Reaction
An international anti-fascist show run by a Scandinavian nerd, a Slavic alcoholic and an American unc that takes you to the darkest corners of the internet to help you understand the footsoldiers of online right-wing mobilization - content creators.
Reaction
Episode 4 - Nick Fuentez
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Fascist ICE agents roam America's streets, kidnapping children, separating families, and shooting American citizens that resist in cold blood. Online, the most radical base of support for these abhorrences are known as groipers. Nick Fuentes' most rabid fans. These anti-social incel shut-ins are a movement so hollowed out by irony, grievance, and online nihilism that no act of depravity against their enemies is enough.
SPEAKER_11Hey bitch, we control your bodies. Guess what? Guys win again. Okay? It's your body, my choice.
SPEAKER_10What you just heard was Nick Fuentes, who is a barely closeted half Mexican white supremacist who has become the fresh young face of bigotry in America. He is a walking contradiction, a self-avowed homophobe who visibly fails to live up to his own racial hierarchy and sexual mores while still demanding ultra adherence to them. He dreams of a white Christian America that purges itself of all foreign influence and sexual deviance. At the same time, Nick spends his time with cat boys.
SPEAKER_11Dating women is gay. Having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay. And you know, it's really it's all gay. And if you want to know the truth, the only really straight heterosexual position is to be in a sexual incel.
SPEAKER_10I'm Freda. I'm Mike. I'm Hugo. This is the Reaction Podcast.
SPEAKER_04A Chicago suburb that in his childhood was 90% white, and currently has a median household income of$119,000. To put that into perspective, the median household income in the state is about 81,000. In other words, the median household income in his hometown is 47% higher than the state taken altogether. The percentage of people in poverty in Lagrange Park is 4%, whereas the percentage of the entire state is 11.6. These are numbers from the 2023 US Census. All of this is to tell you that this is a fairly affluent middle-class suburban community. Wentes graduated high school in 2016. After a lot of notable accomplishments for a high schooler, he was elected student body president. He was selected to greet Illinois governor during a school visit. And he hosted his own campus TV and radio talk show, where he discussed his conservative politics. Bill Allen, who supervised the school's television programs, told the Chicago Tribune in 2017 that, quote, none of the stuff he produced was even close to the level he's at now. After graduation, at the age of 17, he made a blog post where he said the following, quote, My timely birth allowed me to watch on the nightly news the spoils of the American experiment squandered for one final time before the dying gasp of a once exceptional people, as the free world and economic abundance of Ronald Reagan was inherited by the lizard people. My generation is a generation of hopelessness. Because he's a fucking pretentious dipshit.
SPEAKER_10It's it's all one sentence. Yeah, it's it's just blathering fucking stupidity.
SPEAKER_07I fucking hate this moron. Literally born as a pretentious fucking quasi-intellectual little fucking nerd ass bitch, dude. How about you watch some fucking porn and jerk off and I don't know, fucking look at some boobs, dude? Guy is fucking Ronald Reagan at 17, man. At 17, Ronald Reagan at 17. If you told me uh, like, dude, have you ever heard about Ronald Reagan when I was 17? I would be like, whoa, is that like a new type of beer, brother? Like, what the what's what okay? Go on.
SPEAKER_06That's a great name for a beer, by the way. Ronald Reagan. Let's have a couple of cold Reagans, dude. That is a great name of a beer. A couple of cold Reagans. I love that.
SPEAKER_10He's such a fucking nerd. Like, I honest to God, what a fucking nerd. And the the mixed metaphors, the spoils of the American experiment, like, god damn, you're in dipshit.
SPEAKER_04Rose flipping through that thesaurus like at light speed.
SPEAKER_10The spoils of the American experiment. Shut your fucking mouth.
SPEAKER_07Imagine a typical, I don't know. My impression of American high schools uh is pretty much completely taken from film, and it's you know a bunch of clicks and so on.
SPEAKER_04Shout out high school uh musical.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, exactly. And what kind of a click was he in? I mean, I guess the the fucking He was the nerd.
SPEAKER_10He was in the he was in the nerd click, and obviously this is a pretty conservative Yeah, he was in the group that was doing like radio shows and TV, like the campus TV, which I don't know.
SPEAKER_04Do people watch that in the US?
SPEAKER_10Uh speaking for myself, usually it's it was mandatory back then, you know, or you would have like morning announcements and you might have if your high school had a television show, they would like wheel in this CRT monitor and plug it into the wall with a coax cable, and you would look at, you know, your dumb classmates in their suit jackets reading some blather.
SPEAKER_07So you know, so well, dear audience, you know that meme where there's like on top, there's like a lady walking with a guy with big mouscle in high school, and the little nerd is looking at her and is like He has a lot of tattoos as well.
SPEAKER_10It's heavily he's black, it's heavily implied that he's some sort of gang member or thug. Yeah, it's like very racist, yeah. Exactly.
SPEAKER_05And he's like, Oh, I am yeah, I am not a thug, but one day you will regret being with him when you're like a single mother instead while I sit on top of the you know financial hierarchy or whatever.
SPEAKER_07Well, for Nick Fuentes, it was Honestly.
SPEAKER_10Okay, this joke doesn't work because if it was Nick Fuentes, he would want two muscly guys, he'd be sitting there greedily looking from the corner as two muscly guys were smooching.
SPEAKER_06Nick Fuentes is in that comic book, but he's jealous of the lady. Ha ha ha ha. Unironically, yeah. Looking at the heavily tattooed dude, he's like That's crazy. Uh the only wants you for your muscles. I only want you for the racial fantasies that I get to experience with you on top of me. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_04The um the his blog post continues. Donald Trump has created an opening. We don't know for how long, and we don't know if it's big enough. But it's an opportunity for the American people to throw off the yoke of the new age orthodoxy which has enslaved us. Now he didn't write yoke as in y-o-k-ke-e, he wrote yoke as in Y-O-L-K. Like that's that's straight from his thing.
SPEAKER_10Do you see what I mean about the pretentiousness of this moron? Like, he's such a dumbass. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I would have beaten the living shit out of him as a kid in high school. Like, just out of principle. And I would I wouldn't even do it because like he like I'm a dumb guy. He would be saying words I did not understand. But just the the the way he was saying them, the way he would be saying them would just make me go fucking karate chopping him.
SPEAKER_10I mean, this is all blather. This is all pseudo-intellectual blather. It's it's making me react and just call him a moron because New Age Orthodoxy, yoke, you don't know what a yoke is, you idiot. Like, how are you speaking?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, what the fuck does that mean?
SPEAKER_07Circa 2054. You have a son. He comes home and he says, Donald Trump has created an opening.
SPEAKER_06We don't know for how long, and we don't know if it's big enough, but it's an opportunity for the American people to throw off the yoke of the new age orthodoxy, which has enslaved us.
SPEAKER_10What do you do to your son? I say, son, we're going on a scuba diving trip.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, after he left um high school, he enrolled at Boston University. And this is where the iniquant, as we know today, began to crystallize. He became known on campus as a virulent Islamophobe. And when he started openly wearing a red MAGA hat, he claimed that students were discriminating against him, likening it to a person being ostracized for wearing a hijab, which is fucking insane.
SPEAKER_10What's really funny is that BU is AOC's alma mater as well.
SPEAKER_04Uh well, it's not actually Nick Fuentes' alma mater because he dropped out.
SPEAKER_10Well, that makes a lot of sense.
SPEAKER_04She graduated cum laude. Yep, and uh he dropped out to become a white supremacist livestreamer.
SPEAKER_07I would make a lot of jokes if it she wasn't if it was if AOC wasn't a woman, I would make a lot of jokes about cum laude.
SPEAKER_10Thank you for being respectful of women for the first time.
SPEAKER_04Thank you for being a feminist, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yes, yes. We are all respectful. Shaking hands, we're all shaking hands. Dear audience, in the background, you can hear sounds of men shaking hands and agreeing that they are proper respecters of women.
SPEAKER_04That's I don't know what that sounds like.
SPEAKER_10It sounds like skin slapping together.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so that's what we're gonna tell your girlfriend I was about to say. In an interview with the tab, he said, quote, I'm not a white supremacist. I don't hold any views about race or anything of the sort. It's all about ideas with me. I'm an individualist at heart. Less than a year later, in August 2017, he traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia. And then we play the clip from the Unite the Right Rally.
