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Contra Nick Fuentes, Hitler, Nazis on Antisemitism: An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright.
Over the past several years I’ve come to terms with accepting the reality of HBD and its implications on my political views. Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level: Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.
The left-leaning, mainstream-media-liberal explanation for these observations in the disparity between group outcomes seem to… not notice it at all. When mainstream media liberals are reluctantly forced to explain these differences in outcomes they will blame a “bad environment” or blame white people for the legacy of colonialism. These hypotheses both reject the agency that minorities have over their own wellbeing and ignore the vast amount of data in intelligence research and group differences in psychology that predict the bad outcomes that we observe.
I think that understanding HBD just means that you realize that bad people CAUSE bad environments, not the other way around. The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
While it’s obviously social, romantic, and career suicide for any individual to openly admit that they understand HBD (i.e. admit that they’re racist), the Right at the very least tends to adopts policies that people who are openly racist would support. The right tends to support stricter immigration laws, harsher penalties for violent criminals, and to support law enforcement in their goals of catching and deporting people who are here illegally. As a HBD understander, I like these policies.
While many metrics paint the western world as the most divided it has ever been, there is something that the right and left both seem to find agreement on recently: hating Jews. Young people in particular and especially in academia are supporting antisemitic beliefs in America at record rates probably not seen since 1930’s - not only about Israel the state but also about Jews the people.
If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us. The tax revenue from those high earning Jews can go to investing in roads, schools, healthcare, food stamps, social security, public housing, and other government benefits that make Western countries so great to live in. I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.
Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.
But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism. And this makes me especially sad because I would otherwise call the political right my ideological allies on every other issue. The rising popularity of Nick Fuentes obviously is the most noteworthy example, and of course being an intellectually curious person I have listened to several hours of Nick talk about Jews. His main criticisms seem to be over the US’s support of Israel, as well as the undue influence that Jews have over US policymaking. And most critically, Nick believes that the Jews are using that influence to try to tear down the West.
My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.
Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.
For the most part, I agree with Nick’s “America First” agenda. So you could convince me to axe the “give free stuff to Israel” from the US’s budget. But Nick getting so nonsensically angry over such a small line item on our nation’s balance sheet is just wildly disproportionate. I don’t really care about giving a small amount of money to Israel.
What I do care about is that the government of every Western country is stealing money from the productive White/Asian/Jewish middle class (via tax dollars) only to give that money to dozens of immigration non-profits. These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.
Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.
The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.
Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.
Tl;dr: Nick Fuentes is wrong. Happy Hanukkah. Be nice to Jews, and definitely don’t put them in gas chambers.
The problem is that this whole «human capital» philosophy that treats humans as interchangeable stuffing of different grades in the American pie is premised on some extremely degenerate assumptions about human nature at this point.
I notice you don't mention China except as something to beat, while extolling «Japanese», «Taiwanese» and «Asians». It's peculiar because of course Taiwanese are Chinese, most American [East] Asians are Chinese, and indeed, they're doing very well! Low crime, high SAT, sizable tax contribution, and as I've said in my last long post, when an American Jew (Zuckerberg) wants to build an American Superintelligence Lab, 20 out of 30 research scientists turn out to be Han Chinese. In fact, 18 of them even hold PRC citizenship. This is about how it looked at the absolute peak of Jewish dominance in the American cognitive elite.
And yet, and yet – the US is having a decade-long meltdown about strategic competition with China. Even these researchers are suspected as potential spies who'll leak our precious inventions (their own work, largely) to the Red Dragon. There's a lot of vitriol directed at the Chinese, smoothed over with unconvincing noises to the effect of «no no I don't hate Han people, love my Hapa children, much beautiful ancient culture, wow very friendly very nice, I hate the CCP [also nuke three gorges dam]». Well, but the CCP is made of 100 million Chinese people, it has a sky-high approval rating (no it's not fake), and it genuinely represents their collective will to be a successful race, a superpower with hegemonic potential, rather than an assembly floor and source of high-skilled labor for Americans (including Jews).
