In Defense of Nick Fuentes (Sort Of...)
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Summary
Jaden and Nick Fuentes have a falling out, and it's a big deal. I talk about why this matters, and why we should care about it. Also, I discuss why the alt-right is a movement based on friendship, not ideological loyalty, but personal loyalty.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone. This is Richard. Welcome back to my journal. It is Friday, the 13th of May, 2022.
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I will do these podcasts two or three times a week. They're ways of getting my thoughts out
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there as in kind of a rough draft form. And they are usually for subscribers only, but I will
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release some of these publicly. And I think I'm going to do that with this one in defense of Nick
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Fuentes, sort of. It's a hot topic, and I hope it inspires some people to join in the club. We
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actually had a very good discussion about this issue last Sunday with my members call, which is
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a lot like a Twitter space. I'll usually lead the conversation, but I get a lot of input from
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subscribers, and they are often very fruitful conversations. All right. So as I mentioned,
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the title of this journal entry is a bit clickbaity. I think it's well known that I generally dislike
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Nick Fuentes, but I don't really want to dwell on those things. As I said, it's well known. And
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I think sometimes it's fun to talk about gossip or drama, etc. But we don't really learn anything by
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doing that. And it's a kind of situation of, oh, well, this thing blew up, so let's move on to the
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next thing, and it will blow up in six months or three years or whenever. And I think this is really
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endemic to the dissident right, the alt-right. A lot of these problems were quite present at the alt-right
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and have led me to conclude that the alt-right is an unworkable thing as a kind of movement, as it
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existed in 2017. But I think there's a very strong tendency for people to, you know, get excited about
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drama and either denounce someone or profess their undying loyalty to this person. And it's all rather
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meaningless. And it really does, it's at the heart of the fact of a movement that really can't learn
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anything. You know, denunciations, it's not really that fruitful. It's not really, I don't know, it
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doesn't really accomplish anything. It's an emotional release. And it is unserious. So I'm going to talk a
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little bit about my thoughts on this whole saga. So this blew up a little while ago. And I talked about
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it briefly at some places. I actually have not watched the entire Kino Casino episode, which I
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think is some three hours or so. But I've seen some clips, I've gotten the gist, seen some highlights or
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lowlights. And I've read a couple mainstream articles on it. So I pretty much know what's going on. And I
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have seen this before. So what we have at the heart of this episode is a broken friendship between
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Jaden and Nick Fuentes. And I think that in itself is a big problem. The fact that these movements
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really are based on friendship and personal loyalty, not necessarily ideological loyalty,
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but personal loyalty. And I saw a lot of this when I was involved with the alt-right many years ago,
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where people would, you know, tell me someone's name as if I knew about them or cared about them. You know,
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I mean, I'm just making up a name, but it's like, well, did you see what White Eagle said on Twitter?
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You know, oh, we can't lose him. This is, you know, it's this weird kind of thing of who is this person?
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basement dweller? Is this person insightful? Or does he just tweet a lot? Does he just lurk on
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your Discord server and has gained clout or credibility that way? Why do we care about this
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person? And I don't want this to sound too snobby or harsh, but, you know, I remember seeing a
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poster, a kind of digital poster for the AFPAC event, which gathered that entire movement. And
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I'll talk about that in movement a little bit. And you had these figures on there. So there was
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Nicholas Fontes. I, of course, recognize the red elephants guy, Michelle Malkin and Cassandra Fairbanks.
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And, you know, a couple of the people I knew of is either conservatives or alt-right grifters or
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whatever. And then you had these characters, Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow, who were at the bottom
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getting, uh, build below, you know, like Jason video or, you know, Mike clips or some, you know,
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gamer John or whatever. It was just bizarre. And just building a movement based on, you know,
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oh, this guy's so based and he does live streams that, that just is stupid. And, uh, I, I mean,
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it's stupid in general, but I don't think it can actually ever go anywhere. There's no real reason
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for anyone to care about any of these people or respect them outside of they're based and they're
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in our click. And again, I think that was endemic to the alt-right. I think it was super endemic to
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the AF movement, which did grow out of it, grow, it grew out of the alt-right, of course, but I think it,
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um, probably was more accurately, could be more accurately described as post alt-right in the
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sense that, um, you can't underestimate how young some of these people are. I mean, I think some of
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these people were, you know, 13 years old when Trump announced that he was running for president
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in 2015 or, you know, they barely remember events like Charlottesville. Maybe even some of them came in
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after January 6th or something like that. I don't know, but you have a lot of young people with very
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short memories. So I, I think the fact that you have this, you know, friendship nationalism,
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this movement based on clout within a click is a huge problem. Now, yeah, sure. To a degree,
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all movements are like that, but to embrace it to this extent is asking for trouble. It's just not
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going to work. It will end up almost invariably due to human nature and personal jealousy and so on,
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just like this of people claiming, you know, Oh, Nick fudges his numbers again, maybe true. Maybe not.
