A mixed bag

Happy Friday, racketeers. Hope everyone is having a good long Thanksgiving weekend. It’s been another wild week in America, and while I haven’t had enough space to sit and process it all as much as I’d like, I want to share some thoughts with you, unformed as they may be.

In short, we came out of the midterm elections with the general sense that, whatever else you might say about the results, the overriding message of the electorate was a rejection of Trumpian extremism. As the pundits put it: moderation won.

But in the aftermath of the election, it seems reactionary extremism is still doing just fine on the margins, where it always lives. If anything, its proponents were inspired by their electoral setbacks to push harder. Nick Fuentes, the host of the live-streamed talk show America First, reacted to the results by renewing his calls for Trump to be installed as a dictator and for the murder of Jews. This might have been a footnote to the week, until Trump himself hosted Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday night, where the white nationalist was brought by the artist formerly known as Kanye West. Trump claims not to have known who Fuentes was. But Axios