You may never have heard of “crab mentality,” but it’s a real thing, a metaphor derived from anecdotal claims about crustaceans confined to an open bucket. Supposedly, the critters will actively and violently prevent one another from crawling out to freedom. And the nimshal is the mindset of people who, while they hold similar views, turn on each other in order to prevent any member of their club from succeeding.
What brings that mentality to mind is a troika of truculent degenerates—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. While they all share a hearty embrace of racism, derision of women (yes, even Owens), anti-Semitism and isolationism (especially when it comes to American aid to Israel), among themselves they are, blessedly, contentious crustaceans brawling in a bucket.
The well-known personalities’ infighting began back in the summer, when Ms. Owens—she, of the conviction that “Hitler just wanted to make Germany great… The [only—AS] problem is that he wanted… to globalize,” and of denying that Josef Mengele carried out experiments on concentration camp inmates—interviewed Mr. Fuentes. (He, of “Hitler is awesome. Hitler was right. And the Holocaust didn’t happen.”)
While Owens claimed the interview “went great,” Fuentes reportedly called her afterward, screaming and insulting her—and women in general. She later suggested that her then-27-year-old guest suffered from “little boy insecurity.”
Mr. Carlson (he, of the “I’m just asking questions” response to being challenged about insinuations that Israel or Jews are guilty of various nefarious plots) came to Owens’ defense and launched his own attack on Fuentes, referring to him (not inaccurately) as a “child” and (rather inaccurately) a covert federal agent.
Fuentes, in turn, retaliated by calling Carlson a “faker human being” (accuracy indeterminate, since the insult is unintelligible).
And so it went.
Oddly, when Carlson hosted Fuentes on his popular podcast, he treated him with what seemed to be respect.
“Nick Fuentes, thank you for doing this,” he fawned, giving the arrested-development “influencer” access to one of the largest audiences he has ever had. (Fuentes’ own program, which boasts more than a million followers, was recently revealed to be benefiting from “bot farms”—generators of artificial “followers”—in Pakistan, India and Nigeria.)
Carlson occasionally pushed back politely against some of his guest’s most outlandish claims. The rest of the time, though, all was chummy, including when Fuentes opined that the “big challenge” to unifying Americans was “organized Jewry.”
Disturbingly, one bad turn yielded another. Following Carlson’s lead, the British commentator Piers Morgan, who is generally respectable, if somewhat irascible, touted the importance of free speech and hosted Fuentes on his own program for a two-hour chat. To his credit, however, Mr. Morgan did push back hard against Fuentes, at one point chiding him for “your lack of humanity and compassion for people about things like the Holocaust, about slavery.”
After begrudgingly (and unconvincingly) conceding that the “official narrative” of how many Jews perished in the Holocaust might be true, Fuentes doubled down on comments he made about Hitler, ym”sh, being “really… cool.”
Then Owens slithered back into the news with suggestions that either the government or a foreign power (guess which one?) was involved in the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk. When Mr. Kirk’s widow sought to disabuse the public of such conspiracy theories, Owens attacked her, drawing Fuentes out of the woodwork to blast Owens again.
There’s a temptation to view all the backstabbing and recriminations among the terrible trio as entertainment. And maybe many of their combined millions of followers do just that, and regard the spectacle as akin to famously fake “professional wrestling.”
But it’s a temptation worth resisting. While there is certainly an element of “capturing eyeballs” and garnering headlines in the feuding among the haters, there is no reason to doubt their dedication to their ugly sentiments.
And, even taking into account any artificial exaggeration of their followings, they do seem to enjoy the support of many Americans, especially young men. And each of the three aspires to becoming the face of the MAGA movement going forward.
We can only hope that, like crabs in a bucket, each member of the threesome will continue to do all he or she can to prevent the ascension of either of the others. And that, in that aspiration, they all succeed.
To read more, subscribe to Ami
