The ugly sentiments Nick Fuentes has expressed have been welcomed by angry and confused young men, aged 18-27, who’re active in right-wing spaces online, especially platforms like Discord, Rumble, and Telegram. Fuentes’ target audience of disaffected youth includes alienated gamers, college students, and internet trolls drawn from the fringes of the MAGA movement.
Fuentes’ incendiary, often ugly rhetoric (Ted Cruz has called him a “little Nazi”) makes the late Charlie Kirk look like someone who thinks, “It takes a village.” He says he didn't vote for Trump in 2024. MAGA’s too weak on key issues for the 27-year-old from the suburbs of Chicago and his Groypers, who despise feminism, LQBTQ+ rights, Israel, blacks, Jews, diversity, and immigration. Fuentes’ primary criticism of MAGA is that it’s been hijacked and corrupted by "Israel First" neoconservatives, pro-Zionist donors, and Jewish influencers, leading to a betrayal of core “America First” principles like anti-interventionism, economic nationalism, and prioritizing U.S. citizens over foreign interests.
As white nationalists, Fuentes and his Groypers want to live apart from black people, and their rhetoric suggests they feel the same about women. When Fuentes, a self-described “proud incel,” once tweeted, “Your body, my choice. Forever,” it went viral and became a Groyper rallying cry.
The last time a white nationalist reached any level of prominence in the US was in 2016, when Richard Spencer was doing things like yelling, “Hail Trump!” at a conference, after which some attendees responded with Nazi salutes. While Spencer has since faded into the background, Fuentes has over a million Twitter followers after Elon Musk reinstated his suspended account last year. Still, he's the most cancelled person in the country, kicked off Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Twitch, and Reddit. He's banned from PayPal, Venmo, Patreon, and Shopify, making it difficult for him to collect money for his efforts (it appears he has anonymous backers), and he claims no bank will give him an account. Fuentes has been banned from Airbnb, and put on a no-fly list. Still, his podcast on Rumble has a half a million followers.
In a recent essay for Splice Today on the Fuentes phenomenon, “Critical Theory Didn’t Create Nick Fuentes—the GOP Did,” John Mac Ghlionn makes some good points about how the MAGA Right has contributed to the rise of the Groypers, but in minimizing the contribution stemming from Leftist philosophy he misses a crucial point. Mac Ghlionn writes that the theory that the radical relativism of the left, as espoused by Foucault, Derrida et. al “has somehow fertilized the soil for Fuentes and his Groypers” is “nonsense.”
But it's not nonsense, obvious if one traces how the radical ideas of the French theorists have influenced the formation of the tenets of modern progressivism, which the Groypers are acting out against.
The term “critical theory” came out of the Frankfurt School in the early-20th century, its central principle being that power is embedded in social structures, not just in individual actions. Critical theory evolved, and in the late-20th century it produced new, identity-based theories such as critical race theory, intersectionality, postcolonial studies, and queer theory. The gist of these, which has left its stamp on today’s Democratic Party, is that in the hierarchies of power, one group—white males—has historically held a structural advantage, while various minorities were subordinated. The Democrats’ fix has been to favor the marginalized groups, often accompanied by denigration of the white male “oppressors.”
Thus we got, until Trump won in 2024, the constant harping on DEI as the solution to right all the historical wrongs springing from colonialism. “Equity” means the job doesn't go to the most qualified; it goes to the one who's been held down. This is straight-up critical race theory.
The throughline from the Frankfurt School to the current political environment led to young white males with poor economic prospects resenting the scorn heaped on them for their gender and skin color.
So along comes Nick Fuentes, armed with a nasty form of charisma, willpower, the power of speech, and a movement forms around him, populated by a group of guys that have had less male guidance than any other generation in American history. Many of their fathers weren't around when they were growing up, and their teachers were mostly women. After being taught to suppress their male competitiveness and aggression, they became angry and resentful, making them the perfect audience for someone like Fuentes, who doesn't want to give them the guidance they've missed out on. He wants to exploit their disaffection by encouraging them to indulge in their worst instincts. The Groyper generation hasn’t been taught the deeply-ingrained taboo that once existed against fascism, so they're open to it.
The Groypers aren’t conservatives. They don't want to conserve a system with an economy that's not working for them. They're a grievance-motivated group looking for revenge and a white Christian ethnostate. In defense of his thesis, Mac Ghlionn writes, “Fuentes doesn’t quote Foucault. He quotes Netanyahu.” Correct. Fuentes knows better than to quote Foucault to the Groypers, who don't know who he is. But he can see the product of Foucault's ideas many years later, and understand that it's made discontents ready to jump on his radical bandwagon. This is a very confused group of young men following a young man who claims not to be gay, but has said that “sleeping with women is gay.” Perhaps only a Groyper can understand what that's supposed to mean.
Charlie Kirk, preaching God and family, was an antidote to the Fuentes white supremacy ideology and grudge-driven beliefs, but he's gone now. Fuentes and his mob pose a threat to the conservative movement, as evidenced by the GOP uproar over his appearance on the Tucker Carlson show. Fuentes leads a black-pilled movement with a "burn it all down" mentality that favors collapse over reform. They're dangerous because the normal restraints against such a doomsday approach to political change don't exist. What does the threat of losing your girlfriend, money, house, or your reputation mean when you don’t have them?