SPEAKER_02Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!
SPEAKER_04Nick Fuentes attended the violent Unite the Right rally that was so neo-Nazi that the leader of the Proud Boys, Gavin McGuinness, refused to attend, not wanting to associate himself with explicit Nazis. And there were a lot of Nazis. It was even attended by the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Nick Fuentes stood among all these people chanting, quote, You will not replace us, which was the broader chant, but some were chanting, quote, Juice will not replace us, end quote. Speaking to his old high school's newspaper, Fuentes said, quote, The government of Virginia colluded with armed leftist thugs to intimidate us and ultimately keep us from exercising our constitutional rights. But we showed up, we had a permit, and we were peaceful.
SPEAKER_00Fields was convicted in December of first-degree murder.
SPEAKER_04During the quote, peaceful rally, a Nazi whose schoolmate said he would draw swastikas and talk about, quote, loving Hitler as early as middle school, committed a white supremacist terrorist attack, targeting activists who were protesting the rally. The attack resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, a civil rights activist. The perpetrator pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty, and was sentenced to two life sentences and four hundred and nineteen years in prison. Nick Fuentes' attendance and the subsequent media circus around him propelled him to fame. According to a Mother Jones article on him, Fuentes had only 2,000 followers on Twitter prior to the Charlottesville rally. One and a half months later, he had 12,000. Now he has 1.2 million. After Elon Musk unbanned his account, of course. He then dropped out of university, asking his parents, quote, why don't you give me just one year to explore this? If it works out, I'll keep doing it. If it doesn't work out, I'll abandon it.
SPEAKER_07And yes, it worked out. Like his his gr his growth is uh I have to say, rather impressive. And I know that there was a lot of attention around Charlottesville that he truly managed to milk, but there was some weird shit happening with that algorithm with all due respect. Uh growing so much, especially during the first two, three years, is is uh hella creepy.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, also back then Twitter, you know, it was a little different. Like you didn't grow, at least right wingers didn't grow as fast.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, there's very clearly an algorithmic boost for right wingers that Elon Musk wants to grow. And you know, one of the things about Charlottesville, I'm I'm glad you brought up his time in that, because one of the aftermaths of that was the killing of Heather Hire. And Nick Fletz is one of the people who mocked Heather Heyer, who doubled down on the violence. And this is one of the more important points and themes of the show is that a lot of the people in here are the people that glorify and enjoy right-wing violence. Whether it's state-sanctioned violence like ICE agents, you know, killing American citizens, or it's individual acts of uh vigilante violence like Kyle Rittenhouse, or just white supremacist violence murdering activists, they maintain plausible deniability of the thinnest degree, but they do enjoy reveling in harm being done to their perceived ideological enemies. And that's kind of one of the things that separates Nick Fuentes from a lot of the more slightly more mainstream alt-right figures, is he likes to look back at violence committed by the right in history and revel in it and enjoy it and laugh about it and make it comedic.
SPEAKER_04He is one of those people who's trying to push the boundaries of uh you know what is okay to say and everything. Because even um a lot of these like Proud Boy guys and everything, they they have limits to what they're willing to accept for PR reasons. Uh Nick Fuentes does not.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely. And uh, whenever he agitates someone to commit an act of violence, after that same someone actually does do it, they're forgotten by history time and Nick Fuentes himself. Well, he ends up uh, you know, uh kind of converting that towards his grind session and making even more money and growing his audience, etc. etc. And the example with the guy who murdered a lady uh during the Char Charlottesville uh riot is a perfect example of that because now he's rotting in jail, what, like four hundred and nineteen years in prison, nobody even remembers his name anymore. But Nick very much so made sure to grow on his back and on his uh willingness to do violence to the highest degree. So yeah, uh everybody that that follows him, especially those who commit acts of violence, just end up growing his career and rotting in prison forever. Literal parasite.
SPEAKER_04Now, at this point, it's time to talk about the elephant in the room that for some reason always comes up with online fascist influencers. Nick Fuentes is a white supremacist, but also, according to an article in volume 5, issue 4 of the scientific journal Humans, published by Northern Arizona University Department of Anthropology, Nick Fuentes' dad is an immigrant of half Mexican descent.
SPEAKER_11I know I kind of have a white supremacist. I saw white supremacists.
SPEAKER_04What you just heard was Nick Fuentes outside his house in 2024, being questioned by police after he peppers sprayed a 58-year-old Jewish feminist activist who rang his doorbell. He made a deal days before his court date for battery. Among the agreed terms was attending anger management, an in-person apology,$635 in restitution, and 75 hours of community service. In the episode about Sam Hyde, we've talked about how fascism doesn't have to entail white nationalism or any of the characteristics we associate with interwar fascism, or the fascist epoch, as I like to call it. Now I want to explain how white nationalist movements don't necessarily have to be exclusionary to those not perceived as white. For one, whiteness is an extremely ambiguous term with no fully settled definitional characteristics. Who is and isn't white largely comes down to vibes.
SPEAKER_10This is actually a really important point that I want to take a second to highlight. Americans and our definition of white has fluctuated so extremely that at the very beginning of the republic, Benjamin Franklin, one of our famous founding fathers from the great state of Pennsylvania, he said that he doubted that the swarthy Germans or Swedes would ever be compatible with democracy. And the like they did not even include people from Germany or people from Scandinavian countries as white. And if you're hearing that now, that seems ridiculous. We've all heard about Irish people not being considered white or Italian people not being considered white, or maybe Greek or Polish people being of ambiguous, you know, white descent, but it was such a restrictive term when the country was first founded, and now it is so expansive. People try to claim that Nick Fuentes counts.
SPEAKER_04In the book Racism Not Race, co-authored by Alan Goodman, former president of the American Anthropological Association, and Joseph Graves Jr., an evolutionary biologist and geneticist, they write that, quote, race is a flexible classification because the salience of social categories changes over time and place and with different needs. In other words, race is a chameleon. It changes to fit different social and political environments. When questioned by the cop on if he's a white supremacist, Nick Fuentes said, quote, I'm not a white supremacist, I'm Mexican. My my last name is Fuentes.
SPEAKER_11But when speaking to a white supremacist audience, Nick Fuentes says, And so I would say I'm a white person, I'm conscious of my white identity, conscious of nationalism, but I think in a way it's almost redundant to say that you're a white nationalist.
SPEAKER_04Nick Fuentes is both not white and at the same time white. He's a white nationalist of Mexican heritage who wants to deport Mexicans. The inherent contradiction isn't lost on us, but the contradiction that is evident in many non-white white nationalists is easily resolved by subsuming the individual into the movement. He resigns himself that his father is half Mexican, but prefers not to acknowledge it as a meaningful aspect of his identity.
SPEAKER_07But instead of realizing that it's it's you know this metaphysical fucking mumbo jumbo bullshit that can change uh from year to year and realizing that it is bullshit and therefore, you know, stepping away from it, he dives head in into said metaphysical, into not not only embracing the ludicrous lack of definition, uh but using that lack of definition to help himself integrate with said white supremacy.
SPEAKER_10Well, I think one of the things to also highlight is that the nature of Nick Fuentes's so-called movement is an online space. Where basically you could construct an identity, a persona, and who you actually are is obscured by that persona. So plenty of non-white white supremacists can thrive in that space because they're not in a socially mediated environment in real life where they're embodying who they really are, and we're all looking at them and we're checking them and going, How are you saying white supremacist shit? You're not white. That conversation doesn't occur. And it is almost the perfect movement for this moment of atomization, you know, and where all of our communication with each other is now being mediated through screens. So we can create that virtual persona, and in our psyche, we begin to identify with it even if it's not real.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. No, I I absolutely agree, you're correct. Then there's the incel aspect. Nick Fuentes is on a whole other esoteric level of misogyny to what normal people might be used to. People might be familiar with him from his quote, your body my choice spiel following Trump's second election, essentially a threat of rape. But his misogyny gets even weirder. He said that he's proudly a quote, incel male, meaning involuntarily celibate, usually a term for men who, due to various personal challenges, have issues with establishing intimate relationships. But are you actually attracted to women?
SPEAKER_11I am attracted to women. You're not gay. No, but I will say that women are very difficult to be around. Okay. So there's that.
