The Dictatorship
The Nazism taboo in America is broken
In a year defined by President Donald Trump’s attempt to turn our nation into an authoritarian kleptocracy, one of the most disturbing events of the year was not a reactionary policy or a speech, but in fact the results of a focus group which were published Friday.
City Journal, which is published by the influential right-leaning think tank the Manhattan Institute, conducted a focus group of 20 “mostly Trump voters, overwhelmingly Christian, a mix of college and non-college, ranging from late teens to twentysomethings edging into thirty,” based in and around Nashville, Tennessee. The discussion, designed to examine the attitudes of Gen Z conservatives, covered lots of questions, ranging from the economy to feminism to foreign policy. But the most striking answers were related to questions about white supremacist figures — and demonstrated how many young people on the right are marinating in a media atmosphere of the most noxious, racist extremism imaginable, with no obvious pathway back to making such bigotry taboo again.
In today’s right-wing political culture, Trumpism is growing contiguous with Fuentes-ism.
When the moderator asked how many of them knew Nick Fuentes — a white supremacist livestreamer who has, among other things, called Adolf Hitler “really f**king cool,” described Chicago as “n—r hell,” argued in favor of a return to racial segregation, doubted the Nazi Holocaust, opposed interracial marriage and said women shouldn’t have the right to vote — more than half of the respondents raised their hands based on Fuentes’ name recognition alone. Several participants, identified only by their first names, described him in approving or ambivalent terms.
George said, “I agree with a lot of his points. He definitely doesn’t care about how it’s gonna be reacted to, which I respect, but I also think it can be kind of dangerous.” Another, Ally, said, “At its core I believe a lot of what he says, but I think the delivery is kind of poor.” Atticus said, “I dig him… He’s definitely going after more of the shock value with some of his stuff. But as far as general beliefs or values, I sort of agree.”
Andrew, who elsewhere in the focus group said he “really liked” Fuentes, attempted to defend Fuentes as “joking” much of the time, but also expressed earnest support: “I feel like his viewpoints would have been mainstream not that long ago. If he’s saying something like most women want to be raped, well, ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ sells like hotcakes to women, so I feel like that’s just a fact.” Ethan described Fuentes as overly polarizing, but said “He has some interesting opinions, I think specifically about race.” Colin said, “I think he reminds me of the Andrew Tate Republican Party, where he’s really good at addressing a common problem, but the solutions aren’t the solutions to go by.”
There were a few notes of disapproval. Brice said Fuentes “is very dangerous for our side of things,” and Ashley said “I think being too radical pushes people away and makes them look for truth elsewhere.” Notably, neither of these comments contained substantive condemnation, appearing more strategic instead. (Note: City Journal said the transcript it provided was partial, which means other comments might have been excluded.)
The focus group became even more alarming when the moderator asked, “What do you think of Adolf Hitler?”
Ashley said, “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.” Andrew said, “I think we should have a stronger executive branch. I don’t think we should be killing people or doing mass genocide, obviously, but I do think we should have a strong executive….. I support national sovereignty, and Hitler was a nationalist. He was like, we have to take Germany back for Germans. And I feel like we should do that in America. We should take America back for our native population.”
Brice, who described himself as Jewish ancestrally and Christian by faith, said, “I’ve actually read ‘Mein Kampf.’ The end conclusions that he came to: absolutely abominable. But I strangely understood where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.” Only Lauren offered full-throated condemnation: “He made all of those people suffer, and I want to do ungodly things to people who do things like that.”
The moderator followed up by asking how the group felt about Jewish people.
Atticus said, “They’ve got Hollywood on lock.” George queried, “Don’t they own, like, a ton of the media, and, like, just kind of everything?” Andrew said, “I would say a force for evil.” Only Brice diverged, saying he believed Jewish people were “No different than black people, Asian people, or any other people here today.”
