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Contra Nick Fuentes, Hitler, Nazis on Antisemitism: An essay from a strongly-Zionist authright.
Over the past several years I’ve come to terms with accepting the reality of HBD and its implications on my political views. Put simply, HBD is the most straightforward way to explain the vast differences in societal development we see at a global level: Countries with lots of White people in them seem to usually be pretty nice places to live. Countries with lots of Japanese people, Taiwanese, Koreans, or Jews tend to also be pretty great. Countries with lots of Muslims and Blacks tend to be hellscapes with horrific amounts of violence, corruption, nonsensical cruelty, incest, pedophilia, poverty, genocides and immense institutional dysfunction.
The left-leaning, mainstream-media-liberal explanation for these observations in the disparity between group outcomes seem to… not notice it at all. When mainstream media liberals are reluctantly forced to explain these differences in outcomes they will blame a “bad environment” or blame white people for the legacy of colonialism. These hypotheses both reject the agency that minorities have over their own wellbeing and ignore the vast amount of data in intelligence research and group differences in psychology that predict the bad outcomes that we observe.
I think that understanding HBD just means that you realize that bad people CAUSE bad environments, not the other way around. The implications of HBD on immigration politics is undeniable: If you value living in a low-crime society with a high standard of living for the middle class, you don’t want Blacks/Muslims/Indians in your country. And you should support policies that send blacks/muslims/Indians who are already here back to their country of origin.
While it’s obviously social, romantic, and career suicide for any individual to openly admit that they understand HBD (i.e. admit that they’re racist), the Right at the very least tends to adopts policies that people who are openly racist would support. The right tends to support stricter immigration laws, harsher penalties for violent criminals, and to support law enforcement in their goals of catching and deporting people who are here illegally. As a HBD understander, I like these policies.
While many metrics paint the western world as the most divided it has ever been, there is something that the right and left both seem to find agreement on recently: hating Jews. Young people in particular and especially in academia are supporting antisemitic beliefs in America at record rates probably not seen since 1930’s - not only about Israel the state but also about Jews the people.
If you couldn’t tell from the title of the post: I like the Jews. They’re intelligent, hardworking people who are high in conscientiousness and very low in violent crime. I believe that western society has benefited tremendously over the last several hundred years from the millions of Jewish entrepreneurs, scientists, and researchers living among us. Ashkenazi Jews have disproportionately high IQ, and everyone in a society benefits when there are more smart people in that society. Smart Jews make more money than goys, and pay more in taxes as a result. Jewish-owned businesses make lots of great middle class jobs for the rest of us. The tax revenue from those high earning Jews can go to investing in roads, schools, healthcare, food stamps, social security, public housing, and other government benefits that make Western countries so great to live in. I want to live in places with lots of Jews, and I think that you should too.
Quite frankly, I don’t really respect the opinions of the modern liberal when it comes to social issues. Once you understand HBD, liberals become obviously wrong on most every social issue, and (when it comes to immigration) they’re wrong in ways that are fundamentally undermining the ability of every western civilization to continue to exist 30 years from now. So it isn’t surprising to me to see that Antisemitism is rising on the political left - The left is “wrong about every social issue” so of course they’re wrong about hating the Jews, too.
But the right also has alarmingly high rates of antisemitism. And this makes me especially sad because I would otherwise call the political right my ideological allies on every other issue. The rising popularity of Nick Fuentes obviously is the most noteworthy example, and of course being an intellectually curious person I have listened to several hours of Nick talk about Jews. His main criticisms seem to be over the US’s support of Israel, as well as the undue influence that Jews have over US policymaking. And most critically, Nick believes that the Jews are using that influence to try to tear down the West.
My criticism of Nick Fuentes starts thusly: Nick’s beliefs don’t have internal consistency. If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions?? Why would the Jews want to replace the pro-Jewish status quo with a “from the river to the sea” Pro-Palestinian one? It doesn’t make any sense to me. Moreover, Nick’s opinions about Jews make testable predictions: if you suspect that Jews are secretly hoping for a Muslim takeover in America, you could actually, you know, check the voting records. Even in heavily-democrat NYC, only 33% of Jews voted for the democratic candidate Mamdani. If Fuentes were right about Jews, this number should be much much higher.
Re: Fuentes on Israel: If you look at the data since 1947, the US has in fact given more money to Israel than any other country to the tune of $300 billion (as measured on 2024 dollars) over the past 79 years. This averages to $3.8billion per year on average. That sounds like a lot, but honestly it’s small potatoes compared to our current annual defense spending of $850 billion. $3.8 billion a year so that the US can test our weapons systems in actual warzones and maintain the stability of our only ally in the Middle East seems like a worthwhile investment to me. I personally hope Israel uses that money to turn Palestine into a parking lot.