SPEAKER_04What you just heard is a clip from Pierce Morgan, where Pierce Morgan felt the need to press Nick on his sexuality. Quoting from the research article again, and this sentence is fucking insane to read in a scientific journal. Quote Gwentus provides a confusing and at times incoherent narrative about his heterosexuality. Declaring that sex with women was quote gay, and that being asexual was the only appropriate way for a heterosexual male to conduct himself. He also waffled on his celibate status as involuntary, but also said it was voluntary. Sharon Moses, the author of the article, also analyzes other figures like Enrique Etario of The Proud Boys and Kanye West of the 2007 album Graduation. She theorizes that these people from marginalized communities or with backgrounds from marginalized communities believe themselves entitled to the so-called white privilege which they see plainly in society. At the same time, they are identifying others which they believe are not deserving of that privilege, but maybe are being afforded it, or they perceive that they are being afforded it. What makes you deserving of privilege isn't the color of your skin, though certainly that might help. It's dedication to the movement, the ideals, or sometimes the aesthetics. What those ideals and aesthetics are, is constantly in flux.
SPEAKER_10Well, that's also why they celebrate the death of leftists in places like Minnesota, right? Because the two people shot were unarmed white people who nonetheless were standing up against Trumpism, against bigotry, against ICE. And so when they were killed, and it was clearly in the wrong, they were stripping them of their white privilege and being like, haha, they deserved it because they were the radical left domestic terrorists. That's what that is. It is a rejection of their privilege and status and trying to reduce them to a nameless immigrant who was murdered in cold blood.
SPEAKER_04I believe the way that Nick Fuentes justified Pretti's murder was calling him a race traitor, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_10Oh, absolutely. And on top of that, they they justified Renee Good's killing by reaching into the same tropes about, you know, annoying SJWs.
SPEAKER_04Even though all she literally did was say, like, I I don't have a problem with you, dude. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_10Both of their last words were so innocent and clearly without malice. And you can see that the violence enacted upon them by government officials is lauded by people like Fuentes because they are explicitly opposing the movement, and so therefore their humanity and whatever privilege they might have had as white people is forfeit.
SPEAKER_04And by pushing this, by constantly screaming about how you know these people deserve to die, people like Nick Fuentes and other people are asserting their own place in the movement, their own whiteness, even if they might not be white. What these people are seeing is a movement that can in very concrete and material ways benefit them. So they side onto it. But the white supremacist movements also have a motive to bring these people into the fold. Their plan for society gains legitimacy when other groups share their vision, and the inclusion of non-white members aids in creating an illusion that the movement isn't necessarily racist, but rather inclusive and arguing for a so-called separate but equal type of thing. Which of course is a direct allusion to uh a very racist period of American history. In a prior episode, we talked about the imagined community being integral to fascism, the ultra-nation concept. The imagined community for white supremacist fascists takes the form of the so-called white race. Because it's an imagined community, the rules for who does and doesn't belong can be flexible in order to respond to the political moment. To the movement, Nick Fuentes is white enough, just like the Cuban American Enrique Tario is white enough. Until they're not.
SPEAKER_10And this kind of rhymes with the way that the racial politics of Nazi Germany operated. And they had their various, you know, not to get too deep into Nazi racial theory, but Italy, for example, fluctuated in Aryann-ness according to the political necessities of the Nazi regime of Germany. And you see the same kind of behavior here where these people are important because they have followers and therefore the movement needs them, and therefore they become white.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. But nowadays we have uh people like Nick Fuentes utilizing it as a utility for the lack of any better word, than even the Nazis did. Like it it is completely turned into a tool set. Uh you're white because vibe. You're not white because the vibes are not there. What are the vibes, whether you're with us or you're not with us? Of course, as as uh Freda said, these vibes uh exponentially get removed the closer you are to victory, because now an another outgroup needs to be found uh to you know fight against. So even yesterday's white comrades might slowly not be as white uh as we thought as the years progress. But in the in the starting point, in the initial growth period uh that I feel Nick Fuentes and the Gropers in general currently find themselves in, or at least believe they are in, anybody who vibes with us is a fellow white man, and everyone who does not is not. That's why you can have a potentially gay Mexican celebrating the death of two white people in Minnesota and have other white people applauding it because they are less white because they're not with us, and this Mexican kid is white because he's with us.
SPEAKER_04We're going to fast forward a little bit, and then pull you back afterwards. First, let's leave 2017 behind and fast forward to 2020 and 2021. After Donald Trump began promoting the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was somehow stolen, Fuentes began attending, quote, stop the steal rallies in multiple states, presenting himself as a leader of the more online section of this movement, of an already deeply online movement. On January 4th, he floated the idea of killing Republican lawmakers who weren't actively promoting Trump's conspiracy theory, but of course said, quote, We shouldn't do that. I'm not advising that. But I mean, what else can you do, right? Nothing. End quote. Then, on January 6th, 2021, he attended Trump's speech, wearing a VIP badge. Although he never entered the Capitol building himself, as the violence erupted, Nick Fuentes was shouting, Break down the barriers and disregard the police. This capital belongs to us now. Following his involvement in the riots, Nick Fuentes claimed he faced legal and financial setbacks, claiming that he woke up one day to find one of his checking accounts empty. The FBI has confirmed they probed Fuentes' finances in the aftermath of the attack, and with good reason. This will become a recurring theme in our commentary about online right-wing figures. There's a lot of money involved, and it's not always easy to know where it's all coming from. In the lead up to the event, a single donor donated$522,000 in Bitcoin to 22 separate individuals, most of which were far-right influencers. Half of that$522,000 went to Nick Fuentes alone. The donor was a French computer programmer by the name of Laurent Bagelire, who had previously also donated to Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer, like Sam Hyde, the subject of a previous episode. Laurent committed suicide the day after sending the donation. In his suicide note, he said that he had, quote, bequeathed his fortune to certain causes and certain people, end quote. Due to his belief that, quote, Western civilization is declining. End quote. Nick Fuentes is an avid user of cryptocurrency donation methods, which can be used to commit tax fraud and hide dark money funding. It's a way, at least to an extent, to make it harder for investigators to get a hold of his financial transaction records, and to make it harder for authorities to freeze his accounts again. Side tangent, and this one isn't that important in the larger scheme of things, but him and other online fascists also hitched themselves to Yay, or formerly Kanye West's abortive presidential campaign. He was and probably still is dealing with tremendous mental health challenges. On the 26th of January 2026, he took out a full-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, to apologize for the antisemitism and outright Nazi rhetoric that he promoted, at a time when he was hanging out with Nick Fuentes on The Daily. The artist claims his erratic behavior is tied to a traumatic brain injury in 2002 that went undiagnosed until 2023. Hopefully that's the last we see or hear from West saying shit like that, but I bring this up because by exploiting West's very obvious mental health issues, Nick Fuentes managed to get himself a dinner with President Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Far-right types are incredibly good at placing themselves in the spotlight. Everything is a publicity stunt, and following the publicity stunts, they get funding. Now let's rewind a bit. Back to Charlie Kirk. Throughout 2019, Charlie Kirk's college campus speaking tour, which included guests such as Donald Trump Jr., was frequently heckled by other right-wingers in attendance, who believed the positions espoused by Kirk and Turning Point USA didn't go far enough. These deeply online so-called dissident right activists took aim at what they called, quote, conservative Inc., as in Incorporated. A collective consisting of speakers like Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and Donald Trump Jr. Quoting from a Vox article from 2019 by Jane Coaston. In reality, these people are simply the alt-right of 2016 and 2017 warmed over, re-energized and using new terminology aimed at disassociating itself from the optics problem caused by the tremendous failure of 2017's Unite the Right rally. According to the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, countering speakers by simply shouting out specific conspiracy theories is good enough. One of the things the Daily Stormer encouraged their audience to shout was simply Nick Fuentes. This is one of the most effective strategies for generating clout in an online space. Create noise so that people have to pay attention to you. Attack someone so they have to acknowledge your existence. Nick Fuentes is a clout goblin through and through. But it wasn't just clout. In a past episode we talked about action for action's sake, or as a form of community building. In 2020, Nick Fuentes utilized the Heckling Clout, and this network of terminally online far-right activists that had coalesced around their anti-turning point protests to launch the America First Political Action Conference. The founding of the conference itself was another way of attacking mainstream conservatism, as it was set to be held the very same weekend as the mainstream conservative political action conference. In later years, the AFPAC Conference has even been held across the street from CPAC. Nick Wendt as his followers called this rift in the American right wing between mainstream conservatism and the more online fascist guys the quote Groiper War. And Nick's very online followers of neo-Nazis and other fascists were his Gruper army.