After the moderator asked Andrew to clarify his comments on Jews being “evil,” he doubled down, and then the moderator asked others to respond, prompting a bit of pushback: Ashley said Jews and Christians were similar, biblically speaking; Ally rejected “any classification of a whole people group,” adding, “I just don’t think you can say this entire people group is bad.” But Lauren raised what appeared to be an antisemitic trope about sexually corrupting Jewish cabals: “Israel has a lot of connections to sex and human trafficking, and that doesn’t sit well with me.”
Some of us may have been underestimating how much fascistic energy has bubbled up from more grassroots quarters of American political life.
I was blown away reading this transcript. The venomous Fuentes appears to be just another right-wing pundit who maybe rage-baits a bit too much. Jews are described as sly puppeteers. Hitler is not seen as the apex of genocidal barbarism, but rather a nationalist leader who can be at least partially empathized with.
We’ve known for a long time that the right has been growing more extremebut this focus group really made it sink in: in today’s right-wing political culture, Trumpism is growing contiguous with Fuentes-ism, and the long-standing taboo against Nazism in America is broken.
Here’s another way of thinking about it: For a long time American scholars and journalists have been debating whether or not Trump matches the definition of a fascist; but some of us may have been underestimating how much fascistic energy has bubbled up from more grassroots quarters of American political life. And with the overwhelming majority of participants describing themselves as getting their political news from social media, independent podcasts and YouTubers — and hardly any professional institutional media — it’s difficult to see how to guard against it getting worse. Trolls, demagogues and grifters are whispering into the ears of our youth (and not just on the right), and sabotaging our capacity to adhere to democracy.
Let’s be clear that a focus group is not a poll — we cannot quantify how widespread these attitudes and behaviors are. The point of putting them together is to get a snapshot of a specific subset of the population to gauge the more complex elements of their belief systems that surveys cannot capture. But what these young red state conservatives said doesn’t defy what we know about what’s happening on the right, it confirms it.
Data points supporting the idea that the Nazi taboo is broken are everywhere. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson — whom multiple focus group participants said was a media figure who best represented their views — recently conducted a softball interview with Fuentes which allowed Fuentes to present himself as a more innocuous pundit than he is. That interview has in turn roiled the American rightrocking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation as they have struggled to figure out how close of a relationship they should hold with Carlson. The Trump administration employs a man who described himself as having a “Nazi streak” in a text message. In October Politico obtained leaked Telegram messages showing young Republican leaders describing Black people as monkeys and sharing messages that include “I love Hiter.”
A number of prominent right-wingers are openly acknowledging that something has gone rotten. Rod Dreher, a conservative writer, recently described a trip to Washington, D.C., in which he said a “D.C. insider” told him that he estimated that between 30% and 40% of Gen Z Republicans in Washington are Fuentes fans and reported that other young Republicans agreed with that estimate. The point isn’t whether that number is accurate — there’s no way to confirm it on the record — but rather that it reflects a perception within the right that Fuentes is ascendant. Vivek Ramswamy, who ran for president in 2024 and is running for governor of Ohio in 2026, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times recently decrying Fuentes’ growing influence on the right.
The presentation of this focus group by The Manhattan Institute — the group that employs the right-wing disinformation agent Christopher Rufo — should also leave us feeling concerned.
In the introductory synopsis to the focus group findings, the author, Jesse Arm, writes “moral stigmas — racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny — no longer reliably do the work they used to.” But he appears to put the blame for those things on the left, saying that, “After a decade of hearing the same accusations leveled at everyone from John McCain to Mitt Romney to Donald Trump, some see allegations of bigotry as table stakes.” Arm also downplays the extent of extremism surfaced in the focus group by saying there was “one true believer who agreed with Fuentes’ worldview and espoused explicit authoritarian and anti-pluralist views” who was “an outlier.”
The Manhattan Institute is not endorsing the participants’ worldview, but it was also clearly not trying to sound the alarms. It did, however, seem confident that the group was an authentic representation of the state of today’s right-wing youth — a group of Americans who increasingly are intrigued by the most vicious and destructive among us.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer for MS NOW. Sign up for his newsletter.
