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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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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:

  • The Oct. 7 attack is going to be the tripwire that enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing.
  • Israel is going to conduct a "brutal campaign against Gaza" which they "know Iran has to respond to."
  • In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.
  • This will give Israel an excuse to widen the conflict and "to do what they always wanted to do, which is bomb Iran's nuclear program".
  • This will initiate war between Iran and Israel, and Israel will draw the United States into the war with Iran- Israel brings in the United States to "put Iran in check."
  • This will culminate in an end to the regime in Syria and an end to the regime in Iran.
  • This is the big play Israel is making.

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:

  • Said one of his primary motivations to become Senator was to be Israel's greatest defender.
  • AIPAC is not a strong enough lobby.
  • Said that his support for Israel is personally motivated by God's command in Genesis that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.

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.

My continual take away is that I don’t like war being called ethnic cleansing.

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.

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.

Neither side is willing to let it “just be a fight.”

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.