SPEAKER_08Gruyper Army. Do we sound cool yet, bros? Do we sound cool yet? Oh my god. We're calling it a war, bro. We're calling oh my god, I'm gonna post so fucking hard, brother. Oh, I'm gonna post so fucking hard, we're gonna win the front. Okay, the the Twitter boards are our forums of war.
SPEAKER_10It's striking to me how many people make a career off of stalking Charlie Kirk.
SPEAKER_07That's a factor too. Uh look at me. Look at me. Look at Charlie Kirk's wife. Charlie Kirk's wife may be the number one Charlie Kirk stalker.
unknownOh god.
SPEAKER_10I swear to God, if my widow celebrates my death like her.
SPEAKER_07It's kind of rock and roll, though. It's kind of rock and roll.
SPEAKER_10Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_07It's it's uh you know she's having a blast. Oh, and she's getting blasts. Uh anyways. Okay, so now that you know a lot about Soy Hitler, it's time to learn about the Soy SS. The Groipers themselves, the Groiper movement. If you want to understand what the hell that is, uh the worst place to start is probably with their own self-description. They will tell you they are America first, Christian nationalist, just conservative, but not cucked, anti-globalist, pro-family, and other virgin self-descriptors. Pretty basic, run-of-the-mill shit, but that is all surface. Underneath, a groiper is a very specific ideological package, post-alt-right, white nationalism dressed up in Christian clothes, wielding weaponized irony aimed not at overthrowing the American right, but at becoming its future. At the center is a simple fusion religion as race. When they talk about white Christian America, they're not talking about Christianity as a universal faith that includes black American churches, Latino Catholics, Arab Christians, or Filipina nuns. They've stripped Christianity down into a civilizational brand that codes as white, European, and deserving of cultural dominance. In their worldview, Christianity is not primarily about faith, doctrine, or even fucking salvation. It's a marker of who belongs to a civilizational project and who does not. That's why the phrase Christian nation is always in their mouths bundled with anti-immigrant rhetoric. The cross is doing all the racial work. To make this as simple as possible, if you're a grass toucher that I always like to mention every episode, because I think there's at least three grass touchers listening to this show, they found a way to say white while keeping plausible deniability. That's literally it. You know how if you ask three men of three different ideologies, whether a black Frenchman is actually French, they will give you three different answers. Well, now we have the American right to thank for turning a 2,000-year-old indicator of religious belonging, Christianity, into a racial category. For Grupers, non-white immigration isn't a complex phenomenon shaped by labor markets, foreign policy, global inequality, and so on. It's an existential threat, an evidence of some sort of play like uh conspiratorial music behind me, or like music from the millionaire when it starts of a coordinated replacement of white Americans engineered by a ruling class. It supposedly wants to dilute white political power. The great replacement fantasy gives them a total explanation of all of history. Very serious, all of history. Falling wages, changing neighborhoods, corporate diversity campaigns, black woman Uru in Marvel moviru. Everything is woven into one story about white decline versus some sort of never truly defined but kind of defined elite malice. Usually they blame the Jews. Yeah, it's it goes, but yes, yes, but now that depends. There are some based Jews because all of race is now metaphysical, so there can be like based bro Jews, especially the fuck children with a president.
SPEAKER_10Well, Stephen Miller is Stephen Miller is their favorite uh uh Trumpian advisor. Exactly.
SPEAKER_07Epstein bro, bro, like evil evil, evil Jewish cabal that rapes children, uh, but actually based because he did it with our guy.
SPEAKER_10It's it's it's well, did you see that Fluentes did say that uh Epstein was based? Yeah, he was kind of cool.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, he's wearing his fucking quota zip, like the exact same one that Epstein wore.
SPEAKER_10That's the thing that's so important to understand about Nick, and I'm gonna talk about it more later, but it's just these guys are nihilists and they're addicted to outrage. They just like to say shit and get that reaction for attention, but it it does reveal the utter bankruptcy of their entire project. They can't even maintain anti-Zionism.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely not. They they there is constantly this massive threat of white replacement, but where it's coming from is incredibly fluid. Sometimes it's coming from inside the house, sometimes it's coming from outside, sometimes it's not coming, sometimes we are winning. It's on pause, etc. etc. And that's that's the whole fucking point at the end of the day. Yeah, it's like every conspiracy movements exactly, and you can make it into whatever you want depending on the spiel you want to play at this current time with your particular followers. It's as I said earlier, uh a total explanation of everything uh throughout history and today. And you know, once you buy into that whole framework, any policy or politics in general that increases something like I don't know, diversity immediately looks like ethnic cleansing, for example, to them, right? Everything is taken from zero to a hundred. Diversity in films, ethnic cleansing. You've seen a black person in your neighborhood today, ethnic cleansing. You see a white boy wearing uh listening to hip hop, ethnic cleansing. Everything is dialed to a hundred, everything is is as a black woman in your video game. Exactly. Exactly. Uh everything is directed against what in their case is like you know the uh Christian values, etc. etc. This is where you know they they part to an extent with normal conservatives if such a thing even exists. You know, the classic like 9-11, wake up, Joe Biden, wake up. Conservative story was uh America is an idea. Immigration is fine as long as it's legal and people assimilate, markets and freedom will sort things out, blah blah blah. Grupers, on the other hand, think that that whole spiel is suicidal. To them, those institutions, TP USA, CPAC, Fox friendly influencers, they aren't just weak, they are collaborators. They call it, as Fred has said, conservative inc, a bought and paid for class of right wing managers who embrace neoliberal economics, unconditional support for Jews, and self-censorship in exchange for money and popularity. But everyone is in on it. The Grupers, on the other hand, sell themselves as the opposite the real right, the future, a movement ready to hollow out the mainstream right from within. Their key move here is basically repackaging white nationalism. They call it quote legitimate group interests. The pitch is pretty good, I have to agree. Every other group can lobby for its interests. You know, the black people can do it, Latino advocacy groups, LGBT lobbies, but white people are we're denied. Or the way they would say it, Christians, we are denied. On the surface, that sounds pretty reasonable to a lot of normies and grass touchers because they're obviously not making all the connections. But underneath, as the rest of us know, it's a very obvious con. Why? Because those other movements arise from subordinated groups contesting power, white identity as a political project arises from a historically dominant group trying to protect its dominance. The symmetry is completely fake, but rhetorically, it's nonetheless powerful. They can they can steal the language of minority rights to defend majority supremacy, while insisting we are not supremacists, we just don't want to be replaced.
SPEAKER_10I do think that with Nick in particular, he leans a little bit more towards outright white supremacist language and saying, you know, uh pushing conservatives towards saying not only are white people under attack, they actually deserve to exclude others and to create this like white Christian ethnostate. And the problem with that is that both descriptors of that ethnostate are what we have termed, you know, metaphysical vibe categories. Christian. Does that mean Mormon? Does that mean Roman Catholic? Does that mean Unitarian? Like what does that mean Quaker? Obviously not, although I think Nick has become more explicitly pro-Catholic, right?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, they're not gonna bring in like the fucking like Indian Christians and stuff.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, I think he's been advocating for a, you know, he's been LARPing by pushing Francoism, you know, Spanish. That's his safe fascist leader, because most Americans don't have a strong opinion about Franco because they're not educated enough in order to have it.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, we covered that, but it's again, it it's always pragmatic, pragmatic, pragmatic, pragmatic. His utilization of the Catholic Church is because it can it can work for growth. His utilization of people that might not be traditionally defined as white, but that can work with the movement is again pragmatic because it uh it uh it helps growth. His complete metaphysical approach to ethnic belonging, again, it's it's utility overall. It it it it um that's the main point I really want to push with with this kind of approach. Is most listeners listening to this, the moment they realize that, for example, shit like race it aren't really biological. That was arguably the first moment, at least I can say for. Myself that I was like, oh, okay, so it's just whatever, it's like a social construct, so we're all basically the fucking same. I'm not gonna make uh my own race or whatever a big uh part of my identity, but that again, because I can afford because I'm a fucking you know slav living in a Slavic country, etc. etc. I'm not gonna contextualize that. But the second we found out, you know, there's nothing biological about race, we fucking moved on. Well, for them, they don't want to admit it to themselves, but they've figured out that there's nothing biological about race, that it's all he said, she said, and they were like, fucking great, we can utilize that to an even greater degree for a racialized society. Yeah, that is to me is uh is very fascinating. Yeah, they know it's all fake, but they go do it.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, it's also like this is classic American racial politics, you know. Former president of the United States, LBJ, said that if you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice your picking his pocket. Hell, give him someone to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. And that's you know, Lyndon Johnson started his career as a southern Dixiecrat, and then he later, you know, as president, signed the Civil Rights Acts into law, and that transition was one purely made for pragmatic power reasons. And Nick Fuentes is like the inverse of that. He knows that the racial bribe is bullshit, but if it's useful for breaking up like a cross-racial solidarity or working class organizing, it can create this friction between different racial categories that could be used to preserve the hierarchies that he's defending, whether they're racial hierarchies or economic hierarchies. It's the classic fascist gambit. Create this totally artificial construct, push it on the people as a as a wedge, and then use the dominant, you know, faction in order to achieve personal power for yourself.
