RadixJournal - In Defense of Nick Fuentes (Sort Of...)

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. This is Richard. Welcome back to my journal. It is Friday, the 13th of May, 2022.

00:00:12.020 I will do these podcasts two or three times a week. They're ways of getting my thoughts out

00:00:21.880 there as in kind of a rough draft form. And they are usually for subscribers only, but I will

00:00:29.540 release some of these publicly. And I think I'm going to do that with this one in defense of Nick

00:00:37.640 Fuentes, sort of. It's a hot topic, and I hope it inspires some people to join in the club. We

00:00:47.560 actually had a very good discussion about this issue last Sunday with my members call, which is

00:00:58.480 a lot like a Twitter space. I'll usually lead the conversation, but I get a lot of input from

00:01:06.100 subscribers, and they are often very fruitful conversations. All right. So as I mentioned,

00:01:15.520 the title of this journal entry is a bit clickbaity. I think it's well known that I generally dislike

00:01:29.860 Nick Fuentes, but I don't really want to dwell on those things. As I said, it's well known. And

00:01:39.440 I think sometimes it's fun to talk about gossip or drama, etc. But we don't really learn anything by

00:01:51.820 doing that. And it's a kind of situation of, oh, well, this thing blew up, so let's move on to the

00:02:00.540 next thing, and it will blow up in six months or three years or whenever. And I think this is really

00:02:07.920 endemic to the dissident right, the alt-right. A lot of these problems were quite present at the alt-right

00:02:16.200 and have led me to conclude that the alt-right is an unworkable thing as a kind of movement, as it

00:02:26.040 existed in 2017. But I think there's a very strong tendency for people to, you know, get excited about

00:02:35.160 drama and either denounce someone or profess their undying loyalty to this person. And it's all rather

00:02:44.820 meaningless. And it really does, it's at the heart of the fact of a movement that really can't learn

00:02:53.840 anything. You know, denunciations, it's not really that fruitful. It's not really, I don't know, it

00:03:01.380 doesn't really accomplish anything. It's an emotional release. And it is unserious. So I'm going to talk a

00:03:09.260 little bit about my thoughts on this whole saga. So this blew up a little while ago. And I talked about

00:03:21.500 it briefly at some places. I actually have not watched the entire Kino Casino episode, which I

00:03:29.200 think is some three hours or so. But I've seen some clips, I've gotten the gist, seen some highlights or

00:03:38.420 lowlights. And I've read a couple mainstream articles on it. So I pretty much know what's going on. And I

00:03:48.020 have seen this before. So what we have at the heart of this episode is a broken friendship between

00:03:58.640 Jaden and Nick Fuentes. And I think that in itself is a big problem. The fact that these movements

00:04:11.380 really are based on friendship and personal loyalty, not necessarily ideological loyalty,

00:04:23.120 but personal loyalty. And I saw a lot of this when I was involved with the alt-right many years ago,

00:04:30.600 where people would, you know, tell me someone's name as if I knew about them or cared about them. You know,

00:04:39.360 I mean, I'm just making up a name, but it's like, well, did you see what White Eagle said on Twitter?

00:04:46.540 You know, oh, we can't lose him. This is, you know, it's this weird kind of thing of who is this person?

00:04:53.100 Is this person the proverbial incel

00:04:56.040 basement dweller? Is this person insightful? Or does he just tweet a lot? Does he just lurk on

00:05:02.900 your Discord server and has gained clout or credibility that way? Why do we care about this

00:05:11.760 person? And I don't want this to sound too snobby or harsh, but, you know, I remember seeing a

00:05:21.680 poster, a kind of digital poster for the AFPAC event, which gathered that entire movement. And

00:05:28.020 I'll talk about that in movement a little bit. And you had these figures on there. So there was

00:05:33.560 Nicholas Fontes. I, of course, recognize the red elephants guy, Michelle Malkin and Cassandra Fairbanks.

