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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Nick Fuentes is probably the second most important person to watch on the Republican side after Trump himself. He has a lot of "energy", and has the benefit of being extremely online. People keep making the mistake that the "real world" is more important than a small fringe of online crazies, and they keep getting proven wrong over and over and over (e.g. with woke, the alt right, gender identity on Tumblr). The arc of MAGA is long, but it bends towards Based.

I know very little about Fuentes himself, but the analysis here seems wrong. The alt-right, as best as I can tell, has had pretty much no impact in actual policy and very little in terms of national discourse around politics and ideology. Which is as expected from a small fringe of online crazies.

The "woke," and gender identity on Tumblr (subset or, at best, nearly fully overlapping set with "woke"), on the other hand, have obviously had immense and consequential influence in both, and this is due to the fact that they weren't a small fringe of online crazies. Rather, by the time this sort of argument was created to shut down the people trying to bring attention to the anti-liberalism of the ideology that would go on to evolve to something called "woke," ie around early 2010s, it had already been hegemonic in academia for at least a decade and nearly ubiquitous for multiple decades, with plenty of signs of mainstream journalism and mainstream entertainment getting bought in.

So things correctly labeled as a small fringe of online crazies had little impact on real world politics and the everyday life that it influences, while things incorrectly labeled as such did have big impact.

Maybe this Fuentes character's ideas will break into the mainstream over the next 3 years, but so far, him being just a big fish in a small, fringe, online, crazy pond doesn't make me think he's particularly worth paying attention to with respect to national politics.