SPEAKER_04And in this case, the personal power comes in a fuck ton of donations from very lonely people on the internet.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_10I mean, it's it's incredibly to that a half Mexican white supremacist got a French guy to donate him a quarter million dollars right before he lifted the back of his head with nine millimeters of force.
SPEAKER_04It was actually a drug overdose, but yeah, it still works, yeah.
SPEAKER_10Oh, okay. Well, I have a very American visual of suicide.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_07And and when we're trying to look at like this whole like, oh my god, are they really like post-race racists? Is this like uh a new thing that uh Nick Fuentes, this incredible philosopher of the uh post-alt-right right, invented? It's not. It really, it really isn't. Intellectually, this fascist praxis uh doesn't come uh from them or out of thin air. Uh Fuentes is not uh a mastermind. This entire movement is plugged into very old borderline classic, if one could call them, uh fascist and traditional traditionalist thought. Julius Zavola, for example, is the patron saint of this whole movement. He was an Italian fascist philosopher who, you know, hated modernity at kind of an openly stated metaphysical level. He thought equality, democracy, and liberalism weren't just bad policies, but symptom of a fallen age. How did he define a fallen age? Vibes. His alternative was a hierarchical tradition anchored in spiritual aristocracy, warrior castes and a sacrilized order where everyone knows their place. Again, the pitch for all of this doesn't come from hey, look at this study where everybody was happier back when we had, I don't know when we did, but warrior castes and a spiritual aristocracy. No, it is vibes. Of course, Evola didn't think uh, you know, you get there just by winning election. You start upstream, you reshape culture, values, aesthetics, what he called metapolitics, so that when the moment comes, the right kind of politics feels natural. And groupers are doing that exact type of meta politics almost by the fucking book. It's almost impressive. They build a counterculture of content organizations in jokes and aesthetics that normalize hierarchy, ethnic conflict, and contempt for progressive thought. The Evolian move is don't argue about fucking policy, argue the entire modern order as spiritually rotten based on vibes. Literal feelings spread over facts. From there, you can, you know, justify almost anything that claims to restore the vibes-based order, the vibes-based traditions, or most importantly, the vice the vibes-based civilization. It is completely giving up on arguing based on data, based on facts, based on science. It just plays on the emotional tune. And for a lot of us, it fucking works.
SPEAKER_10I I mean he like Evola literally called his ideas magical idealism. So just so you understand how these fascists think, any attempt to really nail them down, pin them down, results in them using words like magic. It is all made up. And they know it's made up, but they think that if they trick enough people, they can kind of force it into place, and then the existence of it as a social fact becomes all the justification they need.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely. And that the meme is that you arguably one can argue that you can force it into place, but it's gonna last for two days. You know, people bounce off of their material conditions, people adapt to the system they are in, they try to milk it as much as possible. You can have a warrior gas system with what what was it, fucking uh philosopher aristocrats that govern everything, and it's gonna last for for you know, if even if like a million people agree to this and live live in some sort of metacommunal area or whatever, it's gonna last for a week because after a week, a guy's gonna be like uh shit, like I kind of low key ne the Coca-Cola, and it just fucking dies. The fascists get their own chaz. Yes, yes, the fascists get their own chaz, their Evola Chaz. What would we call it? Evolaz? Evolaz. Welcome to Evolas population, one million two, one million men and two women. We have kidnapped those two women.
SPEAKER_10They did not come here out of their own accord. You know, it is something to really think about is the concept of homo sociality of the alt-right, where they only really consider other men to be the social creatures. Like women are almost they're not even part of human society to them. They're not even someone whose approval they're really looking to get. Everything is homosocial, everything is about the approval of men. All true feeling is is you know related to other men.
SPEAKER_07It's uh it's it's it's I think a whole episode in on its own, a whole uh series of episodes in on its own that I would love to tackle. That is a very good question.
SPEAKER_04I'm sure we'll talk about it more. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we're not leaving the gay fascists behind. They're gonna be with us this entire time. This entire time.
SPEAKER_06Oh no! No, he's in me! Oh, are you in yet?
SPEAKER_04They're in each other. No, no, I get it, I get it.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, fucking reminding me of like, do you feel it yet, Mr. Krabs? They're gonna be doing a conga line, they're conga line walking around uh the next C Pack. In all seriousness, I do think there is a almost like techno-utopian Peter Thiel future where he imagines like when an artificial womb is created, you know, Peter Thiel is gonna be doing this homo fascism separatism, the you know, start our sea land nation that no girls allowed, literally.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so like Aldrius Huxley, Brave New World type shit.
SPEAKER_07It's always integrated into whatever the status call is, like they will like the the philosopher aristocrats or whatever the fuck. Now I'm butchering my own script, but uh they just change the tagline CEO into philosopher warrior and like uh higher management with uh elevated warrior cast and middle management with uh regular warrior cast. They just want to do the same fucking thing, but with like cool sounding names that allow them to kill a few people every week. That's it. That's that's unironically at the end of the day, yeah. But layered on top of this, like fucking, you know, just uh eternal metaphysical LARP, uh, is also flirtation with a more um, let's say, one traditional institution. Uh Mike mentioned it earlier. I'm talking about what is known to many as Catholic integralism and you know outright cleropascism. Integralism, if you don't know anything about it, is basically a truly just polity that must subordinate the state to the true religion. Liberal separation of church and state is considered a mistake. Think of Franco-Spain, where the church legitimized the state and the state enforced the church's moral order in turn. When some groupers fantasize about Catholic monarchy or a state that enforces the social kingship of Christ, they're not just being cute, they are gesturing at the collaboration between a keyword here, a corrupt reactionary church and the state, where both legitimize each other's calls for moral and legal authority. Basically a feedback loop with an entity pretending to speak in the Lord's name that gives you full immunity no matter how vile your actions are. To an extent that if I can allow myself, it is one of the harshest bastardizations of faith you can come across because these guys make atheists look like church boys. Why? Because they simply and exclusively see the church as an institution, exclusively as a thing to use for its utility in the direction of growing their own political power. If we convince enough people to follow our version of the church, the feedback loop will allow us to stay in power forever.
SPEAKER_04And America is like the perfect spot for this because of you know how Christian everyone is, how like powerful uh local churches are and in communities and such.
SPEAKER_10Well, yeah, I mean, and and how atomized and bastardized it is, especially among the conservative Southern evangelicalism. Like, one of the things that's really under important to understand about American Christianity, and and something you guys may not be aware of, is that Southern evangelical Christianity was created as a faction for the purpose of advancing and protecting slavery and white supremacy. The reason why we call them Southern Baptists is because there used to be an American Baptist religion and it divided among the Mason Dixon line because the Baptist theologians at the time, the church elders, did not want to have slave owners as members of the hierarchy and elite of baptism in America. And so Southern slaveholders, who were the most powerful and influential Southerners in the congregations, they demanded equal status that was kept from them because of their position as slave owners. And so this very tradition of Southern evangelical Protestantism, which is a key pillar of conservatism in America, was structured and built around the material function of defending and upholding slavery. Like literally.
SPEAKER_04Actually, this reminded me because in talking about Nick Fuentes' Catholicism and like Franco-Spain and that kind of stuff, um, I'm pretty sure that Nick Fuentes, if he is kind of leaning into the sort of Catholic LARP, is definitely anti-Second Vatican Council, which is a thing that I think not that many people know about, where the uh Catholic Church apologized for its history of anti-Semitism and made various like theological assertions about the role of Jewish people in biblical history, chiefly saying that Jewish people don't bear the responsibility for the death of Jesus Christ. And all these like Catholic LARPers, they fucking hate that shit because they're all anti-Semites.
