Nick Fuentes enjoys making the misogyny of neofascism explicit

Most people have a basic misconception of white supremacy. They understand it as a kind of basic tribal affiliation based on a racial hierarchy, one in which white people occupy the top rung and are in control of all the others. This is why so many have the misperception that nonwhite people uniformly oppose it.

White supremacy is actually much more than that. It is in fact a system of authoritarian social control, one built around the above hierarchy but also willing to use both state force and extralegal violence to enshrine the various positions on the hierarchy. It’s also quite specifically a male atop the totem pole; white women hold high status in the system, but it’s fundamentally a patriarchy.

This is why you’ll always find certain numbers of nonwhite people, particularly men with authoritarian personalities, willingly participating in MAGA attacks on democracy (think of all the Latinos we have seen engaged as ICE agents, including the two men who murdered Alex Pretti). They are drawn less to the tribal affiliation aspect but rather the authoritarian control, and especially the male control.

So misogyny is usually a salient feature of both the rhetoric around white-supremacist political movements such as fascism and the systems they construct. And this eventually becomes a central focus of their political ambitions: depriving women of political power is an essential enterprise.

The nation’s leading neofascist, Nick Fuentes, recently made this explicit with one of his irregular misogynist rants on his podcast. Fuentes, speaking for all the white nationalists out there, explained to his gullible audience that women are “the enemy” and that they should all be imprisoned. And not just imprisoned, but rounded up into concentration camps—“rape gulags”—where they could be sexually assaulted at will.

This isn’t particularly surprising for a professional misogynist like Fuentes. After all, this is the guy who, after Trump won re-election, posted the viral troll phrase on Twitter, “Your body, my choice. Forever”—which sparked a wave of social-media attacks on women. He has called for women to be burned at the stake as witches. Fuentes also recently admitted that he has never had sex with a woman.

It was all part of an incoming tide of far-right commentary calling for the outright oppression of women—particularly of taking away their right to vote. There’s even a popular meme dating back to 2016 advocating for citizens to “repeal the 19^th” [Amendment, giving women the right to vote].

The idea has been increasingly pushed, especially by Christian nationalist religious figures like Doug Wilson—a mentor to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who recently hosted him at the Pentagon. Wilson says women must be submissive to their husbands and shouldn’t be permitted to vote, and that granting women the right to vote stemmed from Americans embracing “the lie of individualism” that hurts the institution of families, he says.

An Arizona-based pastor named Dale Partridge recently caused a stir on Twitter by posting:

Women vote with emotions

National policy is feminized

Immigrants flood in

Sexual immorality is legalized

Multiculturalism is celebrated

Feelings become the arbiter of morality

Justice is labeled as “harsh”

Western nations collapse

Women blame men

Repeal the 19th.

Social media has become awash with this content, especially in the self-pitying “manosphere” (think Andrew Tate) favored by incels and far-right conspiracists who blame women for all their ills, as well as the associated white-nationalist corners that Nick Fuentes occupies. Indeed, the two sectors often enjoy significant overlap, as his recent rant exposed.

Perhaps more important, Fuentes unapologetically revealed the profoundly totalitarian politics he hopes to unleash, one that makes The Handmaid’s Tale seem like a benign fantasy in comparison:

Women get sent to the gulags first, obviously. Which women? All women. Every woman. Every woman and girl is sent to the gulags. We will determine who the good ones are after the fact. Well, what about the good ones? What about the trad ones? First of all, there are no trad ones or good ones. Second of all, we will determine which ones are acceptable after they’re all imprisoned. Then we will let them out.

You have to do it because those are our political enemies. You want to know our number -- This is unironically just true. The number one political enemy in America is women. Straight up, I’m just telling you. I’m telling it like it is. People might say it’s Jews, it’s Democrats, it’s white liberals, it’s leftists, it’s the Chinese. Our number one political enemy is women because women constrain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. They have to be imprisoned.