00:05:40.220 And, you know, a couple of the people I knew of is either conservatives or alt-right grifters or

00:05:45.340 whatever. And then you had these characters, Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow, who were at the bottom

00:05:53.640 getting, uh, build below, you know, like Jason video or, you know, Mike clips or some, you know,

00:06:04.000 gamer John or whatever. It was just bizarre. And just building a movement based on, you know,

00:06:14.680 oh, this guy's so based and he does live streams that, that just is stupid. And, uh, I, I mean, 0.99

00:06:23.080 it's stupid in general, but I don't think it can actually ever go anywhere. There's no real reason 0.98

00:06:29.120 for anyone to care about any of these people or respect them outside of they're based and they're

00:06:35.740 in our click. And again, I think that was endemic to the alt-right. I think it was super endemic to

00:06:43.800 the AF movement, which did grow out of it, grow, it grew out of the alt-right, of course, but I think it,

00:06:50.740 um, probably was more accurately, could be more accurately described as post alt-right in the

00:06:57.140 sense that, um, you can't underestimate how young some of these people are. I mean, I think some of

00:07:03.480 these people were, you know, 13 years old when Trump announced that he was running for president

00:07:10.740 in 2015 or, you know, they barely remember events like Charlottesville. Maybe even some of them came in

00:07:19.440 after January 6th or something like that. I don't know, but you have a lot of young people with very

00:07:25.400 short memories. So I, I think the fact that you have this, you know, friendship nationalism,

00:07:35.440 this movement based on clout within a click is a huge problem. Now, yeah, sure. To a degree,

00:07:44.100 all movements are like that, but to embrace it to this extent is asking for trouble. It's just not

00:07:52.880 going to work. It will end up almost invariably due to human nature and personal jealousy and so on,

00:07:59.000 just like this of people claiming, you know, Oh, Nick fudges his numbers again, maybe true. Maybe not.

00:08:08.000 I don't know. Uh, some horrible anecdote about looking for a ejaculate on a couch with a black 1.00

00:08:17.700 light. I mean, it's so specific. It seems it probably is true, but I, I don't know. And I don't 0.97

00:08:25.760 care. It's silly gossip, but it's just going to end in this kind of shabby, petty rivalry, jealousy stuff.

00:08:34.680 Um, what's interesting. And, and, you know, from what I've read, Nick has confirmed this,

00:08:40.800 the source of the breakup was the fact that Jaden seems to not be an incel and he had a girlfriend

00:08:51.300 and therefore wasn't dedicating his life solely to Nick. I mean, I find that rather sad. Uh,

00:08:58.060 and, uh, I think someone, you know, someone like Jaden should be applauded for having a GF 0.67

00:09:06.240 and having a life. And I, I get the impression that he probably does want to have a life and

00:09:11.880 will probably leave this whole scene and, uh, be the better for it. Um, but that incel thing,

00:09:20.260 I think that is getting at something very important. I would just say this. I, and I was joking with

00:09:29.660 friend of mine about this. I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that Nick Fuentes is an

00:09:39.620 actual incel in the sense that he's not having sex. The reason why I believe that is that when you

00:09:49.260 have any sort of celebrity, it is an absolute aphrodisiac, even if maybe you could even say

00:10:00.940 especially if, but even if that celebrity is a kind of negative celebrity of being the bad boy.

00:10:08.920 So I can speak to this from personal experience. I won't go into details, but basically a bunch of

00:10:17.580 girls are throwing themselves at you. So the idea that, and Nick, I think Nick achieved less like

00:10:29.640 mainstream media fame than I did because I, you know, spoke to the media at every opportunity and

00:10:37.320 was kind of played in, played into their kind of, Oh, this is Spencer, the well-dressed boogeyman

00:10:44.720 kind of persona. Um, Nick had much more intense celebrity within the movement, much more than I did much

00:10:55.000 more intense loyalty. Um, I, I just, I can't believe that someone like that isn't getting laid. Um, now,

00:11:07.840 you know, there's always been questions about Nick's sexuality when he did this cat boy cammy thing

00:11:19.220 a few years ago. I forgot if it's 2018 or 2019. Yeah. I mean, it raises some eyebrows. And as I said at

00:11:27.580 the time, I mean, look, I don't care about that movement. I, I'm not connected with it. I look upon it

00:11:35.160 objectively in the sense that I'm outside of it. I don't have any dog in that race, but yikes. I mean, 0.96

00:11:43.020 what could Nick have possibly tried to achieve? So it's not just so much that it was a mistake or

00:11:51.860 something like that because everyone makes mistakes and you know, um, politicians flail around and then

00:12:02.040 have miraculous comebacks. Athletes have lows and then highs. So I, I don't care about mistakes,

00:12:08.580 uh, or misjudgments or something like it. The question is, can you learn from it? And do you

