Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) invited Nick Shirley — the right-wing YouTube star who claims to have found widespread fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs — to the State of the Union last week.
Unfortunately, finding fraud in our safety net programs is like finding a drunk in Dinkytown on a Friday night, but let’s set that aside for today.
One of Shirley’s fellow YouTubers, Tyler Oliveira, released a video last week in which he claimed, “I exposed New Jersey’s Jewish invasion.”
Here was Shirley’s response, the same week he was Stauber’s guest inside the citadel of American democracy: “EXPOSE IT ALL.”
Shirley’s cheer for an antisemite is a symptom of the ongoing crackup of the American right over its longstanding conspiracist problem.
Christopher Rufo’s shoddily reported piece about fraud in Minnesota safety net programs in the right-wing City Journal kicked off much of the mess we’ve been living through the past few months.
Even he must be worried about the right’s crashout, however, because he’s talking about it publicly.
“The Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy and algorithm-chasing.”
He’s since added details: “I’ve had multiple people approach me at events with conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk. The most deranged Epstein conspiracy theories are now mainstream. And multiple people in my personal network have had siblings or children go down the antisemitism rabbit holes.”
Which is funny coming from someone who pushed a preposterous story about Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats, with the intention of whipping up a pogrom on people whose crime was coming here to work and seek a better life for their families.
(Lest we forget: Vice PresidentJD Vance rationalized the cat hoax: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.)
Rufo is now desperately trying to shoot a tranquilizer dart into the Frankenstein the right created and nurtured.
The problem with a political philosophy based on racial hierarchies — aside from being morally repugnant — is that they’ll come for you eventually. Or, in this case, for your Jewish allies.
John Ganz, a historian who has tracked the right’s Nazi problem for years, explained the obvious flaw with the right’s “Somalis bad/Jews good” formulation last year:
“That ability to keep the coalition by saying: Be as racist as you want, be as hateful as you want — but against designated enemies who are OK. People ask a rational question: Why are those people off the table?
“And then the answer comes back: Well, because Christianity, or because Israel represents Western civilization — or some kind of rationalization like that. And the antisemites say: That makes no sense to us.”
Sure enough, right on cue, Nick Fuentes, America’s most famous neo-Nazi sympathizer, defended Shirley like he was one of his own:
“The conservative movement is falling out of love with Nick Shirley because he expressed support for Tyler Oliviera, who exposed fraud in the Jewish community. They actually believe that the rules just shouldn’t apply to Jewish people. The double standard couldn’t be clearer.”
The ugly discourse is not new. A trope of American history is some people saying other people aren’t real Americans, and that foreign adversaries are dumping their unassimilable people onto our shores — people who are dirty, corrupt, uneducable, violent and loyal to their countries of origin. Or maybe they are drunks or sexual deviants or believe in strange deities.
The ignorant lies change, but the sentiment stays the same.
For instance, on Bloody Monday in 1855, a mob of the American Party — now known by its more colloquial handle the “Know Nothings” — rampaged through Irish and German neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 22.
Irish, Germans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, Haitians, Indians, Afghans, Latinos and many more.
Charlatans have used “scientific” racism and phony anthropology to claim at one time or another that all of these people can’t be real Americans, and we should expel them or stop their immigration here. It’s a tradition as old as Ben Franklin fearing the “Germanization” of Pennsylvania.
The oppression of Black and Indigenous Americans — outrageous in its own right — is a slightly different issue, but needless to say, the “heritage American” crowd has a long history of dehumanizing them and blocking them from full participation in our democracy, too.
In Stauber’s own district a century ago, “Birth of a Nation” — the propaganda disguised as a film — helped unleash a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, and robust chapters were organized in Grand Rapids, Hibbing and Virginia, as Iron Range historian Aaron Brown recounted a few years ago in the Reformer.
Their primary targets were Catholics and immigrants.
- J. Patrick Coolican is Editor-in-Chief of Minnesota Reformer. Previously, he was a Capitol reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for five years, after a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and time at the Las Vegas Sun, Seattle Times and a few other stops along the way. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and two young children. Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
