-young boys
have since either apologized or claimed
that their posts were just jokes.
And, okay!
But what that all shows is that,
in politics,
people in their twenties
and thirties can rise fast.
The distance
between "college Republican"
and "communications director"
can be just a couple of years.
Now, as for the whole, "they're
just shitty streamers" argument,
these days, streamers can be
a lot closer to the center
of power than you might think.
For instance,
here's one named Stew Peters,
bragging about how he's been
able to "J-pill" his audience,
an antisemitic term for showing
the malign influence of Jews.
I'll warn you: this next video sucks
pretty hard, but if you stick with it,
you do get to see him take
some increasingly wild swings.
As everybody knows, "The Stew Peters
Show" and this network
broadly have been and still are
to this day
at the forefront
of J-pilling the American people.
If societal ills were a bunch of stones
in the middle of a field somewhere
and all of us got together,
walking around,
turning up the stones
to see what's underneath them,
under every single
one of these stones,
you would find a little Jew man,
grubbing his hands, smirking,
wearing his tiny hat,
trying to get over on the goyim.
Trying to kill the goyim
when it really comes down to it.
Just think of all that these people
are responsible for: usury,
central banking, communism,
Bolshevik communism,
the Holodomor,
the transatlantic slave trade,
transgenderism,
the normalization of homosexuality,
the normalization of pedophilia,
transgenderism for kids,
open borders, white replacement,
white genocide,
the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society,
AIPAC,
the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy,
the assassination of Charlie Kirk,
abortion, which is just a modern-day
Molochian sacrifice ritual.
I'll say this:
that man is thorough.
The problem is, that sounds
less like a coherent conspiracy
and more like what Alex Jones
would say
after being kicked in the head
by a horse.
And while I know that guy
sounds completely insane,
what's even crazier is,
guests on his show
have included these three
sitting Republican congressmen,
Kari Lake, and, oh yeah,
the director of the FBI, Kash Patel,
who appeared on Peters' show
eight times from 2021 to 2022.
And look, maybe they all
actually like Stew Peters.
Or maybe they just thought
that they could pretend to,
in order to keep his audience
aligned with their party.
And you may be thinking,
"What's the real difference there?"
To which I'd say, "For sure."
Because here's the thing: while
Karl Rove might want to pretend
this is some anomaly in a party
lovingly hand-crafted over the years
to be inclusive and welcoming, that
is some deeply revisionist horseshit.
The far-right fringe currently rising up
in his party is not remotely new.
From the John Birch Society, through
Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan,
the Republican Party's always
left its door ajar for bigots,
cranks, and conspiracy theorists.
Have you ever listened
to the Nixon tapes?
They would do numbers
on Rumble today!
Sponsored by,
who else but Vandy potato chips!
The chip for the truly
discriminating consumer.
Anyway, the party's
"big tent" philosophy,
sometimes summed up
as "no enemies to the right",
has long meant it's been reluctant
to fully disavow someone
for being too extreme.
And while gatekeepers
in conservative media used to be able
to keep the racist dog whistles
just below audible levels,
thanks to the rise of the internet,
right-wing influencers like these two
are now fully off leash, with every
incentive to get more outrageous,
in order to draw more eyeballs
that they can then monetize.
And that brings us
to our second question:
what are Republicans
trying to do about it?
Well, the truth is, as little as they
think they can get away with.
Because the rise of the online right
was one of the key things
that helped push Trump into
the White House a decade ago.
And at the time, a lot of establishment
conservatives went out of their way
to overlook the fact their candidate
had just been endorsed by David Duke
and had the support
of the literal Ku Klux Klan.
It's worth remembering that Trump
himself was asked about
the fact that he had David Duke's
support, and this was his response.
Will you unequivocally condemn
David Duke and say that you don't want
his vote or that of other white
supremacists in this election?
Well, just so you understand,
I don't know anything
about David Duke, okay?
I don't know anything
about what you're even talking about
with white supremacy
or white supremacists.
Honestly, I don't know David Duke.
I don't believe I've ever met him.
I'm pretty sure I didn't meet him.
I just don't know anything about him.
Yeah, after you get over
the initial shock there
of seeing a glowing, baby-faced
Trump who is able to speak
without sounding like he has
an extra couple of flaps in his throat,
you have time to process what
a truly terrible answer that was.
And while, under pressure,
he did eventually disavow Duke,
he and other leading conservatives
still seem compelled
to try and have it both ways.
At the height of the controversy
over Tucker's Fuentes interview,
at a Turning Point USA conference,
Ben Shapiro, annoying boy emeritus,
called Fuentes a "Hitler-apologist, Nazi
loving, anti-American piece of refuse"
and called Tucker interviewing
him "an act of moral imbecility".