White people like (presumably) you, people who buy into this «human capital» doctrine, are simply people. Chinese and Jewish people are a people, and in their own cultural frame even the People – a distinction which is a bit better articulated than in many other cultures, but in no way an abnormal way of thinking. They are ethnocentric. Goys and barbarians are not part of the people, and the people will coordinate to achieve collective gain in zero-sum games with barbarians and goys. That's table stakes for a self-aware successful culture.
What kind of war against Islam are you envisioning? It's pretty funny because militarily, Islam is not a threat to the West at all and has no potential to become a threat. It is, of course, a moderate but real threat to Israel, which is why pro-Israeli actors will hype up the Islamic threat to try and have you fight their wars. The Saudi money works, if it does, because your ruling class is hilariously corrupt and disinterested in the long-term prosperity of the populace. The main danger scenario is illustrated by the case of the UK, with slow population replacement by a mix of different immigrant groups and the low-status people (low human capital, so much less interesting for «the UK» than Jews or Asians) converting to Islam out of desperation. To stop this, you don't really need high-IQ Jewish generals and nuclear scientists, you need to learn to think of yourselves as «a people» that have intrinsic worth not denominated in tax returns or exam scores. But that's at odds with those very «values» you hope to have the Jews protect for you.
All of this is very mush-headed. There's no need to antagonize any ethnic group or reject cooperation, but there is a necessity to acknowledge that major nations represent essentially ethnic interests that are partially shared by their diasporas, and there is not a single non-Western nation that is straight up invested in propping up the West for «values» or whatever. Including Israel. All alliances will be alliances of convenience.
Maybe it's downstream of deep Christian roots but this is not how we, the liberals, want things to be. There is no contradiction between liking chinese people and disliking one institution that they are currently forming(of course as you note the CCP isn't even the only largely Han Chinese ethnic government), any more than there would be with liking German people and opposing the Nazis. The Chinese people have had previous governments, and so have us westerns. Not only are there obviously previous American presidencies that I oppose, in many ways I oppose the current one. And yet I love my people, I love America and Americans. I love our optimism, the puritan work ethic, the celebration of success. Many of these same great qualities I recognize in the Chinese people I have met.
To the degree that Fuentes strikes a cord against Israeli/Jewish influence it's because it's deep in our marrow that ethnocentrism is evil. And that's why he will ultimately fail. He makes Americans feel uncomfortable dissonance about their gut deep opposition to ethnic centrism and the obvious ethnocentrism of israel, Israel itself being made up of the world's most famous victims of ethnocentrism, But that same energy he's using to drum up resentment of israeli influence is what he opposes. It's why he has to ride the line of praising the jews for serving their ethnic interests as he opposes them. In his preferred world view there is absolutely nothing wrong with scheming in your ethnic interest. I don't think he will be able to turn the Americans in this way, I don't think that's in our souls.
Your post is passive just descriptive. Do you endorse ethno nationalism or just observe it? In my favorite post of yours you once said
What is that monster we sustain? What is it that you hope to see vanquish it and take its place? Could it truly be this cynical ethno nationalist? And if not what?
I will answer thusly.
My default moral intuitions aren't that different from modal American ones 50 or so years ago. Russia is a multiethnic society, clearly defined by one ethnos and culture (mine, to a first approximation), which does not possess the instinct or inclination for clannish diasporic behavior. We are more ethnocentric than modern Westerners but not by far. We assimilate easily in Western societies, find them an upgrade to our own, and generally agree with the way of the West, whereas the ways of The Rest are seen as unfair and backward, if demonstrably adaptive on the personal and sometimes collective level. Ethnocentrism specifically has been investigated in a toy model I like, by one Artem Kaznatcheev and friends, in Canada in 2013, and the conclusion was that it “…eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates”. Intellectually, then, it appears necessary to develop a system that can defend that superior humanitarian way, and the unpalatable conclusion is that in practice it amounts to something not unlike ethnocentrism – aggressive policing of defectors, attention to proxy metrics of defection, operational presumption of non-assimilation, and rejection of comforting lies about universality and natural attractiveness of preferred values. Western experiment with mass immigration and “race-blind meritocracy” is clearly a cheap hack motivated by Western cognitive biases, myopic financial considerations and such, not any concern for long-term preservation of the Way. Similar thoughts are common for sympathetic peoples on the periphery of Western civilization, which is why we see Slavs, assimilated Jews, Moldovans and so on disproportionately represented among the European right.