For the most part, I agree with Nick’s “America First” agenda. So you could convince me to axe the “give free stuff to Israel” from the US’s budget. But Nick getting so nonsensically angry over such a small line item on our nation’s balance sheet is just wildly disproportionate. I don’t really care about giving a small amount of money to Israel.
What I do care about is that the government of every Western country is stealing money from the productive White/Asian/Jewish middle class (via tax dollars) only to give that money to dozens of immigration non-profits. These nonprofits use this money to import hundreds of thousands of people from the most dangerous, violent, and backwards countries in the world. When those room-temperature-IQ people move into your neighborhoods, they are given free cars, free food, free housing, which the “refugees” then use to commit fraud, steal, and continue to be the violent, stabby creatures that they are. Our governments are forcing the productive middle class to pay for 3rd worlders to come and rape our women, and Nick Fuentes is mad about some random $4 billion/yr going to Israel?? Who gives a shit about Israel, Nick.
Nick, of course, blames the hoard of third world migrants on the Jews that are living in Western countries. The evidence for this is that there’s a disproportionate number of Jews that work for the institutions that are destroying this country. As an HBDer, this is easy to explain: there exists group differences in intelligence between the races, and Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence is very high. So you should expect Jews to be overrepresented in all positions of economic, scientific, or political prestige - even overrepresented within the institutions that are doing work that you hate.
The most plausible explanation for the vast amount of cultural decline in our country over the past 15 years is NOT some secret cabal of Jews conspiring to destroy the countries that they share with us. It seems much more likely that outside actors who actually have a vested interest in watching the US and Europe collapse are to blame: the Qatari, Saudi, Emirati oil money are buying their way into influencing Western academic, political, and social capital in a way that undermines Western values and promotes Islamic ones. Likewise, the Chinese Communists are no doubt using all of the psychological warfare tools at their disposal to accelerate the collapse of the American Empire. The Chinese definitely want to see America be as multicultural as possible and promote identity politics to create more divisions within us.
Islam is at war with the West, and they have been for thousands of years. The difference is now the West is losing this war, and we are losing badly. If Western Civilization can muster the courage to actually declare war against Islam, as they have declared war on us, the Jews will be overrepresented in the political, military and cultural institutions that are fighting for western civilization. The Jews helped us beat Hitler. The Jews helped us beat the Soviet Union. The Jews can help us beat China. The Jews can help us beat Islam, too.
Tl;dr: Nick Fuentes is wrong. Happy Hanukkah. Be nice to Jews, and definitely don’t put them in gas chambers.
The thing about all this is even the Jews themselves don't believe it. They watch It's a Wonderful Life or Harry Potter or Star Wars, and see characters like Potter and the goblins and Watto and say "That's me! Yes, they're not technically Jewish, but it's an antisemitic stereotype!" You literally cannot put a greedy, sleazy character in a story without the Jews saying you must be talking about them. Why do the Jews never look at George Bailey or Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker and say "That's me! Yes, he may not be canonically Jewish, but he's obviously just a stand-in for a Jew in this fictional setting."
For what it's worth, they're hardly alone in this. The Russians watch LotR and see the orcs and say "That's me!" They even play horde in WoW.
Not everyone wants to be a hero. Heck, I myself play Diablo, see Zoltun Kulle, and say "That's me!"
Everyone who's anyone plays horde in WoW. Come on now.
It's kinda amusing--my innate distaste for Orcs was so strong that when I played Warcraft 3 as a youngster, I was annoyed that I couldn't skip the Orc campaign, so I just stopped playing the campaign entirely. (Which was ridiculous, since as it turns out, the Orc campaign is really good!).
What was always especially odd to me is that as I've grown up and encountered people who identify as orcs (nobody in my circles growing up did), they're not people I'd have identified as orc-ish at all. Like Russians do not look anything like orcs to me, and I found it astonishing they would interpret Lord of the Rings as such. Maybe the very lower class, prison sort kinda look like orcs, but one could say that just as well of the British lower class, or probably any lower class. And Grubby was (and still is) one of my favorite pro gamers, and he's the Warcraft 3 Orc God. Grubby looks about as opposite of an orc as a human could possibly look.
As an adult, the whole theme has become even more amusing: Warcraft 3 obviously got the term "orc" from Tolkien, but Tolkien wasn't the first to use the term, either! The first, to my knowledge, to use it was William Blake, who used it in a similar but slightly different sense: Orc is not what we'd call the orcs themselves, but is rather a spirit of destructive rebellion that possesses humans. He uses it to refer to the Americans in America, A Prophecy, where he gives um... a very unflattering description of Americans, basically burning down everything beautiful in the world and infesting it with fire and plagues in their war against the angel Albion.