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I don't know. Uh, some horrible anecdote about looking for a ejaculate on a couch with a black
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light. I mean, it's so specific. It seems it probably is true, but I, I don't know. And I don't
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care. It's silly gossip, but it's just going to end in this kind of shabby, petty rivalry, jealousy stuff.
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Um, what's interesting. And, and, you know, from what I've read, Nick has confirmed this,
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the source of the breakup was the fact that Jaden seems to not be an incel and he had a girlfriend
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and therefore wasn't dedicating his life solely to Nick. I mean, I find that rather sad. Uh,
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and, uh, I think someone, you know, someone like Jaden should be applauded for having a GF
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and having a life. And I, I get the impression that he probably does want to have a life and
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will probably leave this whole scene and, uh, be the better for it. Um, but that incel thing,
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I think that is getting at something very important. I would just say this. I, and I was joking with
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friend of mine about this. I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that Nick Fuentes is an
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actual incel in the sense that he's not having sex. The reason why I believe that is that when you
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have any sort of celebrity, it is an absolute aphrodisiac, even if maybe you could even say
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especially if, but even if that celebrity is a kind of negative celebrity of being the bad boy.
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So I can speak to this from personal experience. I won't go into details, but basically a bunch of
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girls are throwing themselves at you. So the idea that, and Nick, I think Nick achieved less like
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mainstream media fame than I did because I, you know, spoke to the media at every opportunity and
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was kind of played in, played into their kind of, Oh, this is Spencer, the well-dressed boogeyman
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kind of persona. Um, Nick had much more intense celebrity within the movement, much more than I did much
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more intense loyalty. Um, I, I just, I can't believe that someone like that isn't getting laid. Um, now,
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you know, there's always been questions about Nick's sexuality when he did this cat boy cammy thing
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a few years ago. I forgot if it's 2018 or 2019. Yeah. I mean, it raises some eyebrows. And as I said at
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the time, I mean, look, I don't care about that movement. I, I'm not connected with it. I look upon it
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objectively in the sense that I'm outside of it. I don't have any dog in that race, but yikes. I mean,
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what could Nick have possibly tried to achieve? So it's not just so much that it was a mistake or
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something like that because everyone makes mistakes and you know, um, politicians flail around and then
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have miraculous comebacks. Athletes have lows and then highs. So I, I don't care about mistakes,
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uh, or misjudgments or something like it. The question is, can you learn from it? And do you
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have the ability to kind of make a comeback or do you have some, is there something about you that's
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worthwhile, but it's just the oddness of the mistake. It's, it's like, what are you possibly
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trying to achieve by that? And it, yeah, it was creepy, uh, to put it mildly. I think maybe one
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of the funniest things about it I remember is it wasn't so much that the, the pair Nick and Catboy
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Cammy were, um, looking at each other, uh, adoringly. But, um, I think on that video, Nick
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denied the existence of dinosaurs or something like this, you know? So, uh, the science types say
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that religious people are wacky, but then these crazy scientists claim that giant lizards walked
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the earth. I mean, who's the religious fanatic now? Yeah. That type of argument. That's amusing,
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but yeah, I, I, I, I generally think that either Nick is gay or that he has a very screwed up
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sexuality that that that's actually understandable in terms of his age and the movement that he's in.
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Um, it's an isolation, alienation from women and all of the horrors of the internet. These are very
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online people. All of the horrors of the internet are at their fingertips. It, it leads to a kind of
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screwed up sexuality and it leads to these weird statements like it's gay to have sex with women
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or, you know, uh, in cell in seldom is the ultimate form of manliness. And, you know, I would rather
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have sex to the tranny than a woman. All, all this just weird nonsense. That's extremely creepy,
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but I think speaks to the predicament of a lot of zoomers like Nick, Nick, they, you know, maybe
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calling, maybe suspecting that they're gay is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe the better way to
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look at it is they are just immensely sexually screwed up and frustrated. That's probably what the case is.
