In April, Tucker Carlson unleashed a viral condemnation of Donald Trump’s threat that Iran would be “in hell” if Tehran did not reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “This is insane,” Tucker thundered, especially affronted that such a profanation would be issued on Easter weekend. His performative shock, of course, may simply mark another attempt to become the face of an “America First” alternative to the Trump personality cult, and establish himself as a 2028 presidential candidate for the Republican primary. And Tucker’s more recent mea culpae – including one podcasted out with his brother and erstwhile Trump speechwriter, Buckley Carlson, in which he apologised for misleading people into supporting the president – suggest that this Occam’s Razor analysis can’t be ruled out.
But it would be a mistake – or in any case a lost opportunity – to dismiss Tucker’s Easter indignation as only electoral positioning. Doing so would prevent us from seeing his tirade’s status for what it (also) is: a window into the evolving psychological terrain of the New Online Right, something very different from the conservatism that preceded it. The American Right, at least in its neoconservative iteration, coalesced around an Islamophobia inherited from Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and radicalised on 11 September 2001. But its successor movement – the scene of wildcat podcasters, looksmaxxing influencers, and a few old-guard converts like Carlson himself – has developed a curious and telling fascination with Islam, which they tend to hail as a civilisational corrective as much as a threat.
This is a weirder reversal than it first appears. A movement frequently caricatured – and which at times self-describes – as the last bulwark of Western chauvinism turns out to regard the West not as a civilisation worth defending but as a civilisation already doomed. Their society is hollow, sterile and decadent, at least compared to an Islam it imagines as everything the West was but no longer is. As a quick trip into this version of the New Right will show, Iran – that is, the Islamic Republic, and therefore, symbolically, Islam itself – stands as an emblem of civilisation, a civilisation that, unlike the West, is resisting the slide into decadence and entropy.
It wasn’t the first time Carlson had signalled as much, either. In a Sky News interview in June, he repudiated his Fox-era Islamophobia wholesale: “Many times I said on television, ‘The problem is Islam. The problem is Muslims. They all want to kill us. They’re all crazy. They’re all in this lunatic suicide cult created by Muhammad in the 7th century.’ I believed that. I was hysterical… Now, that’s not true.” What replaced hysteria was something stranger still: sustained admiration for what Islam has preserved and what the West had squandered. Speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest in December 2025, Tucker rebuked conservatives who criticised American Muslims, calling such criticism “disgusting” – a remark that stunned his audience into silence. He has repeatedly praised Sharia law, moreover, for offering moral clarity in contrast with Western decadence, announced plans to buy a house in Qatar, and produced what critics called propaganda films for Gulf state governments.
This Islamophilic branding stands as a skeleton key for emerging paradoxes and curiosities on the New Right. And it has as much to do with our version of the enduring “Jewish question” as it does with theology. For all his aspirations to a downmarket demographic, Carlson still largely speaks for and to the tribal sensibilities of a class of disaffected patricians. So, for a more stylised and uncut version of his yearning, we have to turn to Tucker’s counterparts further down the algorithmic and meritocratic stack: Andrew Tate, Sneako and Bronze Age Pervert (BAP). Carlson’s AmericaFest outburst encodes a post-liberal reverence for Islamic “civilisation” but retains a degree of academic poise and cool abstraction. Tate, Sneako and BAP, meanwhile, embrace Islam more floridly, if no less instrumentally. For them, it seems, Islam is less a theological destination than an aesthetic solution to a spiritual crisis.
Tate’s conversion to Islam was, in effect, the launch of a brand partnership. It allowed him to style himself as the paragon of anti-Western discipline: sober, hard-bodied, unapologetically patriarchal. Islam, he declared upon converting, is “the last religion… the only faith [whose] core tenets are still respected by followers… because no other religion has boundaries which they enforce. If you will tolerate everything, then you stand for nothing.” What he praises in Islam is not piety, then, but hierarchy. It is not the faith’s metaphysics that he prizes – and certainly not its ethic of submission, the literal meaning of the word Islam – but its (imagined) masculinity, force and power. Islam, for the edgelord cohort Tate leads, has become a technology for asserting order over women, appetite and the ambient chaos of liberal modernity. That it offers – or, as it is more accurately imagined to offer – an integrated, syncretic worldview rather than therapeutic pluralism is part, if not the bulk of its appeal.