00:12:13.620 have the ability to kind of make a comeback or do you have some, is there something about you that's

00:12:17.660 worthwhile, but it's just the oddness of the mistake. It's, it's like, what are you possibly

00:12:26.500 trying to achieve by that? And it, yeah, it was creepy, uh, to put it mildly. I think maybe one

00:12:34.660 of the funniest things about it I remember is it wasn't so much that the, the pair Nick and Catboy

00:12:40.760 Cammy were, um, looking at each other, uh, adoringly. But, um, I think on that video, Nick

00:12:46.960 denied the existence of dinosaurs or something like this, you know? So, uh, the science types say

00:12:54.680 that religious people are wacky, but then these crazy scientists claim that giant lizards walked 1.00

00:13:01.180 the earth. I mean, who's the religious fanatic now? Yeah. That type of argument. That's amusing, 0.91

00:13:07.340 but yeah, I, I, I, I generally think that either Nick is gay or that he has a very screwed up 1.00

00:13:22.880 sexuality that that that's actually understandable in terms of his age and the movement that he's in. 0.96

00:13:32.780 Um, it's an isolation, alienation from women and all of the horrors of the internet. These are very

00:13:42.780 online people. All of the horrors of the internet are at their fingertips. It, it leads to a kind of

00:13:48.280 screwed up sexuality and it leads to these weird statements like it's gay to have sex with women 0.99

00:13:54.960 or, you know, uh, in cell in seldom is the ultimate form of manliness. And, you know, I would rather 0.99

00:14:03.140 have sex to the tranny than a woman. All, all this just weird nonsense. That's extremely creepy, 1.00

00:14:09.220 but I think speaks to the predicament of a lot of zoomers like Nick, Nick, they, you know, maybe 1.00

00:14:18.980 calling, maybe suspecting that they're gay is the wrong way to look at it. Maybe the better way to 1.00

00:14:24.380 look at it is they are just immensely sexually screwed up and frustrated. That's probably what the case is. 0.99

00:14:32.900 Um, but the, the, the incel thing was very important to him. I mean, the, the, the inceldom was the source

00:14:42.980 of the friendship breakup. And I think this gets to a larger issue, which is worth discussing.

00:14:52.860 And that is the playing to his fan base. So, you know, someone like myself, I don't get accused

00:15:06.040 of being a grifter in the sense of, I just tell my audience what they want to hear. So let's,

00:15:14.820 let's take a step back. Let's define grifter. Now you could apply that label grifter to almost

00:15:22.520 any political person, public intellectual, political entrepreneur, et cetera. You could

00:15:29.060 just say, Oh, they're a grifter. They're taking donations on Patreon. They've got, they're on a

00:15:34.160 sub stack. They're on whatever. And you can say, Oh, they're just a grifter. Well, I think that's an

00:15:40.680 extremely unfair way of describing someone. Um, you know, I mean, where does the definition of

00:15:48.360 grifter end is a journalist for the New York times or Buzzfeed? Are they grifters? Exactly. I mean,

00:15:55.160 because they're getting a paycheck to write about politics and talk about politics. I don't think

00:16:00.000 so. Um, I would define grifter in the sense of someone who cultivates an audience and delivers them

00:16:11.560 comfort food for money. So someone like, and, and these people can be intelligent. They can be

00:16:19.100 unintelligent. Someone like Caitlin Bennett, she does publicity stunts. She tweets about Catholicism or 1.00

00:16:29.760 family values or whatever. But her main asset is the fact that she kind of looks like a,

00:16:37.280 the daughter or housewife that you would want. Maybe not my cup of tea, but she has an audience.

00:16:46.580 And so she'll tweet about her cooking like, Oh, look, I'm such a good housewife. I just made this

00:16:51.720 chicken dinner for my hubby. And it's a way of allowing, or I'm, I'm going to wear a bikini and

00:17:00.540 carry a semi-automatic weapon around, you know, a kind of new version of a chick with a dick, I guess. 1.00

00:17:11.000 Um, she, it's titillating. It offers a kind of parasocial relationship with her audience where 0.99

00:17:19.720 her audience can in a way be married to her or have Caitlin Bennett as the audience's collective

00:17:28.060 daughter. So it's very similar to only fans. Only fans is not really about porn because porn,

00:17:37.140 as we know, is ubiquitous on the internet. The end 99.9% of people don't pay for porn. They

00:17:45.800 get it for free. And yeah, they're, you know, there's some sites that have paywalls or something

00:17:53.380 like that, but where you have, you know, you pay $9 a month or whatever to get, I don't know,

00:17:59.760 high definition or whatever, but the vast, vast majority of people just get it ever. It's ubiquitous.

