It’s been just over a month since Tucker Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes.
In that time, the Speaker of the House has told the media that he spoke to Carlson to say it was a “big mistake” to give Fuentes a platform. President Trump defended Carlson’s decision, on quintessentially Trumpian grounds. (He said that Carlson was a good guy since “he’s said great things about me over the years” and so “if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it,” then why not?) Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts initially vigorously defended Carlson, though Roberts backed off of part of what he’d said in the face of massive backlash. As Stephanie Slade writes in Reason magazine, “The institutional American right has been mired in crisis ever since.”
If you’ve done such a good job of keeping The Discourse from dripping onto your shoes that you don’t know who Fuentes is, he’s an increasingly popular right-wing podcaster. A conveniently pithy summary of his views can be found in a stream he did on Rumble earlier this year. Explaining his disagreements with more moderate conservatives, he said:
So they’re always coming up with, “No, it’s not the Jews. No, it’s not women. No, it’s not blacks. It’s actually really complicated.” No, it fucking isn’t at all. Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise, it’s that simple. It’s literally that simple.
Later in the stream, he came back to this core point:
But the older I get, the more I realize it is really this simple. We need white men in charge of everything again. That’s it. Like, it’s that simple. You sort of start to get based and you kind of realize what’s up, and you have this inkling in your head, you’re like, man, we need white men in charge of everything. And then people kinda get convinced like, “No, it’s like, it’s about ideology. We need like right-wing patriots that love the free market,” or like, “No, we need like trad Christians.” It’s like, no dude, we need white men running everything. OK?
Even ultra-conservative blogger Rod Dreher called Carlson interviewing Fuentes “a bright red line that I was hoping Tucker would not cross.”
Cross it he did, though. And he’s unlikely to be the last.
So, let’s talk about that bright red line.
Why has it been so hard to draw around someone as cartoonishly vile as Fuentes?
I said that the man was “increasingly popular.” How popular?It’s hard to say. He’s got over a million Twitter followers, and during times when the spotlight is really on him he’ll get hundreds of thousands of concurrent views for his Rumble streams, but five to ten thousand concurrent views seems more typical. Dreher has claimed to be in a position to know that “30-40%” of young Republican staffers in Washington, D.C. are “groypers” (followers of Fuentes). Emily Jashinsky, one of the resident conservatives at Breaking Points, asked a bunch of well-connected conservatives if they thought that was right, and they all told her they thought it was a big overestimate. One anonymous Trump administration source told her that it’s “not double-digits.”Does that reassure you?
As a general rule, I wince when I hear the word “platforming.” To pick a classic example, I actually think it would have been fine if Bertrand Russell had debated Oswald Mosley. In fact, it makes me a little sad that we don’t have that debate (preferably preserved on YouTube, but I’d settle for a transcript).If Carlson had thoroughly skewered Fuentes’s views, I would have been all for it. That’s…not what happened. Carlson pushed back here and there, and did say a few times that not all Jews are bad, but the overall vibe of the interview was that Carlson was welcoming Fuentes as an ally in good standing while encouraging him to chill out a bit on some of his most extreme views.
Putting aside this particular example, though, the point that really interests me here isn’t the tactical question of whether it’s better to debate Fuentes, ignore him, yell at him, or what. Instead, I want to think a little more broadly about the kind of political landscape where there’s room for a Fuentes in the first place.
There have always been at least a few people saying the kinds of things Fuentes says in the quotes above. Shine your flashlight into enough dark corners, and you’ll always be able to find someone building a little ideological cockroach nest along the same basic lines. But, no one was arguing about whether the percentage of young Eisenhower staffers who were fans of George Lincoln Rockwell was in the single or double digits.
There’s surely a lot you can say here about subjects ranging from social atomization and the crisis of masculinity to the historically familiar nexus between economic precarity and ethnic scapegoating to the ways that new technologies and the evolution of media have created more room for both encouraging and horrifying types of dissent from mainstream politics. I’m not going to pretend that anything I say below adds up to an explanation of why we’re getting a groyper infestation now as opposed to any other point in American history.
Instead, I want to focus in on one narrow aspect of what’s going on here.
When Fuentes attacks Jews and other broad demographic groups, and his more mainstream critics say no, it’s intellectually asinine and morally repulsive to talk about whole groups like that, are they going to sound credible?
Fuentes himself put his finger on one reason why not in one of his recent Rumble streams. He said:
[If] I said:“These Muslims need to go home. Fuck them. They’re barbarians. They’re third world. They like to live in open sewage and bomb crap.”…you think any conservative would disavow me? Any of them, any Republican. You think if I was known for saying that, do you think I would have any trouble getting into CPAC or the New York Young Republican Club Gala or the GOP? Of course not. Because Laura Loomer has access to the White House and she says stuff like that. Ben Shapiro has access to Trump and he says stuff like that.
When he’s right, he’s right.
There’s a much more general point here, though, and it doesn’t just apply to the Trumpian Right with its lurid fantasies of hordes of fentanyl-slinging cat-eating immigrant rapists. Various forms of essentialism (whereby entire groups are taken to partake in some collective group-essence) are totally ubiquitous right now. They litter the ideological landscape. In particular, it seems to me that two of the factions that make a particular point of loathing Fuentes have very little standing to do so.
Zionists, of course, hate Fuentes both for his antisemitism and for his hostility to US support for Israel. (They also seize on any opportunity to conflate those two things, so Fuentes’s existence is very convenient for them.) And proponents of left-coded identity politics see his noxious worldview as the antithesis of what they believe.In both cases, though, it seems to me that insisting on essentialism for the goose makes it a lot harder to plausibly condemn essentialism for the gander.
Start with the Zionists.
