Fuentes: political grifter

Nick Fuentes

I’m going to assume you know who Nick Fuentes is. If you don’t, he’s a loudmouth American pundit - and a very dangerous one. He’s in the news following an interview with Piers Morgan. You should take the time to familiarise yourself with his ideas. You can watch this video for starters - which is the basis of this post.

I can see why this stuff is so seductive in that I’ve made a lot of these points myself over the last few years - particularly on globalisation, decline and mass immigration. Of concern, though, is the scapegoating of Jews and the wholesale rejection of the lessons of the Holocaust. We *should* measure our actions in the present against the past precisely because we never want to see that ever again.

But if you’re not going to learn those lessons, and you still think Hitler is “cool” then take a moment to recall how that panned out for Germany. Hitler was an incompetent commander, both paranoid and delusional, and his obsession with Jews is precisely what derailed the Nazi project - along with his imperialistic fantasies.

Regardless of all that, though, this is an American pundit talking about the American experience, and it does not transpose onto Britain. Though I don’t generally devote much time to American politics, where this becomes a concern to me is when I see these narratives being transposed into British politics the same way the left imported woke ideology. We’re seeing a surge of antisemitism on the right, where the right is losing sight of actual problems (and their causes) to indulge in naked Jew hatred and scapegoating, most of it based on classic antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories stitched together through selection bias.

We’ve only seen this on the fringes, but it’s growing on X. Whatever superficially plausible narratives Fuentes cooks up, this is a man who is happy to play midwife to a resurgence of Nazism - because he’s a nihilistic troll. He gets off on opening the door to evil.

I do try to engage in the arguments, because the foundation of Fuentes’s thesis is not entirely baseless. There is a debate to be had about disproportionate Jewish representation in US institutions and finding of cultural institutions. It is an American debate to be had by Americans. Britain has its own distinct politics - and we should not use the American debate as an intellectual framework for our own. The conduct of the British establishment is not explained by reductive arguments about Jewish influence.

Some attempt to argue that it is, particularly on the far right, where the narratives and economic ideas start bending toward the left (horseshoe theory). They start off with superficially plausible arguments but it doesn’t take long before it descends into 9/11 conspiracy theories and claiming Mossad is behind everything up to and including the British weather. It’s at that point you know who and what you’re dealing with. The plausible arguments put forth by Fuentes et al are just a smokescreen for Jew hate.

The reason this stuff is popular is because people tend to like reductive explanations for the way things are and they like having someone or something to blame. Tell me who you blame and I’ll tell you your politics. For the far left it’s “billionaires”, for the midwit left wing progressives it’s “Russia”, for the civnat right it’s the WEF and “Globalists” and for the ethnat right it’s “The Joos”.

I’ve challenged these narratives recently. I don’t think billionaires are to blame for “inequality”, I don’t think Russia is behind calls for Ukraine to pause the conflict, the importance of the WEF is overstated, and the Jewish influence debate in the UK doesn’t have direct application to British politics. Britain is in a mess for a lot of reasons, and for the most part we are the authors of our own misfortunes.

Of course, I’m then accused of being a “zionist” - which is laughable. I just don’t like lazy, simplistic narratives. This is exactly the same basis upon which I attack populists because their shtick is equally intellectually threadbare.

I can take on board some of the points made. It’s become all too common to tar anyone on the right as a Nazi, which is a shorthand to associate any immigration restrictionism with the Holocaust, and this is dishonest and cynical, and they’ve done it so often that they’ve worn it out, which is why you get the likes of Fuentes who say they simply “don’t give a fuck”.

I get that. I also get it that legacy Jewish advocacy groups are used as sock puppets in this kind of politics, as we have seen with the hounding of Farage this week following allegations of schoolboy age racism. We see this dynamic on steroids in the USA, but it’s peripheral to UK politics. The British left and the establishment have a different playbook. For them it’s all about altruism and being a “decent person”. It’s pure narcissism at work. They attempt to brand Farage and Reform as “far right” but it doesn’t work - not because people “don’t give a fuck” but because it’s so patently not true - especially when the core of the new right is broadly pro-Israel and civic nationalist. For the far right label to stick, it would have to have some basis in reality.