The Dictatorship
What Tom Emmer said about Somalis was racist. What’s worse is he doesn’t believe it.
ByMichael Tisserand
There was a time when President Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans didn’t think House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., had a sufficient understanding of who his enemies ought to be. But in remarks he made Wednesday at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, Emmer did his best to signal that Trump’s enemies are his enemies, too.
Emmer’s 11-minute talk, during which he expressed racism and transphobia and railed against abortion, also served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be. The name of the state party used to be Independent-Republicansand the late U.S. Sen. Dave Durenberger used to describe the state party’s worldview, without irony, as progressive Republicanism.
Emmer’s talk served as yet another contrast to the memory of what Republicans in Minnesota used to be.
That party is long gone. At Wednesday’s event, Emmer theatrically dismissed a few sheets of paper he said were his talking points and proclaimed, Trump-like, that he was going rogue. He took aim at transgender youth (“there’s a reason why Sodom and Gomorrah was destroyed”), at “elite radical lefties,” at “evil Marxists,” at the media, called his state’s abortion laws “as bad as North Korea” and called the state itself the “People’s Republic of Minnesota.”
But Emmer earned some of the most enthusiastic applause in his racist rant against the state’s large Somali American population. “Sometimes Minnesotans are so afraid that you’re going to call us a racist, you’re going to call us an Islamophobe,” he said, before saying, “But I’m done being careful. Even the least bit careful.”
He said, “I don’t really care where you come from. But if come to this great country, you have to understand, you’re coming here to be an American.” Somalis “don’t assimilate,” he said, “And if they don’t assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from.”
Among the people who responded angrily to Emmer’s slander of Somalis was Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who was born in Somalia. “I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back to where I came from,” she wrote on X.
In the debacle that followed Kevin McCarthy being voted out of the House speakership in 2023, Emmer was not elected to replace him because, by MAGA standards, he was too moderate. Trump called him a “Globalist RINO” and was still fuming that after Joe Biden won the race for president in 2020, Emmer voted to certify that election.
Emmer has worked harder to be seen as MAGA since then. In December, he appeared on “Varney & Co.” on Fox Business to support an Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge that made Somalis among its primary targets and became known as Operation Metro Surge. He offered up conspiracy theories and lies about Somali Americans committing 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities. He said money was being stolen from Minnesota state and federal programs to fund the Somali-based terrorist group al-Shabab.
When he signed up with the so-called Sharia Free America Caucus in February, he railed against letting “anti-American ideologies take root in our communities” and said he had been fighting against the nonexistent threat of Sharia law since he was a state legislator. I was unable to find stories of Emmer as a state legislator fearmongering about Sharia law. However, in 2015, when one of Emmer’s fellow Republicans was being rightly rebuked for attending an anti-Muslim event in St. Cloud, Emmer was a voice of reason and tolerance. He wanted his constituents to know that Somali Americans were contributing to the Minnesota communities they had made home and that they were “some of the fastest-assimilating populations.”
That same year, Emmer joined then-Rep. Keith Ellison, the Democrat who’s now the state’s attorney general, to found the Congressional Somalia Caucus: to help Somali Americans here and to promote peace and stability in Somalia.
Now Ellison is taking the lead in legal challenges against the ICE assaults Emmer champions.
This is the ticket into MAGA world: an embrace of abdication of decency and a necessary rejection of the spirit of welcome and tolerance one once held.
This is the ticket into MAGA world.
In April, a west central Minnesota event called “Understanding Immigration: A Community Conversation,” included Ayan Omar, a Somali American from St. Cloud, as a speaker. She works as equity director for the public schools and has been active in interfaith dialogues in the city.
Omar spoke of coming to the U.S. as a child, learning English by watching “The Simpsons” and learning self-value by watching “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The message from Mr. Rogers, she said, was especially important because “I just wanted to cower and hide away because I stood out. Not only because I was a Somali-American refugee, but I was also poor.” It was learning about Frederick Douglass that inspired her to become a teacher.
