How Bigotry Got a Makeover

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, December 08, 2025

 

Beginning in the 1980s and going into the ’90s, during the talk-show boom, I recall seeing white supremacists on television almost every week. Geraldo Rivera or Morton Downey Jr. or Sally Jessy Raphael would host neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and other assorted racists and anti-Semites and let the audience have at them.

 

In those days, the fanatical bigots who made the TV rounds were cartoonish weirdos. Wearing white robes and swastika armbands, they raved in extravagant yokel accents about blacks and Jews, and the audience usually ended up laughing at their bumpkin idiocy. They were showcased as freaks, another iteration of the satanists, fetishists, or “vampires” who appeared on the same shows.    

 

Watching them, you were surprised that such people actually still existed, but you had no fear of their gaining any significant traction. In the decades immediately following the success of the civil-rights movement, genuine white supremacists had little appeal in the larger culture. As for recruitment, they came at you with a full-on maniac zeal that rendered them laughing stocks. You basically had to accept the hood or the swastika right out of the gate. There was no viable on-ramp for normies on the outside. 

 

Without realizing it, many of us born before roughly 1990 were lulled into believing that hate groups and racist blowhards would always retain their freak status in America. We never envisioned a future time when they would find purchase in the culture.

 

It took another quarter century or so, but they would get their on-ramp. Today, you don’t have to dive into the deep end of the hate pool in one shot. You can get there more gradually by treading in the shallower waters of permissibility. That’s what the bigots offer you first. That’s the on-ramp. They let you think and say things that the liberal culture had for decades deemed off-limits. And it doesn’t have to start with racism or anti-Semitism or bigotry of any sort. Maybe you needed a space where you could say that gender isn’t a choice or where you could question the efficacy of the Covid vaccine.

 

So step-by-step, you made your way to the taboo-breakers of the right. They don’t merely allow the verboten; they encourage it.   

 

And if those were your red-pill issues, you were proven correct. The establishment had obscured the truth, and you figured it out. What’s more, those are merely two official narratives of many you’ve seen fall apart in the past few years. From Russiagate to Joe Biden’s fitness, you see a crumbling edifice of authorized consensus. So what other impermissible ideas, you ask yourself, might the establishment be afraid to air—and why? If you’re young enough to have missed out on the tail end of a decent education and a pre-woke culture, it won’t take you long to get around to questioning World War II, Israel, Jews, and race. With the old gatekeepers long gone—along with the gates themselves—there’s no endpoint to the conspiracy thinking and taboo-breaking.

 

Here's the most telling thing about a Nick Fuentes rant: He’s having a blast, howling with laughter. What’s Tucker Carlson’s signature soundbite? The cackle. The left-liberal cultural consensus imploded in a series of lies that left its adherents looking like dupes. So today—in an inversion of the past—it’s the unhinged racists who are laughing at the normies.

 

At least, for now. They’re still freaks. And they, too, will face a future they never saw coming.