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Last week we had a conversation about Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes. This week we see two more salvo’s in the conversation:
New York Times: Nick Fuentes Was Charlie Kirk’s Bitter Enemy. Now He’s Becoming His Successor. [Archive]
Ben Shapiro on X [YouTube]:
I attribute some material amount of Trump’s political rise to the mainstream media covering him so much. One, because he drove engagement; two, because I think they thought he’d be easy to beat. Fuentes was catapulted into the mainstream when elements of the media and the left tried to pin the Kirk shooter as a far-right groyper. I didn’t believe Trump would succeed, so maybe I shouldn’t trust myself, but I struggle to believe that Fuentes will actually go mainstream. Shapiro plays many clips of Fuentes. To me, it sounds like Fuentes is joking in some, but I think they are extreme enough that at least most Republicans will be turned off. With Shapiro entering the ring and what my Twitter feed is feeding me, it seems like there are definite battle lines being drawn on the right.
Shapiro’s fellow Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh:
It’s hard for me to gauge “normie” right circles, as before Kirk’s assassination, I couldn’t have definitively differentiated between Kirk’s and Crowder’s campus antics. It seems like Kirk may have been the most influential -if not, very possibly ascendant to be - figure on the right. Not sure through Kirk's sheer influence, but also keeping the coalition together and keeping the more radical wing at bay. I wonder if Trump will weigh in.
One of the crazier things to see here is the normie Jewish response.
Huh?
Yes yes the Jews didn’t kill Jesus they just lobbied the local government to do it for them, which sounds like a Larry David sketch FFS.
Eric Weinstein posted something on twitter the other day attacking the idea of dual loyalty, and pointed out that people asked the same question of Kennedy. Yes Eric, they did. Was it because they were Nazis? Or maybe this is just a reasonable question? Perhaps infinitely more reasonable to ask a Jew than a Catholic when we aren’t sending missiles to the Vatican and I can’t ever move there if I want and there aren’t any senators saying they want to the Vatican’s number one representative in congress?
And then of course there is Ben Shapiro himself, saying his loyalty to America is “backstopped” by the existence of Israel, because if America ever makes him mad he can just leave and go there - but don’t ever dare suggest that he might have dual loyalty.
The duplicity of all of this is staggering.
It amazes me that the dual loyalty argument is never answered by "Israel should listen to America," only by "America should listen to Israel."
One person answered it that way, in a fashion.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/assuring-the-security-of-the-state-of-qatar/
I want to hear it from Shapiro and Weinstein.
There's a reasonable argument that Israeli dual citizenship is no more disloyalty to the United States than being a fan of AJ Brown is disloyalty to the Philadelphia Eagles.
I always just ask the question of “If Country A and Country B went to war, which one would you fight for?”
Rarely have I gotten a solid A or B answer to that question, and even that answer usually comes with 5 minutes of provisos and lawyerly hedging while being pressed.
Mostly the answer is just vaguely outraged spluttering. People are stupid and think the current status quo will last forever because that means their comfortable lives of no sacrifice or loyalty whatsoever will never be intruded upon.
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Fuentes has been in the mainstream of younger conservative political culture for years now imo. Even in the “normie mainstream” he was a trending after his “your body, my choice” remark. He’s definitely becoming more mainstream recently though.
I attribute more to the Fuenteian proto-groypers at 4chan and the_Donald who meme’d him into popular support, pure populist energy against the wishes of Ben Shapiro who conspired with Michelle Fields to create fake controversy to topple his campaign, leading to their resignation from Breitbart. How quickly we forget! Ben Shapiro was very late to supporting Trump and actively fought against him.
Fuentes is a breath of fresh air for disaffected citizens and the undercurrent political culture of the Internet but if I had to pick a constituency to win an election, Ben Shapiro still has more sway in turning out voters for his cause, even though he and I would agree on practically nothing.
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A principle that has served me well for twenty four years: If he calls someone a coward who isn't, don't trust him. This applies regardless of his target's other vices.