SPEAKER_10You know, as the Catholic in the room, or at least raised one. Like it was also progressive in a lot of ways, it actually changed the way the religion was practiced, right? It it it changed the you know, Catholic mass from being spoken in Latin to being spoken in local language to being translated to be more participatory, to be, you know, elevating the women of uh role of women in the church. You know, obviously it still has a patriarchal domination where only men can be, you know, priests, but it was you know, there was a whole bunch of innovations and changes that eared away from some of the older traditions of pre-Vatican II. And so for people like Fluentes, and by the way, he's a heretic, which ironically means he's against the hierarchy. So this position, in and of itself, is heretical.
SPEAKER_07It 100% is. That's what I tried to say. It's one of the most heretical things I've ever heard. He is lying to you as a religious person by saying, uh, yo, like we should have the church over like uh equalized with the state. Hell, we should have it over the state. But what he's proposing, in essence, is a 100% state-run church that will just regurgitate exactly what the state wants you to hear. The church no longer exists, it's just a mouthpiece, the same way the South Baptists were as well. It is so heretical, it does not take you from separation of church and state. It literally tells you remove the church from the equation by integrating it into the state. There is only the state. It's insane for a Christian to hear this, any practicing Christian to hear this, without his fucking brain not exploding. But of course, we have so many precedents, especially the United States. Mike, please correct me if I'm wrong, where every Joe with$200,000 can just uh for tax evasion purposes, can just go and make a fucking church in a mall and be like, I'm the fucking Pope.
SPEAKER_10We do have a phenomenon in uh in America called storefront churches.
SPEAKER_05Don't the Kardashians have a church? Isn't that fucking wild?
SPEAKER_10I'm sure. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised, honestly. I would love to do an episode on Trump's uh spiritual advisor and evangelical televangelism in general because it's such a fucking scam. And the way that it has been allowed to violate a lot of the laws in America, you know, churches are supposed to be apolitical, meaning not make political endorsements from the pulpit and things like that in order to preserve their tax exempt status. But there has basically been an open flouting of that in the last 40 years, and these kind of Bible thumpers, these snake handlers, snake charmers, you know, tent revivalist scam artists have become extremely dominant.
SPEAKER_07I don't know if Fredd agrees, but that might be my number one biggest culture shock when looking at uh American culture, you know, in general. It's just the what you call like the storefront church, like just the seven million uh denominations uh that you can just pick from and do that like completely treat it as you know a storefront business where you know you're you're listening to something in that like a stadium-sized church, and then there's little ladies passing, and you're giving money in a basket, and he shouts, MOOM money, goddammit! And you just like whip out more money and more money. It is it's like watching a very badly written movie about very unrealistic looking aliens from another galaxy. You're like, aha, this there's no way. Yeah, it's like they live. Yeah, there's just no way, and this is like actual human beings, and I genuinely feel sorry for them. I will I'm not making fun of them. It's just it it is the biggest, uh, not gripe, but the biggest culture shock that I experienced whenever I watch shows on stuff.
SPEAKER_04My biggest culture shock was actually when I went to America once. It was a a man propositioning a woman for sex on top of a car hood very loudly at like 6 p.m. outside of a corner store. I feel like you could see that in in Europe as well. Yeah, probably. But they I don't know if they proposition in Italy. They probably wouldn't have car hoods, it would be like on my Vespa!
SPEAKER_06I'm sitting on a ma Vespa. On the Vespa. Signorina, do you like a machestier on my Vespa? You would if you like a machestier, you would love how it looks like when the wind uh hits it. My Vespa can drive us 60 miles per hour.
SPEAKER_10All I'm trying to say is European men are are perverts as well. Oh no, yeah, many are, yeah.
SPEAKER_07Oh no, they are, they are, they are, they are. No, objectively, the biggest culture shock of America is just like people dying everywhere on the street. I've never seen that anywhere else. And I've been to very poor countries. That that's like I was fucking around with the mega churches. I've never been to my church.
SPEAKER_10I will say that has gotten significantly worse since 2008. Like, you know, homelessness in general, people dying on the street.
SPEAKER_07Speaking of 2008, what do we remember 2008 for? Workers suffering. And what I find most interesting about the Grupers is that they love talking about workers suffering. They sometimes even use anti-capitalist rhetoric. You know, they complain about wage slavery, financial parasites, big corporations shipping jobs overseas. That was my favorite, kind of gets me wet. They talk about student debt, housing costs, optimization. On the surface, all of these fancy words sound like they've read uh quite a bit of left critique, but their analysis always hits a fork on the road. One path is class politics. Understanding these crises are expressions of capitalism's structural logic and building solidarity across race and gender to control and confront capital. The other path is racial politics, interpreting the same crises as plots against your race, blaming migrants, minorities, and cosmopolitan elites of particular ethnic backgrounds. The Grupers consciously choose, as we've heard by now, the second path. They talk anti-capitalism, but they never stay with it long enough to implicate the system itself. Instead, they personify capitalism as globalist elites and then fold everything back into their great replacement story. The textbook definition of how racism functions in a capitalist society diverts real class anger away from the structure and onto other segments of the working class or onto a demonized minority. You don't have to be a socialist or communist or even a nice, beautiful, but slightly stinky anarchist to agree with what those ideologies propose. But this particular analysis of how reaction forms in its relationship to the crisis of any particular system, but now we live in capitalism of this particular system, is something that I believe everyone across the aisle can, except for the right, of course, can agree on. The person screwed by landlords, bosses, and austerity is invited to imagine his fundamental enemy is not his boss, but the migrant worker or the black neighbor, and above all, the lib or the commie who defends them. Capital always gets off the hook. If you're a billionaire who wants low taxes, weak unions, and a docile divided workforce, a movement that channels rage into racial identity while leaving property relations intact is not your enemy. It's your shock absorber, a perfect army of financial cuckolds, workers, and lumpens. Selling themselves out en masse. And yet they really do see themselves as anti-establishment. You can truly see that. I don't know about Nick, I'm not a psychoanalyst here, but his followers really do. Part of why their message lands is that the libs hand them plenty of ammunition. Liberal capitalism loves symbolic inclusion. The ad with the diverse caste, the corporate pride logo, the politician who says black lives matter, and then does nothing about housing or policing. When people notice the real, let's be honest, gap between representation and material reality in this system, it opens space for a counter-narrative, both for the Reds, but also for the Browns. And here I mean ideology, dear listener. I'm not saying that the Mexicans are defenders of capitalism. Though in this case. They're replacing you while they laugh about equity. They correctly spot liberal co-option, then leap straight past real analysis to ethno-reactionary conclusions. Racial capitalism creates the wound. Fascism offers the gangrenous cure. Running underneath all of this is a split over what to do with a decayed system. Some on that orbit still think in builder terms, capture institutions, pass laws, impose a Christian nationalist order. Others are accelerationists. They've given up on reform or capture and want to push the system into crisis as fast as possible. In their worldview, you know, society is too corrupt to fix, collapse is both inevitable and desirable, because only through chaos can a pure, strong new world emerge. So you get a politics that kind of always oscillates, including Nick Fuentes himself, between lobbying for influence at conferences and fantasizing about civil war. The same Gruper might one day be talking about running candidates, and the next celebrating the awesome chaos of January 6th as a taste of what's to come. And none of this would travel very far, especially among younger audiences, without the final ingredient to today's explanation of the Groiper mind. Irony. The lubricant that lets the entire machine run without immediately burning out. On the front end, the ideology comes wrapped in jokes, memes, and just asking questions type shit. It's not Jews control everything. It's kind of weird how many people in X sector have similar backgrounds. It's not we need a white ethnostate. It's what's wrong with white, what's wrong with wanting to preserve our culture? It's not women shouldn't vote. It's ha ha ha. If we if we went back to traditional gender roles, wouldn't that be funny, right, Rose? That would be that would be that would be that would be funny.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right with you. There you go.