What she was describing was the process of her becoming more and more American. Countless other Somali Americans have had similar experiences. OEmmer knows that.
And not so long ago, he wasn’t afraid to say it.
Michael Tisserand
Michael Tisserand is a Minnesota-based writer whose works include “Krazy,” a biography of cartoonist George Herriman, and Sugarcane Academy, a memoir of his family’s experiences of Hurricane Katrina. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently writing a book about Charlie Chaplin and “The Great Dictator,” for Oxford University Press.
An appeals court on Friday upheld Harvey Weinstein’s2022 rape and sexual assault conviction in California, but ordered the trial judge who gave him 16 years in prison to resentence him.
A three-judge panel from California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal unanimously issued the decision, saying his trial judge did not violate the former movie magnate’s constitutional rights.
“We reject his attempts to disturb the jury’s guilty verdicts,” the judges wrote in their opinion.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said in an email that “We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand.”
The decision came a day after prosecutors in New York decided Weinstein would not face a fourth trial there, dropping the #MeToo-era case after the accuser said she could not bear to testify again.
The California panel said that resentencing was necessary because the judge that sentenced him considered New York convictions that were later thrown out as an aggravating factor. California’s attorney general agreed.
Weinstein, 74, still stands convicted of another sexual felony in New York, and he remains behind bars awaiting a September sentencing there. Prosecutors there are seeking a 20-year prison term.
In California, Weinstein was convicted in December 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against an Italian model and actor known during the trial as Jane Doe 1. He would serve his new sentence there only after his New York term is complete.
After the trial, Jane Doe 1 came forward under her name, Evgeniya Chernyshova, when she sued Weinstein in civil court.
The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly as Chernyshova did. Her attorney also said she consented to being named.
Chernyshova testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited to her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival and assaulted her.
Weinstein’s defense argued that Weinstein deserved a new trial because Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prevented his trial lawyers from asking about Facebook messages between Chernyshova and festival head Pascal Vicedomini that would have shown they had a sexual relationship.
The questioning would have demonstrated that she perjured herself when she said she and Vicedomini were just friends and colleagues, the defense said. And the lawyers argued it would have bolstered their assertion that she was not even in her room on the night of the alleged assault.
“The lower court all but gutted Mr. Weinstein’s defense,” attorney Jennifer Bonjean told the appeals judges at April 23 oral arguments.
But the appeals court said in its ruling that Weinstein did make the arguments he wanted during the trial based on other evidence, including another set of Facebook messages that Lench allowed.
“Thus, there was no denial of Weinstein’s constitutional right to present a defense,” the panel wrote in its opinion.
The three judges also found that Weinstein’s lawyers failed to adhere to California’s rape shield law prohibiting evidence of an accuser’s sexual history when they tried to introduce the messages. Weinstein’s lawyers had argued that the shield law was not pertinent because they wanted to use the messages only to impeach the witness’s credibility.
And the appeals judges said testimony from accusers describing sexual assaults Weinstein was not charged with was appropriate, and allowed under state law.
Before his sentencing, Weinstein told the judge that this was a “made-up story” from a woman he had never met.
The Los Angeles jury acquitted Weinstein of the sexual battery of a massage therapist and failed to reach verdicts on counts involving two other women.
“This is not the end of the appellate process,” Engelmayer said in his email Friday. “We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it would not have comment on the decision until the office reviewed it.
An email seeking comment from Chernyshova’s attorney was not immediately answered.
ByGarry Pierre-Pierre
One of the first people, and the very first doctor, to publicly receive a Covid-19 vaccine in the United States was Dr. Yves Duroseauthe chair of emergency medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan.
At a time when fear had emptied city streets and refrigerated trucks were lined up near hospital loading docksthat son of Haiti was a face of hope.
For Haitians, that image carried a deeper resonance. Ours is a community that America has often noticed only in moments of crisis. For once, the country was looking at a Haitian because he represented hope.
