Leopards Eating Conservative Faces
Ben Shapiro's cowardice in the online conservative civil war
Conservative Twitter Insanity
I’m a very online person.
Sometimes, I’ll start to explain something that’s happening online to a friend who’s not terminally online in the same way I am. I’ll start with “Ok, so the first thing you need to know is who ‘PepeGoat420’ is. He’s a poster in the ‘SwoogyBois’, which is a group of…” and then realize that their eyes have already glazed over, and I sound like an insane person.
There’s been some unbelievable drama going on in conservative Twitter. At the risk of sounding like an insane person, let me introduce you to the main players.
Dramatis Personae:
Ben Shapiro - Founder of the conservative news site and media company The Daily Wire. A Jewish neoconservative of the old style. He supports Israel, is predisposed towards military action against Middle Eastern countries, wants to cut taxes and slash the size of the government, etc. Best known for bragging how dry his wife is during intimate moments.
Candace Owens - An employee at the Daily Wire. Conservative agitator. Also a shameless grifter who ran anti-Trump sites before realizing how much money there was in conservative commentary. A black woman who created #Blexit, a campaign for black voters to leave the Democratic party.
Nick Fuentes - A Hispanic white supremacist and commentator. Leader of the ‘Groypers’, an alt-right group of racist trolls known for using the Pepe Frog avatar. Famous for being pro-theocracy, a raging anti-Semite, and saying that he’s still a virgin because men having sex with women is gay.
So basically, (inhales)
Chief Virgin of the Frog Avatars Nick Fuentes has a long running grudge against 'My Dry Wife' NeoCon Ben Shapiro. Shapiro fires Insane Grift Lady Candace Owens from his website The Daily Wire because Shapiro, who is Jewish, loves dropping bombs on Palestinians whereas Owens loves thinly-disguised antisemitism.
Chief Frog Virgin Fuentes, who also loves antisemitism, then tells his army of Frogs to start coding the phrase 'Christ is King' as antisemitic, to insult Shapiro’s Jewishness and to support Insane Grifter Lady. His groyper followers spam the replies of Jewish conservatives with thousands of 'Christ is King' posts, and also post images like this:
The Frog Avatars have now tricked Non-Frog conservatives into making long posts explaining how 'Christ is King' is antisemitic, which makes them look anti-Christian to normie idiots wandering by. Also at some point pro-Hamas Islamist shitposters might have been crucial early adopters?
I definitely drifted into insane person territory there. Let’s back up.
Owens joined Shapiro’s Daily Wire in 2020. The two seemed to be a great match, both being diehard conservatives with a provocative flair. But Owens was always a little more comfortable leaning into outright grifts than Shapiro, always a little more obviously willing to say whatever got her clout online. She began her media career with a failed anti-Trump and anti-Tea Party angle:
Yet Owens, suddenly a new face of the American right, was less than two years ago the CEO of an online publication that frequently mocked then-candidate Trump, including conducting a mock “investigation” into his penis size. (The story determined that it was likely very small.) And in a 2015 column for the site lambasting conservative Republicans, Owens wrote that it was “good news” that the “Republican Tea Party... will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope).”
In short, Owens is a grifter who will say whatever gets her attention and money. Shapiro, for all his many faults, does seem to have an actual guiding ideology. The fault line was always there.
That line began to widen after the Israel/Palestine conflict went hot last year. Shapiro is a staunch supporter of Israel in the classic neoconservative sense, supporting both Israel’s military actions thus far and the US’s foreign aid to Israel. Owens has been fiercely critical of Israel and opposes the US sending foreign aid there - a much more Trumpian line skeptical of involvement in foreign conflicts of any kind. Recently her criticisms of Israel and Jewish commentators supporting them began to take a more openly anti-semitic line, often taking shots at Shapiro himself. This culminated with Owens liking a tweet asking a Rabbi if he was ‘drunk on Christian blood again’, a reference to the blood libel conspiracy. Shapiro fired her a few days later.
Enter the frogs.
Nick Fuentes is an edgelord racist streamer who has gathered enough of a following to have had dinner with Donald Trump. He’s denied the Holocaust, praised Hitler, and called for Jews and all non-Christians to be executed. He’s openly hated Ben Shapiro for a long time, mostly because Shapiro is Jewish.
When Owens was fired for antisemitism, Fuentes rallied to her cause. I really cannot emphasize enough how openly and directly Fuentes just hates every Jewish person.
Fuentes said he supported Owens in her "full-fledged war against the Jews", also saying “This is the face of a total Jewish defeat… We f—ing got your back, Candace… They're filth.”