Sneako, a second-tier edgelord influencer with Gen Z reach, has performed a similar mutation. Born-again into Islam seemingly by way of TikTok algorithms and naked Tate emulation, Sneako’s Islam, too, is mostly lifestyle décor – a counter-cultural credential that cloaks his content in the gravitas of tradition, while providing rhetorical cover for his retrograde gender politics. On camera, his reverence for Islam often collapses into flex: reading Koranic verses between lifting sessions and posting from mosques as if they were elite clubs. Ritual practice requires yielding oneself to God. Sneako’s content asks God’s rituals to yield to the self – just another element in the indefinite personal optimisation stack alongside cold plunges and creatine. Like Tate, he channels a post-secular appetite for order itself. What both Tate and Sneako reveal, then, is something like Huntingtonian cosplay, where Islam is weaponised as the last serious thing in a world gone soft.
Bronze Age Pervert represents a more rarefied variant of this trend. Though not, like the other two, Muslim, his sensibility converges with the broader Islamophilic turn through his metaphysical contempt for the senescent, decadent West – the civilisation, as he puts it, of “part time jewbs, 4 hrs in traffic, fat wife”. Against this tragic fate, BAP poses a frank question: “Why isn’t ISIS better?” (My emphasis.) For BAP, Islam carries little to no theological weight. Its value is emblematic. Its endurance proves that some cultures have resisted surrender to softness, irony and sterility. Islam’s virtues, as BAP sees them, lie in its refusal to apologise for strength. BAP’s engagement with Islam, in other words, is less theological than it is atmospheric. As one careful reader noted in their review of the book Bronze Age Mindset (2018), his views on it as a creed appear to have been “entirely gleaned from the fact that [German philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer once said that it was stupid”. Islam doesn’t come down to doctrine for BAP. It’s only a posture: a civilisation that has not yet apologised for existing.
In this, he echoes a line that runs through the early-20th-century traditionalist René Guénon, who fled what he saw as the metaphysical shallows of Paris for Cairo, and whose vision of sacred order now flickers, if faintly, through the memeified aestheticism of the dissident right. Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (2015) – in which a French professor greets his country’s slide into an Islamic political order first with indifference and then with zeal – imagined this capitulation a decade before the online right began performing it as content. The novel’s title, like the word islam itself, names exactly the gesture this cohort can’t quite bring itself to make. BAP is the clearest example of this dynamic. His Bronze Age Mindset is at once the raw text of online revanchism and a restorationist manifesto whose readers, many of whom overlap with the Islam-curious right, yearn for a civilisation animated by telos and unafraid of transcendence. Yet BAP himself hasn’t converted. He supplies the philosophical scaffolding for those, like Tate and Sneako, who have made the leap he hasn’t, can’t or won’t.
Together, these figures sketch out the ideological silhouette of a movement that treats Islam not as faith but as a frame – a kind of blueprint for revivalism. Their admiration is selective, symbolic and opportunistic, yet it tells us something profound. In a culture where religion has been reduced to preference and identity to performance, Islam emerges as a placeholder for what the West has lost or forgotten: purpose, clarity, an unfractured metaphysics, and a community, umma, bound by something more durable than individual preference. Whether converted or simply converted-on-camera, these men are not returning to God. They are reacting to a decadence bemoaned by more mainstream conservative voices from Douthat to Vance, and doing so with the tools at hand. (Nor are segments of the online left immune to this logic, as the curated masculinity and ascetic cosplay of Hasan Piker suggests.)
But the irony of their positioning is structural and terminal. Because what these figures have actually embraced is Islam minus the… Islam: submission without submitting, the aesthetic of discipline without its labours, patriarchy without piety. And they do all of this on TikTok and Telegram – the very platforms they hold responsible for Western decline. In seeking metaphysical rescue, in other words, this particular slice of the new right hasn’t escaped decadence, they have consummated it. Tate’s self-help didactics have the fervour of Frank TJ Mackey (a motivational speaker and pick-up artist) in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, only without any of the self-awareness Tom Cruise’s character discovers at his father’s deathbed. BAP’s archness is so sustained it collapses into its own kind of camp. And the Larp-ish pieties of the influencers in their combined wake are less a restoration than a re-enactment produced for an audience of disaffected young men who consume it between sets at the gym. These aren’t opponents of decadence so much as decadence’s most recent and least self-aware products.