SPEAKER_07Fucking hilarious. Irony utilized like that does at least three things at once. It keeps them on platforms because moderation systems and casual observers can't always tell where the line between joke and belief sits. It lowers defenses, and it builds a gradual on-ramp. You start by laughing ironically at jokes you'd never say sincerely. Then over time the distance shrinks. The more you repeat a line, even as a joke, the less shocking it feels, and the more obvious it becomes. That mechanism is central to how Gruper ideology works. A teenager who would never click on a straight-faced neo-Nazi video will click on a stream mocking soy boys and blue-haired pronoun people. Google pipelines. He'll stick around for the bits about immigration. Google pipelines. He'll get used to slurs as punchlines. Please Google pipelines at this point. If you're not Google pipelines, he'll internalize the frame that quote, we straight white Christian guys or whatever, are under siege. Once the identity is locked in, the heavier stuff, Evola quotes, Catholic monarchy, great replacement theory, all of those don't feel like a great leap. They feel like the logical conclusion to the story he's already accepted. If you strip away the memes, the theater, the streaming drama, the streamer drama. If you strip away the memes, the theater, the streamer drama, what you're left with is remarkably ancient. A fascist adjacent project that wants to restore a racial religious hierarchy using a mix of spiritualized traditionalism, conspiracy theories, and a hatred of modernity. A grouper is just the latest skin this thing is wearing.
SPEAKER_11Jews 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.
SPEAKER_10It's important that we explain how these Gruiper scums survive in the physical material process for how they organize, broadcast, and then insert their ideas into the broader American right. Nick Puentes's alt-right media ecosystem thrives in a distributed semi-underground network that's designed to survive bans, deplatforming, and public scrutiny. This provides a resilience that resists efforts to suppress. At the core of our alternate video and streaming sites like Rumble, Cozy, Odyssey, and formerly D-Life, which each market themselves as free speech havens for people banned from mainstream platforms. These platforms provide not just broadcast infrastructure but serve as identity markers, using them as itself proof of persecution, which alt-right figures use as currency. This creates a hardcore support base and incentivize financial support and personal loyalty, as we've discussed this episode. Surrounding the broadcast platforms is a dense network of chat apps and private communities based especially on Telegram, Discord servers, and other encrypted messaging spaces. This is where the hardcore organizing happens. Extreme and violent memes are tested, while broader talking points are refined. This is also where harassment campaigns are planned, launched, and coordinated. The public-facing streams serve as recruitment centers, while the private spaces are ideological pressure cookers where even more virulent rhetoric is derived. I think one of the things that is common in these spaces is the law causation of their opposition. So if you're somebody who has ever covered, and I expect all of us when this episode is released to become targets in these spaces. And that's part of what protects these spaces from scrutiny is journalists, political commentators, and other people know that if you investigate or talk about these spaces, you will be will become a victim of their harassment.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_10This ecosystem also feeds parasitically on mainstream platforms it officially rejects. And this has kind of changed a bit because Elon Musk buying uh Twitter has basically made Twitter one of the leading alternative platforms. So they've unbanned or allowed like a lot of hardcore extremist rhetoric to flourish on X as part of like Elon's effort to turn it from this kind of liberal progressive space of the mainstream to a place where you know far right speech is normalized.
SPEAKER_07Can you imagine how pissed off all the owners of alternative platforms were when Elon bought it and basically turned it into a right-wing safe haven? Like the guys who were making like 100k a month or even some probably like five, six million a month, depending on the size of the platform, from you know being like free speech uh safe spots. And then this motherfucker, this piece of fucking shit, he just lets let's fucking Nazis post.
SPEAKER_01And he's not even making money off of them. Right, right, at least in the beginning, yeah. Exactly. That must have sucked.
SPEAKER_10I don't know. I I think of Twitter as a big money loser for Elon, but it's part of a larger political project where it's like Yeah, yeah, but I'm talking about the other guy, the other Fail sons that were like, you know.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah, they got fucked. And fuck them. Yeah, they're like, what is he doing? He's fucking our bag.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, but that's isn't that the but that that's the point. Like they were like, we we have to create alternative platforms for free speech. And then they got fucked by free speech.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Like they were betting by making a platform uh that is uh more quote unquote free speech than other platforms, you are betting against the world entertaining your definition of free speech. Because the second it starts entertaining it, aka you know, the biggest world forum, x.com, entertaining it, leads to your bankruptcy. You're betting against the thing you're saying you believe in, you're shorting freedom of speech whenever you make a platform that allows pure freedom of speech. You understand what I'm saying here?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, yeah, they were betting on woke, like never backsliding at all.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Yes, thank you, thank you, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_10But I will say this like one of the people who got cucked a little bit was Donald Trump because he had his own platform, Truth Social.
SPEAKER_06Follow me on Truth Social. My name is KKK420420.
SPEAKER_10So, but you know, unfortunately for all of us, all the Gulf states can just buy his you know Truth Social stock so they can bribe him that way. Be like, hey Trump, if you uh give us X and Y Z, you know, positive outcome, we can buy up your you know Truth Social shares because nobody uses that shit.
SPEAKER_04Dude, it's so fucking cool to be 79 years old with clearly one foot in the grave and being like, How can I make more money? Like, how can I take more bribes? Literal disease.
SPEAKER_10I think he's legitimately too stupid to realize he's gonna die soon. Like, I I think Donald Trump significant like everybody of any amount of intellect has that moment of existential dread where you learn to like consider your own mortality or consider the fact that you know life is fucking short.
SPEAKER_07Except me, I will never die.
SPEAKER_10And I fell in the other side. I think Donald Trump is legitimately too stupid to ever have done that. Like, I think he really believes he's gonna live forever.
SPEAKER_07Juan Hando. Absolutely. All of them do, all of them do. That's why they're low-key even betting on uh on curing it. Like they're gonna be the first ones. We're gonna be the first ones. Trust me, we're gonna be the first ones, the first ones, the first ones, the first ones.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, dude, I want to see when Donald Trump transforms into that weird vampire guy who uses his like son's blood or whatever.
SPEAKER_10Oh my god, I don't think you want Eric Trump's blood, and you definitely don't want Donald Trump's Jr.'s blood. Have you seen the women he dates? I mean, I mean the amount of stepped on cocaine he's used. Like you are injecting some chemicals into your body if you used his blood.
SPEAKER_04He's gonna hook Baron up to the Golden Throne. That's why he's got him inside playing Paradox games so he doesn't go out and do cocaine.
SPEAKER_10And so, as I was saying, it's important to notice that these alternative platforms that Nick Fluentes and the Groipers exist on, they feed parasitically on those mainstream platforms. Twitter, TikTok, YouTube re-uploads. They use them to clip, irony post, and bait leftists, journalists, liberal commentators so they can milk them as lolcals. And uh Fluentes' content often spreads even further through his critics, quote tweets, and various outrage cycles than through his own channels. And so part of his strategy is to be so extreme, so hyperbolic, so uh over the top that attention from hostile media is not a setback, but actually part of his growth strategy. Look at how he's pissing off the libs. Another key site for the movement is direct media overlap, where Fuentes' ideas circulate indirectly through podcasts, substacks, and shows that don't identify as white nationalists, but are nonetheless sharing adjacent themes. Think of this as the funnel, the alt-right funnel, an alt-right pipeline. So you'll have Nick Fuentes at the end, but further down the line, you'll have somebody like, say, Tim Poole or some other Trump uh-aligned alt-media podcasts. These shows do not identify as explicitly white nationalist, but they share adjacent themes civilizational decline, demographic panic, anti-liberalism, and hostility to feminism and multiculturalism. This is where the laundering happens. Language gets cleaned up, racial explicitness is softened, and the ideas become usable by a broader right-wing audience without requiring open allegiance to Fuentes himself. And finally, the ecosystem thrives culturally in online irony spaces, meme forums, and edgelord subcultures where sincerity is treated as weakness. Jokes, slurs as humor, and deliberate ambiguity allow users to retreat from accountability while still signaling in-group membership. This makes the ecosystem resilient. It can deny what it is while continuing to function as a right-wing model. And I think all of us have seen this kind of, and it's something that we've discussed a lot on the show. We're going to continue to discuss is how a lot of the right-wing ecosystem is vibes-based and floating between, you know, what is a legitimate political project, what is humor. And every single individual in this space gets to pick and choose for themselves what is real and what is a joke. And this kind of allows the space to remain kind of in unity while people are saying contradictory things to one another. Because what is one person's joke is another person's explicit political idea. And being able to operate in ambiguity gives them that resilience.
