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Of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, Hanania was right again *
Two months ago, Richard Hanania predicted that Nick Fuentes and the groypers would become a major force in mainstream Republican politics. At the time, there was a fair bit of TheMotte discussion (including by me) which could be described as dismissive. Some choice quotes:
Yeah, about that... A few days ago Nick Fuentes did a full interview with Tucker Carlson. This was a mild surprise at most, given that Tucker has been dabbling in less-than-sympathetic viewpoints on Israel and Jews as of late. A lot of people thought that this would be the nail in the coffin cementing Tucker as a fringe figure, and that his days headlining major conservative events would end.
This appears not to have happened:
The Heritage Foundation is the Conservative Establishment think tank. It doesn't get more mainstream than them. What is striking is that the statement doesn't just contrast America with Israel, it contrasts Christians with Israel, a tacit acknowlegement of the legitimacy of Christian discomfort with Israel specifically because of their rejection of Christ. This isn't quite total groyper victory, but one can see it on the horizon.
From a realpolitik perspective, I think this is bad. The groypers are right that Israel doesn't act in America's interests and that many American Jews have dual loyalty. That's how coalitions work. A few billion dollars in aid and geopolitical cover is a small price to pay for having the ethnic group that controls international finance and global media on your side. Rooting-out infidels might be a good strategy if Christ is King, but if he isn't, and it turns out we're all alone on this big round rock, then the groypers are blowing-up the conservative intelligentsia for no good reason.
*Apparently this is a series now.
The Tucker/Fuentes interview is about to hit 17m views, compared to Tucker's 1.5-2m view recent episodes I checked. Heritage Foundation is definitely bending the knee.
Nick Fuentes is being strategic. The biggest "threat" to the Dissident Right movement is that the Conservative movement integrates these highly credible criticisms, which until now have only come from the DR at great expense and persecution to those who have been making this argument for years (and that's not to take credit from those like Pat Buchanan who have been doing this for decades longer). But at this point it's fair to say the DR is becoming mainstream with the Heritage foundation video being at least as relevant of a signal to that fact as the Fuentes/Carlson interview itself.
I say Fuentes is being strategic because Fuentes is obviously moderating himself recently to ensure he and his movement are included in this integration of these, until now, radical arguments which are going mainstream.
But the Coup de grâce is not merely shedding light on Dual Loyalty and foreign subversion, but to force that same apparatus to confront its sheer hypocrisy when it comes to White Identity versus Jewish Identity. Until now those like Ben Shapiro - "I don't care about the browning of America" and Mark Levin just operate in the zone of this sheer hypocrisy as they have since the 1920s, just dismissing anyone who gives this criticism of their behavior as a crazed antisemite. That's not going to work any more, the cat is out of the bag. The more they double down on that position the more strength they give the underlying criticism that's going mainstream.
Edit: One thing I want to emphasize is the content of the Heritage Foundation's statement:
That is a very significant statement.
What do you make of Fuentes’ embrace of civic nationalism today, the videos of him saying that anyone born in America is an American, that that’s what America First means and so on? It seems like a stunning moderation, but it’s not truly sudden either, he’s been setting it up for several months (even before the Kirk assassination), pushing back against his followers’ violent antisemitic rhetoric in a way he didn’t before, tongue-in-cheek comments about Jews actually being behind a lot of great movies and comedy, gently dressing down his more…violent commenters in the chat. Certainly it’s drawn a hugely negative reaction from many groypers and extreme antisemites who formerly liked him in the last 24 hours on Twitter. I don’t think it’s as simple as just moderating to appeal to Carlson’s audience, because it’s aligned with his own streaming on his own channel recently. Six months ago he was hostile towards Dave Smith, the libertarian anti-zionist and Jewish convert to Christianity, primarily for being ethnically Jewish. Beyond antisemitism, he advocated for the imprisonment and/or expulsion of certainly a substantial proportion, if not the great majority, of black people in America. Today, Fuentes makes the case for what I would consider Bannonite civic nationalism, indeed he’s almost totally aligned with Bannon’s vision of a loosely culturally Christian multiracial conservative coalition.