They are the ones that are hurting the fertility rate. They’re the ones making us sympathetic to poor people, which are also brown people. You know, when you -- I want you to understand something. When you’re sympathetic to poor people, you’re sympathetic to brown people because brown people are poor. OK? Not all poor people are brown, but most brown people are poor. So women are making us sympathetic to poor people, aka brown people. Women are making us sympathetic to George Floyd. Women are the reason that their fertility rate is low because they’re getting educated and they attack every man as a rapist and a pedophile and they’re henpecking and controlling all the men.

So just like Hitler imprisoned Gypsies, Jews, communists, you know, all of his political rivals, we have to do the same thing with women. And we’ll sort it out. We’ll find the good ones. They can prove themselves. Then we’ll let them go.

So they go to the gulag first. They go to the breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated. The bad ones will toil in the mines forever.

Fuentes is gleefully unabashed about his totalitarian agenda. Like all authoritarian personalities, he militates against democratic rule and embraces a Trumpian dictatorship—which in his imagining would end up committing historic atrocities and ending the democratic experiment. Misogyny is just the starting point for his broader eliminationist campaign to eradicate Blacks and Jews and nonwhite immigrants and LGBTQ people.

Shane Burley, a Portland-based journalist/author who has conducted deep research into these movements, explained the dynamics of Fuentes’ misogyny recently in an interview with Kelley Hayes:

Gender has always been an important throughline of fascist politics, particularly in creating a heroic narrative that men themselves can internalize and from which they can figure out how to perform masculinity. It is based distinctly on violence, but also on entitlement, what women are and what they should offer to men. By doing this it can capture resentment men feel, particularly the loneliness that comes from the lack of socialization for building relationships as well as just the reality of modern work life, and channel it back into their performance of masculine violence. If they feel alienated in their life, they are taught to blame women, thus putting pressure on the women in their life to engage in a kind of social reproduction that lets the system of alienation just continue further.

What this means practically is that social uplift and women’s autonomy is presented as directly threatening to male identity and is blamed for any material or emotional deprivation they have. Racial politics are obviously central for men, but gender politics play out in every man’s life on a daily basis and can act as a type of binding concept for keeping men occupied with violent behavior that serves the needs of the larger nationalist movement.

As Burley observes, Fuentes’ particular vision of authoritarian male rule is even more toxic than what can be found in traditional fascism, “because earlier forms of fascist patriarchy are about forcing women into a narrow role of motherhood/spousalship that can reproduce a type of ‘traditional family.’ Fuentes doesn’t even want that and celebrates himself as a virgin and blames women for the world’s ills.”

If all of this misogyny has a distinctly Catholic ring to it, that’s intentional on Fuentes’ part. “I want this country to have Catholic media, Catholic Hollywood, Catholic government,” he told his audience on a podcast. “I want this to be a Catholic occupied government, not a Jewish occupied government.”

This is not modern Catholicism, of course, but the authoritarian Catholicism of the medieval Church, whose views of women were crystallized in the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a text published by Inquisition authorities in 1486:

All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. ... What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours. ... Women are by nature instruments of Satan—they are by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the original creation.

These kinds of beliefs gradually receded from dominance during the Enlightenment and later eras. However, fascist ideology revived this kind of hatred in the 20^th century and gave it new life.

Hitler and Mussolini both were ardent in their misogyny: “The Nazi Revolution will be an entirely male event” was one of Hitler’s most repeated phrases. Hitler’s views on women, in fact, were a core component of the Nazis’ mass psychological appeal, and were widespread throughout fascist movements. What was remarkable, perhaps, about the Nazis was the open glee with which they murdered women; they retained the ancient Catholic hatred of female putrefication, but freed from whatever constraints might have existed in the context of a church, they became relentlessly violent.

The German scholar Klaus Theweleit a few years ago examined the literature created in the post-World War I Weimar Germany by the paramilitary Nazis called the Freikorpsmen, and published his findings in a two-volume work titled Male Fantasies.

Theweleit found that, essentially, the fascist psychodrama entailed a wholesale unleashing of male desire, including incest, rape and murder. The fascist mindset entailed reveling in control over the bodies of others, embodied perhaps in their embrace of torture. And at the bloody beating heart of it all was a pathological fear of women.