To get back to Tolkien, here is his explanation of where the word came from and early thoughts on The Problem of Orcs:
(1) Various letters of 1954
(2)
(3) Draft of unsent letter
(4)
(5) Notes on 1956 review by Auden of LOTR
(6) Letter of 1957
And this is where we get the "racist Tolkien!" stuff from:
(7) 1958 letter to Forrest Ackerman about his proposed film treatment of LOTR (I will never not be tickled by the idea that Forry and his entourage turned up on Tolkien's doorstep full of misguided enthusiasm to do an animated version)
(Z is screenwriter Morton Grady Zimmerman. And Tolkien's criticisms of him seem even more applicable to McKay and Payne)
(8) Draft of unsent letter, 1958
(9) Letter of 1965
Bonus note on origin of "warg": (10) Letter to Gene Wolfe (yes, that Gene Wolfe) 1966
I have to give his description of Forry turning up, it's too good to leave out:
(11) Letter of 1957:
(12) Letter of 1957
("Cobb" was Roy Cobb, 19 year old cartoonist who was a junior artist at Walt Disney Studios)
It's always amusing to me to hear Tolkien talk of his own work. He does not seem entirely self-aware of what he's doing, in contrast to Blake, who, despite being less intelligent, is in some sense much more clearheaded. I know that sounds rich given Blake's galaxy-brain prophecies, but he at least is under no delusion that he is discussing archetypes which do have some degree of correspondence with real-world thoughts and behaviors, and is not ashamed to make those connections explicit, rather than try to waffle around with "Oh no, I never do symbolism or allegory! I think that's so crass" like Tolkien does.
Like there's this interview I watched recently where Tolkien is disavowing symbolism and the interviewer is like "Come on, man, the Tree of Gondor is so obviously symbolic of the state of Gondor" and Tolkien's like "oh, well, yeah, obviously, but I didn't mean symbolism like that." Ok, well what do you think symbolism is, man? If I had to read between the lines, I think he had unpleasant interactions with not-particularly-intelligent fans trying to read his work like Pilgrim's Progress or something ("by Orcs, did you mean the Russian communists?!"), which he found so off-putting that he overcorrected in disavowing the notion entirely.
There's a difference between "the bald-headed eagle is a symbol of the American nation" and "the Ferengi symbolise Yankee traders". I'm with Tolkien in that interview: no duh the White Tree symbolises Gondor, the way the Union Jack symbolises Great Britain or Uncle Sam symbolises America. That's straightforward representation.
Symbolism of the type he meant is different, it is that "The five wizards are the five senses" and then everyone argues over is Gandalf sight or hearing. That's not what he meant, and if the interviewer thought he was being ever so clever, I have to say no he wasn't.
People were going "well obviously the One Ring is the atomic bomb" and he had to explain "I invented this before ever anyone even heard of atomic bombs". That's the facile, surface reading of "symbolism" that he hated. Lewis meant Aslan to symbolise Jesus in a direct parallel, but Tolkien (despite earnest commentators) did not mean "Gandalf is Jesus, they both died and were resurrected".
Oh, come on, it's much more than that. It's not merely a crest. In the books, the White Tree is dead, and no sapling of it was found. When Aragorn returns and ascends to the throne, he is led by Gandalf to find a lost sapling of the dead tree, which he returns to the courtyard and plants, where it grows and blooms. This clearly symbolic of the loss and restoration of the line of kings.
It's not just the football logo for Team Gondor.
It is more than just a dead tree, but it's not some kind of "and by putting in a tree, it really means that the British Empire will continue to survive into the future" symbolism, either. Tolkien liked trees so he put in trees. What are the seven stars a symbol of, then? What are the seven stones? Remember the rhyme:
Tall ships and tall kings
Three times three.
What brought they from the foundered land
Over the flowing sea?
Seven stars and seven stones
And one white tree.
Tolkien explains in notes what they were, and it's not this kind of facile but dumb explanation here:
Tolkien doesn't put symbolism of that type in, he puts prophecy in: "the hands of the king are the hands of a healer", and so forth. This is how Aragorn establishes that he is the rightful heir and king (and that is what the split between Gondor and Arnor started with, the denial by Gondor that descendants of the Arnorian line had any inheritance rights on the throne).
There isn't any symbolism of "by X you meant the Tories/the Communists/the Joos, just say it, we all know you really mean it, it's Da Joos isn't it???" kind.
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