But when JD Vance took the stage,
he very pointedly said,
"I didn't bring a list of conservatives
to denounce or deplatform",
and got pretty sanctimonious
about it.
President Trump did not build
the greatest coalition in politics
by running his supporters through
endless self-defeating purity tests.
We have far more important
work to do than canceling each other,
we have got to build,
and President Trump is a builder.
Okay, I'll say this:
no one takes a stand
about not taking a stand
quite like JD Vance.
"You know what? Given a choice
between Nazis and non-Nazis,
let me unequivocally state,
boldly, and clearly,
that I would like to talk
about something else please."
And while, to be fair, Vance has
publicly condemned antisemitism,
and when asked directly,
has condemned Fuentes,
even saying at one point
he could "eat shit",
it is noticeable the extent to which
he's paired that condemnation
with attacks on affirmative action,
or immigration,
issues where he and Fuentes
have some common ground.
At one point, he even
told an interviewer,
"If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes
should occupy a second of your focus.
And the people
with actual political power
who worked so hard to discriminate
against white men
should occupy many hours of it."
In fact, in that Turning Point
speech, he had some notable lines
that really wouldn't feel out of place
in a Fuentes rant,
from mocking "Soros DAs"
and Jasmine Crockett's "street girl
persona" to telling this fun joke.
Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar's candidate
for mayor of Mogadishu!
Wait, I mean Minneapolis.
Little Freudian slip there.
What a fucking cunt.
Sorry!
Sorry, little Freudian slip there.
What a fucking cunt.
It's no wonder
Fuentes himself has said,
"JD Vance panders to the far right
but simply doesn't want the baggage
of associating with the far right."
And it's not just Vance
trying to have it both ways.
A year after Kevin Roberts condemned
that Fuentes-Carlson interview,
he attended
a "national conservatism" conference,
where he noticeably
declined to even say their names,
instead proposing
a different approach.
I'm sometimes asked
about one or two
of these podcasters in particular.
Let me say here
that as idiotic and absurd
as their rhetoric
and conspiracy theories can be,
that they are irrelevant
to the conservative coalition
we are building in America.
What I've learned is that
the worst thing you can do
is to engage with them.
Because speaking
as a parent of four,
when you have a toddler
who's misbehaving,
you just need to ignore them.
Okay, I mean, that's pretty bad
parenting advice in general,
but it also
isn't remotely applicable here.
If your toddler's throwing a tantrum
because you made pasta
in the wrong shape, sure, ignore it,
parent how you want.
But if your toddler hosts
a four-hour podcast
in which he discusses
his favorite Himmler deep cuts,
I'd think about maybe intervening.
Anyway, I am very sorry
for Kevin Roberts' kids,
but congrats to their therapist,
I guess.
It's not often that you have game
tape to analyze during a session.
But as much as Roberts
might want to pretend
that these figures and their views
are irrelevant to his party,
or Vance might insist that they
only deserve a second of attention,
that is a hard case to make, given how
prevalent some of this extremism is.
Because it's not just the candidates
you've already seen.
Ohio Senator Jon Husted recently fired
his 25-year-old political director
for using Nazi soldiers
as his profile photo.
And Georgia's Republican candidate
for Senate, Mike Collins,
has come under heavy criticism
for having multiple ties
to white nationalists, including,
by the way, his own son-in-law,
who is a "pro-white nationalist
and social media influencer."
If you are thinking that that sounds
like a pretty unhinged combo,
you'd be right about that,
as scrolling through his content,
you quickly go from posts like
"why you should eat red meat"
through "you must
stop watching porn"
and "dealing with loneliness",
quick side note:
the hat's probably
not helping there…
To stuff like this Telegram post, whose
caption explains that it contains,
quote, "all of the proof Jews control
our government through finance"
which he said "my wife made",
who, you'll remember,
is Mike Collins' own daughter.
And if you're thinking,
"Well, that is just his kid",
you should know, Collins' former
chief of staff was on a group chat
with famous white nationalists,
including Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
And Collins himself once responded
to an antisemitic Twitter account
that said,
of a Washington Post reporter,
"In case you were wondering,
yes she is", meaning, Jewish,
with, "Never was a second thought."
And while Collins has completely
denied any antisemitic intent,
saying, "Y'all just see stuff that ain't
there," are you sure about that, Mike?
'Cause it sure feels
like there's a lot there to see.
And it's not just Collins,
there are other worrying
candidates further down-ballot,
like Marshall Rawson, who's currently
running for Florida's state house.
He attended the Charlottesville
Unite the Right rally
and marched
with the League of the South,
the racist and
antisemitic neo-Confederate group.
