April 21, 2025

In the silence of his prison cell, as Dély explains in his book, Venner came to a realisation that would change the course of French politics. In hindsight, it seems obvious. But, at the time, it represented a paradigm shift. The far-Right would never be the same again.

His realisation was that the far-Right would never gain power through insurrection. Instead, if it hoped to govern someday, it had to win at the ballot box. In modern democracies, violence wasn’t only inefficient — coups, as Venner knew first-hand, could easily fail — but it also turned ordinary people off. The OAS hadn’t managed to keep Algeria in French hands or even boost the cause of French Algeria. “Indiscriminate terrorism is the best way to cut yourself off from a population,” Venner wrote. “It’s a desperate act.”

The far-Right, Venner now believed, had to forsake violence if it was serious about one day implementing its violent project. Drawing on Lenin, he argued that revolution was “less about seizing power than about using it to build a new society”. To do that, the movement needed to develop a coherent ideology and create an organisation to spread that ideology in society.

But — and this is the most important part — the far-Right couldn’t be transparent about its ideology. The reason: ordinary people were brainwashed. “Through permanent one-way propaganda, to which everyone is subjected from childhood,” Venner wrote, “the regime, in its many forms, intoxicates the French people.” The far-Right had to outwit the regime. “A revolutionary struggle, a fight to the death against an all-powerful, wily, experienced adversary, must be fought with ideas and cunning rather than force.”

As such, it was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it. Instead, without abandoning its core tenets, it should adapt its appearance. In Dély’s pithy phrase, the far-Right should “know how to change its attire to better reassure and seduce”.

“It was necessary for the far-Right to hide its true nature. People weren’t ready for it.”
Venner had been mulling this strategy for a while. Back in 1959, when he had founded the Nationalist Party, a violent group which would soon be dissolved, Venner had told new recruits that they should be careful about what they said in public. “Never discuss subjects that may shock newcomers by the way you present them,” he had warned them. “For example, the métèque problem must never in a presentation or a conversation be approached with the perspectives of the crematorium or the soap dish.” In other words, never say that you ultimately want to exterminate all métèques. When you are a fascist, you can kiss but you can never tell.

Shortly after leaving jail in 1962, Venner published his pamphlet. Titled Pour une critique positive (Towards a Positive Criticism), it became a self-help manual for generations of French far-Right activists, for whom Venner is the closest thing they have to an Antonio Gramsci. With his bold, iconoclastic text, he laid the ideological groundwork for the National Rally to become the most popular party in France. And he pioneered the strategy of dédiabolisation that has been at the heart of Marine Le Pen’s political career.

For years now, commentators have marvelled at how Le Pen detoxified the party she inherited from her father, Jean-Marie, a convicted Holocaust denier. In 2015, she even expelled him from the party for making antisemitic comments. Since then, Le Pen has worked hard to soften her rhetoric. For instance, she doesn’t use the loaded term “Great Replacement” anymore; instead, she talks about “mass immigration”. And unlike her erstwhile rival Eric Zemmour, she doesn’t limit herself to talking about the threat of “Islamic extremism”. She has spent considerable time talking about economic issues.

Le Pen has also nurtured a new generation of far-Right leaders who don’t raise their voices or go off-script. With their tailored suits, they look like respectable politicians.

For those who made a great deal of money and attracted large followings over the last half-decade or so railing against all things woke, this is an uncertain moment. Unless they want to lie to themselves, they can’t pretend it’s still 2020 and millions are marching in the memory of George Floyd.

What do those aforementioned two paths look like in practice? They are probably best represented by two prominent activists, Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. Rufo rose to fame as the leader of the movement against critical-race theory, and he has found great influence in the second Trump administration. A longtime conservative, Rufo is now proudly MAGA. Trump’s attacks on higher education are ripped straight from Rufo’s playbook. If he still pretends woke is more dominant than it actually is — to a hammer, everything is a nail — he is at least openly supportive of Trump and understands that what he reaps is what he sows: an administration willing to violate free speech and due process in the name of combating socially progressive causes.

Hanania is, like Rufo, a warrior of anti-woke. Even more extreme, in some ways, he once posted pseudonymously on several white-supremacist and misogynistic websites. If he disavowed that era of his ideological development, he still could be called, based on his public writings, a racist and misogynist. Hanania’s story has a new twist: He is now, unlike Rufo, explicitly anti-Trump. “I think there’s a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working that is unprecedented, at least in our recent history,” Hanania recently told Vox. Admitting, on “pure policy,” there was much he liked when he it came to Trump’s war on DEI, “if you’re looking at where the movement is going, [when it comes to] how political movements and how people in power should behave and act in their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it’s gotten pretty bad.”

Is anti-MAGA a new grift for Hanania? Or is he earnest? It doesn’t matter much; he, like Rufo, has made his public pronouncements, and he is taking the action he sees fit. The more intellectually confused position may be best represented today by Bari Weiss’s Free Press, which can neither strongly denounce Trump like Hanania nor, like Rufo, transition to being a full-throated arm of the conservative movement, like almost all right-wing media. Before Trump was inaugurated again, the Free Press had an obvious niche: There were a good number of centrists and left-leaning liberals who had grown disenchanted with the progressivism of the late 2010s and early 2020s. In retrospect, it was absurd that an opinion piece published in the Times by a sitting senator could trigger the effective firing of a top editor and mass revolts among staff. The performative aspects of woke were exhausting, and they did chill free speech.

But now it’s the federal government plainly attacking speech and behaving lawlessly.