Barbara Ehrenreich described this in her foreword to Male Fantasies:

The Freikorpsmen hate women, specifically women’s bodies and sexuality. It would not be going too far to say that their perpetual war was undertaken to escape women; even the motherly battlefront nurse is a threatening intrusion in the unisexual world of war. This hatred -- or dread -- of women cannot be explained with Freud’s all-purpose Oedipal triangulation (fear that heterosexual desire will lead to punishment by the father, homosexual yearnings for the father, or some such permutation of the dramatic possibilities). The dread arises in the pre-Oedipal struggle of the fledgling self, before there is even an ego to sort out the objects of desire and the odds of getting them: It is a dread, ultimately, of dissolution -- of being swallowed, engulfed, annihilated. Women’s bodies are the holes, swamps, pits of muck that can engulf.

The Nazis, who envisioned themselves as forging a revolutionary future, had no real place for women except in a secondary role—as mothers and helpful supportmates. To this extent, their ideal Nazi woman was described thus:

Therefore a woman belongs at the side of a man not just as a person who brings children into this world, not just as an adornment to delight the eye, not just as a cook and a cleaner. Instead woman has the holy duty to be a life companion, which means being a comrade who pursues her vocation as woman with clarity of vision and spiritual warmth.

—Paula Siber, “The New German Woman,” 1933, from Fascism [1995, Oxford University Press], edited by Roger Griffin

Theweleit describes the resulting pathology:

Men themselves were now split into a (female) interior and a (male) exterior -- the body armor. And as we know, the interior and exterior were mortal enemies. ... What fascism promised men was the reintegration of their hostile components under tolerable conditions, dominance of the hostile “female” element within themselves. ...

As a matter of course, fascism excluded women from the public arena and the realms of male production. But fascism added a further oppression to the oppression of women: When a fascist male went into combat against erotic, “flowing,” unsubjugated women, he was also fighting his own unconscious, his own desiring-production. This is clear from the fact that whereas in World War I, the Hohenzollern women had posed as nurses, Hitler concealed his “beloved” from the public. Not only was she useless for the rituals that maintained Hitler’s rule, she would have gotten in the way.

Indeed, this is about how Hitler himself spoke regarding women:

Man’s universe is vast compared to that of a woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. It’s only incidental if he devotes his thoughts to a woman. Woman’s universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that is why she’s capable of loving so deeply.

—Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Secret Conversations, pp. 344-345.

In his 1989 book Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values—and Our Own, Norwegian scholar Harald Ofstad sums it up:

The Nazi view of sex roles is based on conventional notions taken to extremes. Sexuality has no intrinsic value; it is only a means of unleashing the power of men and the strength of the nation. Women are instruments.

A real man can never have any deep emotional contact with a woman. Her world is totally at odds with his. Real men can only have meaningful contact with other men, e.g., in such organizations as the SS. There they share the bonds of companionship and loyalty to their leader.

As Ehrenreich explained, the Nazi compartmentalized the women of his world. To fall outside the “acceptable” role for women in Nazi society meant that one was an Enemy. And they reserved some of their most venomous hatred for such women:

In the Freikorpsman’s life, there are three kinds of women: those who are absent, such as the wives and fiancees left behind, and generally unnamed and unnoted in the Freikorpsmen’s most intimate diaries; the women who appear in the imagination and on the literal battlefront as “white nurses,” chaste, upper-class German women; and finally, those who are his class enemies—the “Red women” whom he faces in angry mobs and sometimes even in single combat.