He directed his army of fans, known as Groypers and who usually sport Pepe Frog avatars, to spam the mentions of Shapiro and other Jewish conservatives with the short message ‘Christ is King’. This was meant to harass those users and offend them while being prima facie reasonable - in conservative world, who could get mad at Christians simply saying ‘Christ is King’?
This is a favorite tactic of the loose confederation of 4channers, Groypers, Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups. You may remember a few years back when they intentionally began coding the OK sign as a white supremacist gesture. This serves several purposes: it’s funny to them, it allows them plausible deniability when they openly signal white supremacy, and when liberals say “Actually the OK sign is racist now” it makes liberals look insane to normal people. That’s why they do it.
‘Christ is King’ works in much the same way. It’s obviously a form of targeted harassment to spam that phrase in the replies of Jewish people, and it spread from there by people who clearly knew about the game being played. But when the head of the Daily Wire posted a long, rambling explanation of why ‘Christ is King’ was antisemitic, he just sounded anti-Christian to normie/offline conservatives. Less plugged in conservatives were expressing confusion about how saying Christ is King could possibly be anti-semitic. If your response to a three word phrase is a 2,000 word essay, you’ve already lost.
As a sidenote - I’ve seen it referenced in multiple places that pro-Hamas Islamist accounts were early adopters, pretending to be Christian and eagerly posting Christ is King messages as a way to dunk on Israelis/Jews. I haven’t been able to verify it, but it would be another insane wrinkle.
Leopards Eating Faces
So now there’s a bizarre Civil War going on on the fringes of the conservative Right. In the first camp are conservatives who are still extremely conservative but who aren’t openly racist, and who fancy themselves to have some level of intellectual honesty. The second camp is open and proud racists, trolls, theocrats and fascists.
The first group is posting long explanations of why the people saying ‘Christ is King’ hate Jews. The second group is… well, they’re not nearly as intellectual.
This is spilling out into other arenas as well. The conservative satire site The Babylon Bee made a post indirectly referencing the controversy (and an unusually funny one given their typical fare):
The Bee’s conservative fans were not pleased. “Has the Bee gone woke?” they asked.
Watching this all, I can’t help but reference the ancient verse: I never thought the Leopards would eat MY face!
My first instinct is to sympathize with Ben Shapiro here, but I find that I can’t. Ben Shapiro made this bed, and now he’s going to have to sleep in it.
Candace Owens has been a known grifter as long as she’s been a public figure. Ben Shapiro knew she was a grifter when he hired her. He’s quietly tolerated or even promoted anti-semitic people and trends in his conservative movement for years. After Elon praised a Twitter post that said “Jews hate all white people”, who was there to rehabilitate his image? Ben Shapiro. Who hired Gina Carano after the actress was fired for comparing conservatives to Jews in the Holocaust? Shapiro again. He’s defended these people directly, and he’s also largely been silent as a massive amount of anti-semitic freaks became dominant in conservative circles.
This especially extends to Candace Owens herself. Owens said in 2019 that the only thing Hitler did wrong was ‘go beyond his border’ and things would have been fine if he just kept his genocide within Germany. Shapiro hired her a year later anyways. Owens defended Kanye West when he tweeted “I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” while employed at the Daily Wire, and Shapiro did nothing.
I can’t have any sympathy for Shapiro, because he’s a coward at heart.
The Cowardice of Mainstream Conservativism
As I see it, there are four important groups of conservative commentators today.
The Outcasts: These are the Never Trumpers, those who’ve left the Republican party because of principled opposition to where it was headed. This is the smallest group, consisting of publications like The Bulwark, The Dispatch, etc. I admire them, I hope their ranks grow, and I wish them well.
The Proud Freaks: This Alex Jones, Nick Fuentes, and others who aren’t ashamed of their racism or insanity. If you call them racist, if you call them Nazis, they say “Hell yeah!”. This group is also small but growing at a disturbing clip.
The Grifters: These people don’t have an ideology, they’ve just realized that it’s very easy to get famous by being a provocative conservative personality. It’s a profitable play and business is booming.
The Cowards: This is the largest group of conservatives, the ‘mainstream’ of the Republican party. They’re not outright racist, and they’re not grifting. They believe in conservative ideals. But despite being aware of how their movement is being infiltrated, they say little and do nothing.
Fuentes is a proud freak. Owens is a grifter. And Shapiro is a classic coward. He’s smart enough to know exactly what was happening in the conservative movement. But he stays loyal, he promotes the party, and he begrudgingly cooperates with the freaks and the grifters. He made his bed and now that the freaks have come after him he’s got nowhere else to sleep. That goes for him and the entire institutional conservative movement that hasn’t stood up to these people in any meaningful way.
