Miscellaneous Musings: Am I biased against Fuentes?

No, I’m accurate

I’ve lambasted the self-proclaimed “Christian Nationalist” political commentator Nicholas Joseph Fuentes, on several occasions. He’s a despicable racist and anti-Semite. The question is is this a bias? The answer to that is that, unless you genuinely posit that Fuentes has no idea what any words mean, no reasonable person could honestly disagree with my assessment of Fuentes.

One might object that, if I had already heard that Fuentes was one, confirmation bias may have led me to being overly quick to regard him as a bad faith actor. That objection is easily refutable. I first heard of Fuentes, in 2019, when I watched Owen Benjamin’s video #666 The Number of the beast (description linked here.) In that video, Benjamin criticised Ben Shapiro for criticising people on the Alt-Right who claimed not to be Alt-Right, instead calling themselves New Right or America Firsters to appropriate Trump’s inaugural address in service of a racist agenda, and who frequently named themselves after amphibians or mammals as they engaged in emotionally driven rants wherein they would shout or even sing their anti-Semitic white supremacist moon landing conspiracy theories. Benjamin posited that Shapiro was talking about him, reckoning that he was the only person on the Alt-Right who sang about moon landing conspiracies. Benjamin noted that Fuentes and the “Groypers” named themselves after frogs, which are amphibians, and call themselves America Firsters but that the only people of whom he was aware naming themselves after mammals were Benjamin’s followers, who named themselves after bears, and mainstream Republicans, calling themselves red elephants, but that Shapiro supported the latter.

Benjamin called Shapiro the Devil, accused Shapiro of thinking that anyone whose first loyalty was to America instead of to Israel was a white supremacist, and complained that Shapiro didn’t understand that being on the “Alt-Right” simply entailed supporting an alternative to the mainstream Right. That last claim might be easier to believe had Benjamin not also made the video Why I despise Ben Shapiro and the Neo Conservative/Zionist Movement (linked here). Beginning two minutes in, Benjamin declared “Ben Shapiro is one of those guys and he watches the lines move from side to side because of his disgusting paranoia. He’s an American citizen and all he can think about is Israeli global dominance, as our friends die.” Three minutes and fifty-two seconds in, Benjamin decided “You know what as I read this, I’m going to also put up a picture of Ben Shapiro. This is why I despise this little piece of shit. These are the wars he advocates. These are the wars he will never fight in. These are the wars he profits from. These are the wars that these fucking stupid little Jew fuckers, all right this is going up, why do you think I can’t stand these fucking people?”. Four minutes and twenty-three seconds in, he called Shapiro “Ben the Jew”. Beginning thirteen minutes and fifty seconds in, Benjamin said “It’s still my fucking Facebook picture even though these fucking Jews won’t let me on my own fucking page”. Beginning fifteen minutes and forty-five seconds in, Benjamin said “I’m sorry for crying but I haven’t read that in a long time and Ben Shapiro wants to start more wars. You first, Ben. You first. You put on a combat uniform and you go over there and you fight your little Jew wars, Ben.”

That convinced me that Benjamin was an anti-Semite but I had no assessment about Fuentes because, for all intents and purposes, I didn’t know who he was.

Shortly thereafter, I watched Shapiro’s speech denouncing the Alt-Right ( linked here). Beginning fifteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds in, Shapiro said “For example, your thought leaders, your self-proclaimed lead influencers, will say they’re not on the same page as white supremacist Richard Spencer but then, they’ll go on Facebook and post about the Charlottesville white supremacist rally … The rootless transnational elite know that a tidal wave of white identity is coming and they know that once the word gets out, they will not be able to stop us, the fire rises. Really hiding the ball there, are ya? Let’s say that your self-proclaimed lead influencer has compared Alex Jones’ ban from social media, a ban, by the way, which I opposed publicly, to a modern Kristallnacht and the beginning of a white Holocaust. When it comes to the Holocaust itself, you have some questions, you do. Those questions are questions like this, this is a direct quote from a lead influencer on the Alt-Right. Matt says if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has fifteen ovens, working twenty-four hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make six million batches of cookies? I don’t know. That’s a good question. No, that doesn’t sound really correct to me. Wait a second. It takes one hour to build a batch of cookies and you have fifteen ovens, probably in four different kitchens, right, doing twenty-four hours a day for five years. How long would it take to get to six million? Hmm. I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be five years, right. The math doesn’t seem to add up there. None of it really adds up. None of it really makes sense. This crazy cookie analogy. Six million cookies. Nah, I don’t buy it. That’s all irony. I’m an irony bro. This is the kind of stuff some of these folks are saying”.

Beginning seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds in, Shapiro complained “You’ve suggested that a religious Catholic who writes for my website, a guy named Matt Walsh, is a … Shabbos goy race traitor … what prompted that outburst, by the way, on the part of this Alt-Right lead influencer? The fact that my friend, Matt Walsh, said that the El Paso racist shooter should be publicly executed and in brutal fashion.” Shapiro also cited an Alt-Right influencer as having said that miscegenation and bestiality were both degenerate.

Now, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that most of Shapiro’s quotations came from the same person. That said, I had no idea if it were Andrew Anglin or Pat Buchanan or Owen Benjamin himself or another influential figure of the Alt-Right.