SPEAKER_07And makes it extremely difficult to fight.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, and that's the thing, because like as we fight it, we get called what, you know, we're we're scolds, we don't understand humor, we're autistic, we're, you know, whatever they want to say in order to kind of deflect from actually having to engage. And just going back to things that we've said before, we take words seriously, we take words responsibly, and they have the right to play. And Nick Fuentes, he represents the right to play, and that is a tremendous advantage. Nick Fuentes does not need to be formally endorsed to be effectively mainstreamed. He only needs proximity. Content creators, politicians, donors, and media figures play distinct but mutually reinforcing roles. The integration of the online rights most extremist elements has been a hallmark of the Trump era. In 2022, Trump sat down to dinner with Ye, formerly Kanye West, and Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago. At the time, Trump received so much backlash that he claimed to have no idea who Nick even was. Those days are now long gone, and prominent figures on the right are chomping at the bit to interact with Nick. And I think for me, this is the thing that has changed in Trump too. In Trump one, they made gestures and dog whistles toward the alt-right, but now mainstream conservative figures are directly integrating them into the movement. And Nick Fuentes is a perfect example of that.
SPEAKER_04It's a make or break moment because whether or not Donald Trump like steps out of the White House doesn't matter. He's 79 years old. He is the guy who ties all this together. Everyone is trying to figure out how to like push this that they've been building up to right now. And they have limited time.
SPEAKER_11I'd be like, great. Yeah. Like we don't care. That's and look, Tucker, that's why I'm sitting here, you know? I mean, because we had a contentious dialogue. Well, I thought you were a fed. I was in the five. I thought you were a fed.
unknownI was a fed.
SPEAKER_11Yeah. I'm not a fed. Um, but whatever. I don't care what people.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, we showed each other a badge as we know we're I think of Tucker Carlson as probably in my mind, he's the 2028 front runner for president if he runs. Because I think JD Vance, it's something we're gonna talk about very shortly, but I don't think JD Vance has the juice. He's got an Indian wife. Yeah, and like he's he's fought with these people too much. He's too much of a lol cow, the memes have already ripped him up. Whereas Tucker Carlson is the one person who I think actually could reunite the right, unironically, uh, in that he has enough cachet with like all the way with like the neocon conservatives, all the way to Nick Fuentes. Because they ultimately had a pretty positive interaction because Nick is greedy for more attention. And if if he's going to be given it by Tucker Carlson, he's going to be given legitimacy. He's willing to kiss ass. He's a born sycophan.
SPEAKER_07And especially a sycophant for somebody that is actually going to follow through on most of the things they say. Tucker Carlson. This man, as ironic as it sounds, is a class conscious reactionary. He actually understands how things work. He just wants to, you know, pivot them in uh the direction that best suits him and his family and his cohort, etc. etc. He doesn't punch in the dark, is what I mean. Tucker Carlson in particular.
SPEAKER_10Oh no, Tucker Carlson, he kind of he's like a Neo Bercher. Do you guys know what the Bercher movement is?
SPEAKER_04No.
SPEAKER_10Remind me?
SPEAKER_07No.
SPEAKER_10Oh fuck. God damn it. I I really want to talk about this now and and and and uh wait you talk about the John Bercher here, but I don't know that I can. Oh no, yeah, then I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot of people. It's called the Bercher never as well. I'm familiar with that. But um he's basically a Neo Bercher for me. And the Bercher movement was largely purged from um the American conservative movement by kind of the neoconservative national review Reaganites. The Birchers were like basically blood and soil nationalists for America, explicitly white supremacist and virulently anti-Semitic. But after World War II, that was like a bad look. So they were kind of pushed out. And so I think of Tucker Carlson as a neo-bercher, he's like a crypto bircher, and he's bringing back a lot of those tropes, which is why figures such as Tucker Carlson flirt openly with Fluentes. They're using Israel's genocide in Gaza as a differentiator between the insurgent far right that they represent and more mainstream Zionist conservative Republicans. And I also think it'll be a differentiator from Trump himself, right? They will use Trump's slavish support of Israel as a way to demonstrate how they're changed. And that's why I think Tucker Carlson is the is, you know, my odds on favorite if he wants it to be the Republican primary nominee in 2028, because he'll be able to separate himself from Trump using the Jewish control of Trump or Zionism as that wedge, as it falls in popularity to the point where it's no longer viable to be associated with Israel in a national political campaign in America. I think that using that anti-Semitism to differentiate himself will be Tucker Carlson's strategy of overcoming whoever is trying to carry on the Zionist Trumple, you know, staff or, you know, and carry that forward. I don't think it's viable. Fuentes uses Israel's influence on American politics of the Republican Party as fodder for pushing anti-Semitic views instead of opposition to Zionism or its foreign state agents influencing American politics with donor money. Fuentes frames Jewish people in explicitly Nazi terms as a foreign nation of parasites that infect a host society for their own benefit. And they'll oftentimes link Jewish leftists as avatars of the great replacement theory. And that's how they import this European anti Semitism into America by saying it's actually Jewish people that argue for, you know, mass migration and therefore they're trying to dilute the white race so they can enslave America. Society and control it for Israel. Mainstream politicians and political commentators like Tucker Carlson are actively working to integrate the political movement of America first and even Nick Fluentes himself into the broader Republican coalition. Now, politicians like J.D. Vance echo the same narratives about demographic decline, civilizational collapse, elite betrayal, and launder ideas that were once confined to explicit white nationalist spaces.
SPEAKER_09And I think that my my message to young men is don't allow this broken culture to send you a message that you're a bad person because you're a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you're competitive.
SPEAKER_10Ironically, J.D. Vance is a frequent target of Fuentes who mocks Vance's marriage to an Indian woman and their mixed-race children.
SPEAKER_11Now, first of all, I have to say uh I really appreciate the invitation. It's very gracious. I've said a lot of negative things about J.D. Vance. So for him to extend an invitation like that to me to have dinner, a traditional Indian dinner with him and his family, it actually moved me. It actually touched me a little bit. Uh, but respectfully I must decline. That's sort of the whole point. I don't want to eat shit. Kind of the whole point. We don't want them here because we don't want to eat shit.
SPEAKER_10In October 2025, a scandal exploded when members of the young Republican National Federation had group chats of leaders throughout the country leaked. According to official reporting by Politico, they referred to black people as monkeys and watermelon people. They mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide. They lauded any Republican who they believed supported slavery. William Hendricks, the Kansas Young Republican vice chair, used all the variations of the N-word more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans, referred to rape as epic. Peter Gianta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber. Racial slurs, Holocaust jokes, and calls for the rape and torture of their opposition. This wasn't a common section on X, a threat on poll in 4chan. This was the National Young Republican Club with over 15,000 members. Behind closed doors, where they all think no one can see them, the next generation of Republican apparatus are all either fans of Nick Fuentes and the American Forced Movement, or at the very least sound exactly like him. And Vice President J.D. Vance was right there to diffuse the intensity of the backlash, comparing the chat to offensive yet different leaked messages from a Virginia Democratic candidate saying he refused to engage in pearl clutching. This process signals a shift in right-wing politics away from ideological discipline and toward affect and identity. The boundary between respectable conservatism and open ethno-nationalism has become porous because outrage and attention reward those who push the line rightward. Fuentes operates as that testing ground. If his ideas spark backlash, mainstream figures can disavow him while still absorbing the parts that resonate with their base. If they gain traction, the distance quietly shrinks. But looks like marginalization is often just a holding pattern before partial or even full adoption. This has created a future where far right does not need to win outright to succeed. It can reshape the agenda by forcing conversations onto its terrain. It is normalizing once taboo assumptions about race, gender, and national belonging. The next generation of white, male, conservative white men is buying what Nick Fuentes is selling. And that is a model in which contradiction, provocation, and extremism are not liabilities but tools. And where mainstream conservative figures act as translators, ensuring that the most radical ideas survive by changing just enough to pass. Listen, podcasts like this are not going to get a lot of sponsors. This is an extreme topic about extremely unpopular and controversial figures. And the only way we'll be able to continue to create podcast content like this is from the support of the community and the support of listeners. So if you value journalism, if you value an anthropologic study of the alt-right, you're only going to get it if you support it. So I'd like to personally ask everybody listening if you have the ability and you found it valuable, please consider supporting us by clicking the link in the description and joining our Patreon. We have plenty of extra content there, and we're looking forward to seeing you.