Words lose their original meanings quickly when you’re operating with ulterior motives like Ben is here. Calling someone else a coward for platforming a person with views you deem abhorrent when you’re the person who refuses to debate him is… an interesting inversion of the English language.
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It’s hard to do the, “we are principled civic nationalists who believe in the inherent dignity of every human being,” routine when your organization employs Matt Walsh. Walsh believes basically the same things as Fuentes does. The only difference is that Walsh believes that Jews are part of based White Western Civilization, and Fuentes doesn’t. It’s incredibly transparent why Ben Shapiro is taking such a firm stance on this issue in particular. This is why Fuentes is going mainstream.
I consistently see people talking about Matt Walsh like he's some turbo bigot who's openly making insinuations, but upon inspection of any of these claims they always seem to just...fall apart? Like today he kinda went viral with a list of things he thinks Republicans need to pass. And it was like all sorts of reasonable things like dismantling SNAP entirely, banning people from holding public office if they have a citizenship from another country that hasn't been renounced, requiring English literacy to run for office, banning immigrants from countries where >10% of immigrants from said country are receiving public benefits.
Other times he has done things like advocating expanding the use of the death penalty, he ran lead on the Tennessee anti-transing of kids legislation, etc. It all seems pretty in-bounds, just a bunch of stuff that can get the pearl clutchers to do said clutching.
You are correct that Matt Walsh’s positions are standard conservative ideals taken to their logical conclusion, my point is that Nick Fuentes’s positions are also conservative ideals taken to their logical conclusion. The only difference is that Fuentes would count Jewish identity as foreign citizenship, which it essentially is under Israeli law.
Lots of people in the US can apply for citizenship elsewhere and be let in. By a quirk of genetics, I could apply for Irish citizenship and be accepted. My mom did it, my blue tribe siblings are doing it. I refused, because I'm American, married to an American, with American kids.
But because the offer is open, should I be forbidden from ever holding office? I reject allowing another country's absurd citizenship policies to effect what Americans can do in America to that degree.
I’m not the one who wants to forbid dual citizens from holding office, Matt Walsh is (if @anti_dan is to be believed). My point is that in terms of the actual legal rights possessed by a person, being a Jewish American is functionally equivalent to being an Israeli-American dual citizen living in the USA.
Eh, no it isn't. In particular, if a Jewish non-Israeli visits Israel, they still have full US consular support.
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Sure, but why should I, as a native-born American who would qualify for Israeli citizenship, be bound by Israeli law? If Italy was willing to accept me as a citizen because of my ancestry, would that count as a citizenship from another country even if I never applied? Your "only difference" is in fact an enormous difference. Being Jewish does not make one Israeli. Even being Jewish and feeling favorable towards Israel does not make one Israeli.
I don’t think this the point. I highly doubt that Zohran Mamdani is bound by Ugandan law. Is Matt Walsh simply confused about the state capacity of Uganda and Somalia?
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So make the case. What part of expelling Somalis or killing SNAP means we should pogrom the Shapiros?
Applying the same logic Walsh and other MAGA voices apply to non-white, non-Christian minorities with left-skewed voting patterns and possible dual loyalties (and particularly to members of said minorities who hold positions of power and influence) to a particular white, non-Christian minority group whose members enjoy non-renouncable de facto foreign citizenship, are disproportionally involved in left-wing activism, and use their considerable access to positions of power and influence to cancel anyone who suggests that their commitment to lobbying on behalf of their foreign homeland might possibly constitute dual loyalties, even when individual members of said group (cough, Sheldon Adelson, cough) are entirely specific that their primary loyalty is to their foreign homeland, gets you to something like Nick Fuentes' views on Jews.
More locally, there are regular posts complaining about "rootless cosmopolitans" on the Motte by people who think they are talking about Blue tribe Yankee elites and don't know that the expression started out as an antisemitic slur. It is unsurprising that a political movement that sees "rootless cosmopolitans" as the enemy will come for the OG rootless cosmopolitans eventually.