Since then, I read the National Review article Just What Does a Guy Have to Say To Be Considered Beyond the Pale (linked here) and I realised the person of whom Shapiro was speaking was Fuentes. The writer, Jim Geraghty, referenced and thus led me to a Twitter thread (linked here) wherein Benny Johnson denounced Fuentes and showed an entire plethora of clips of him saying hideously bigoted (and pro-Fascist) things.

So, when I watched a Daily Wire video, linked here, of Shapiro refusing to debate Fuentes, I was in full agreement. Shapiro suggested that someone who thought he should debate Fuentes should try watching the videos of Fuentes “playing Grand Theft Auto, running over an Orthodox Jew, cackling maniacally, and then talking about how he had just killed Ben Shapiro” and of him “randomly jabbing” a knife into the air while discussing Shapiro. I had not seen those particular clips (and to this day, I still haven’t.) That said, I had seen all the other Fuentes content to which Shapiro referred and as such had zero qualms about believing Fuentes had behaved the way Shapiro described. This was later reinforced by the video of Fuentes confronting Shapiro, in front of Shapiro’s children, berating Shapiro for denouncing but not debating him.

So, when I watched a video essay explaining Why some on the Cultural Right HATE Jordan Peterson, I wasn’t remotely surprised by the revelation Fuentes detested Peterson. As I said, at the time, “I wouldn’t think that Nick Fuentes would be a fan of Jordan Peterson because engaging in Fuentes’s content makes it clear that he’s not” and “When a right-winger considers Candace Owens and Donald Trump Junior to be shills for the Left, it’s fairly easy to see that Jordan Peterson would be beyond the pale”.

Since then, I heard that Fuentes supported the January 6th Capitol Riot and I read the National Review article Nick Fuentes and AFPAC Do Not Represent a Real Constituency by Nate Hochman (linked here). Hochman criticised Marjorie Taylor-Greene for her willingness to give the keynote speech at a Fuentes-organized event. Hochman refuted her claim not to be aware of Fuentes’s views by citing the clip, linked here, of Fuentes saying Putin being “like Hitler” in the Ukraine would be “a good thing” and getting his audience to cheer for Putin. Fuentes almost immediately backtracked on the “terrible analogy” but still praised Putin and then welcomed Taylor-Greene to the stage. My thinking at the time was that, even if the Hitler praise genuinely were meant sardonically, the praise for Putin was obviously sincere and being pro-Putin ought to be damning enough.

As a result, when Trump made headlines for hosting Kanye West, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Fuentes, I reviled all three.

Megan Kelly and Charles C.W. Cooke made a video, linked here, wherein they rightly lambasted Trump for breaking bread with Fuentes. After seeing it, I watched the infamous of video of Tim Pool interviewing the trio (not the full livestream, just the most notorious part). Pool told West “I think they’ve been extremely unfair to you”. West asked Pool who he meant by “they”. Pool replied “the corporate press”. West complained “we can’t say who they is can we”. Pool responded “I don’t use the word the way I guess you guys use the word”. Fuentes objected “It is them, though, isn’t it.” Pool replied in the negative. Fuentes began to argue but West interrupted Fuentes to ask Pool what he meant by claiming it wasn’t “them”. Pool began answering and West angrily stormed out of the studio. Pool revealed, in a video about West’s walk-out, that Fuentes and Yiannopoulos followed suit. (Yes, I know it wouldn’t have been a revelation had I watched the full episode.)

Then, West and Fuentes appeared on Alex Jones and West repeatedly praised Hitler, West falsely claimed that Hitler invented microphones (actually the work of Emille Berliner and Thomas Edison) and highways, West denied the Holocaust, and West predicted Netanyahu would try to have him murdered. Fuentes explicitly told Jones that he agreed with West.

So, I wasn’t, even remotely, surprised by Fuentes siding with Candace Owens when the Daily Wire fired her, details linked here, nor by the fact he said anti-Semitic things in his response like “Christ is king and that means Jews can’t be in power”. It was shortly thereafter that I watched Destiny, the Krassenstein brothers, and George Santos debate Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Sneako, and Suleiman Ahmed. (Ahmed was nominally the moderator but he was clearly debating on Fuentes’s side.)

I watched the full debate. In it, Fuentes denounced the American constitutional system on the grounds that “Americanism” was a heresy, he advocated legislation explicitly banning all non-Christians from all government office, elected or appointed, at any level, he claimed that he loved Hitler because he loved everybody but he also defended West’s pro-Hitler comments (West had said that he believed everyone had something of value to offer “especially Hitler”), and he denounced Destiny and Santos as degenerates for being bisexual and gay respectively. (It also came up that Fuentes had spam reported Destiny, accusing him of advocating genocide against the Palestinians, to get him banned from YouTube.) In other words, Shapiro was right about Fuentes all along.

This is why I’ve been so critical of people like Tucker Carlson and Steven Crowder for brownnosing Fuentes. If interviewing a neo-Nazi genuinely is necessary, then at least don’t be obsequious towards him. That said, Piers Morgan challenging Fuents on his bigoted commentary only for Fuentes to double down on it only proved what everyone already knew.

So, am I unduly biased against Fuentes? No. Considering Fuentes a “despicable racist and anti-Semite” is the inevitable logical consequence of paying attention to what Fuentes says and does.

My name is Matitya and this has been one of my Miscellaneous Musings

(Disclaimer: In this Miscellaneous Musing, I cited the work of Destiny, Tim Pool, Megan Kelly and PF Jung. I would like to make it abundantly clear that I do not support them as they are now.)