00:18:04.940 It's ever churning. It's ever being churned out, et cetera. But what is it about only fans?

00:18:11.280 That relationship that the Mark can have with his only fan model is the feature, not the bug.

00:18:23.100 That's what it's about. It's about that fantasy of being married to her. And so we shouldn't really

00:18:29.880 be surprised when a sizable proportion of only fans, not only do they pay $9 a month, but they'll

00:18:37.280 just send this girl $1,000 on PayPal. And I'm, I'm sure there's some male models who have very similar

00:18:45.520 parasocial relationships with their female fans or male fans. So it's that simulation of an

00:18:53.080 actual relationship of familial relationship or a love relationship. That's the secret sauce.

00:18:58.240 That's what makes only fans work. And I think in that sense, the kind of grifter is very much like

00:19:06.960 an only fans model. Although this grifter is not, you know, showing us his genitals, um, but is telling 0.97

00:19:15.960 the audience what it wants to hear and offering that kind of parasocial relationship, comfort food.

00:19:21.140 A lot of grifters can be intelligent and can, you know, legitimate, legitimately put forth

00:19:29.480 discourse. That's a contribution. I'm thinking of Glenn Greenwald. He is a journalist. He is a good

00:19:38.080 writer, highly prolific, but let's be honest. What is his secret sauce? Who is his audience at this

00:19:48.100 point? His audience are conservatives who want to hear about how liberals suck so hard. They're 0.99

00:19:55.700 terrible. The GOP is the true working man's anti-war party, anti-state party, whatever. They want to hear

00:20:02.900 that from this gay journalist who's been lionized and was involved in the Snowden leaks.

00:20:11.820 So he, although Glenn Greenwald is a intelligent guy, of course, the reason why he's lost a lot of respect

00:20:24.940 is just that he doesn't, he's offering comfort food. He's offering a narrative that makes his audience feel

00:20:34.400 warm and fuzzy inside for profit and a lot of profit. I wish I had his subscriber base, obviously.

00:20:44.400 So Nick was like that in the sense that he recognized the youth inherent in the alt-right of 2017,

00:20:55.600 certainly inherent in the AF or Gryper movement. And he played to them. And so even if Nick was just

00:21:05.200 banging chicks left and right, and you know, the Swedish bikini team was visiting his house every

00:21:13.480 weekend, even if that were the case, I think he would have desperately tried to hide that.

00:21:19.240 Because he had to present himself as an incel for his audience. And his audience did not so much see

00:21:28.820 him as a leader. Because a leader is someone who's, by his nature, egotistical, and is going to order

00:21:36.900 people around and lead them. They saw him as a kind of emblem of themselves, as their avatar, as the

00:21:44.340 ultimate young incel zoomer who is representing them. And again, that was an absolutely successful

00:21:56.500 model. He understood his audience. He catered to them. He represented them. And they were very loyal

00:22:06.660 to him, at least for a time. It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would last.

00:22:14.340 But I don't think Nick is going away. But I do think that any time there's a kind of, like,

00:22:24.580 crack in the ice, it's almost a matter of time before it comes caving in.

00:22:31.520 Now, I first learned about Nick, I can remember this, back in 2017. And he was a young conservative,

00:22:48.420 he was in high school, or not in high school, I think he had just gone to university at the time,

00:22:53.100 he was a freshman, in 2017. And he was the kind of, like, ultimate person that we were trying to reach.

00:23:05.280 Or like, and maybe that was, I look back at it now, I think it was mistaken to try to reach those people.

00:23:10.460 But he was kind of the ultimate person that the alt-right was trying to reach.

00:23:14.620 Oh, here's the disaffected conservative normie who has rejected conservatism and is now on the Trump train

00:23:24.180 and loves the alt-right and is edgy on social media and, you know, so on.

00:23:29.560 I remember seeing an interview with him on Stefan Molyneux's show and just hearing about them,

00:23:39.880 hearing about him. And he got connected with James Alsup. And so Alsup was a very similar figure,

00:23:47.300 someone who didn't really present himself as an ideologue, but as a kind of conservative normie

00:23:52.540 who now is a nationalist and all that kind of stuff. And I did know that he went to Charlottesville.