For me, the antisemitism creeping in on the right is of itself quite objectionable, but it offends me on a much more autistic level in that it simply does not offer an accurate diagnosis or any solutions. Antisemitism is the clearest indicator of mediocre intellect and sub-GCSE comprehension skills and reasoning ability. Moreover, it is actually far right. The groyper accounts on here pushing remigration, don’t just want to deport all illegals and unproductive third worlders. For them, remigration must also include integrated and naturalised Jews. Not only that, the removal of Jews is their top priority. It occupies their every waking moment - and now their leading lights are trying to rehabilitate Hitler and they’re dabbling in Holocaust denial. It turns out that while not everyone the left call a Nazi is a Nazi, rather a lot of them are these days - and Fuentes is their smokescreen.

Thinking about this further, it’s worth some analysis of what Fuentes *actually* says. The following is a direct quote:

“Our country is going to shit. Every knows it, that’s the bottom line. Bigger than all of this is a very simple idea. The simplest, most fundamental idea is this... everything is going to shit. We all know how things used to be - because we’ve seen the videos. It’s like a portal to another universe. We’ve seen the videos of [American cities] in the forties and fifties and we see what it was like. And we see what we could have had - and it’s lost - it’s gone - and everyone knows it. Everyone knows it’s gotten worse. --- And we know exactly why. Because in 1969, MLK Junior got shot, and race riots destroyed all those cities. Detroit was the Paris of the midwest. Now it’s a fucking dump. And then, after all the cities got turned into a dump, and the whites fled, then they poured the immigrants in, and then for fifty years we were subjected to wave after wave, unrelecting, of immigrants that we did not desire - that are not making our country better”.

Here he pins decline on a single cause. Only the decline of American cities was gradual, then all at once - for a number of reasons. It’s interesting he mentions Detroit. He’s misreading what happened.

The sixties saw a white flight because of a growing middle class - taking tax revenue with them to the suburbs. That didn’t happen for black worker. Black workers were often confined to the toughest, lowest-paying jobs - even in the auto industry, leading to intense racial tensions and militant union activity like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. (fascinating rabbithole)

The subsequent history of the Detroit economy was one of globalisation and decline. Between militant trade unionism, making bad cars at a high cost, subject to better and cheaper Japanese competition, the industry died on its arse. It’s much the same story as our own car industry.

This story of decline is replicated in a number of American cities, not least the posterchild for American decline, Baltimore. Once a hive of heavy industry which declined from the 1970s onwards - along with the American middle class. The videos Fuentes is looking at is the fag end of the post WW2 manufacturing boom.

The question as to whether America should have opened its borders to international competition is one for economic historians, as is the case in the UK. Thatcher may have done may of the right things for the time, but now things don’t look so rosey. Still, what was done, was done.

Here we should not forget the onset of manufacturing technologies, where robots replaced workers on production lines and skip winding systems could do in a day what would take a thousand miners to produce in a week. Then by the eighties and early nineties, you has an aspirational middle class who didn’t want to send their kids into factories, steel works and mines - necessitating some immigration. By the mid nineties, globalisation and the era of the WTO was in full effect.

It’s easy to look at videos of the past with misty eyes, but it wasn’t middle class suburbia for everyone. There was still a very poor white urban working class driving rusty shitboxes and living in derelict rowhouses and tenements. This is not one of those Fraser Nelson type articles saying everything is better now, because it clearly isn’t. Fuentes is right in that things are objectively worse - and fentanyl has ravaged the American middle and working class. America’s high trust society is collapsing. Still, though, we should be sceptical of rose tinted nostalgia.

In the new century, we’ve seen politicians desperately attempting to put all these genies back in the bottle, but then we saw mass adoption of the internet which ravaged the high street and now everywhere looks derelict. Nobody is exactly sure what to do about that. And nobody really knows what AI will do. All we do know is that it will exacerbate existing trends.