If you hold the (entirely mainstream on the right) viewpoint that people who self-define as hyphenated-Americans should be excluded from positions of power and influence, deciding that this applies to people who act like Israeli-Americans is a matter of Noticing things. And frankly, things that are easier to Notice than the black-white achievement gap. "America is for everyone who plays by the rules and lets of fireworks on 4th July" is intellectually coherent. "America is for heritage-Americans" is intellectually coherent. "America is for heritage-Americans plus Jews" is not.
Judaeo-Christian is an obvious crock of shit to anyone who actually believes in either Judaism or Christianity. (Basically, letter vs spirit of the law). A substantial minority of American evangelicals believe that scripture requires Christians to be unrequitedly nice to Jews, but conservative Catholics (who have been the brains of the operation for decades now) don't read it that way.
You can do right-populism in way which is explicitly anti-Muslim and sees Hindus and Jews as part of a big-tent anti-Muslim coalition. In European countries where most of the unwanted immigrants are Muslim you see this happening - Hinjews were a big part of the British Conservative Party's right-populist turn under Johnson (which admittedly turned out to be fake) and are part of the coalition behind RN in France and PVV in the Netherlands. But in a country where the majority of unwanted immigrants are Hispanic, that isn't the way MAGA is doing right-populism. Given the natural alliance between Hindus and Jews as market-dominant minorities (in the West) whose principal enemies (in their home countries) are Muslims, I wouldn't be surprised if American Jews see MAGA anti-Indian racism as a warning sign.
Self-define is not act like. It's the difference between "they proudly call themselves a Nazi" and "they're on the right, so their policies are Nazi-like, so they're a Nazi".
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I mean, when Matt Walsh says 'dual citizens shouldn't be allowed to run for office' he's not talking about me- I could, in theory, claim Dutch citizenship through my grandfather. I've never bothered because I don't particularly want to live in the Netherlands, and in the US this is not an uncommon situation(although the most common country is likely Italy). This is a roughly analogous set of circumstances to Jews technically having access to Israeli citizenship.
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It's almost like some people just constantly lie. Like their entire worldview is based on the notion that there's no such thing as objective truth, just competing power narratives.
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I think you're way underestimating the difference in the way Fuentes vs Walsh come off. Walsh would not have said 'your body my choice'. He's just a lot less hoe-scaring. He talks like a social conservative who believes his own stated moral and practical reasoning and not one who's actually just bigoted.
What are you talking about, I can perfectly imagine him saying that. Specifically on the topic of abortion he had quips like its not your body (because it is child's body). So your body my choice (of protecting baby's life) could actually fit his modus operandi relatively well. Walsh is also a troll such as literally describing himself as theocratic fascist on his X bio as of now. He is an entertainer, positioning himself as some sort of simple redneck delivering shocking statements in deadpan manner - this is the same tactics that other right-wing activists/youtubers/personalities use to move the Overton Window be it Jesse Lee Peterson or Matan Even. When it comes to hoe scaring, he has has pieces with names like This is How We Stop the Festering Disease Called OnlyFans. so there is that
So I am not sure what your mental model of Matt Walsh is, but he is very different from the more snobbish position taken by Ivy League educated catholic Michael Knowles inside Daily Wire staff. In fact I'd say that at least since Kirk's assassination, Walsh actually turned more serious and gloomy, kind of blurring the line between obvious troll for entertaining purposes and serious anger and rage.
While this would scare actual literal hoes, I don’t think it would play too badly with the sort of normie marginally-right-of-center women to whom the phrase “don’t scare the hoes” is intended to refer.
The rest of your point still stands.
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I don't think "your body, my choice" even reflects bigotry; it reflects sabotage of the right wing, it reflects a total apathy or even antipathy for actual pro-life politics, it reflects "scaring the hoes" for the sake of it while actively desiring for them to continue murdering their children. It's evil. It's fed shit. It's willfully encouraging the abortionists' rhetorical frame.