And while he's since tried
to downplay that, saying, quote,
"We arrived late on the second
day after the march,"
not only is that
in no way exonerating,
I'll point out that,
once he did show up,
this video shows him
getting a pretty warm welcome.
Marshall's finally here!
Good to see y'all.
What's up, brother?
How you doin', Mrs. Rawson?
Yeah, they seemed pretty happy
to see ol' Marshall there.
And while it went by kind of fast,
it is worth noting
that that friendly exchange took
place right next to a swastika flag.
And if you have a conversation
right next to a swastika flag
that does not begin, "Hey, the
fuck is that swastika flag doing here?"
I feel like that's already
a pretty good tell.
And it gets even worse.
Because Rawson later stood
among the marchers at the rally,
that is him right there,
and that is the guy who,
not long after,
killed a counterdemonstrator
with his car.
So, condemning Rawson should be
the lowest possible bar to clear.
And yet, when a reporter asked
28 Florida Republicans,
many of whom had endorsed Rawson,
if any of this changed
their mind about him,
only three even bothered
to respond,
with one, Byron Donalds, sending back
a boilerplate condemnation of racism
without mentioning Rawson by name,
and the other two standing by him.
The point here is, far-right views
in the Republican Party
are by no means irrelevant,
and they are way past the point
of being ignorable.
Some of them are literally
on the ballot in nine days,
in an election, by the way, where
the single biggest campaign spender
is this fucking guy, you know,
of the "Adolf aloha" wave.
And some longtime members
of far-right movements
seem fully aware
of these developments.
In fact, when Jared Taylor,
the founder of the white nationalist
New Century Foundation,
was recently invited to speak
at a Maryland university,
he recorded a video afterwards,
in which he both shouted out the guy
that invited him there, Colin McEvers,
who's running for the state
legislature, by the way,
under the slogan,
"It's time to fight for our home",
and pointed to the larger shift
that he saw underway.
The Republican Party is, in effect,
the party of white people.
Look at a Trump rally.
It might as well be a meeting
of the sons and daughters
of the Confederacy.
There's a big difference between old
Republicans and young Republicans.
I can go to a meeting
of old Republicans,
and no one knows who I am.
Young Republicans
treat me like a hero.
And even a few old Republicans
are beginning to see the light.
Voters will decide in November
how well they like Marshall Rawson,
Bo French, and Colin McEvers.
And to all you Republicans
who know what's at stake:
your time to stand up for your people
may come sooner than you think.
I don't like anything about that!
I don't like the way
he pronounced the word "white"
and I especially don't like it
coming out of the mouth of a man
who looks like Carl from "Up"
if he went down some dark paths
after Ellie died.
The one thing
I'll agree with him about there
is that
the time for choosing is here.
Some of the candidates
you've seen tonight,
whether they are running for
the first time or are up for re-election
or a new job,
are currently favored to win.
But even if they all lose,
and I hope they fucking do,
the party that put them
on the ballot still has to reckon
with how it got to this point.
And while I'm sure mainstream
Republicans will keep trying
to dodge this issue,
many are clearly betting
that they'll be able to make it
through the midterms
without having to take a principled
stand that could lose them a vote,
make no mistake: this party
is at a crossroads right now.
Their current leader is, by the
standards of both the Constitution
and even the most generous
cardiologist, on his way out.
And the next iteration of the party
is currently being decided,
amid a rising chorus of white
nationalists, open neo-Nazis and bigots.
And while I know that is a pretty
ugly picture to paint of their party,
if Republicans are not willing
to stand up and do something about it,
then I'm afraid, much like a certain
politician running in upstate New York,
it might soon be the only picture
of it they have fucking left.
And now, this.
And Now: Drive Carefully,
It's Mating Season.
State wildlife officials say
that mating season is underway,
meaning more deer are on the move,
looking for love.
On the move, looking for love.
The fall mating season,
known as the rut,
causes male deer to become more
aggressive and less predictable.
Yeah, it does.
The deer get very, very skittish,
they start engaging in bad behavior.
I'm about to be bad.
Deer mating season is underway,
so it's… what do we say?
It's very active, the deer activity.
Ain't nothing wrong
with a little deer actin' up.
- I actually looked this up.
- Oh, boy.
Because I'm a big nerd. Do you know
what the deer mating call is?
- Do you want to hear it?
- Please.
He's right.
We do say that.
Fall is deer mating season.
And that can mean more deer
crossing your path.
That's stuff that you and I
look at in the morning.
Not deer mating,
but watching deer.
Whatever your interests are.
You know what my interests are.
Y'all drive careful now.
That's our show,
thank you for watching,
we'll see you next week, good night!