Tucker too essentially asks Fuentes in the interview, and it’s relatively explicit, “OK, so what do you want to do about it?” and Fuentes says (and I paraphrase loosely) force AIPAC to register as a foreign lobbying organization, ban dual citizens from serving in congress (Randy Fine, announcing legislation that would do just that, said last week that to his knowledge no Jews in Congress are Israeli citizens, so this would be no change), stay out of foreign entanglements and put America first, and that anyone who puts America first (relatively nebulous) is an ally of his. This is a pure Buchananite position, when previously Fuentes was well to the right of Buchanan, who was certainly moderately antisemitic but not in an ‘expel the Jews’ way, which was much more central to groyper messaging.
There was also some minor drama today on Twitter (which I’m sure you saw) about some guy who was full-on “kill them all” rhetoric about Jewish people getting a cop visit, which I think highlights what is increasingly a rather colossal gap between the groyper hardcore and the current Fuentes position.
You are right to perceive Fuentes shifting significantly in that direction, even well before the Kirk assassination, but I don't see it as a moderation. It's influence from Richard Spencerism. People also think Spencer moderated since 2016 but if you actually critically analyze his perspective, it remains among the most radical on the DR. Richard didn't moderate at all, he took the failures of the 2016 Alt Right and developed a new perspective on what ought to be the political aspirations of a radical movement. Fuentes has been heavily influenced in that direction.
The 2016 Alt-Right was a collection of memes, at most you could say the political aspirations were to "keep America majority (or all) White." Well that simply isn't possible, demographic change is baked in the cake. Do White people even need to have a majority to thrive? No, they do not, as Richard has been saying for years "Aryans are a global people" and always have been, the aspiration should not be to build an all-white neighborhood in rural Arkansas it should be pan-Aryan Imperium. And recently Fuentes has essentially adopted this same position, saying the political aspiration is ultimately a "New Rome", which is a pivot from "we just want to live in an all-white country" but not something I would say is moderation. It's actually what I have long-said should be the political objective of a white-identitarian global movement.
And by that analysis, it's myopic to blame subversive Jews purely for the development of multiculturalism; multiculturalism emerged as a managerial tact for maintaining global Empire, especially in the face of the Soviet threat which could capitalize on discontent from marginalized groups. Fuentes cited this directly in the Carlson interview as well.
Building and managing a global Empire does fundamentally require the cooperation and allegiance of non-white groups. Yes I think some Groypers will be made discontent by the overtures towards non-Whites, but that has always been a quirk of Fuentes with this fandom of rap and Kanye West. People joke all the time about how so many Groypers are non-white, but they don't stop to consider how many die-hard Jewish nationalists are non-Jewish themselves (AKA the entire Conservative movement... until now). The fact that there does seem to be an affinity among non-Whites for White Identitarianism is something to be capitalized on, not something to be rejected, as I said 9 months ago here:
And this pivot also doesn't represent much of a moderation on the JQ. Fuentes still maintains that the organized, international Jewish community is collectively responsible for the hostility towards White people deeply embedded in our Culture, and that their animus is motivated by their Jewish identities. That's always been the crucial insight of the "JQ", and Fuentes directly named Jewish identity as an obstacle to America First in his interview with Carlson.
Fuentes is accepting the reality that Global Empire is ultimately an operation that requires cooperation from non-whites, but at the same time we cannot accept the incessant hostility and subversion of White people by current management. That still has to be confronted, and it is being confronted at an effectiveness nobody in the DR really thought possible even optimistically. Enlisting non-Whites, but on vastly different terms than the cultural status quo with respect to the status of non-whites relative to whites, is more of an intelligent and strategic development than it is a moderation.
I think even Fuentes would accept Jews as Allies, as long as they are held to as high a standard of cooperation as Jews enforce on their their non-Jewish Allies.
It’s very possible, if you recategorize Hispanics as white. Now you have a country that’s about 80 percent white.
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