Letters from an American - November 2, 2025

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

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November 2nd, 2025. Last Monday, October 27th, right-wing personality Tucker Carlson interviewed white nationalist Nick Fuentes for more than two hours, mainstreaming the podcaster whose praise for Hitler, vows to kill Jews, denial of the Holocaust, and apparently gleeful embrace of racism and sexism has, in the past, led establishment Republicans to avoid him.

When Fuentes had dinner at Mar-a-Lago in a gathering with then-former President Donald J. Trump in 2022, Republican officials condemned the meeting. Then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican of Kentucky, said, there is no room in the Republican Party for anti-Semitism or white supremacy. Amid the blowback, Trump suggested the meeting had been accidental, with Fuentes attending as a guest of rapper Yeh, and the dinner being quick and uneventful. Fuentes emerged as a right-wing provocateur in 2016 after a brief stint as a student at Boston University, but fell out of establishment channels after appearing at the August

2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists and neo-Nazis shouted, Jews will not replace us. Headlined, Fuentes launched his own independent show where he attracted a fan base known as Groopers who ferociously opposed established right-wing politics. As Ali Brand noted on Friday in the Atlantic, in 2021, Fuentes said he wanted to drag the Republican Party, kicking and screaming into the future, into the right wing, into a truly reactionary party. Fuentes took on Charlie Kirk, who established Turning Point USA in 2012 as a vehicle to attract young people to right-wing politics, encouraging his supporters to troll Kirk's events. As Will Summer reported last Thursday in the bulwark, just days before Kirk was murdered in September, Fuentes taunted him, saying, I took your baby, Turning Point USA, and I f***ed it, and I've been f***ing it.

And that's why it's filled with groipers. We already own you, he said. We own this movement. By the end of October, Fuentes had about a million followers on X. Certainly, neo-Nazi voices are becoming more obvious in the Maga Party. Last month, Jason B.ferman and Emily Noe of Politico reported on 2,900 pages of messages exchanged on the messaging app Telegram, between leaders of the hard-line pro-Trump factions of young Republican groups in New York, Kansas, Arizona, and Vermont.

In the edgy messages, the leaders used racist themes and epithets freely and sheared slavery, rape, gas chambers, and torturing their opponents. They expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler. Also last month, the White House was forced to withdraw Trump's nomination, for Paul Ingrossia to head the office of special counsel, a watchdog agency. Republican senators said they would not confirm him after the publication of texts in which Ingrossia said he has a Nazi streak in May. Vice President J.D. Vance dismissed the young Republicans' chat as stupid jokes made by kids,

although the eight members of the chat whose ages could be ascertained were 24 to 35, and included a Vermont state senator, chief of staff for a member of the New York Assembly, a staffer in the Kansas Attorney General's office, and an official at the U.S. Small Business Administration. Carlson seems to think momentum is behind Fuentes. He has given Fuentes access to his own 16.7 million followers on X and posted a photograph of himself with his arm around Fuentes, both of them beaming. The platforming of a white nationalist by a MAGA influencer who used to be mainstream started a fight on the right. The president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, posted a video defending Carlson's interview from The Venomous Coalition attacking him.

Activist founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank in 1973, in response to the 1971 Powell Memo, calling for the establishment of conservative institutions to stand against the liberal ones dominating society. Heritage policies became central to the political thought of the Reagan Revolution and went on to shape the foreign policy of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, remaining a powerful force in Republican policy through Trump's first term.

When Roberts took over the leadership of Heritage in 2021, he dedicated it to institutionalizing Trumpism. Robert says he looks to modern Hungary, under authoritarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, as not just a model for conservative state craft, but THE model. He brought Heritage and the Orban-Link Danube Institute into a formal partnership.

The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orban Orban showed in Project 2025, which heritage led to map out a future right-wing presidency that guts the civil service and fills it with loyalists, attacks immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ plus individuals, takes over businesses for friends and family, and moves the country away from the rules-based international order. After Roberts put out his video, former Senate Republican leader McConnell commented on social media, the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement is only as strong as the values it defends. Last I checked, conservatives should feel no obligation to carry water for anti-Semites and apologists for America-hating autocrats. But maybe I just don't know what

time it is. Senior analyst for tax policy at the Heritage Foundation, Preston Brasher's, simply posted an image of Norman Rockwell's 1943 painting depicting freedom of speech, a man in a flannel shirt and a Navy bomber jacket standing to speak at a meeting. With the caption, Nazis are bad. When Roberts' chief of staff, Ryan Newhouse, reposted a missive suggesting that those unhappy with Roberts' video

should resign, Brashers retorted that most of us had been at Heritage a lot longer than he has. But if losing my job at Heritage is the consequence of posting Nazis are bad, it's a consequence I'm prepared to face. The modern Republican Party was always an uneasy marriage between business interests who wanted tax cuts and deregulation, represented by lawmakers like McConnell, and the racist Dixiecrats and religious traditionalists who wanted to get rid of equal rights for racial minorities and women. Traditional Republican business groups can provide the resources,

