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The remarkable predictive accuracy of Nick Fuentes on the Israel Conflict
I'm sure most here have heard of Nick Fuentes, maybe seen clips where he's said something funny or outrageous. I do not consider myself a follower of Fuentes, I have my criticisms of him and his movement, but I have to give credit to Fuentes for churning out consistently correct predictions.
When it came to the Israeli-Gaza war, Nick Fuentes registered these predictions in this short clip, in summary from just the first 60 seconds:
Nick Fuentes registered these predictions on October 8th, less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Fuentes may have registered the best predictions out of anyone in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7th (feel free to keep me honest here if you think someone else was even more on the money).
Hindsight bias being what it is, the accuracy of Fuente's predictions may seem less impressive than they actually are. But I still remember the huge amount of uncertainty leading up to the Gaza campaign, including a high degree of uncertainty over the strength of Israel's retaliation against Gaza- whether they would show restraint or even put boots on the ground in the first place, and even if they put boots on the ground would it be a relatively short and mostly symbolic campaign. Certainly at the time "Israel is going to ethnically cleans Gaza, provoke escalations from Iranian militias, and widen the conflict to try to draw the US into war with Iran" was a prediction registered by not very many people.
Fuentes drew a huge amount of criticism for vocally opposing Trump's campaign due to his belief that Israel would draw Trump into war with Iran. A lot of that criticism comes from the "Bronze Age Pervert" sphere, and BAP is a sharp critic of Fuentes for Fuente's low-IQ obsession with da Joos. But we can contrast Fuente's sober-minded and accurate predictions with BAP's own incoherent analysis of the conflict he published last week, chalking it up to some old-man syndrome while remaining baffled as to why Israel is pursuing the strategy it has engaged in since the beginning of the conflict.
Nick Fuente's live-stream on Rumble in the aftermath of the US bombing campaign against Iran had something like 66,000 live viewers, with overall viewers on that VOD now around 530k, putting his viewership on par with Ben Shapiro despite the fact Fuentes is banned from YouTube so his content is relegated to a much less mainstream platform.
One of the most remarkable parts of the Ted Cruz / Tucker Carlson debate was that Ted Cruz:
And then, just a few minutes later, Ted Cruz accused Tucker Carlson of being "obsessed with Israel" for Carlson's pointed questions on AIPAC as a foreign lobby. The turnaround of why are you so obsessed coming from someone who just said God has commanded him to support Israel is just a discredited attempt to derail the conversation.
Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.
My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.
It’s just war. It’s even a just war based on any literal thing I can think of in our psyche over the last several decades, much less the last two thousand years.
My prediction is Iran squirreled away its nuclear stuff and they’ll bomb a few bases and we’ll all call it a day - no idea if the regime is falling or not.
And I’m sure Israel wants leaders around them in various countries that don’t want to slaughter them completely.
Fighting Hamas is a just war. Reprisals against civilians, on the other hand, are broadly prohibited. Since Hamas has a vested interest in entangling the two, it is very hard for Israel to keep its hands clean.
The strongest criticisms of Israel involve the parts of it which appear profoundly uninterested in doing so. There are more of these than I would like.
Regardless of intent, every dead civilian lets critics pattern-match to My Lai. That’s the kind of event which shaped the antiwar psyche.
That's basically the first example Bryan Caplan gives in missing moods about why he doesn't trust the war hawks defense of civilian death.
What he expects is more like "It's a sad but necessary drawback to the messy reality of war that sometimes peaceful civilians are swept up as collateral" and yet instead often sees stuff more like "Hell yeah let's wipe them out, the only good [nationality] is a dead one!"
Caplan isn't that much older than I am, so he's mostly seen the same wars I have. These have been predominantly wars in Islamic countries, where his argument doesn't hold much grip on reality. We are talking about Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, now potentially Iran. These are territories where "Death to Israel" holds 90%+ popularity and "Death to America" is only a few clicks behind.
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No, that's just how human psychology works. Earnestly keeping in mind the pain suffered by the innocent in the prosecution of a just/necessary/Good war is just asking for your enemies to act like puppy-killing utility demons. That's what dehumanization is for, so you can fight and win without being hobbled and cripped (and eventually, raped, murdered and genocided) by your own suicidal empathy.
It's the same reason conservatives post Ghibli memes about crying deportees. They are no longer willing to give a shred of concern or credibility for crocodile tears of the people who caused the situation on purpose. Accusations of cruelty are met with mockery, because if you give an inch they'll let in another 50 million unvetted randos.
It's the same reason progressives never, ever, ever express any concern about the feelings and harm they may cause to their outgroup. It's the same reason no one is even bothering to try to use anything like this argument on Hamas or Iran, or their supporters in the US.
Just round the situation off to "blame goes to the aggressor" and win the damn war.
If he says "X happens", a response of "Yeah that's how people work" is an agreement that X happens, is it not?
That can serve as an explanation for why they do it, but it doesn't dispute Caplan's claim whatsoever then, it's in agreement with it! That instead of taking a somber "sad but necessary" view, they appeal to collective guilt and laugh about it.
You frame your comment like a dissent, while the actual substance is the same just under a different framing.
A: "Why is this marathon runner sweating so much? I would expect them to not want to be sweating. Do they not realize that sweating is unpleasant?"
B: "They're sweating because they are running a marathon. The sweat is an adaptive strategy that makes them better at running marathons. If they did not sweat, they would be worse at running marathons, and probably not be able to do so at all."
A: "Isn't that what I just said?"
B: "No. It really isn't."
