Horseshoe Jacobins
The Conspiracy of "Civilization"
Livestreamer Nick Fuentes recently spent a segment of his show warning his audience about me. At some level, I’m hesitant to even acknowledge it or him, but it can make for a useful opportunity to explain a few things about broken cultures and ways of thinking.
His thesis, roughly, was this: a group of Jewish operators, including me, has cooked up a sneaky new framing for a nefarious agenda. In his telling, we talk about “Western civilization” now — Cicero, the Founders, the rule of law, the inheritance of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem — as a cover or Trojan Horse for our real agenda (mass surveillance, Israel, etc.)
“The Jews are extremely sophisticated. They will outlast us. They will outsmart us. And they will come up with a new conceit. And by the way, they already have…. So they’re changing tactics, and they’re trying something new. They are starting to conflate the word ‘civilization’ and ‘the West’ with the Judeo-Christian narrative: they say it’s Christians and Jews, the United States and Israel,as civilization, versus the barbarism of the Communists and the Muslims… This is Joe Lonsdale’s line… Joe Lonsdale from Founders Fund, Paypal Mafia, ‘Cicero Institute’ — Jew.”
He went on to mention Shaun Maguire (a partner at Sequoia Capital) as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose anti-immigration politics Fuentes casts as a deception to distract from “Jew” Miller’s actual agenda.
It is the same model that has overtaken much of the academic left, beginning with the French: the belief that principles are never really principles, that ideals are only masks for power, that the Constitution is just a tool of domination, that all appeals to liberty, equality, law, or civilization are really just strategies by which one group imposes its will on another. The Jacobin, French Marxist left says that America’s founding principles are fake because they serve the oppressor class; Fuentes says they are fake because they serve as cover for Jews. It’s a different specific villain (with some overlap, no doubt) but the same failed reality model.
Fuentes has an audience, and that audience is growing, not just because many young people find his broadcasts entertaining — but because the institutional center has spent two decades failing young Americans and lying about it. In that environment all sorts of characters can find willing listeners, including regrettably for a 3,000 year old ethnic & religious scapegoat against Jews.
It is actually fortunate that he brought up the Cicero Institute, because our outlook on America’s problems is so different. We do not tell young Americans that their country is fake, that its principles are lies, or that their future depends on finding someone to blame or resent. We tell them that things can actually get better — things can work — if we find the courage to confront specific problems.
In an online culture poisoned by irony, it becomes incomprehensible that leaders would earnestly promote ideas like “Western Civilization.” As for me and Cicero… we really believe that America is exceptional because our culture and institutions were shaped by principles that are actually true: ordered liberty, equal dignity under law, constitutional government, civic virtue, the pursuit of excellence, and the belief that free people can build positive-sum institutions that lift others up.
Fuentes’ mentioning Cicero — as well as a long-running focus on Palantir — is entertaining to me, having founded and built both organizations and watched them be wildly misunderstood in ways that are easy to dispel. Cicero is a highly-effective state policy organization that understands broken systems and has partnered with legislators of both parties to confront them in specific, principle-driven ways; but if you ask the crazed demonstrators on our doorstep, we’re rounding up the homeless in order to put them into a private prison operated by none other than… you guessed it: Joe Lonsdale.
In a way, I understand the seduction of a story like this, crazy as it is. But Cicero as a cover for a Jewish agenda is actually even crazier. “Joe Lonsdale and his co-conspirators are trying to break up medical cartels” is a lot less exciting.
We are funded by people who understand that civilizational confidence flows from whether the things actually work. And we know that if we are going to solve the most pressing challenges facing our fellow Americans — a broken education system, spiraling healthcare costs, and increasing dysfunction from violent crime, homelessness, and crumbling infrastructure — we need to revisit and boldly apply the principles that made the West great. Power has to be checked, incentives have to be aligned, and public officials have to be accountable to the people they serve. All of this is actionable.
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The Jacobin mistake is assuming that people are or want to be revolutionary class actors. Fuentes, who is like a Horseshoe Jacobin, makes the same mistake in thinking that the inheritors of a great “civilization” want to dump it in order to oppose Jews.
In the case of Americans in particular, this is a very bad misunderstanding. Our governance problems are real (that is the entire basis of our work at Cicero) but Americans really want institutions that work and a country where they can go their own way. They want to live peacefully among neighbors who may not share all their views; and they want the freedom to build, work, trade, invent, and form new institutions. It is that sense of freedom — the freedom to build the lives we want and self-actualize — that has made American life so fruitful in a country where we actually disagree with our neighbors quite a bit!
We have, despite some difficulties along the way, managed to stay at least somewhat focused on the goals so eloquently spelled out by our forefathers:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It is concerning to see a new version of “right-wing” discourse that encourages people to throw all of this away. It echoes non-right ideologies that have wreaked havoc in the last few decades, all descended in some way from the Jacobins. Extreme feminism, crazy DEI oppressor/oppressed frameworks, climate hysteria, “population bomb” anti-natalist fears… These are all dead-end sets of ideas that inevitably lead to heartbreak for those who take them too seriously for too long. Individuals ruin their lives believing this stuff, and countries destroy themselves believing it.
The real “exception” in American exceptionalism is that we’ve managed, generation after generation, to stop these loser psychoses from taking over the country.
The encouraging thing is that this new version of it isn’t winning, either. And for the young people out there, figures like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or more recently Spencer Pratt provide strong examples for why the nihilism of Fuentes is wrong. These three men have different registers and different flavors of politics — people can pick from the buffet of what they like or dislike about each of them — but each have done something really interesting (and in the case of JD and Marco, attracted the ire of Fuentes himself).
Vice President Vance speaks to people who have been failed by institutions without telling them their country is fake or that their neighbors are the enemy. Secretary Rubio has his own optimistic way of speaking, and his rising star is, if nothing else, proof that Americans want leaders who show competence and principle in complex situations, and who can articulate real visions about who we are. Spencer Pratt’s improbable second act running for LA Mayor from his burned-down lot is a reminder that Americans still respond to humor and resilience — and strong rhetoric against a genuinely terrible regime in the form of LA’s current leadership. Even if he doesn’t win the race, a candidate like Pratt is showing what winning looks like at the level of personal character and how to fight with energy.
Americans want brokenness to end, and in the long run, broken cultures — whether left or right — that are inviting Americans to become broken themselves, whether it’s Fuentes-thought or loser communism, will lose to strong, winning cultures. In this one way, Fuentes is actually right to worry about a new strong culture emerging around the core ideas of our civilization.
But the idea that it’s “Jews” orchestrating it is silly. Actually, the conspiracy in favor of the values of our civilization is much larger than that. Americans of all stripes want to reclaim the frameworks that made our nation functional and strong in the first place, and we will.
Well put and important. Thanks for looking at nihilism straight on and calling it out.
Excellent piece.