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Um, but the, the, the incel thing was very important to him. I mean, the, the, the inceldom was the source
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of the friendship breakup. And I think this gets to a larger issue, which is worth discussing.
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And that is the playing to his fan base. So, you know, someone like myself, I don't get accused
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of being a grifter in the sense of, I just tell my audience what they want to hear. So let's,
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let's take a step back. Let's define grifter. Now you could apply that label grifter to almost
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any political person, public intellectual, political entrepreneur, et cetera. You could
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just say, Oh, they're a grifter. They're taking donations on Patreon. They've got, they're on a
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sub stack. They're on whatever. And you can say, Oh, they're just a grifter. Well, I think that's an
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extremely unfair way of describing someone. Um, you know, I mean, where does the definition of
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grifter end is a journalist for the New York times or Buzzfeed? Are they grifters? Exactly. I mean,
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because they're getting a paycheck to write about politics and talk about politics. I don't think
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so. Um, I would define grifter in the sense of someone who cultivates an audience and delivers them
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comfort food for money. So someone like, and, and these people can be intelligent. They can be
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unintelligent. Someone like Caitlin Bennett, she does publicity stunts. She tweets about Catholicism or
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family values or whatever. But her main asset is the fact that she kind of looks like a,
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the daughter or housewife that you would want. Maybe not my cup of tea, but she has an audience.
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And so she'll tweet about her cooking like, Oh, look, I'm such a good housewife. I just made this
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chicken dinner for my hubby. And it's a way of allowing, or I'm, I'm going to wear a bikini and
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carry a semi-automatic weapon around, you know, a kind of new version of a chick with a dick, I guess.
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Um, she, it's titillating. It offers a kind of parasocial relationship with her audience where
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her audience can in a way be married to her or have Caitlin Bennett as the audience's collective
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daughter. So it's very similar to only fans. Only fans is not really about porn because porn,
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as we know, is ubiquitous on the internet. The end 99.9% of people don't pay for porn. They
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get it for free. And yeah, they're, you know, there's some sites that have paywalls or something
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like that, but where you have, you know, you pay $9 a month or whatever to get, I don't know,
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high definition or whatever, but the vast, vast majority of people just get it ever. It's ubiquitous.
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It's ever churning. It's ever being churned out, et cetera. But what is it about only fans?
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That relationship that the Mark can have with his only fan model is the feature, not the bug.
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That's what it's about. It's about that fantasy of being married to her. And so we shouldn't really
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be surprised when a sizable proportion of only fans, not only do they pay $9 a month, but they'll
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just send this girl $1,000 on PayPal. And I'm, I'm sure there's some male models who have very similar
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parasocial relationships with their female fans or male fans. So it's that simulation of an
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actual relationship of familial relationship or a love relationship. That's the secret sauce.
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That's what makes only fans work. And I think in that sense, the kind of grifter is very much like
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an only fans model. Although this grifter is not, you know, showing us his genitals, um, but is telling
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the audience what it wants to hear and offering that kind of parasocial relationship, comfort food.
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A lot of grifters can be intelligent and can, you know, legitimate, legitimately put forth
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discourse. That's a contribution. I'm thinking of Glenn Greenwald. He is a journalist. He is a good
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writer, highly prolific, but let's be honest. What is his secret sauce? Who is his audience at this
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point? His audience are conservatives who want to hear about how liberals suck so hard. They're
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terrible. The GOP is the true working man's anti-war party, anti-state party, whatever. They want to hear
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that from this gay journalist who's been lionized and was involved in the Snowden leaks.
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So he, although Glenn Greenwald is a intelligent guy, of course, the reason why he's lost a lot of respect
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is just that he doesn't, he's offering comfort food. He's offering a narrative that makes his audience feel
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warm and fuzzy inside for profit and a lot of profit. I wish I had his subscriber base, obviously.
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So Nick was like that in the sense that he recognized the youth inherent in the alt-right of 2017,
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certainly inherent in the AF or Gryper movement. And he played to them. And so even if Nick was just
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banging chicks left and right, and you know, the Swedish bikini team was visiting his house every
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weekend, even if that were the case, I think he would have desperately tried to hide that.