If all day every day you do everything in your power to equate the State of Israel with a collective entity called “the Jews,” it’s a bit much to say that only people who like “the Jews” are allowed to draw the same equivalence.If all day every day you say that anyone who has a problem with what Israel is doing must have a problem with Jewish people in general, sooner or later people are going to start accepting your premise. But, you might not like their conclusion.
Similar points apply to the radical-liberal identitarians. If you routinely talk as if the world is divided into vast ethnic hive minds, such that “white people” act in the world as a collective entity, committing this or that atrocity, you have no right to be surprised when people apply the same logic to Israel/Palestine. If “white people” collectively did slavery or colonialism or are collectively perpetrating police violence, then why shouldn’t you say that “the Jews” are committing the atrocities in Gaza? What’s wrong with saying, not that the IDF bombed this refugee camp or that hospital, but that “the Jews” bombed the hospital?
On a normative level, the socialist Left has always been driven by egalitarian universalism. Everyone counts the same, just for being a person. On a factual level, socialists have always tried to analyze the the world in terms of concrete material-structural positions rather sorting people into demographic types (white people, black people, Jews, Muslims).A nice illustration here is Adolph Reed’s explanation of what’s wrong with the usual identitarian-progressive story about the “racial wealth gap”—that white people in general have stopped black people in general from accumulating wealth. Reed writes that this framing
rests on a grand ideological mystification. Indeed, the extent of polarization of wealth and income both nationally and within populations classified respectively as white and black should indicate the folly of any such notion. There is no black wealth or white wealth, only wealth held by black or white individuals and households. The differences in wealth between otherwise comparable black and white individuals and households on the average, either median or mean, likely reflect, among a variety of factors, effects of present or past discrimination or exclusion. In principle, “racial wealth gap” could be a shorthand for characterizing those aggregate differences. However, race reductionism, in conflating the distinction between race as a category of social classification and race as an organic group, represents “racial” wealth as if it were owned collectively. This has been a conceptual failing of the wealth gap notion since its emergence in the 1990s. It has gone unchallenged because the hegemony of race relations ideology has implanted as common sense understanding in American society the racist reification of black people as a unitary entity to which distinction between singular and plural does not apply.
And race reductionists have an interest in perpetrating the sleight-of-hand that obscures the wealth gap’s mystified character. Recently, I was on a black nationalist inclined podcast whose host agreed that stratification by occupation, income, and wealth among black Americans is greater than among other populations classified by race/ethnicity and that the bottom half of blacks and whites alike have no wealth. Yet he insisted that the wealth gap framework holds because blacks’ “collective” wealth is much lower than whites’. But, of course, there is no black collective wealth, just as there is no white collective wealth. It may be that habituation to positing blacks as a singular entity undermines the ability to recognize that basic fact. If so, imagine a white nurse down on her luck and in danger of eviction trying to dip into the collective pot of white wealth for a subsidy, or maybe texting Elon Musk to pitch in.
What Reed lays out so nicely here is exactly what’s wrong on a factual level with Fuentes’s gibberish about “Jews running the world.” If you have enough Jewish friends, some of them are probably struggling with their bills. Do you think they could hit up Miriam Adelson or whoever administers the Jewish Collective Wealth Fund? Do you think random broke Jewish people benefit from the disproportionate number of Jews in Hollywood or high finance? If so, how?
Conversely, if you think whites or men or straight people or whoever should step back and listen in activist meetings because it’s important to Center the Voices of the Oppressed, how exactly are you making sense of that picture of reality without the exact kind of conflation of statistical disproportionalities with the status of particular individuals that Fuentes is trafficking in when he rants about “Jews running the world”?The white leftist adjunct literature professor or whoever being told to “step back” doesn’t personally control anything, and the black female leftist freelance journalist who gets to be centered as the Voice of the Oppressed is probably doing better than tens of millions of low-income white men. If the first person is a congenital oppressor who can at best wrestle their oppressor-ness into submission and become a Good Ally (not unlike a vampire who virtuously abstains from drinking human blood), and the second is the Voice of the Oppressed, that’s pure uncut essentialism.
Take Nation columnist Elie Mystal, who wrote after the election last year that white women as a category must not care about alleviating suffering like he does, because they voted for Trump. “White women,” he said, “voted to allow white men to do harm and think they’ll vicariously benefit.” In Mystal’s analysis, the four point gap between white female Trump voters and white female Harris voters adds up to the white-women Borg being a collective Trump supporterI’m certainly not suggesting that there’s any kind of real world moral equivalence here between the Mystals of the world and the groypers. The former are annoying. Their ideas are badly thought out (and certainly counterproductive when it comes to achieving the many political goals on which Mystal and I would overlap). But that’s the worst you can really say about them. A world where they got everything they want would be better than the one we have right now. A world where Fuentes got everything he wanted would be a nightmare.
What I am suggesting, though, is that Mystal-style essentialism makes it harder to credibly and consistently say that other essentialisms (which put plus or minus signs next to different entire groups) are evil and need to be exiled to the margins of society.
If “white women” can be bad as a collective entity, why is it out of bounds for Fuentes to say that “women” can be bad as a collective entity? If you think whites in general can be collectively bad, and Fuentes says, no no, see, whites are collectively good and it’s everyone else that’s bad, all you can do in response is to fight him case-by-case, saying *actually, I’ve run the numbers, and the averages work out such that women/Jews/black people aren’t collectively bad after all.*When he runs his numbers about disproportional black crime, you can come back by providing an economic explanation of that disproportion, and you’ll be absolutely correct, but…are there not also structural-economic explanations of the various bad things that you take Oppressor Groups to have collectively done in the world (on the basis of precisely the same kind of “disproportionality” conflations about groups and individuals)? Does your materialism only apply to members of Oppressed Groups? How does that work?
The only way to win this game is not to play.
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