If you’re lucky, you’ve probably never heard of the right-wing writer and Twitter activist Pedro Gonzalez — not until this week, at any rate. I am not so lucky: I encountered him virtually a few years ago on a mutual friend’s Facebook page and was immediately repelled.
Now, though, he’s at the center of a fight between pro-Trump and pro-DeSantis forces on the right. Gonzalez is a DeSantis partisan, and, well, I’ll let Breitbart explain:
Pedro Gonzalez, a rising conservative influencer and politics editor of Chronicles magazine, regularly in 2019 and 2020 sent racist and antisemitic messages, Breitbart News can reveal after reviewing months’ worth of his private messages.
“Yeah like not every Jew is problematic, but the sad fact is that most are,” Gonzalez wrote in one group chat in 2019, for instance.
“I am at the point where I can respect Jews as individuals and like them as individuals, but as a group I see them as problematic,” Gonzalez said in another.
Now: Nobody who has ever followed Gonzalez’s Twitter feed or his various writings is surprised by this news. So I’m not interested into grappling with his racism here, but about the response.
“Give him some grace.”
I’m all for grace. Without it, we’re locked in a perpetual war with each other, forever collecting grievances and heartaches. Forgiveness is good — even in politics. Hopefully, if you’ve read me here, you’ve gotten the vibe that while I disagree with conservatives on most things, I do my level best not to hate them. (I am imperfect at this.) I need grace — not in a religious sense, necessarily, but in my relationships — so I hope to practice it.
On the other hand, “grace” isn’t really the defining feature of the Trumpist/DeSantis right1, is it? In fact the movement seems to deliberately cultivate a “crush your enemies and hear their lamentations” ethos.
Here’s Gonzalez writing in 2021 for American Greatness, the Trumpist website:
Instead of complaining about dirty Democratic political machines and crying to courts about unfair elections, the post-Right must learn to fight dirty and build political machines to serve its own interests.
A precondition to all this is distinguishing between friend and enemy, something that we so far seem incapable of doing properly, in part because the Right has deluded itself with “big tent” thinking. A recent study found political appointees in the Trump Administration were only about 50 percent Republican, compared to more than 80 percent Democratic appointees under Presidents Clinton and Obama. The post-Right must disabuse itself of tolerance as a principle—as the Left has—if it intends to do more than lose with grace and grit.
Thus, the real division is not over which way the river of power really flows, but between reformists and revolutionaries; those who want to merely take over cocktail parties, and those who want to assault, discredit, and replace the culture and the ruling class and the regime it sustains.
Gonzalez, it’s safe to say, has been one of the leading advocates for the “But He Fights” style of politics, where a pugilistic attitude — a determined lack of grace — is the primary qualification for Republican candidates, ahead of competence or smarts or even good ideas. Power, and the determination to get it, are the only things.
It’s possible to read Domenech’s grace appeal as being directed only at the right. In the battle of “us” versus “them,” maybe Domenech wants to remind his friends that “us” should include a large segment of the right. Save the dirty work and ugly stories for the Democrats, right?
Ahem. Here is Gonzalez’s last story for AmGreatness, back in 2021:
Multiple sources have informed American Greatness that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is having an extramarital affair with adviser Corey Lewandowski, who previously served as a campaign manager for Donald Trump. The alleged fling reportedly has continued for months, sources say.
Lewandowski accompanied Noem across the country as she stumped for Trump’s reelection last year. According to South Dakota Republicans, former Noem chief of staff Joshua Shields left, in part, because of Lewandowski’s butting in. Lewandowski, who is married with four children, still has the former president’s ear, which he reportedly uses to Noem’s advantage.
Ugly stuff, directed at somebody ostensibly on the same side of the political aisle. Where was the grace then?
But it’s not surprising that Gonzalez went after Noem, or that some pro-Trump conservatives apparently planted this story with Breitbart. Once you start drawing hard “us” versus “them” lines, it’s easy to keep redrawing those circles smaller and smaller until there’s only a few allies left. If grace is something extended to and received only among friends, well, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for grace.
I am not saying that Gonzalez doesn’t deserve grace2. But there is nothing in the public record that suggests he would extend that grace. He has lived by the BHF ethos. Now he is on the receiving end of it. That’s usually how these things go.
Grace is often — hopefully — accompanied by apologies and amends on the part of the recipient. Gonzalez in the last day or so has nodded in the direction of regret about his racist messages, but that falls short of a real apology. He’s thankful for the grace he’s received already. A genuine repentance would probably mean abandoning entirely the style of politics that he practices. I don’t really expect that.
This can be true of all ideologues across the political spectrum, but we’re talking about Gonzalez right now.
I’m of the opinion, almost certainly shaped by my religious background, that nobody really deserves grace — but that it’s nonetheless often good for both the giver to give and the recipient to receive.