How do you solve a problem like Nick Fuentes, the racist dateless wonder whose stratospheric online rise has tickled the Zoomer right, horrified the Boomer sensibles and – until now – left the rest of our news feeds blissfully unmolested?
Once a fringe figure on the American right, this neo-fascist gnome has now become an unignorable topic in The Discourse. The Fuentes Question has roiled American conservatives, following his appearances on more mainstream right-wing podcasts, in which the streamer has presented a more reasonable version of himself, while faux-naïf hosts like Tucker Carlson have let him.
The origin story goes something like this. Fuentes was a lower-middle-class kid from a Chicago suburb. He was radicalised by Donald Trump and his America First credo, before morphing into the Adderall Generation’s answer to Lord Haw-Haw, spewing a joking-not-joking racism, Jew hatred and misogyny to his giggling fanboys, all at 100mph. He has also argued for a form of Christian dictatorship – to ‘take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe’.
Piers Morgan had him on his YouTube show this week, in an attempt to OWN Fuentes, or at least make him own his fetid little tirades, which he has tried to downplay as dark humour with a grain of truth. It was, to put it gently, not an entirely fruitful exercise. If the aim was to show us Fuentes is scum, mission accomplished. If the aim was to discredit him in view of his admirers, it backfired spectacularly.
Morgan played clip after clip from Fuentes’s Rumble show – ‘Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise’ is a particularly pungent example – before asking him ‘so you’re a racist, then?’, or some such. To which Fuentes usually assented. On and on it went, for two full hours of my life that I will sadly never get back.
Morgan performed something of a service in proving that, after years of everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton being called a fascist, Fuentes is the real deal. Not least because Fuentes himself plays a double game. As the Free Press’s Coleman Hughes has shown, he routinely says one thing to his followers and another on other influencers’ podcasts, to make himself more palatable. It also served to knock down Fuentes’s claim that much of what he says is ironic, even though he has openly admitted that this is partly a ruse. ‘Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views’, he said, in a 2020 video. Fascist Taqiyya, if you will.
Still, you can’t shame the shameless. If nothing else, When Piers Met Nick demonstrated the limits of pearl-clutching when it comes to confronting this new breed of Very Online racism. Condemning these weirdos’ views is necessary, but ultimately insufficient. After all, they are actually racists. They get off on the outrage and the gasps. They also extract a certain nihilistic glee from saying the worst thing imaginable, even if they don’t totally mean it. It’s infantile, for sure. Fuentes, 27, is a teenage edgelord still struggling to escape his gamer chair. But a telling-off won’t cut it.
Nor will clampdowns. Fuentes is testament to this. He has been deplatformed by everyone from YouTube to Airbnb. He had his bank account frozen in the wake of the ‘January 6’ riot, where Trump’s more harebrained followers stormed the Capitol, convinced the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’. (The diminutive Fuentes, proving he is all mouth and no trousers, urged a crowd to ‘break down the barriers and disregard the police’, but didn’t enter the building himself.) All of it raised his profile; lent him the frisson of dissidence.
What we need is a reckoning with identity politics. Fuentes hardly speaks for a whole generation of disaffected young men, but he has been lent some fertile ground at the edges. Generation Z were force-fed woke grievance politics, and chastised if they dissented. They were told group identity is great, with the exception of white group identity. Young men were told men weren’t shit. The hysterical overuse of ‘far right’ and ‘racist’, in turn, insulated a portion of young people from these forms of censure. No wonder some grifting upstarts have managed to make hay out of this.
We also need to go on the offensive against this particular faction of right identitarians. That means pushing back on their racial essentialism and BS statistics. (Piers, bless him, didn’t make the best fist of the latter, leading to a painful digression about per-capita crime rates.) But it also means pointing out how pathetic – as well as bigoted – all of it is. Just as the wokesters blame all of their problems on white supremacy, and the Jews, the new racist right blames all of their problems on anti-whiteness, and the Jews. It’s a dumb racialisation of deeper material and cultural problems, and an embrace of babyish victimhood to boot.
As for the misogyny, I for one am shocked that someone who has never so much as touched a woman seems to hate them so much. The best part of the interview was when Morgan straight up asked Fuentes if he is a virgin. (Reader, he is.) Personally, I’d have been tempted to open with that. We can and should talk about how #MeToo or victim feminism or the explosion of online pornography has poisoned relations between the sexes. But the self-pitying rage of the sexless young man is a story as old as time.
Perhaps the barmiest claim made about Fuentes is that he is the next stage of the populist revolt – a take that serves to both flatter his ego and vindicate the fever dreams of the anti-populist set. Apparently, when a multiracial coalition rebelled against the undemocratic elites at the ballot box, when parents showed up at school boards to stop critical race theory and gender ideology being preached to their children, when ordinary Americans expressed their horror at Big Tech firms silencing speech at the behest of the government, what they were really hankering for was to be ruled by a ‘Catholic Taliban’, to use Fuentes’s phrase – for someone in power to tell them what to do, put women back in their box and divide up society by race, only in a more vintage, reactionary fashion. Democracy, freedom of speech, genuine equality – these are the popular causes of our time. Nick Fuentes is only a clownish mirror image of everything that Americans have been rebelling against.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_
