Nick Fuentes Is An Attention Farmer

And a man-child. And a socialist. But I repeat myself

Nick Fuentes wants your attention. He is not actually interested in ideology or history or race, or even America. Nick Fuentes only wants your eyeballs and your ears aimed at him. That’s it. That’s all he wants. The rest is incidental: the effects on you, on others, on society or politics, are incidental to his project of self-promotion. Fuentes says whatever stupid shit will get your attention. Blaming all the wars that ever happened on Jews, as Fuentes does, is absolutely some stupid shit.

Perhaps the reader finds apologetics for National Socialism alarming. I do. When Fuentes dabbles in revisionism and dives into Holocaust denial, we pay attention, because that is bad behavior. When Fuentes endorses blood libels and conspiracy theories about Jews, we pay attention because that behavior is universally seen as a trigger for getting upset. Even a person who likes and agrees with Nick Fuentes is paying attention because they know he is socially unacceptable. He is the rebellious calf in this classic Gary Larson cartoon. An audience always exists for his act. It is not the least bit original.

I do not own this image, that’s why it is above the paywall

But how big is the Fuentes audience, and how consequential, really? In a clip of Fuentes that I watched this weekend, he accuses Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Max Blumenthal of trying to “steer the mass awakening” as witting tools of an Israeli operation to create a controlled opposition. In fact these are simply his most notable competitors for the anti-Semitic podcast audience. Owens has attacked Fuentes before, while Carlson and Blumenthal both have better funding than Fuentes: this particular conspiracy theory is not really about Israel. It is about Fuentes and his share of a relatively small audience.

Speaking of controlled opposition, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times has decided that Fuentes is the anointed successor to Charlie Kirk, who had tried to marginalize him in conservative circles. Like his competitors, Fuentes has attacked Erika Kirk as “fake”. “Why does the Times want him to look cool?” Robby Soave asks at The Hill. “Do they want him to be the next Charlie Kirk? Why would that be the case? Hmm. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn there.” Yes, perhaps there is.

According to the available public opinion polling on Nick Fuentes, about 6 percent of Americans view him favorably. That’s it. Just six percent. The most interesting aspect of this number is that just 3 percent of white males approve of Fuentes. His favorability is actually higher with black (12 percent) and Hispanic (11 percent) men. His audience absolutely does not consist of ‘toxic white males’ or any other such nonsense. If we are supposed to worry about the popularity of Nick Fuentes because of his white supremacist views, then we should worry that black and Hispanic men seem to favor white supremacy more than white men do. If Rod Dreher is correct that groypers are “something like 30 to 40 percent of DC GOP staffers under the age of 30”, it is quite a statistical anomaly that needs study.

Fuentes certainly doesn’t have a big audience among history nerds. As I explained in this recent essay, Adolf Hitler considered the Holocaust his greatest achievement. He considered his project of creating a new German people and state to be a miserable failure in defeat, however. Fuentes expresses admiration for Hitler, but denies Hitler his own definitions of success and failure. Fuentes holds an imaginary view of Hitler that is in reality anemoia, nostalgia for a past that never existed. My review of Hitler’s National Socialism by Rainer Zitelmann unlocked this morning. It is available for free reading for seven days.

Hitler's National Socialism Was Socialism