#altright

Paul Krugman:

There’s deep turmoil at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing “think tank” that calls itself “America’s most influential policy organization,” and is responsible for Project 2025. I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute. As many readers know, Tucker Carlson recently invited Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who espouses antisemitic conspiracy theories, onto his podcast. This was shocking but not surprising: It has been obvious for a long time that virulent antisemitism was a growing force within the American right, especially among young people. Last month Politico reported on the contents of private chats between a number of Young Republican leaders that include declarations that “I love Hitler,” jokes about gas chambers, and more.

So should it come as a surprise that Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, put out a video defending Carlson and attributing the uproar to “the globalist class,” a turn of phrase routinely used to attack Jews? It was clearly a surprise to Roberts that his defense of Carlson provoked a widespread backlash. And displaying the complete refusal to accept responsibility we’ve come to expect from leading conservatives, Roberts now claims that he was just reading a script written by an aide, saying “I didn’t know much about this Fuentes guy.” He explained his ignorance by saying “I actually don’t have time to consume a lot of news. I consume a lot of sports.” Yeah, right.

Why did Roberts weigh in on the Carlson-Fuentes controversy? He obviously felt he needed to express support for the right of conservatives to be conspiracy-theory antisemites -- despite the fact that Heritage itself has an antisemitism task force. Unsurprisingly, many of the task force members have now resigned.

Media reporting on this story has been excellent and revealing. However, I believe that much of the commentary misjudges the true nature of Heritage, portraying it as a genuine think tank that picked the wrong leader or was corrupted by MAGA. Because the truth is that Heritage has always been a fraud. It has always been a propaganda mill cosplaying as a research institution – a scam that worked for a long time. Heritage’s problem now is that its original scam was designed for a different era — a Reaganesque era in which plutocrats could discreetly leverage bigotry and intolerance to elect Republicans, who then delivered deregulation and tax cuts. Heritage was an integral cog within this scheme, giving superficial respectability to policies that were in fact deeply regressive and discriminatory, and overwhelmingly to the benefit of the moneyed class.

[...]

But telling lies on behalf of the wealthy isn’t enough in the MAGA era. To be a right-winger in good standing you also have to be a sexist, a racist, and an antisemite, while promoting Qanon and other conspiracy theories.

You can see the devolution of Heritage in its choices of chief economist. Back in 2014 Heritage hired Stephen Moore, who has had a remarkable career in the right-wing universe, repeatedly landing plum jobs despite his utter incompetence. I’m not being hyperbolic here: He has repeatedly shown an almost pathological inability to get facts and numbers right. But he hasn’t, as far as I know, promoted racism and bigotry. And to his credit, he severed his connection with Heritage after the Carlson/Fuentes scandal broke. Today, Heritage’s chief economist is E.J. Antoni, whom Donald Trump tried to install as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the previous head because he didn’t like a weak jobs report. Antoni is, if anything, even less competent than Moore. But he still might have gotten the job if Wired and CNN hadn’t uncovered his since-deleted Twitter account.

Why not learn Krav MAGA!

V Spehar and Jed Bookout at Under The Desk:

“I am writing to you along with my colleague Diana Xie to ask if you would be willing to support an innovative webseries that seeks to bring prominent neuroscientists and philosophers to discuss their research on the Internet in an informal setting,” began an email sent to Jeffrey Epstein on November 2, 2013. “Our show, the first of its kind, has been backed by many prominent scientists and we now have 30 days to fund a $25,000 Kickstarter campaign at http://kickstarter.neuro.tv. The objective of NEURON, a registered non-profit, is to remove the barrier between academia and the general public, by communicating fascinating aspects of neuroscience while giving both novice and experienced scientists the opportunity to learn how to frame their cutting-edge research in a way that is accessible for everyone.” And then, at the very end,

“Thank you for considering our request and giving your time. Your contribution to the campaign will mean very much to us. Sincerely, Jean-François Gariépy, Ph. D..” The files on Gariépy in the Epstein drop are sparse; there are only eight files in total with his name. Compared to some of the other strands within the files - such as Epstein’s connections to Mossad, Russia, egg freezing, and the (partially now-known) co-conspirators of his sex trafficking operation like Les Wexner - the connections to Gariépy are so small that you might just pass them over on your way to another document connecting Epstein to Peter Thiel and Palantir. But that’s only if the following two things aren’t true for you: You didn’t read the next email Epstein sent You don’t know who Jean-François Gariépy is.

