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Notes -
Nick Fuentes just tweeted this, surprised no discussion here (too much arguing about fascism?)
He was a very hot topic here a month or two ago, curious how our right leaning friends here are feeling about him/his thoughts as the ongoing right-wing divorce over Israel et al continues. I actually thought the right wing infighting a ~month ago had died down, but maybe it's coming back?
I think partially he's just engagement farming, but he was pretty explicit/firm in his views on his stream too. I'm not familiar enough with him to know how much he flip-flops on strong statements he makes a few days/weeks/months later.
I think there should be a way to punish politicians who tell you what they think you want to hear on the campaign trail and then do the exact opposite (or an indefensible watered down version of what they said; cf. Trump's actual actions on illegal immigrants) once they're elected. Fuentes evidently feels the same.
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For the Groypers to exert political influence, they need to make it costly for politicians to ignore their interests. Fuentes may command the numbers to shift an election. The optimal strategy is to prove that you will defect if your interests aren’t addressed, to force cooperation with Republicans in later elections. If the Groypers just say that they will always vote R, then the Republican establishment has zero motive to cooperate with their interests.
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Fuentes just seems like the right wing version of the "don't vote for Genocide Joe" lefties, they have very particular views and if you don't happen to match them then it's better to vote for the opponent as revenge
And now we see famous finger-in-the-wind Haircut Newsom calling Israel an Apartheid State.
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I feel like he had a brief chance to become someone really significant, adding his followers to the general Republican coalition. He would never be able to control the Republican party, but they would have listened to him. Instead, he threw it all away for some sort of purity test, like many extremists do. He'll have no influence at all, and it's not even clear what he wants. He reminds me of Jon Stewart- very funny as a comedian, but not much of a serious thinker.
I also think he relied on 4chan /pol/ memes to do a lot of the lifting for him in generating ideas, but 4chan is kinda dead these days, which killed his best source of material.
I feel like his last real chance at significance died with Charlie Kirk; there was nothing he really could have done to salvage being the main known in-house rival to a central martyr figure like that. Leftist conspiracy theories that the assassin was affiliated with Fuentes were obviously baseless nonsense, but before info came out it at least felt vaguely plausible (though certainly not the null hypothesis).
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Purity test as in not doing a massive regime change war in Iran?
What is the limit? How low can the republicans sink while the base stays loyal? Americans should do what the British are doing by abandoning the torries en mass
Iran as in the regime sponsoring every pack of rabid bugsnipes from here to Timbukthree for the past 47 years?
Perhaps if Trump didn't want to lose voters for attacking Iran he should have ran on it and tried to justify it.
Of course, if Trump ran on "we've been at war with Iran for 47 years and under my administration we'll start a regional war" my guess is that he would have just straight up lost the election
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This current situation still appears better than the previous baseline.
I would disagree. The UK can afford that better than we can because they are not as polarized; their current situation is a conflict within the local Blue Tribe analogue, with no significant Red Tribe to speak of. This lowers the pressure significantly, and allows maneuvers that are probably not survivable in our context.
I don't think that's fair. The European Red Tribe isn't going to look the same as the American one, and while the hard right has it's gripes with Farage, they aren't that different from the American hard right's gripes with the Republicans. On top of that, there's Lowe, who might not be polling high, but ir doesn't seem fair to call him insignificant.
That said, I think you're right about the "can afford" bit starting a new party in Europe, even in a first past the post system like the UK's, seems to be doable with a lot less friction than in a giant country like the US.
To give two examples, it doesn't seem to me that there's a European analogue to the Christian Right or to Gun Culture in terms of relatively-large, cohesive and politically-powerful subcultures. It seems to me that this is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, a distinct, cohesive, organized Red Tribe is the reason America is such an outlier politically from the European political scene. On the other hand, it means polarization and thus tribal conflict gets much worse, because legible structure makes coordinating large-scale, serious meanness much easier. And in America, the coordinated meanness is much further along the escalation spiral: we're actually trying to do mass deportations now, and Blues are actually coordinating terrorism to fight back against those efforts.