On a more philosophical level, I don't know. Ethnocentrism is a crude but effective means to preserve the intrinsic direction of a people, it increases the activation energy for changing course, and lets the direction be explored further. Moral intuitions aside, I'm not convinced that the Western direction is truly superior; it would be premature to say so.
I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good — real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts. Why is diversity good? I consider great men of history to be scientists, and civilizations to be ongoing longitudinal natural experiments – about the limits of human nature, society, what kinds of minds should be incentivized to develop, what notions of goodness are viable and lead to more adaptive behavior, better instrumental outcomes and, in the limit, to greater collective and individual flourishing. Some experiments achieve negative results, invalidating the hypothesis for observers, but it's always a pity if this happens for contingent reasons like a natural disaster, or an opportunistic alliance, or luck of the draw in relative timing of access to some preexisting technology. I am distraught at being unable to know how failed civilizations could have developed to their “mature” stage, given a couple more millennia of literacy and a handful of extra IQ points, or passing a good reform, or contacting a powerful idea earlier; where would they have met their ceiling. When possible, one should run experiments in controlled conditions, after all.
The West is a beautiful experiment, plausibly the most successful that has ever been proposed. Its core thesis, stripped of the ever-changing scaffolding, is something like “human nature inherently has the spark of God's love and wisdom, therefore individual freedom is good and barriers to its realization are at worst prejudices, at best training wheels and must be systematically removed”. It's been working very well. But this near-genocidal desire to universalize the way smells less and less like sincere proselytism, and more like anxiety, fear of the hypothesis getting falsified. The truth is, the West has no clue as to what made or makes it work, beyond currently-commoditized pieces like capitalism (but whence capitalism? If “because freedom”, why does it port to societies that don't adopt the rest of the package?) Americans sometimes boast of “nation-building” Germany and Japan, developing “institutions”, and that reveals the hollowness and vulgarity of the doctrine. Germany and Japan, seriously? Japan got destroyed in the first place precisely because it got competitive, while remaining philosophically largely alien; Germany was actively advancing a divergent branch of the Western thesis. And today, both these nations are deeply troubled. Nation-building in less performant societies has a dismal track record. The West doesn't really know what to teach others so that it sticks. Really, what made the West into what it is, what was the generative function behind those generically adaptive innovations? Christendom (adopted Middle Eastern teaching, effectively dead now)? “HBD” in the sense of high IQ and conscientiousness – OK but why did it happen, just deep time migration patterns, cold winters, founder effects? What's the lesson here, pray to RNG? Galton-style Social Darwinism, Gregory Clark's Anglo class eugenics (grotesquely replaced with education-mediated assortative mating, also largely dead, and their practical implications made taboo in the resultant society)? “High trust” and non-kin cooperation by default (as covered here, a giant exploit for people who practice kin cooperation, and thus a mere bootstrap phase)? Science? Everyone above 95-ish median IQ can do science. The discovery was invaluable, but can “the West” come up with anything of that caliber ever again? Rather, can you even do what you used to do? We seem to be near the end of the session. Do you even know if you want to live? When you have full automation, will you put forward an argument for not just exercising your freedom to pass away replacing yourselves with machines, like you're currently doing with immigrants? Of what nature will that argument be?
