Does calling someone a racist make them become a racist?
No, not really, unless you're a child. Why do people think otherwise?
I’m in the final stages of a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about the cracks in MAGA, which are wide and growing.
It’s about more than grocery prices, Iran and the Epstein files, as important as those issues are. Folks on the right are tearing each other apart about anti-Semitism and racism, and me and my producer Lucy Proctor have been talking to some very interesting insiders.
As part of the process I’ve watched the entire Tucker Carlson chat with Nick Fuentes from last October. For all of the fireworks that have been touched off by a leading conservative influencer getting cosy with King Groyper, the actual content is pretty mid. Fuentes tones down his most grossly offensive stuff, Carlson asks why Fuentes attacks people he broadly agrees with, they mostly get along swimmingly, and the whole thing tells us something potentially both very important and very disturbing about the current state of the American conservativism, but only on the meta level.
It won’t make it into the doc, but I’ve been preoccupied with one moment that happens half an hour in, when Carlson appears to indicate he’s arrived at some sort of point.
CARLSON: This is my main question to you, is when you get attacked, when people call you names, like they always call me “racist” and I would always think to myself, I’m actually not. I would tell you if I was racist. I’m a little sexist but I’m not racist. And I never understood why they did that. And then I thought maybe the point is to make me racist. Where you just get to you get to a point where you’re like, “Well if you’re going to slander me then I’ll just become the thing you’re calling me.” I do think that’s a feature of human nature, don’t you?
FUENTES: Mmm-hmm.
CARLSON: And if you stare too intently at the accusers, at the, you know, Ben Shapiro or Mark Levin or Ted Cruz or whoever it is calling you names, it like distorts you and you actually change and become what they say you are. Have you thought that ever? Do you worry that that happened to you?
FUENTES: No, I don’t think it ever did because I know who I am.
What Fuentes is (by his own admission, and voluminous recorded evidence) is a racist anti-Semite, so we can be doubly sure it isn’t name-calling that makes him say things like: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be in prison for the most part, and we would live in paradise.”1
But here Carlson is repeating an idea that has become conventional wisdom on the right: that people are radicialized simply by being called names by their opponents.
Really?
When you think about it, this sounds pretty preposterous. Can you think of a time in your life where someone insulted you, and you not only accepted the insult but began to internalize it? Sounds pretty wild, right?
But I try to keep an open mind, so I had to find out — is there any shred of truth here?
