Nick Fuentes: Political Punk
And: Europe's Co$tly War Folly; Islamizing Medicine; 'Great Leader'; Norman Podhoretz
Take a look at this clip below from Piers Morgan’s interview with Nick Fuentes. Be forewarned: there’s some serious cussin’ in here, so it’s NSFW. Watch for as long as you can stand it. It shows how evil Fuentes is, which we’ve discussed here, but it also reveals an important message about Hitler, “coolness,” and our cultural moment. It’s the kind of thing you really need to see and hear in order to appreciate how extremely difficult it’s going to be to counter the influence of Fuentes and those who will inevitably rise with him, or in his wake. I’ll explain after the clip:
For me, this exchange is the right-wing version of those iconic scenes of Prof. Nick Christakis on the yard at Yale in 2015, trying to talk reason to the students, who were not interested in hearing it. They yelled, sobbed, cursed, and demanded that he accept their moral condemnation. That was the left-woke of a decade ago. Overflowing with moralistic dudgeon. Hysterical, even.
Comes the right-woke Nick Fuentes, with a very, very different way of dealing with a talking-to by Boomers. Everything Piers Morgan says is true, and his indignance at the moral repulsiveness is entirely appropriate. This is the kind of interview that many of us (well, I) would have liked Tucker Carlson to have done.
But from the few minutes I spent with the clip, I understood Kathleen Stock’s point about why Fuentes — whose views she despises — wiped the floor with Morgan. Recall:
So yes, everything is debatable, as Fuentes says; but nobody is actually debating. There can’t be debates where neither side is willing to play by the rules. I am afraid I have no quick answer as to how to make Fuentes’ white nationalism less appealing to masses of young men, but Morgan has shown us that old-school tactics have absolutely had their day.
I’m telling you, watch a few minutes of the exchange, and you’ll see why. Fuentes is abhorrent — and doesn’t care that you abhor him. He makes fun of British intellectual Daniel Finkelstein’s stories about family members being slaughtered in the Holocaust, and persecuted by Stalin, that other Fuentes hero.
You cannot shame the shameless. In fact, like the first English punks (of whom Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was an avatar), their spiteful indifference to the opinions of respectable people was at the core of their appeal. One of the Sex Pistols’ biggest hits was its 1976 debut single, titled “Anarchy In The UK” (and fair play, it’s a hell of a rock song). The opening lines:
I am an Antichrist
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want, but I know how to get it…
Oooh, scary! But it was all for show. It was all about shocking the elders. The Pistols really were confessed nihilists in their day. Today, John Lydon — the lead singer then known as Johnny Rotten — is old, fat, and MAGA:
Which is to say, he’s still punk. But I digress.
Fuentes is working on the same power of punk to stir up angry young people. The thing is, when the Sex Pistols and other punks were setting the tone for UK pop culture, the idea that they would have any real-world political influence was absurd. Nobody working in government and mainstream politics would have dared to represent their spoken sentiments into policy.
And this is the greatest difference between Sid Vicious (and Johnny Rotten) and Nick Fuentes. The 1970s punks were a sideshow. Fuentes, a 2020s punk, has real and growing political influence, precisely because he’s a punk, and because there are plenty of people in rising positions of political responsibility on the Right who take him seriously.
It can be fun to listen to “Anarchy In The UK” and imagine that Johnny Rotten is speaking for oneself. In truth, Britain was in no real danger of anarchy or political nihilism. Some 1970s British young people really were punks, but most of their audience really were just playing at it. A later Sex Pistols song, “God Save The Queen,” said, “She ain’t no human being.” Shocking, seriously — but only that. (Controversially on the Left, their song “Bodies” condemned abortion.)
When the Sex Pistols were interviewed on TV back in the day, and went full Fuentes, in terms of being rude and profane and shocking (here’s the clip; NSFW, for language). They even brought one of their girlfriends wearing a Nazi armband. None of these people were Nazis; they just wanted to shock and offend straightlaced men like their interviewer.
At the end of the Sex Pistols documentary The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, their manager, Malcolm McLaren, famously says
The thing about Fuentes is that it’s never quite clear what he means and what he doesn’t mean. I think he is genuinely a Jew-hater and Nazi sympathizer. But the fact that he plays the punk, the trickster, thrilling his audience by treating the Olds like the Sex Pistols treated the stuff interviewer in that interview, delights his audience.
But Fuentes’s audience is something the Sex Pistols’ audience never was: politically engaged. That’s a massive and meaningful difference. What if Sex Pistols fans who took their nihilism with a meaningful degree of seriousness had representation among staffers at Westminster anywhere from 10 percent (Jashinsky low number for pro-Groypers in conservative Zoomer DC) to 40 percent (Dreher high end estimate for same)? Would that not have been a bit of a concern?
Anyway, I think the lesson here is that trying to interview Nick Fuentes is like trying to interview the Sex Pistols. It only strengthens Fuentes, and makes the interviewer look like a stuffed shirt. That said, it says something about the state of our culture today that there are a hell of a lot of people who laugh at a man whose family was incinerated in Hitler’s ovens.
Anyway, I’m with Ben Shapiro here, in his TPUSA speech yesterday. I don’t agree with everything he believes (I think our chief difference would be on the economy), but he’s being brave and principled:
More today for paid subscribers below, including an item on Europe’s toy-army march to war, while fleecing European taxpayers; the Islamization of medical ethics via wokeness (you thought it was dead?); Trump’s Kim family mimesis; and a few words about the irreplaceable Norman Podhoretz.