00:24:02.300 I never saw him at Charlottesville. I mean, I was only with a very small amount of people in Charlottesville.

00:24:08.880 But he went there, and I can remember the fall and winter of 2017 post-Charlottesville.

00:24:16.900 And, you know, immediately after that event, there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm

00:24:23.280 related to the fact that we felt like victims at that event.

00:24:28.940 So it was, we were mistreated by the police, we weren't allowed to speak, we had a permitted rally, blah, blah, blah.

00:24:37.980 And there was a lot of enthusiasm and kind of team building, you could say.

00:24:42.700 But very, very quickly, all of that started to fall apart.

00:24:48.580 And the alt-right went into these series of spasms,

00:24:54.520 mostly led by people like Nick or Andrew Anglin or Weave,

00:25:00.860 that were basically trying to find a scapegoat or trying to attack some part of this very broad movement. 0.99

00:25:10.180 And attack it and kill it, and I think kill it like a scapegoat. 0.98

00:25:16.480 It is putting the sins of the community or whatever onto something 1.00

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.

00:25:44.800 I'm, you know, I'm sure Nick took part in that.

00:25:48.340 I mean, Nick has famously talked about, you know, no e-girls ever kind of thing. 0.95

00:25:54.600 And they did that for a little while.

00:25:57.240 And then that seemed to bizarrely morph into an optics campaign.

00:26:03.100 So it went from being wildly misogynistic to we're the best, we have the best optics.

00:26:11.100 And what did the optics mean?

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. 1.00

00:26:32.040 So Wignat is Uyghur nationalist.

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.

00:26:46.180 Although I was considered a Wignat, certainly.

00:26:49.980 I think from my views, I don't know.

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. 1.00

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

00:27:18.660 move towards them.

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

00:27:44.820 in just a little bit.

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

00:28:10.640 so on.

00:28:10.860 We can't have that.

00:28:11.900 We can't have, on the one hand, the Wignat, the guy with tattoos who's screaming and attacking

00:28:17.800 people.

00:28:18.260 We can't have that.

00:28:19.260 We also can't have Spencer.

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.

00:28:32.160 And, you know, we can't have that either.

00:28:33.640 We need to kind of blend in and kind of, you know, work our way up the conservative movement

00:28:39.680 ladder.

00:28:41.220 Soon, you know, the conservatives will be us.

00:28:43.660 This was the idea.

00:28:50.200 I think there was a, there was kind of inherent contradictions to Wignatism or Amnatism or optics-ism.

00:28:58.800 And these are the contradictions.

00:29:03.620 Some of these people who are professed Amnats have the worst optics.

00:29:11.220 Not all of them, but most of them.

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

00:29:31.100 and all sorts of things.

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.

00:29:40.760 And I, I don't think many other people did.

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

00:29:57.040 course, um, very similar.

00:30:00.040 You can make a lot of comparisons with them.

00:30:02.220 They are Trump-based rallies that went out of control for various reasons and became albatrosses

00:30:14.140 hanging around everyone's neck.

00:30:15.420 That's a fair description.

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,

00:30:27.700 famously went into, um, Nancy Pelosi's office.

00:30:33.820 Some appliance is beeping.

00:30:36.300 I'll just let it go.

00:30:37.880 But there wasn't a lot of crossover.

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

00:30:58.420 Nazi, neo-Nazis and so on.

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.

00:31:10.940 January 6th is very different.

00:31:14.460 January 6th was normies.

00:31:16.360 Now the Groypers were there and the Groypers were derived from the alt-right, no question, 0.94

00:31:22.440 but it was a normie rally.

00:31:25.500 And the normies had become more radicalized than the alt-right of old was.

00:31:32.380 I mean, the normies were invading the Capitol.

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

00:31:55.360 was called before the rally even began.

00:31:57.180 And 99 out of 100 people left and went home and then chaos ensued in downtown.

00:32:04.640 I don't need to revisit this.

00:32:05.780 Maybe I'll revisit it, revisit it in another broadcast.

00:32:11.100 Um, January 6th was far more intense.

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.

00:32:35.100 It was a weird thing.

00:32:36.800 I think mainstream conservatives molded into the alt-right just as much as the alt-right kind

00:32:46.220 of molded into conservatives.