It's just trolling - it's trying to appeal to internet edgelords even at the expense of the movement it supposedly endorses. The only correct move for pro-life activists is to denounce it immediately.
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I agree that they come off with very different demeanors, but that's obviously not why Shapiro put out a 45-minute special episode with no ad reads. What is the actual policy opinion being expressed by Nick's, "your body, my choice," that isn't also supported by Walsh? Walsh doesn't even support rape exceptions for abortion.
Why don’t we flip this.
What are some policy positions of Fuentes that you don’t like?
Not trolling or trying to be funny, but actual consistent positions?
It’s hard to find a good-faith summary of Fuentes’s policy positions, so I’m going off the top of my head here:
This clip has been going around as evidence that Fuentes wants to kill all the Jews, but the real thing he is advocating for here is executing witches. He sounds pretty serious here. I don’t think this is one of his joking-around clips. I think this would be bad policy and I disagree with it.
In a recent episode Nick went on a big monologue about how surrogacy is evil because it rips babies away from their mothers. I disagree with this and think a ban on surrogacy would be bad policy.
Nick doesn’t think Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, and Josh Hammer are Americans. He is typically vague on the policy details, but he rants about these three specific people almost every night. I don’t think there is any way to interpret Fuentes as not supporting revocation of their citizenship. I don’t think there is a valid basis for doing this and I disagree with it.
Well the first thing he is obviously trolling, and the second two are pretty benign.
Surrogacy basically the plot of handmaid's tale. It seems like there's quite a bit of resistance against that.
And as far as people with dual citizenship not being Americans - this is also self evidently true. There are some semantics that could be worked here, but there is certainly a different class of American who would have dual citizenship. Is a person in a polyamorous marriage really married in the classic sense to their husband? I mean...yes...sortof, but also not really.
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I would agree that walsh and fuentes have more similar 'actual policy opinions' than in the popular consciousness. But this is the motte, we're not a representative sample. Walsh is much less hoe-scaring because he talks like he believes his social and racial conservatism out of moral and practical reasons, and not like he believes it out of bigotry. Non-ideologues, especially women, care about that a lot more than they do specific policies. Walsh and Fuentes both have blandly standard trad-cath policy views on abortion, the difference is that Walsh stopped going to Latin mass because some interpersonal drama with Candace Owens convinced him to go to his local parish instead, and as far as anybody knows Nick Fuentes is not a consistent church attendee.
Now I don't actually know Fuentes's motivations. I'm just saying, the way he talks makes a bigger difference than we're giving it credit for because we're weird policy autists. Shapiro didn't put out a special episode with no adds because of that, obviously- he did it because he's Jewish and feels threatened. This is the baseline state of being Jewish and doesn't tell us much, and I doubt that the employees had much room to tell him to stop. Not that I'm suggesting they tried very hard- Walsh, like most actual rad trads, very likely is used to seeing low-IQ antisemitism associated with schizophrenic drama queens and probably neither thinks it's a societal emergency nor feels much personal sympathy for its evangelists, although I obviously can't speak to his personal motivations. But the difference in popular perception? Walsh comes off as a true believer with a reasoned value system. Fuentes comes off as an unhinged bigot. Principles are important vs women are gross(and gay-as-in-literally-homosexual misogyny is probably going to be as big an issue for Fuentes appealing to the normies as the anti-semitism).
To those that have followed Nick, I think he makes it pretty clear to his audience when he’s joking about things to the extent it doesn’t require him making a statement or apology about things. But I don’t think he’s politically insincere. He believes in a lot of truly anti-establishment policies. He’s an anti-Zionist which in the eyes of the establishment makes him an anti-Semite. He believes in biological differences between people and genders which makes him a racist and sexist to his opponents. Ben Shapiro plays much more to the mentality of the left when he attacks Nick than he seems to realize or even care about. I guess the “facts” started to care about his feelings.
Ben no doubt feels threatened by people like Nick which is why he doesn’t engage with his views but opts for a smear campaign against him wherever he deems it necessary and has the opportunity.
