The Right just gets worse and worse. I thought it was intolerable when Reagan was their idol, even more ludicrous with the cult of ignorance around George W Bush, and then dived off the deep end with Trump…but Trump is just a shallow, doomed figurehead. We need to fear what’s coming next: Nick Fuentes, or someone like him.
What they’re going to do is tap in the zealotry of an increasing radical Christianity.
Christian nationalism has returned to the core of the far-right after a tour through the wilderness of Alt Right syncretism involving the usual fascist amalgam of Odinism, Satanism, nature worship, British Israelism, Ariosophy, and so forth. In some ways, members of the white nationalist movement predicted this turn following the terror of Charlottesville, investing in efforts to infiltrate Christian conservative groups rather than focusing as much on exploiting the traditional tensions between radical subcultural milieus and liberal democracy.
Today, these white nationalists within the America First (AF) movement, led by Nick Fuentes and his supporters, are effectively infiltrating religious movements associated with the New Apostolic Reformation, the Orthodox church, and the Mormon church through proxies and supporters. Supporters have attended political events associated with the Church, started far-right church groups, and engaged with religious media in order to pull Christians further to the far right.
It’s a formless chaos right now. Reading through that summary, you get the impression that they’re morphing at a frenetic rate, they’re just sucking in bits and pieces of far right ideology and splicing together into nightmare creations, most of which are doomed to failure. Every little splinter group out there is a mutational experiment, struggling to find a survival strategy, and the most successful exploits seem to involve glomming onto the most sensationalistically evil ideas, because that’s what makes good clickbait, will maybe start trending, will catch on with the algorithm, and will skirt the edges of bannable content. So far, Christianity + racism + debatemebro culture seems to be a winning recipe, with a little dash of odious history to spice it up, as the America Firsters do so well.
AFers characterized themselves as Christian nationalists, meaning that they believe that the US is fundamentally a Christian nation, but elements of their movement reveal even deeper commitments to reactionary ideology. Fuentes has also made statements indicating Holocaust denial and promotes racist ideas (eg, “human biodiversity” and “race realism”) prominent among white nationalists. He also has a particular view of universal Catholic doctrine common among fascists. However, efforts to engage politically with different congregations outside of Catholicism characterize AF’s larger effort to move Trump supporters and the rest of the Republican Party toward white nationalist positions.
Fuentes openly debates other movement members from different congregations, like Pentecostalists and Seventh Day Adventists, about the nuances of revealed doctrine. To people who have expressed support for America First, Fuentes advises remaining discreet about their sympathies, while dropping hints about their beliefs and observing how their cohorts respond. In this way, America First works through entryism not just in college groups, and Turning Point USA most specifically, but also in churches and other right-wing organizations.
Have you ever seen or listened to Nick Fuentes? Like Pewdiepie, his popularity among a certain segment of the population is utterly incomprehensible to me — he’s a child-like hate machine who smiles and smirks while denying the Holocaust or taunting black people or encouraging authoritarian crackdowns on others (but not on him, oh no — that’s just an opportunity to claim victimhood). Fuentes himself might be on the road to irrelevancy — he’s been banned from YouTube and Twitter, and this kind of movement thrives best on social media — but they’re not done going through Lovecraftian changes and drinking the acid of insanity. I don’t think they’re going to fade away as long as social media survive on capitalist anarchy and leeching off the madness of crowds.
And, as usual, the Democrats do nothing.
This week’s and the week-before-last’s episodes of the Knowledge Fight podcast has covered a recent speech and several of his video’s he’s posted on Alex Jones’ banned-dot-video site. Fuentes doesn’t just say the quiet part out loud, he blares it at top volume. Yes, his nasally, whiney voice sounds like some is dragging Wolverine’s adamantium claws over a huge blackboard, but he’s young and what he says is appealing to alienated white boys who think brown people are out to get them.