The UK right is pretty clearly willing to accept the left's electoral victory. Their reasoning, which is in my view correct, is that a left victory will result in very bad policies, which will in turn discredit the left further and rebound in their favor. This is a risky bet, but the risk seems rational and acceptable to me, given their situation. However, a dominant variable in that calculation is that they don't really have much of a choice, because they have no legible path to victory other than that provided by electoral politics.
In America, by contrast, I'm willing to accept the left's electoral victory, for certain definitions of "accept" that do not preclude their leaders and agents being murdered by people on my side, in much the way they have been willing to "accept" my electoral wins, modulo murders of my leaders and agents by people on their side. That doesn't change the fact that if such murders happen to them, they are not going to accept it as I have, and instead are going to escalate to the limits of their capability, or the fact that I will support unlimited escalation in return. Electoral Politics is still plan A in both the European and American contexts, but American politics has a legible plan B, and both tribes having been in a degenerate orbit toward it for at least a decade now.
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What did he do?
He went on Tucker Carlsons podcast, and did a pretty good job defending his ideas. Tucker took on a sort of fatherly role, trying to get Nick to grow up a little. It actually ended really positively.
And then like a day later he was back to bashing Tucker as a CIA plant or something.
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Telling all of his followers to boycott the election or vote Dem because the Republicans are too pro-Israel for his liking. It just seems delusional to me.
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Fuentes has personal beef with GOP kingmakers because they have been shutting him out and getting him canceled for 10 years.
He was very public about not voting for Trump in 2024 too. Here’s a clip from Nick’s election night stream. I’ll let you decide whether or not he’s happy Trump won.
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He endorsed Kamala last election too, this isn’t new.
That's insane, he's so right? No one, not even the Dems, liked Kamala lmao
was it engagement farming bait?
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Same thing Richard Spencer. These guys (to the degree they are a meaningful type) endorse Democrats.
That is surprising to me given he's basically a joo-poster. There's no way he doesn't hate the Dems for being SoyCucks or what have you.
I think it's the outgroup fargroup distinction. They don't actually like the Democrats, they just hate the Republicans for not being far right enough and want to spite them. In the same way that progressives and LGBT people don't really like radical Muslims (and probably don't know any in real life), but advocate for them to spite the right.
Or, rather appropriately for the times, how Sunni vs. Shi’ite infighting and holier-(halal-ier?)-than-thou dick-measuring has ironically pushed the Gulf Arabs into an alliance with Israel in all but name.
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It's not, extremely online shock jockeys that only extremely online shock jockeys of both sides care about are not representative.
Sorry I couldn't find a link to the same clip that was not reposted by another extremely online shock jockey, but the right seems pretty united right now. https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2029586732614557943
He's increasingly popular with the "MAGA base" because if a member of the MAGA base feels betrayed they cease to identify as "MAGA" or even "Republican".
The coming midterms are probably going to be a generational slaughter for Republicans.
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Richard Hannia is another similar example of this phenomenon.
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If you're pissed at Trump for getting us into yet another middle-eastern war (and I am), the correct response is either not to vote, or to vote Libertarian. Voting Democrat is just telling the world that you want both war AND drag queen story hour.
Voting Libertarian, which I mostly do for largely deontological reasons, gives less feedback than voting Democrat within internal Republican autopsies. If it can be shown that Republicans lose elections when they put Israel first, they will be motivated to change their policies.
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Fuentes, like Hanania, was always going to do this, though. It's not about Iran, it's about being controlled opposition from Day 1.
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I don't know why he has followers or influence. I watched a documentary on him and his ilk (including some other, even bigger loser named Baked Alaska and various cretinous lackeys) and they really didn't seem like they should be able to attract many people to give them the time of day.
Fuentes is legitimately funny and a good speaker and the like. His followers by and large aren’t, and feel like they have a raw deal in society. Fuentes gives them an explanation that doesn’t boil down to ‘you’re a dork’, which will always be popular.
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