Republican operative Grover Norquist explained in 1985, but these groups can provide the votes. But while business got its tax cuts and deregulation over the years, the base voters of the party, especially the evangelicals who had come to see ending abortion as their key demand, did not see the country reorganized in the racial and gender hierarchies they craved. Trump promised to deliver that for them. When establishment Republicans fell away from Trump

after the August 2017 Unite the Right rally, after Congress had passed and Trump had signed the 2017 tax cuts into law, Trump turned to the base, using the threat of their wrath to keep the establishment figures in line. Now members of that base are strong enough to tie the party itself to Nazis. a line establishment figures like McConnell, who is 83 and retiring from the Senate in 2027, finally seem unwilling to cross. But there is greater instability behind this fight than the split in today's Republican Party.

What held the Republican coalition together was a call for an end to the New Deal government put in place by both Democrats and Republicans after the great crash of 1929. But while wealthier Americans were happy to get their side of the bargain, many Republican voters seem less happy with theirs. They seem to have believed that government programs helped only minorities and what talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh called Feminozis. But the extreme cuts to the federal government, first under billionaire Elon Musk and then under Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vote, have hammered all Americans. And now those cuts are hitting health care and food. Premiums for next year's health care insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplace are skyrocketing.

And because of the way subsidies expanded under President Joe Biden, the hardest hit states will be those that voted for Trump. Democrats in Congress are refusing to sign on to a continuing resolution to end a government shutdown unless the Republicans will work with them to extend the premium tax credit. But Trump is refusing to talk to Democrats about it.

The administration has been pressuring Democrats to agree to the Republicans' terms for a continuing resolution by refusing to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with a reserve fund Congress set up for emergencies. On Friday, federal judge John McConnell of Rhode Island ordered the government to use the emergency funds to provide SNAP benefits. Trump promptly took to social media. Bashing the Democrats, he said he said he would ask the court for direction as to how the government could fund SNAP legally. On Saturday, Judge McConnell ordered the administration to use reserve funds for at least a partial payment this week,

and quoted back at him Trump's social media post claiming, It will be my honor to provide the funding, once McConnell provided more clarity. Meanwhile, economics journalist Catherine Rampel reported today that the administration has told grocery stores that they cannot offer discounts to customers affected by the lapse of SNAP, that the Republicans are feeling the pressure of voters' anger shows in the repeated statements of both Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican of Louisiana, that they will produce a health plan better than the Affordable Care Act just as soon as Democrats agree to the continuing resolution.

On Air Force One Friday, Trump told reporters that it's largely Democrats who use SNAP, and today, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rawlins, who oversees SNAP, told the Fox News Channel that Democrats support SNAP because they want to give handouts to undocumented immigrants. Trump will not tolerate waste, fraud, or abuse while hardworking Americans go hungry, she posted on social media. Perhaps it is Trump's great gaspy party of Friday night

that has me thinking about the 1920s. Or perhaps it's the Republicans' Nazi talk. The United States had a strong Nazi movement in the 1930s, strong enough that more than 20,000 people attended a Nazi pro-American rally at Madison Square Garden in commemoration of George Washington's birthday in 1939. But it had an even stronger Ku Klux Klan movement in the 1920s, which burned like wildfire in the early years of the century. After the horrors of World War I, an influenza pandemic, the visible rise of organized crime to get around the prohibition of alcohol,

and the ongoing racial and ethnic changes to the country, KKK members across the countryside rallied to an Americanism that rejected international involvement, blamed the changes in the country on immigrants and black Americans, and promised reform. Numbering about 5 million, KKK members swung elections, usually to the Democrats in the South and to the Republicans in the North.

We know we're the balance of power in the state, the Grand Dragon of the Illinois KKK said in 1924. We can control state elections and get what we want from state government. But in 1925, powerful Indiana clan leader D.C. Stevenson was convicted of raping and murdering Madge Oberholzer. When the governor, whose election the clan had supported, refused to pardon him, Stevenson began to name accomplices in the corrupt web of state politics, making it clear that the championing of traditional values had been a con. Membership in the clan plummeted, but its anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-New York City sentiments were still strong enough in 1928 to sink Democratic candidate Al Smith. We now face the darkest hour

in American history, Ku Klux Klan forces wrote when Smith won the Democratic nomination. They called him the Antichrist and burned crosses in the fields of Oklahoma when he crossed the state line. Smith won only 40.8% of the vote to Republican Herbert Hoover's 58.2%. But then, the next year, the bottom fell out of the 1920s economy of rich and poor that, Scott Fitzgerald skewered in the Great Gatsby. By 1930, some Americans were on their way to embracing Naziism. But others turned away. As they dealt with economic ruin, rural white Americans had left the KKK,

whose membership fell to about 30,000. And in 1932, voters elected Al Smith's campaign manager, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in his own landslide, as he focused on a new kind of economy, giving him 57.4% of the vote to Hoover's 39.6%. Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

Thank you.