Theweleit later describes this latter class in more detail:

The description of the proletarian woman as monster, as a beast that unfortunately cannot be dealt with merely by “planting a fist” in its “ugly puss,” hardly derives from the actual behavior of women in situations such as those described above ... Rather, it can be traced to an attempt to construct a fantastic being who swears, shrieks, spits, scratches, farts, bites, pounces, tears to shreds; who is slovenly, wind-whipped, hissing-red, indecent; who whores around, slaps its naked thighs, and can’t get enough of laughing at these men. ... [p. 67]

Women who don’t conform to any of the “good woman” images are automatically seen as prostitutes, as the vehicles of “urges.” They are evil and out to castrate, and they are treated accordingly. The men are soldiers. Fighting is their life, and they aren’t about to wait until that monstrous thing happens to them. They take the offensive before these women can put their horrible plans into practice. [p. 171]

Hitler made an explicit link between “liberal” feminist and suffrage movements—which even then were working to undermine the traditional disempowerment of women—and Jews shortly after obtaining the chancellorhood in 1933. The next year he denounced the so-called New Woman as the “invention of Jewish intellectuals.” He also urged German women to reject as unnatural the “overlapping of the spheres of activity of the sexes” as embodied in “Jewish intellectualism.”

Hitler was fond of complaining about “feminized” Christianity and consistently prescribed a vision of Christ as “a fighter” and of the faith as “manly” and “hard.” The Nazis’ Christian wing, the Deutsche Christen, likewise railed against how “feminized” the church had become, and argued for a “virile” vision of the faith.

After Hitler’s defeat, this pathology again slithered to the fringes. Mostly you could find complaints about “feminized” Christianity from folks like Identity pastor Pete Peters and Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler. The former, in fact, was fond of describing the source of the “feminization” thus:

The Jewish leaders believe they already control America. Recently, one of them stated publicly: “We have castrated Gentile society, through fear and intimidation. It’s manhood exists only in combination with a feminine outward appearance. Being so neutered, the populace has become docile and easy to rule. As all geldings are by nature, their thoughts are not concerned with the future, or their posterity, BUT ONLY WITH THE PRESENT and the next meal.” What a perfect “word picture of modern American society. It is the attitude of Christians, who don’t want to be involved, and allow Jews, to control the school and often the church. We MUST break these fatal bonds, if we are to remain free.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, however, a lot of this talk--as well as the vision of the “warrior Jesus”--returned with some intensity to the mainstream, though there had already been some seepage from the far right in the previous decade. Much of it, in fact, was closely associated with the increasing prevalence of neofascist ideas and modes of thought as part of our political and popular cultural discourse.

Stan Goff posted an important essay at Truthdig in 2006 titled “Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America” ruminating on the then-growing fascist undertows:

If one simply pays attention to cultural production in the United States, especially film and video games, it is fairly easy to see that the very memes that are the cells within the body of white nationalist militarism are ubiquitous within our general cultural norms. The film genre that most closely corresponds to a fascist mind-set is the male revenge fantasy, wherein after some offense is given that signifies the breakdown of order (usually resulting in the death or mortal imperilment of idealized wives or children) in which Enlightenment social conventions prove inadequate, and the release of irrational male violence is required to set the world straight again. Any reader can list these fantasies without a cue. It is one of the most common film genres in American society.

Arthur Silber explored this point even further:

One of the most fascinating parts of Goff’s discussion is his focus on the sexual and gender part of this equation: how surpassingly and bloodily violent “masculinity” is glorified and romanticized, in stark and negative contrast to a “weak,” “vacillating,” and ultimately useless “femininity.” To see the popularized version of the “general cultural norms” that Goff mentions, you need only watch the hugely popular television series 24. Courtesy of a friend, I recently watched all of season four. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a more repellent embodiment of vicious, revenge-driven, murderous male fantasies, replete with innumerable bloody deaths and even the noxious idea that torture “works.” That last idea is indisputably false, but even Hillary Clinton now repeats the lies that inflict monstrous pain, and that ultimately kill. So much for “opposition” to the rising tide of barbarism. And series like 24 are the manure out of which grows our fascist future.

Much of the outrage directed at 24 (such that can be found) focuses on the regular use of torture, and on the savage notion that torture is “effective” (and that “they deserve it,” too, of course). But keeping Goff’s broader analysis in mind, it is crucial to appreciate the more complex system that 24 and similar propaganda glorifies, including most especially the system of myths upon which such “entertainment” relies. Tens of millions of Americans are being conditioned every day to view an incomprehensibly violent, utterly arbitrary militarized domestic state as representing “virtue,” and indeed a necessary virtue: supposedly necessary to protect us from the enemy, who is now to be found everywhere. Perhaps it’s your next-door neighbor. That day, too, may not be all that far away.