And you know what? THEY’RE STILL BEING COWARDS NOW.
Shortly after the conservative civil war blew up, there was a big gathering on Twitter Spaces to debate the ‘Christ is King’ episode. Nick Fuentes joined the debate. So did Jeremy Boreing, who is close partners with Ben Shapiro and is the co-founder and CEO of the Daily Wire. Fuentes opined Jews shouldn't hold political office in the US and that Ben Shapiro needed to convert to Christianity. Boreing could have issued a fiery condemnation. He could have said “This guy is an awful shithead. Nobody should listen to him. He’s a racist freak idiot and needs to be thrown out of our movement”. What did he actually say?
"I listen to your show quite often, I think you're one of the most talented people out there"
-Jeremy Boreing to Nick Fuentes
and
When another speaker told Boreing "Jews had Christ killed" and complained "free speech is under attack" by the "Jewish lobby", Boreing responded not by condemning antisemitism but by reassuring him no Daily Wire employees are Israeli & that DW is America First
Boreing, Shapiro, and the whole lot are gutless, spineless cowards. They’re still unwilling to directly call out racism. They’re afraid of confrontation. It would cost them too much. They’d lose viewers, their audience would shrink, they’d lose influence within the movement. They’re still trying to make peace with - and I cannot emphasize enough how literal and open they are about this - white supremacists, anti-semites and fascists.
This is the story of how Trump took over the Republican party, how he’s still the dominant figure in the party, and how the racist wing of the conservative movement has only grown and become more and more prominent. This happened because the respectable institutions within the conservative movement did nothing to stop it beyond some limp-wristed, half-hearted denunciations. It’s still happening today and Fuentes and his like are more brazen than they’ve ever been before. And now that the Leopards are eating his face, Shapiro doesn’t know what to do.
This, right now, is the big difference between liberals and conservatives.
The left also has its vocal faction of antisemites, but one thing you're not seeing is the institutional Democratic Party or mainstream liberal media figures catering to them. You'll see frustration and anger over the behavior of the Israeli government and military in Gaza, to be sure, but it's always framed as "this isn't helping, you're making things worse, and Israel will probably be worse off than it was before once this is over." There is a real line within the liberal establishment between criticizing Israel's treatment of Palestinians (which is, to be sure, a mainstream view in the party) and outright defending Hamas and their actions or harassing Jewish Americans over it, and progressive and leftist activists who fall on the wrong side of that line find out very quickly that they are a lot less welcome in mainstream liberal circles than they used to be.
Am I worried that this faction of the left could grow in the future and take over the party? Certainly, especially given how young it skews. (Just ask British Labourites.) But right now, they are on the outs with the Democrats, and they know it. If anything, right now my biggest worry is that their estrangement from the mainstream left could put them on a path to being radicalized into the far-right.
The conservative movement, on the other hand, has let these guys flourish in their ranks. You laid out the case perfectly, so I won't repeat it, but I will simply add that, for the last several years, the movement has seemed (from my outside perspective) obsessed with chasing countercultural clout. As liberal values became more mainstream and conservative values came under growing criticism, conservatism responded by taking on an aggressive, trollish, "fuck the system and fuck you" ethos. Donald Trump's gleefully loutish behavior was a big part of this, to be sure, but what I find more telling is how the word "normie" has spread in right-wing circles as a pejorative. It means "normal person", somebody who lives an ordinary lifestyle and believes in the values assumed to be held by most Americans. What Richard Nixon called the "silent majority". When I hear it, it's usually coming from conservatives, and it's usually meant as an insult akin to "sheeple", as if to dismiss ordinary people as easily misled idiots and flatter themselves as members of an elite who know better than everyone else.
It shouldn't be a shock that antisemitism, a value system rejected by most ordinary Americans, would find fertile soil in what's become of the right, or that a conservative movement that styles itself as outsiders fighting The Man would have fewer antibodies against it.
Your breakdown of the 4 types of conservatives is a mental model that should be broadcast from the river to the sea!
How's that for a provocative compliment?
Provocations aside, it's frankly brilliant in its simplicity, accuracy, and fairness... and if broadcast more widely, I believe it would help progressives/dems better understand their opposition so much better than they do now. The lack of understanding of the granularity of the conservative movement today helps explain the utter lack of effective tools developed to counter it.
Nice work, now do the same for Dems/progressives so that conservatives can get a clear-eyed view of their competition!