Tate, Sneako and BAP’s Islamophilia only makes full sense when we see what it’s not-so-secretly against. These figures admire Islam, finally, as the opposite of something else. That something, of course, is Jewishness, or rather, a fantasy of Jewishness as representative of urbanity, irony, abstraction and the corrosion of civilisational virility. Islam is valuable in this equation because it’s everything Jewishness allegedly isn’t: embodied where Jewishness is cerebral, martial where Jewishness is lawyerly, certain where Jewishness equivocates. The online right’s rejection of liberalism, secularism and therapeutic pluralism is real, but disguises something simpler: the conviction that the Jews did this. Islam, in this telling, is the cure not because it is holy but because it is the opposite of Jewishness. Islam, in this account, has resisted the West’s hollowing. This is what Tate means when he calls it the last real religion.
BAP is the clearest example of how this works, and the most (ironically) instructive, given his own half-Jewish heritage. He never names the Jews directly but nor does he need to. His followers know what his unique diction means – “bugmen”, for example – and many of them say it plainly where he won’t. What BAP provides is a philosophical vocabulary for antisemitism that appears to be merely a metaphysics of vitality. Some people(s) have this vitality and others drain it. Islam – particularly in its Iranian, Turkish or Gulf state forms – becomes his exhibit A of those who have it. BAP allows his followers to draw their own conclusions about who drained ours.
In this way, the New Right’s Islamophilia isn’t so different from the neoconservatives’ Islamophobia. Both compulsively position Islam as a surrogate for cultural health. But where the Huntingtonian neocons depicted Islam as civilisation’s outside and other, the New Right sees it as civilisation’s last bulwark. In the latter’s telling, the real threat to the West isn’t in Iran, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but in Israel and its alleged fifth-column operatives here in the West. In this revision, they revive the German Dolchstoßlegende – that is, the stab-in-the-back myth – in which noble cultures are undone by parasites within. What this online right has embraced, then, isn’t really Islam. It’s that religion’s fetishised silhouette.
[Further reading: The closing of the Anglophile mind]
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Subscribe here to commentThe Enemy Was Never a Civilization
Travis Alexander has spotted a real inversion. Parts of the online right now treat Islam—usually through a postcard of the Islamic Republic—as proof that the West is finished: hollow, infertile, incapable of seriousness. That is a sharper break with neoconservatism than it first looks. The same civilization once cast as an existential threat is recast as the last community that still believes in itself. Alexander is right to find this strange. He is also right not to flatter his own side.
The fetish, however, is only the mirror of the older hostility. Both turn a region of states, classes and unmet needs into a moral emblem. For much of the postwar period, Western policy in the Middle East did not require a theology of Islam so much as a workable antagonist. A simplified “Islamist” threat licensed partnerships with compliant strongmen, postponed political settlement, and kept the region in a condition of managed unrest. Control of sea lanes and the disruption of overland alternatives have long shaped that habit. The costs are not abstract. Millions in the Arab world have been left without security of water, food or a credible horizon of peace; voters in the West now feel the same squeeze in daily life. Extremism grows in the gap.
What looks like civilizational drama is often anti-solutionism: the preference for managing conflict over ending it. Prolonged instability has been more reliable for a narrow set of political and commercial interests than for Israelis, Palestinians or neighboring societies. Using any one leader—Netanyahu included—as an instrument of delay is not a defense of any people. It is a refusal to close the file.
A more ordinary diplomacy would treat peace as a material interest, not a sermon. Saudi Arabia’s turn toward development and coalition-building, and pressure for a Gaza withdrawal that can open a political track, are modest signs that settlement can be made to pay. The online right’s new romance with Islam will not deliver that. Neither will the older reflex of inventing an enemy large enough to organize a foreign policy.
Civilizations make poor mascots. Incentives do not.
@TurkiFRasheed