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Even though they're outlawed and abhorrent, reprisals are still a frequent though unfortunate part of war and occupation. They have happened in many cases without a significant genocidal or ethnic cleansing objective.
True, but they don’t help beat the allegations.
It would be much harder to accuse Israel of genocide if they studiously avoided anything that hit the general populace. Water, power, etc.
But of course that would come at some cost in Israeli lives. Understandably not popular in Israel.
I really don't think it would. I would describe their current conduct as studiously avoiding the general populace, but the nature of the place of combat means even an 'A' student is going to kill or injure a ton of "civilians" (a term I hesitate to use when the population has elected Hamas, and the only people who would have a chance if another election were held were people calling Hamas too soft on killing Jews).
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Sure, and then they couldn't hit Hamas. This is the same Hamas that builds command centers under hospitals, then accuses Israel of war crimes when said command center gets bombed. Anyway, the various violations Israel is accused of are typically either nonsense (that is, there's no such rule in international law) or they are violations of treaties Israel has not agreed to, such as Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Convention.
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I would say that Israel is not treated quite fairly here. Russia is way more indifferent to civilian casualties, they hammer the energy infrastructure of ukraine more, blew up a fucking dam and so on. And yet no one is seriously accusing them of being genocidal.
Israel decided instead of doing the fast, cheap and easy way - cover from end to end with napalm and throw a match, to actually put their men in street and urban fights. And also why no is accusing Egypt of starving Gaza when there is another border there. And in theory this is Egypt territory. And they didn't just throw some dry ice or lpg in the tunnels. Now probably not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they care of PR and anyway they are paying the price of a genocide anyway.
I think "no one" is excluding a lot here: the governments of several NATO member states have made such claims, and the ICC (which admittedly isn't held in the highest esteem everywhere) has issued arrest warrants for Russian leaders on genocide or genocide-adjacent charges.
I'm not suggesting you have to agree with those descriptions, but I think it falls well short of "no one."
Probably I didn't phrase it well. Because those are performative pearl cluthing mostly. I don't believe that anyone smart and informed sincerely believes Putin wants or is committing genocide.
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Ukraine's population is 20x the size of the population of Gaza, but the civilian death toll in Ukraine is 3x lower.
So on a per capita basis, Gazan's are dying at a per capita rate of ~42x higher. My incredibly rough math has 1 civilian death per 3,158 Ukrainian citizens (using 2022 population) versus 1 death per 74 Gazans.
Couple of orders of magnitude there.
What’s the civilian death rate in Bakhmut/mariopol/etc? Ukraine’s land area is pretty big, and life in Gaza and life in bakhmut or chernihiv might be a one to one comparison but live in lviv definitely isn’t.
Also, as I understand it, the government of Ukraine doesn't make it a deliberate tactic to hope their own population gets killed so they can get PR wins which bring international pressure on their behalf.
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Yeah that’s one of the obnoxious aspects of the post-WW2 mythos.
Stop trying to guilt trip me into seeing one side or the other as intrinsically righteous. Everything has to be a “genocide” or an “ethnic cleansing”. Why can’t it just be a fight? Men fight with each other. Always has been always will be.
The difference being Israels exceptional brutality, their politicians using references to biblical genocides and the high civilian death toll.
High Civilian death tolls according to whom.
I have such a hard time determining anything accurate here b/c both sides have major pressure to lie. And very early on Hamas got caught in an apparently blatant lie about a Rocket hitting a hospital, leading to civilian casualties. Note that Gazan authorities ALSO misstated the number of injured and dead!
So now I have to take all their claims with a veritable pound of salt.
Whoops.
And of course the October 7 event was specifically a bunch of Hamas warriors attacking, massacring and kidnapping civilians. So I'm pretty inclined to say "A pox on both your houses" for the duration of the conflict. Yes, I am aware that U.S. tax dollars and weapons are streaming to the Israeli side of the fight.
Finally, the incidents I CAN generally verify include a dude in the U.S. Setting Jews on Fire and another shooting two unarmed Jewish Embassy staffers.
Don't know of any incidents in the U.S. going the other way.
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There is a difference between men fighting one another (Hamas vs. IDF) and men fighting unarmed civilians (Hamas vs. Israelis; IDF vs. random Palestinians).
As much as I would prefer the former, it’s not on the table. Hamas can’t stop hiding behind civilians without getting slaughtered. Israel can’t stop killing civilians without giving Hamas opportunities to slaughter Israelis. Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”
So yes, it’s teetering on the edge of ethnic cleansing. Not because of a psyop to claim righteousness, but because all the remaining options look an awful lot like killing noncombatants and driving them off.
I don’t understand this perspective. Obviously the fair fight is Hamas/palestinian army versus IDF, and Hamas are the ones who refuse to fight it. Therefore, the blood of civilians is entirely on Hamas’ hands.
If throughout history's wars the defeated party's army said ‘we’re not surrendering, we’re just going to do terrorism in civilian clothes now’, genocide would be the routine consequence.
I more or less agree, but I was trying to argue against @Mihow and @Primaprimaprima’s complaint about the term “ethnic cleansing.”
If Israel is fighting a just war, then it has a legal war goal which isn’t ethnic cleansing. Therefore activists who insist otherwise are being disingenuous.
If Israel isn’t fighting a just war, though, its war aims might include things like killing all Palestinians. This is verboten in the post-WW2 world. Naturally, Hamas has made it impossible for Israel to fight without killing some noncombatants and, in doing so, casting doubt on its war aims.
My point is that calling it ethnic cleansing isn’t a sign of mindkilled bad-faith partisanship. It is an intended outcome of Hamas’ strategy.
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