China is another large old civilization. They've been running their own experiments. Their most enduring research program is Confucian. At the risk of butchering it, Confucianism says something like “humans aren't very good and are prone to self-interested behavior. Individual humans are not even human, they can only be elevated from monkeys via social context, and even then they default to barbarianism. But if compelled to cultivate “virtue”, starting on the mundane level of filial piety, hierarchical propriety and standardized ritual, escalating to mental discipline and scholarship, if rewarded with reproductive opportunity for utmost compliance, if the peace is maintained for many generations – they can build hierarchical societies of unbounded scale and splendor; and eventually, more of them become Superior Persons capable of and entitled to correct independent moral reasoning, and those will ennoble everyone else”.
It is debatable how seriously that has been pursued, but I'd say at least as seriously as the Christian/Western program. Both have undergone course corrections that arguably reflect growing out of their scaffolding and purify the original strategy. The West going from theism to deism to non-superstitious interest in the Universe, generalizing the validity of “love” and “freedom” beyond traditional norms. The East purging “thieves of virtue” along with ossified ritual and adopting a more common-sensical epistemology. To an extent this can be decried as trivialization and loss of function on both sides. There's been substantial convergence, but the divergent bits are what's at stake. Right now, I think the Eastern project is showing more promise, and the West is no longer in a position to lecture them on how to steer it. They're more ethnocentric? Less individualistic? They're authoritarian? Their society feels wrong? OK, I hear you. But they're solving social trust, they're solving – in their own way, less charismatic and more transactional – international relations, they're even solving creative expression, while having solved long-term large-scale coordination to a greater extent. And crucially, this isn't their first rodeo, they've had massive collapses and comebacks, they're the only major player that has a sophisticated applied discourse about civilizational recovery. Isn't it saying something that they've fallen behind, failed catastrophically, but have recovered, denied you the option of converting them, and are again pursuing their own program? Isn't it exciting that another solution can exist? Aren't you curious of where it will peak? Of course, they're doing well enough that another questions, for example “how much of the light cone will we be able to claim at this rate” are becoming salient for savvy observers. So it is necessary that they be treated as competitors, not just an interesting alternative path.
Jews, likewise, are a unique research program. They have an insular doctrine of their exceptionalism and special nature of themselves as “the people of God”, their moral obligation to biologically and culturally perpetuate themselves, a very long story of surviving and adapting, institutions built for venerating and reproductively rewarding exceptional individuals who have superior insight into God's will, they're punching so far above their weight that it's almost comical… and all of that hinges on extreme, almost naive ethnocentrism. They've mixed with Western peoples, experienced some assimilation, and now we're watching them return to a more traditional (indeed, exxageratedly traditional) form, with large Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox subpopulations having a vast fertility advantage over secular ones which, so long as they exist, provide a bridge to Western decisionmaking, invent spins like “Judeo-Christian liberal democratic values” and “our common Islamic/Communist/Han enemy”, and generally add confusion (partially their own). It doesn't take a genius to recognize that this research program, while fascinating on its own, can derail the Western one, and on top of your own dysfunction and anxious miscalculations it can create very ugly outcomes. We've seen trial runs in the Middle East, and the worst part is that you can barely articulate that it was mostly about them, not your “strategic interest” or oil or some other bullshit. So they, too, ought to be treated as competitors. It's okay, they can take it.
That's pretty much all relevant live players; smaller or less coherent players, who have a latent opportunity to expand their niche, are also more ethnocentric. The West is uniquely non-ethnocentric and has unique moral narcissism about this fact, largely owed to successes of the last several centuries. I think the jury is out on whether this system is sustainable or has the highest ceiling, and you're not entitled to try and “enlighten” others, but you're clearly valuable enough to think of how you can preserve and improve your program in a world of ethnocentrists, and that's what you should be doing now.
Spawn a great man or something, I don't know.
There's a lot here, thank you for the reply. Your analysis of the various 'peoples' is interesting. I find a lot of it compelling but, as a true believer in my people's experiment - and how lost I'd be if I weren't, I suppose this is how a practicing and believing christian must feel when they are baffled by how atheists can function without god - I do find things to disagree on. I'll have to digest it before that pushback can come up in some future engagement.
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