Joan Burbick’s 2006 book, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy describes in close-up detail how fear and suspicion of women—and an unstated desire to inflict violence on them—is embedded in the gun-toting culture of the American far right. It begins when she’s forced to leave a gun show because she’s carrying a camera:

Before I left, I asked the organizer why they enforced rules against cameras. What was the problem? Was it a distrust of government? Did they think I worked for the ATF, the IRS, or the FBI? Was it anger against gun-control groups? Did they think I worked for Sarah Brady’s handgun organization, or for Cease Fire, a Seattle-based gun violence prevention group? Maybe it was about hunting and animal rights? Or worse, I could be a PETA worker.

There was a long list of possible reasons for the no-camera policy.

The organizer looked at me hard when I asked the question. Why no cameras? He responded with one word: “Alimony.” “What?” I asked. Had I heard right?

“Alimony?”

“Yes, alimony.” He then explained that the men inside the gun show didn’t want their pictures showing up in newspapers where their ex-wives might see them.

I asked him more questions, but he wasn’t in a talking mood. It was about alimony, period. I’d have to leave it at that.

Maybe the organizer thought some ex-wife had hired me to track down her husband and prove that he was handing over for a new hunting rifle what should be her cash. Maybe the organizer actually thought that ex-wives scanned the local papers looking for photos of their former husbands to see if they could catch them spending what was legally theirs.

It’s telling that the first excuse that the organizer could offer was in an area of common animus: it’s all about those ex-wives. Burbick drills down further into the meaning of this animus:

At later gun shows, I started to pay more attention. Were ex-wives and their demands a threat to some guys at the gun shows? I frequently saw books for sale at the shows such as The Predatory Female by Rev. Lawrence Shannon, whose field guide to dating includes a set of tactics to undermine the supposed Gestapo power of women who rule the divorce and child-custody judicial system. In a radio interview, Shannon said that “victims of the predatory female are strewn all over the nation, writing alimony checks, recovering from gunshot wounds, treating cat scratches, trying to see their children, paying attorney’s fees, picking through the detritus of their lives, and struggling to recover from ruined years.” The Predatory Female is a collection of warnings about women who prey on the feelings and bank accounts of unsuspecting men. Female predators have their eyes on one thing alone—money. They marry and divorce to get alimony. They use emotions of love, trust, and care to undermine the sacred contract of marriage. They are the new scourges of secular life, hunting down unsuspecting men to get bucks and tear out their hearts.

Wives were threats. Girlfriends were threats. Women who talked too much were threats. And women who held public office and wouldn’t shut up were the scourge of the land. I have also picked up bumper stickers at gun shows that said: I JUST GOT A GUN FOR MY WIFE. IT’S THE BEST TRADE I EVER MADE. Or, handouts detailing the “Top 10 Reasons Handguns Are Better than Women,” ending with the number-one reason, “You can buy a silencer for a handgun.” I had also seen some pretty vicious materials on Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno at local shows in the ‘90s. A new fear floated above some of the gun exhibits: judges, lawyers, and voters were giving women too much power, and the women were using that power to take guns away from their husbands, their boyfriends, and their constituents. A gun-grabber lurked in the heart of the liberated woman.

Maybe the no-camera rule was about alimony. In this latest male fantasy about the war between the sexes, I could have been hired by a female predator to shoot pictures at a gun show for a ruthless ex- or estranged wife. I was just part of a new generation of bottom-feeders out to get men, one of the vast army of women intent on misandry, a new word invented to capture this hatred of men by women.

All of this, of course, was written 20 years ago, long before the Tea Party and the ascent of Trump and the emergence of the alt-right white nationalists and Christian nationalists. The warnings issued then have all come home to roost—especially in the form of neofascists like Nick Fuentes.