Ours is a community that America often noticed only in moments of crisis.
That memory from five and a half years ago is one reason the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians hit me so hard. Not with anger, but with deep sadness.
When I took the oath of citizenship decades ago, I believed America rewarded commitment with belonging. I still want to believe that. Thursday’s ruling suggests that, for some immigrants, the word “temporary” didn’t just describe their legal status but the nature of America’s welcome.
The first TPS recipients from Haiti arrived after the magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands of people in 2010. Today, Haiti faces a different catastrophe. Armed gangs control much of the capitalthousands have been killed or displaced and the State Department continues to warn Americans not to travel there.
For many TPS holders, the country they fled has not recovered. In many ways, it has become even more dangerous.
They believed something basic: that the United States would not send them back to a country engulfed by political violence, armed gangs and institutional collapse. TPS was created for those for whom returning home is unsafe. That humanitarian commitment should matter just as much as the lives those TPS holders have built since arriving.
They waited for Congress to do what some members had pushed for for years: create a pathway from temporary protection to permanent belonging. Instead, the years passed. Children became adults. Mortgages were paid. Careers were built. Entire lives unfolded while Washington postponed action. Temporary Protected Status became less a bridge than a waiting room. The finish line kept moving. Now, for many, it has disappeared altogether.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Haitian nurses, home health aides and other essential workers were hailed as heroes. Their work was indispensable then, and healthcare leaders say it remains indispensable today.
This dependence is not sentimental. It is measurable. The Boston Globe, citing data from the National Domestic Workers Alliancereported that roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
According to a report by Massachusetts lawmakers Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, ending TPS for Haitians “threatens to seriously disrupt the health care, senior care and disability care workforces amid a nationwide health care crisis and persistent staffing shortages.”
Roughly 13,000 Haitian TPS holders work as nursing assistants each day, caring for an estimated 65,000 patients.
There is nothing temporary about the lives these TPS holders have built. There is nothing temporary about paying taxes for decades, buying a home, planting a garden or knowing your neighbors by name. There is nothing temporary about raising children who begin each school day by pledging allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. There is nothing temporary about risking your life to care for strangers during a once-in-a-century pandemic.
I never imagined that, decades after taking my own oath of citizenship, I would be writing about a generation of immigrants who walked that same path with the same faith only to discover that the road ended before they reached their destination.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it must also confront a question that has shadowed much of its history: Who gets to belong?
Too often, America has answered that question by welcoming people when their labor is needed most, only to question their place later.
Perhaps that is the greatest irony of all. The people we continue to call temporary have spent years proving their commitment to this country. This ruling is bigger than Haitians or Syrians. It speaks to the covenant a nation makes with the people who answer its call during moments of need.
Though that process has never been smooth, America has always been at its best when it expanded the circle of belonging. Italians, Jews, Asians and even Black Americans born here were all told at one time that they could never fully be American. The country was not diminished by widening the definition of who belongs — it was strengthened by it.
The question is no longer whether Haitians who have their built lives here belong. They have answered that question through years of work, sacrifice and service.
The question is whether America still remembers what it means to be a country that welcomes immigrants.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum.
The U.S. has every right to enforce its immigration laws. But laws do not exist in a vacuum. They also reflect the promises a nation makes about who belongs. After more than 16 years, the Haitians affected by Thursday’s ruling are no longer strangers passing through. They are co-workers, parishioners, homeowners and taxpayers woven into the fabric of neighborhoods from New York to Florida to Massachusetts.
Pull one thread and you do more than remove one person. You weaken the fabric itself.
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Garry Pierre-Pierre is a Pulitzer-prize winning, multimedia and entrepreneurial journalist. In 1999, he left The New York Times to launch the Haitian Times, a New York-based English-language publication serving the Haitian diaspora. He is also the co-founder of the City University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Center for Community and Ethnic Media and a senior producer at CUNY TV
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