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Because he had to present himself as an incel for his audience. And his audience did not so much see
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him as a leader. Because a leader is someone who's, by his nature, egotistical, and is going to order
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people around and lead them. They saw him as a kind of emblem of themselves, as their avatar, as the
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ultimate young incel zoomer who is representing them. And again, that was an absolutely successful
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model. He understood his audience. He catered to them. He represented them. And they were very loyal
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to him, at least for a time. It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would last.
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But I don't think Nick is going away. But I do think that any time there's a kind of, like,
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crack in the ice, it's almost a matter of time before it comes caving in.
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Now, I first learned about Nick, I can remember this, back in 2017. And he was a young conservative,
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he was in high school, or not in high school, I think he had just gone to university at the time,
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he was a freshman, in 2017. And he was the kind of, like, ultimate person that we were trying to reach.
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Or like, and maybe that was, I look back at it now, I think it was mistaken to try to reach those people.
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But he was kind of the ultimate person that the alt-right was trying to reach.
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Oh, here's the disaffected conservative normie who has rejected conservatism and is now on the Trump train
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and loves the alt-right and is edgy on social media and, you know, so on.
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I remember seeing an interview with him on Stefan Molyneux's show and just hearing about them,
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hearing about him. And he got connected with James Alsup. And so Alsup was a very similar figure,
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someone who didn't really present himself as an ideologue, but as a kind of conservative normie
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who now is a nationalist and all that kind of stuff. And I did know that he went to Charlottesville.
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I never saw him at Charlottesville. I mean, I was only with a very small amount of people in Charlottesville.
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But he went there, and I can remember the fall and winter of 2017 post-Charlottesville.
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And, you know, immediately after that event, there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm
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related to the fact that we felt like victims at that event.
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So it was, we were mistreated by the police, we weren't allowed to speak, we had a permitted rally, blah, blah, blah.
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And there was a lot of enthusiasm and kind of team building, you could say.
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But very, very quickly, all of that started to fall apart.
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And the alt-right went into these series of spasms,
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mostly led by people like Nick or Andrew Anglin or Weave,
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that were basically trying to find a scapegoat or trying to attack some part of this very broad movement.
00:25:10.180
And attack it and kill it, and I think kill it like a scapegoat.
00:25:16.480
It is putting the sins of the community or whatever onto something
00:25:21.600
and pushing the scapegoat out into the desert to die.
00:25:25.180
First, there was the anti-e-girl war that was this massive attack on any female in the movement
00:25:37.060
that was, you know, led by Anglin and company, also led by people like Roosh.
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I'm, you know, I'm sure Nick took part in that.
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I mean, Nick has famously talked about, you know, no e-girls ever kind of thing.
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And then that seemed to bizarrely morph into an optics campaign.
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So it went from being wildly misogynistic to we're the best, we have the best optics.
00:26:15.020
It, like all kind of scams or lines of attack, it was based on truth.
00:26:23.780
It was based on a truth of, you know, there are these low IQ Wignats out there.
00:26:34.880
You know, and I think they kind of pinpointed Matthew Heimbach or something like that,
00:26:43.100
Matt Parrott or something as the object of ridicule.
00:26:51.960
Sometimes I'm a Wignat, sometimes I'm a liberal, sometimes I'm a federal agent.
00:26:55.640
They do all sorts of contradictory attacks on me.
00:26:59.800
But anyway, so it was, we need to, those Wignats are the ones ruining the movement.
00:27:06.760
So we can't have these helmeted rallies in public.
00:27:12.440
We need to be conservatives because the conservatives are moving towards us and we need to kind of
00:27:19.840
And I think, again, I think there's actually a lot of truth to that claim.
00:27:23.420
Obviously, I think you should look good and look presentable and so on.
00:27:29.800
I also totally agree that the conservatives are moving towards the alt-right or the dissonant
00:27:37.860
right, although that kind of twisted in an interesting way, which I think I'll talk about
00:27:45.920
So the notion was we will blend into the wallpaper of the Republican Party as optics, amnats.