“I will fund,” Epstein wrote exactly one week later. “send details.” “The total amount of money needed on the institutional side ranges from $20,000 to $50,000,” Gariépy responded. “The exact amount needed depends on the requirements of the donor. For instance, if a main donor was willing to share sponsorship of the program with Duke University, who has expressed interest in sharing sponsorship, then $20,000 would suffice. If you would like to fund the entire initiative, then we would need something closer to the $50,000 mark.” “Let’s start at 25k,” Epstein wrote.” And by November 13, 11 days after the pitch, Epstein and his accountant Richard Kahn cut a check to Gariépy to fund his venture. As for WHO Gariépy is, well… it’s probably worth noting that today, Gariépy is known as one of the original subsets of commentators in the American alt-right, one who regularly called for the creation of a “white ethnostate,” but since 2023, it is more than likely that IF you know who he is, it’s because his partner has been missing for nearly three years.

Back in October 2023, The Daily Beast reported that a woman named Élora Patoine, known online as Mama JF, had been missing since she was dropped off by her husband Gariépy at a gas station back in June of that year. Élora’s disappearance caused a fissure between figures on the alt-right, with his former friends accusing him of foul play, and Gariépy denying wrongdoing to this day, instead claiming that her being missing is “evidence that men should have more legal control over their wives,” despite the fact that the two were not legally married. To this day, there is no sign of Élora anywhere, but there’s a number of incredibly strange statements that Gariépy has made over the years in regards to where she could be.

[...] Jean-François, in the meantime, has stayed an active content creator - as far as I can tell, his influence in the alt-right scene disappeared years ago, so now he streams a live show called JFG Tonight where he covers the internet news of the day. This is quite an interesting turn of events for a man who, up until the point Epstein financed him, was a pretty well regarded scientific researcher. At his Researchgate portal, you can see a number of research papers that have been cited over 1,000 times in other people’s research. He was renowned for his research on neural networks involved in the respiratory rhythm in lampreys, as well as the social interactions of monkeys.

For a scientist, he seemed… normal. Look at this 2013 report he co-authored shortly after Epstein’s funding for neuro.tv titled, “The neuroethology of friendship.” Within it, Gariépy et al. make the claim that friendship is something viewed within animals, therefore friendship is an evolved trait. “We argue that understanding the neuroethology of friendship in humans and other animals brings us closer to knowing fully what it means to be human,” they write. In a long-since deleted C.V., Jean-François wrote that he had been interested in biology, music, mathematics and archeology since his childhood, and as a teenager, he was interested in the observation of fish reproduction in captivity.

“I have always been interested in describing society, culture and the neural mechanisms that underlie social interactions in the normal population and in individuals with psychiatric disorders,” he wrote. “I think that an understanding of human and animal social behaviors can be obtained by neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Combining neuroscientific techniques with classical approaches describing dynamic social phenomenons such as those found in sociology and economics will allow us to further our understanding of social complexity.” I mean, I’m not sure what all of it means, but this is about as normal as one can get in the scientific world: co-authoring a study on how friendship is a trait derived from evolution. Yet almost immediately after entering Epstein’s orbit, Gariépy… changed. He claimed to have become “disillusioned with the scientific community” and left the university life behind to become… a full time YouTuber. And not just for neuro.tv. He joined the show Warski Live with co-host Andy Warski, and began collaborating almost instantly with people much further off the beaten path than the scientists of yesteryear. He worked alongside people like right-wing commentator Sargon of Akkad, avowed white supremacist Andrew Anglin, and the notorious “face of the alt-right” Richard Spencer, before later collaborating with straight up neo-Nazis like David Duke, Mike Peinovich, and Nick Fuentes.

[...] There’s no real evidence that Epstein is the reason for Gariépy’s lean into a more degenerate lifestyle beyond the timelines intersecting in an interesting way. Indeed, one other buried document within the Epstein files from Darren Indyke is an 0-1 Nonimmigrant Petition for a redacted individual that uses the show as an example of the redacted individual’s excellence as a reason she should be granted a nonimmigrant visa. And yet Gariépy, to this day, is a firm defender of Epstein, casting doubt upon the extent of his crimes in a 2025 interview with Richard Spencer, and proudly announcing that he was in the Epstein files on January 30.

[...] Was it really as simple as Gariépy doing a 180 in life shortly after meeting Epstein - or was there something else going on? Considering Epstein’s roots in potentially planting the seeds for Pizzagate, Gamergate, and most online discourse with Steve Bannon (as discussed last week with his connections to 4Chan), it’s hard not to be the slightest bit suspicious that Epstein ALSO funded one of the more questionable figures of the old alt-right.

Leftist/"Woke" Alt-Right/Conservative