Nick is absolutely anti-Semetic, in the sense of holding an animus against the Jewish people and not merely the modern state of Israel. Probably not in the "6 million wasn't enough" way, but likely in the "109 aren't enough" way and the "~250k is more like it" way. The same applies for the charge of racism: I don't think he'd push the TND button, but he'd definitely support a back-to-Africa program, and not out of any sense of care or goodwill towards blacks.
More importantly, his audience is not captive to his particular politics; if anything, it's the other way around. Fuentes is currently the most influential avatar of right-wing antisemitism, and if he moderates his stance to unacceptable levels the memeplex which backs him will simply find a new host.
What evidence are you leaning on in support of the accusation? It has to be more than that’s he’s said inflammatory things for effect.
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As Israel is becoming an increasingly brown country consisting of jews from MENA countries and religious fanatic ultra orthodox groups it is going to be hard to push the narrative that Israel is a pro western country. Israel has a long history of oppressing Christians, is causing chaos in the middle east and is doing extensive lobbying.
Which group is supposed to be supporting the west? The ultra left LGBTQ groups in Tel Aviv? The ultra orthodox? Ben Gvir talking about moving millions of Palestinians and creating a migrant tsunami?
What makes the zionist narrative difficult is that the ADL, AIPAC and the average Likud voter aren't really representing Matt Walsh base. Mainstream republicanism seems to be a wide tent as long as they are Israel first. The Israel first part is an increasingly difficult sell. They can pander Matt walsh as legitimate because he satisfies the jewish donors but he won't have the same appeal to the base. The base won't see him as more legit.
Worse than the rest of the middle east? Last I checked Christians were allowed to prostelytize in Israel, while it's illegal in Turkey, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, the West Bank, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE, Yemen, and Afghanistan. Open Doors is a nonprofit that tracks persecution of Christians: Israel did not break the top 50 globally, compared to Saudi Arabia at 12th, Yemen at 3rd, Iraq at 17th, Syria at 18th, Oman at 32nd, Iran at 9th, Egypt at 40th, Turkey at 45th, and Jordan at the #50 spot.
My point being, the Middle East is very hostile to the West in general, and Israel is by far the most pro-Western country in the region and the safest place in the Middle East to be a practicing Christian.
This is, as I understand it, largely correct.
Israel certainly isn't wholly innocent of persecuting Christians. Israel is, intentionally, a country where the normative religion is Judaism, and everything else is subject to a measure of hostility. It is harder to be an Arab Christian in Israel than it is to be a Jew, and obviously that has something to do with the state's constitution. It is, however, still better to be a a Christian in Israel than to be a Muslim, and perhaps more importantly for comparative purposes, it's better to be an Israeli Christian than it is to be a Christian in almost any other Middle Eastern nation.
Again, not perfect, there are difficulties, and Israel is by no one's standards a shining beacon of religious neutrality and liberalism. But Israel is very easily one of the least-bad countries in the region.
As I point out every time this comes up, Christians in Israel are a model minority very similar to eg Chinese-Americans. Israeli Christians generally outperform the Jewish minority but have less political representation, and this is a very common situation in first world countries.
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I don’t see how the presence of non-Jews in Israel can be anything other than a transient state. Jewish nationalism is extremely strongly encoded in its institutions, culture, and constitution such that there will always be an impending threat to its minorities of some sort of fascistic upwelling towards the expulsion of minorities and purification of the state, even if presently this nascent urge (being fundamental to non permeable forms of nationalism) is held in abeyance.
Perhaps, but what you fear may happen in Israel is actively happening in just about every other country in the Middle East. Islam has long agreed that the presence of Dhimmi in the House of Submission must be a transient state.
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Tangential, but heterodox lefties Theory Underground found their anthology on Charlie Kirk and the Left book, featuring Michael Tracey and Zizek, cancelled by Amazon: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LUZnOEkEKmw&t=7s
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