00:28:03.580
So we'll wave flags and dress in khakis and polos and talk about how much we love America and
00:28:11.900
We can't have, on the one hand, the Wignat, the guy with tattoos who's screaming and attacking
00:28:20.680
Now, Spencer, granted, dresses well, but he's, you know, an atheist and he hates conservatives
00:28:27.080
and he's into Nietzsche and he says, you know, all sorts of outlandish things.
00:28:33.640
We need to kind of blend in and kind of, you know, work our way up the conservative movement
00:28:50.200
I think there was a, there was kind of inherent contradictions to Wignatism or Amnatism or optics-ism.
00:29:03.620
Some of these people who are professed Amnats have the worst optics.
00:29:15.940
There's another contradiction, which is that, and I don't think this contradiction was quite
00:29:21.720
foreseeable, but the conservative movement went towards Trumpism and then towards QAnon
00:29:32.580
The conservatives became more radical than the alt-right.
00:29:37.960
I mean, that, and I don't, and I, I didn't foresee that.
00:29:42.440
It's a, it's a wild thing where if you look at these two rallies, like look at Charlottesville
00:29:48.960
in mid to late 2017 and then, uh, January 6th on, uh, in, in the beginning of 2021, of
00:30:02.220
They are Trump-based rallies that went out of control for various reasons and became albatrosses
00:30:16.720
There wasn't a lot of crossover between the two rallies.
00:30:22.840
Now there, there's some notable crossover, Nick Fuentes being one person, Baked Alaska,
00:30:40.860
The, the people who went to Charlottesville were, I would say, mostly alt-right people.
00:30:47.880
There were a lot of, there was many white nationalists.
00:30:50.180
There were some, you know, people invited, as I learned later by Jason Gessler, uh, actual
00:31:00.460
Um, you know, there, there was a, a whole host of, of people.
00:31:07.260
Um, but you could say that they were kind of the non-conformist types.
00:31:16.360
Now the Groypers were there and the Groypers were derived from the alt-right, no question,
00:31:25.500
And the normies had become more radicalized than the alt-right of old was.
00:31:35.240
The normies were talking about hanging Mike Pence.
00:31:37.300
The normies were talking about keeping Trump in office for four years, I guess, maybe forever.
00:31:44.460
No one made any of those types of claims in Charlottesville.
00:31:49.460
I mean, I can remember when the Charlottesville rally was scuttled, when in a state of emergency
00:31:57.180
And 99 out of 100 people left and went home and then chaos ensued in downtown.
00:32:05.780
Maybe I'll revisit it, revisit it in another broadcast.
00:32:15.540
And has, has obviously eclipsed Charlottesville by a factor of a hundred or a thousand in terms
00:32:24.460
of discussion about it and its impact and its legacy.
00:32:30.300
So I don't, I don't think AF fully recognized that idea.
00:32:36.800
I think mainstream conservatives molded into the alt-right just as much as the alt-right kind
00:32:52.700
But the other contradiction at the heart of AF and why it couldn't really work was that
00:33:09.940
There are many people, grifter types, who I find to be just totally synthetic.
00:33:17.740
I'm thinking of someone like Jack Murphy or something like that.
00:33:21.380
I don't think he had, he had any sort of audience.
00:33:27.380
He had an audience because Tim Poole gave him an audience.
00:33:31.380
Um, he had an audience because the Claremont review of books or the, whatever it is, um,
00:33:37.760
decided to give him grants that he was, I think he was entirely synthetic.
00:33:46.180
Nick had a genuine audience that he created and cultivated in the ways that I described earlier.
00:33:51.660
And that was the reason that he got in bed with long-time conservative activists.
00:34:02.760
Women for Trump, women for America first, Alex Jones, Ali Akbar.
00:34:07.720
All these people have long legacies of dirty tricks of, you know, conservative political engineering, et cetera.
00:34:21.380
He has 10,000 zoomers watching his stream in 2020.
00:34:27.960
And they are hardcore, least in least rhetorically.
00:34:36.440
So Nick ultimately got involved in this structure that I have identified as multi-level marketing.
00:34:53.880
So imagine a typical multi-level marketing scheme, like Mary Kay or doTERRA or something like that.
00:35:09.920
And you have the producer who gets it out there.
00:35:17.080
So it's kind of like a wheel with multiple spokes coming out of it.
00:35:22.040
And if you create a channel, you're going to create an additional down channel or downstream.