00:32:48.800 Interesting.

00:32:50.500 Worth talking more about that.

00:32:52.700 But the other contradiction at the heart of AF and why it couldn't really work was that

00:33:02.400 Nick ultimately had to maintain his following.

00:33:06.740 And Nick absolutely had an organic following.

00:33:09.940 There are many people, grifter types, who I find to be just totally synthetic. 0.92

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.

00:33:24.440 I think he was propped up by multiple people.

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. 0.90

00:33:42.120 Well, not entirely, but mostly 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.

00:34:17.920 And they saw Nick, he has a real audience.

00:34:21.380 He has 10,000 zoomers watching his stream in 2020.

00:34:26.020 We need to tap into that.

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.

00:34:50.520 And so what do I mean by that?

00:34:53.880 So imagine a typical multi-level marketing scheme, like Mary Kay or doTERRA or something like that.

00:35:04.060 Now there's the product, right?

00:35:06.660 Makeup or essential oils or whatever.

00:35:09.920 And you have the producer who gets it out there.

00:35:14.440 And then you have a series of channels.

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.

00:35:35.540 I'm good at selling this product.

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.

00:35:45.680 And I'm going to get a kickback from that.

00:35:49.620 It is a pyramid scheme, you could say.

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.

00:36:26.460 If you're in second, you might profit.

00:36:28.860 And if you're in third, you're going to lose your shirt.

00:36:32.120 This is how it operates.

00:36:33.680 And so you have all of these channels.

00:36:36.060 So Nick was, and this is part of optics.

00:36:39.640 I think it's part of Nick's background and conservatism.

00:36:42.320 It's part of Nick's just personality.

00:36:44.220 He was a channel manager for the alt-right.

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,

00:36:58.660 they were kind of ultimately going upstream.

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?

00:37:18.020 We don't like them. 0.99

00:37:18.940 They're evil. 1.00

00:37:19.680 They hate us. 1.00

00:37:20.760 They're like Trump.

00:37:21.780 They're socialists.

00:37:22.620 They're from the left.

00:37:23.420 Blah, blah, blah.

00:37:23.840 You hear all that.

00:37:24.860 No one said that about Nick.

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.

00:38:03.820 She wanted to go get his audience.

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.

00:38:18.780 They are simply political operatives.

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.

00:39:05.740 And that, too, was a secret of his success.

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.

00:39:37.600 It wasn't opposed to it.

00:39:39.560 So the optics game led to the greatest optics catastrophe in conservative movement history.

00:39:48.580 Remarkable stuff.

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...

00:40:07.940 He doesn't involve people.

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.

00:40:17.720 Might be more efficient that way.

00:40:21.500 But I would say this.

00:40:24.500 There...

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. 0.70

00:40:41.780 We just need to talk about immigration and birth rates and Christianity, CRT. 0.56

00:40:47.820 Where were the older people?

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, 0.97

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.

00:41:34.060 Nick experienced this.

00:41:35.320 He was making all of his money from Zoomers, from people sending in Super Chats or anonymous Bitcoin donations.

00:41:42.880 Where are the adults in the room? 0.98

00:41:45.760 Why are these boomers this useless? 1.00

00:41:48.480 And again, I don't even agree with them. 0.98

00:41:51.660 I don't agree with any form of America First movement or American nationalism.

00:41:56.940 I am past that.

00:41:59.760 I don't even want it to succeed on some level.

00:42:03.280 But I do have to ask, where were the adults?

00:42:07.800 Why didn't they control the corporation and the infrastructure?

00:42:13.640 And why didn't they fund it?

00:42:15.300 Because they're good questions to ask.

00:42:21.180 And I think in this sense, Nick's antagonism to boomers was pretty right on. 1.00

00:42:34.760 On some level, when you don't take responsibility, you can't complain when something goes up in flames.

00:42:41.580 All right.

00:42:44.360 That's all for now.

00:42:45.360 I'll talk to you soon.

00:42:46.480 Thanks.

00:42:46.780 I'll talk to you soon.

00:42:50.540 Bye.

00:42:50.680 Bye.

00:42:51.200 Bye.

00:42:51.800 Bye.

00:42:52.660 Bye.

00:42:53.140 Bye.

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RadixJournal - May 14, 2022

In Defense of Nick Fuentes (Sort Of...)

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