Fuentes has always been explicit about his bloodthirsty authoritarianism, which he correctly sees as the only means of achieving his murderously eliminationist goals.

“I don’t believe in democracy. I do not believe in universal suffrage,” he gloated after having dinner with Donald Trump. “I don’t support women’s rights. I don’t support LGBT rights. I believe in race and gender essentialism. I’m a Catholic reactionary. I believe that organized Jewry is extremely influential.”

He’s spoken several times about the need to replace democracy with an autocracy—even though he acknowledges the popularity of abortion rights and civil rights:

And it sucks, and it is what it is, but that’s why we need dictatorship. … We need to take control of the media, take control of the government, and force the people to believe what we believe. Or force them to play by our rules, and reshape the society. Because right now, you look across the board, and you put on a referendum whether we want to live in a gay country or non-gay country, a feminist country or a non-feminist country, abortion land, no abortions—you’re gonna be disappointed in the results.

Fuentes denounced democracy as an invalid system because it gives equal power to people of wide-ranging abilities and disabilities. He also ran down a list of people to whom he would deny voting rights:

If you’re an immigrant, no vote for you. If you’re here for one or two generations, you don’t get to vote. If you’re a woman, you will never get to vote. If you’re a child, you don’t get to vote. These are my stipulations, OK? That’s how you prevent stroke victims and criminals and Nelson Mandela-style terrorists that wanna kill all white people for being beautiful—that’s how you prevent them from getting elected. Because otherwise it’s gonna be Brazil and South Africa forever.

… These are one of two pathways if we don’t save ourselves with a return to dictatorship, aristocracy, something a little more … refined, a little more sensible.

He also gleefully discussed the kind of violent chaos such a campaign would unleash on the American landscape—namely, by going through a period where a “brutal regime” guns down people in the street if they break the laws:

Well, you gotta restore order. You gotta put soldiers on the ground, and they gotta restore law and order. You gotta go into San Francisco, you gotta go into Chicago, you gotta go into New York, and when you see looters and smash and grab and all this, these people gotta be hunted down. They just gotta be hunted down, they can’t get away with it. It’s gotta be like Tombstone. The National Guard or the Army—rather than focusing on Trump supporters and creating ISIS in the Middle East, whatever, Russia, or trying to go to war with China—let’s use DHS, and the NSA, and the FBI, and the military and the National Guard, and go after the scourge of crime! We could solve all the crime! You could go in these horrible neighborhoods, and you could clean them up in a week! It doesn’t have to happen for very long. You need to have a really brutal period where, looters just get like shot, okay? It’s gotta just be like the Wild West, it’s gotta be like Tombstone for, like, a little while.

And it’s like these people are like, ‘All right, I bet! I bet!’ And then they go and steal a catalytic converter or something, and then they just get wasted! They just gotta get wasted! They start running, and they think the cops aren’t gonna chase ‘em, and they just get wasted! They just get like, head exploded from a mile away, military snipers just blows their head off. And you know, people are gonna complain, they’re not gonna like it, but that’s the kind of thing that’s gotta happen. It’s for everybody’s benefit.

… We need a real Caesar to come in and break this cycle with like, two years, tops, of kind of like a brutal regime. And I don’t say that glibly, I don’t say that like it’s funny, it’s not funny. We’re in a crisis right now. And you need like this transition period of real brutality to break the cycle and stop this downward spiral. Because that’s what it is.

None of this ranting would matter, of course, if Fuentes were just a pathetic loser ranting to a tiny audience in obscure corner of the internet. However, he’s not. In fact, it seems like everywhere you turn these days, he’s doing yet another interview with an influencer with a mass following. He’s been making the rounds among the podcast set, including Russell Brand and Sam Hyde and the usual suspects in the roid-ranger “fitness” crowd, not to mention the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald, who’s never met a fascist he doesn’t like. He also showed up on British journalist Piers Morgan’s talk show, talking about Jews and Hitler and immigration and women, confessing that he’s never been laid.