As such, we’re seeing declining GDP per capita, and growing state debt, all trying to keep the house of cards from collapsing. Politicians were slow to recognise the predatory trade strategy of China, hopeless at reining in their own spending, and failed to get a handle on the military industrial complex. Meanwhile, the free trade economic dogma of the American right (and Clinton) was never reappraised, and they all believed that immigration was an unalloyed good that would keep GDP afloat. A litany of errors.

More recently, as the internet has polarised politics, the west has abandoned old ideas of loyal opposition, and now it’s winner takes all, and there is no longer any such thing as loser’s consent. The politics we are seeing is a substitute for civil war - and there are no rules. That extends to rigging elections and gerrymandering votes - and one way to do this is to simply fling open the borders.

As such, it is easy to understand why MAGA exists. Trump realises that remigration is necessary just to restore elections to a properly American demos. It’s also why DOGE is needed and it’s also why tariffs are needed - and to uncouple from China - in an attempt to restore some of the domestic manufacturing base. But even at full pelt, Trump is not going to “make America great again” if voters believe that to be a restoration to a 1950’s romantic fantasy. You can’t univent technology, you can’t switch off the internet, and not even America can cut China out completely. It’s going to take a new vision and a serious class of thinkers.

For America (and Britain) to become what they have become is the culmination of decades of decline and change. The past is a foreign country. But now we’re in a dangerous era of demagogues (on the left and right) peddling simplistic solutions and scapegoating. The West is at its weakest and enemies foreign and domestic are seeking to exploit the weaknesses. To do this, they use time-honoured tactics of reinventing and recontextualising the past, selling a false prospectus and pointing the finger at any convenient scapegoat.

The danger is that always sound plausible. They wouldn’t rise to power if they didn’t. We have our own version in Farage who tells us all these problems can be fixed with a wave of a magic wand. They always overpromise and underdeliver, feeding the cycle of disappointment, disillusionment and disengagement.

We’re now starting to see that with Trump. Superficially, Trump is doing what he was elected to do, but American white nationalists don’t see it that way. As Trump grapples with the realities of being in power, and finds himself embroiled in the quagmires of American overseas policy, the emergent far right calls for more disengagement, isolationism and authoritarianism. The political opposition becomes the blood enemy, and soon you’re back to conspiracy theories about Jews - blaming them for the downfall.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. We have been here before. We’ve seen these plausible but nihilistic cynics before. What starts with “I’m just asking questions” ends in pogroms.

This is ultimately why I stopped having anything to do with the ethno-right fraternity on this platform. I do believe that remigration is necessary (to an extent), and I do believe it will solve a lot of problems, but ethno-nationalists are increasingly seduced by this American poison, preaching the same myopic isolationism, disengagement, indifferent neutrality, and the same old antisemitism. I’m just not on that bus. I don’t like where it’s going, and more to the point, I’m quite certain there’s something even more sinister behind it.

Yesterday I saw a highly plausible report claiming that robots were boosting Nick Fuentes. His supporters claim the report was funded by Jews therefore it should be disregarded. But I don’t think it can be so easily waved away. I am certain there’s a lot of organic growth, but I’ve seen with my own eyes the legions of low follower unverified groyper accounts, and the AI driven bots are becoming more sophisticated all the time. There are several good reasons why foreign powers would want to stimulate the rise of an isolationist demagogue, so that America withdraws from the world and surrenders the game to its enemies. Certainly, Iran and Pakistan have cause to back an anti-Israel mouthpiece.

Now I know we have seen all this speculation about bots before. Much the same was said about Russian bots causing Brexit - but I never found that especially compelling. The momentum for Brexit was built over two decades in pubs up and down the country. There was enough genuine anti-EU sentiment to swing it, and the public conduct of the remainers pushed it over the line, declaring their naked contempt for the working class. Moreover, Britain leaving the EU wasn’t a geostrategic prize for Russia or anyone else. There is, however, a great deal in it for the basketcase regimes to push for American isolationism. Fuentes is a golden ticket.

I’m not at all taken with Fuentes. Even leaving aside the antisemitism and the juvenile edgelordism, he’s still what my grandad (a Yorkshire farmhand) would have called a shitehawk, and I do know a shitehawk when I see one. I’ve spent a lifetime studying political grifters, and I know I’m looking at one right now.