00:35:30.840
So let's say I have been in doTERRA for a long time.
00:35:37.540
I sell, you know, I have like a hundred good customers.
00:35:41.820
Well, 20% of those customers are going to start selling it themselves.
00:35:52.960
It's not an illegal pyramid scheme, which is, you know, Bernie Madoff, you know, you pay me and I'll pay you out through more income.
00:36:03.280
Those are illegal, obviously, but they're also just inherently unstable because they're going to collapse at some point.
00:36:10.460
It was not a pyramid scheme in that sense, but it is a pyramid scheme in a different sense.
00:36:16.480
There is a real product that is being sold, but it's being sold down channels in the way that if you're in first, you are absolutely going to profit.
00:36:28.860
And if you're in third, you're going to lose your shirt.
00:36:39.640
I think it's part of Nick's background and conservatism.
00:36:49.720
But the key is, is that all of those sales, those super chats that he was getting or Bitcoin donations or whatever,
00:37:01.440
So when the alt-right first emerged in 2015 and 2016, there was shock and confusion and hatred on the part of mainstream conservatives.
00:37:15.280
They were like, who are these alt-conservatives?
00:37:26.080
People would run cover for Nick by saying, oh, he's just a concerned young conservative.
00:37:34.380
I mean, when Marjorie Taylor Greene went to speak at AFPAC, and what we learned later, she might have been induced to do that by Milo, another character from the past.
00:37:46.140
But anyway, when she went there, she explained it away as saying, well, I wanted to go talk about America First policies with young people, with a thousand young people, and I don't know who Nick Fuentes is.
00:37:58.520
Well, the latter is a bit unbelievable, but the former is absolutely true.
00:38:06.580
Those people, Alex Jones, wanted to get his audience.
00:38:10.920
Those people who were organizing January 6th wanted Nick involved to get his audience.
00:38:15.860
He has an organic audience that they do not have.
00:38:22.400
He is a personality with a cultivated audience in the way that I described.
00:38:29.500
But it wasn't the alt-right in the sense that the alt-right was antagonistic towards conservatism.
00:38:35.740
It was an alt-conservatism in the sense that it was a down-channel that ultimately led to the Republican Party and ultimately led to Trump.
00:38:44.760
So to take this analogy of multi-level marketing, there's the product, you know, Mary Kay, doTERRA, whatever.
00:38:50.160
The product here is Trump, and it's ultimately the GOP, and it's being sold in down-channels to ultimately hundreds of thousands, even millions of people.
00:39:00.080
But he was a particular down-channel of that whole system.
00:39:12.780
And he played that role, and he followed it all the way to the end, which led to January 6th.
00:39:23.240
But optics was part of that path that led him to January 6th.
00:39:39.560
So the optics game led to the greatest optics catastrophe in conservative movement history.
00:39:52.580
Now, I would just say a couple of things in closing here.
00:39:58.900
One thing we learned about Nick from this Jaden, you know, expose was that, you know, everything's kept...
00:40:09.260
He just kind of gets people on his board, but he does everything secretly.
00:40:12.000
Okay, whatever, that's not terribly surprising.
00:40:25.500
The fact that you had this friendship nationalism group of people in their 20s operating like this...
00:40:34.000
really is an indictment of the boomers who love all this America First stuff.
00:40:41.780
We just need to talk about immigration and birth rates and Christianity, CRT.
00:40:51.120
Why are they so incapable of taking charge of anything?
00:40:56.460
Why weren't there 50 or 60-year-olds or even older who went in and said, I'm going to run this organization for you?
00:41:06.160
Why did they just allow this thing to go off the rails?
00:41:10.620
Why is it that these young people who are underfunded are kind of flying by the seat of their pants while you have these old guys just, you know,
00:41:20.900
they're too conservative, they're too penny-pinching and visionless to actually fund something?
00:41:29.020
I mean, I have experienced this myself over and over again.
00:41:35.320
He was making all of his money from Zoomers, from people sending in Super Chats or anonymous Bitcoin donations.
00:41:51.660
I don't agree with any form of America First movement or American nationalism.
00:42:07.800
Why didn't they control the corporation and the infrastructure?
00:42:21.180
And I think in this sense, Nick's antagonism to boomers was pretty right on.
00:42:34.760
On some level, when you don't take responsibility, you can't complain when something goes up in flames.