Fuentes is “positioning himself as the sort of alt-Charlie Kirk,” Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “And I think since Kirk’s death, even though Fuentes isn’t quite as wrapped up in MAGA, [Fuentes] has sort of tried to position himself as being the successor to Charlie Kirk.”

Since the death of Kirk, the Sun-Times reports, Fuentes has “gained more than 100,000 followers on X and Rumble, and his podcast reached the No. 1 trending spot on Spotify before it was removed from the platform in mid-October for violating its hate speech policies. His first ‘America First’ show that aired after Kirk’s death collected more than 2.5 million views on Rumble.”

A caveat: Open Measures examined the surge in Fuentes’ numbers and concluded it was likely a short-term burst driven by media appearances and likely to fade. But the inescapable reality is that his pernicious authoritarianism is spreading, seeping gradually, into the national discourse and becoming normalized. This is especially the case when his media interlocutors paper over his innate fascism and horrifying totalitarianism.

Greenwald, for instance, gushed over Fuentes as “very impressive” and even calling him a “generational talent.” Describing Fuentes’s ongoing feud with fellow far-right personalities Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, Greenwald noted that Carlson “did acknowledge like, look, Nick Fuentes is spectacularly talented. I mean, he’s like, like, you know, a very rare, like generational talent in terms of his ability to go before the camera, attract attention, be charismatic, but he’s not like a ranter and a raver, Nick Fuentes is very well read, very, very informed. There aren’t a lot of people who know more about the topics Nick Fuentes covers than Nick Fuentes. It’s very impressive.”

“And that combination of being very charismatic, an extremely adept communicator, just kind of a natural camera presence, and having really smart insights that are grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading, and thinking, and critical evaluation—it’s a very potent combination. And that’s the reason why he’s becoming so so popular that even people at the heights of Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson can’t really ignore it anymore,” he added.

Greenwald also minimized Fuentes’ bigotry and utterly whitewashed his misogyny, describing how he has become a persona non grata among establishment conservatives: “Not from what people believe are his racist views about black people or immigrants. Tons of people have those views and are perfectly welcome and fine in right-wing circles. The sole cause of it was his opposition to Israel, and his questioning of the power of the Jewish lobby to keep the United States subservient to Israel,” he insisted.

This is exactly how Fuentes likes the narrative: whitewash the vicious misogyny, racism, and antisemitism by focusing on the latter and claiming it is only a reflection of his opposition to Israeli politics. He complained on a podcast that his reputation as a white supremacist is caused solely by a “smear campaign” aimed at “reputational destruction” and personal harm.

“I was not really controversial when I got started,” Fuentes insisted. “I didn’t really say anything that was that out there, but I was saying that Israel is not our ally, so they put somebody on me. In this case, it was Jared Holt at Right Wing Watch. Right Wing Watch is a subsidiary of People For the American Way, which is a [George] Soros-funded nonprofit. So, this guy would watch my show every night—he was paid to do this, it’s his job—and he was paid to look for every time I said anything controversial—anything that sounded controversial, any joke that sounded offensive—and his job was then to clip what sounded bad, post it on Twitter, and say that represented that I’m a white nationalist, I’m an extremist, neo-Nazi, Christian fanatic.”

“And this has taken place over the course of 10 years,” Fuentes continued. “Ever since I was 18 years old, this is what I have been subjected to. And after 10 years, you get a profile as all your worst clips, all the things that could sound bad, all those things have been compiled over your entire career and then they make you out to be a fanatic, a nut job, a hateful person. And so that’s how I got the reputation as a white supremacist, white nationalist, all of the above.”

As RWW’s Kyle Mantila observed, Holt was no longer working at RWW when it began monitoring his output. And in the end, all of the examples caught on video were all his undeniable views, expressions of his profound authoritarianism:

Finally, did it ever occur to Fuentes that the reason he has developed a reputation as a racist, antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian nationalist fanatic, extremist nut job is because he spends hours every night saying things that give people the impression that he is a racist, antisemitic, neo-Nazi, Christian nationalist fanatic, extremist nut job?

Not to mention deeply misogynist.