He doesn’t need YouTube or Twitter to send out his marching orders, not when Jones and Parler or other digital soapboxes for fascism are allowed to exist.
I’m not linked to this podcast, but Knowledge Fight took a break from their usual dissection of Alex Jones today, in order to dissect a speech by Nick Fuentes. Alex Jones usually codes his anti-Semitism by referring to the Jewish people as “globalists”, yet Jones’ channel released the speech being dissected. It forms an unwinnable situation for Jones in doing so, which this podcast explains at its end. https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/knowledgefight/NickFSpeech.mp3
Clearly, the Fuentes America First trend is that we should go back to the way this country was founded. Reinstate legally mandated belief in The Church of England. Make Biden and McConnell et al swear allegiance to the CofE, and to the Queen. Raise taxes to fund them more. America First MUST mean obeying Boris Johnson, our Queen’s Prime Minister.
It’s not as if following Native American theology were a concept, so “going back” couldn’t literally mean that.
@ 4 Bruce
Reinstate legally mandated belief in The Church of England.
The colony of Pennsylvania was founded by a Quaker.
The Massachusetts colony was founded by a bunch of raving religious fanatics that the Church of England was in league with the Devil/Pope—the terms were interchangeable.
Sure, Akira, because the Republicans aren’t blocking every last thing the Dems try to do to fix things…
@jrkrideau:
And the colony of Rhode Island was founded by a Baptist who was pretty much on the run from Massachusetts at the time, and who understood (unlike the founders of Massachusetts) that religious liberty actually had to mean religious liberty for everybody, not the ‘we need to be free from oppression so we can be free to be the oppressors ourselves’ that some of the other colonies had been founded on.
(People forget there actually was once an attempt to ban Christmas… it was before the American Revolution, and the Puritans were the ones behind it, as they considered Easter the only true Christian holy day and Christmas to be far too tainted by pagan traits. And, really, they weren’t entirely wrong on the why…)
WMDkitty:
Does Biden need the GOP’s permission to muster America’s police and military power on these scum?
Stupid AF. Says it all.
@8
Yes. He does. Or do you want to set the precedent that the leader of the country can use the military to subjugate civilians without checks and balances? Jesus with authoritarian leftists like you who needs alt-righters. Its like you want to give these nazis the legal precedent to accomplish their goals.
Way to go with the false equivalency there, PZ, comparing actively, perniciously evil Fuentes to Pewdiepie, a mere immature idiot. And while I stopped watching Pewdiepie years ago, I do still enjoy his contemporaries’ content, such as that of Markiplier. Hmm, maybe you should step outside your curmudgeonly old-man bubble and watch some of his videos, without carrying all that baggage. Unfortunately, the good ones tend to run a bit long, this one is 35 minutes: “GHOST HUNTING WITH THE BOYS” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlQ84jvjz2c how’s that for a non sequitur?
@loosenoodlepoodledoodle 11
You forgot to show the false equivalence. Saying so doesn’t make it so. I won”t be watching your link.
@10
As opposed to you, who’d give them the right to speech and the press, to vote, to hold office, to breath…
But hey! If you’ve got a better idea other than write pithy Sorkin-esque rebuttals to their rhetoric try to psychoanalyze them to find out where the brown-people bad-touched them, and pray to the non-existent gods that another spineless lib get’s elected, let’s hear it!
Edit:
…to their rhetoric, try to…
Greene has denounced Christian churches as “Basically Dead” because they don’t support Trump enough. The American Right uses “Christian” as a label, ignoring how the Bible describes Jesus Christ. And others of the Right are calling Pence the anti-Christ.
The issues involved with Christianity are irrelevant to the American Right. If that label wasn’t there, another label would take its place. Labels such as “patriotism” and “socialism” don’t have any more meaning than sports team nicknames do. They just define the teams they are on.
What’s the origin of “groypers”? Do they really call themselves that? Does “groper” mean in the USA what it does in Britain? (Trump’s “Grab ’em by…” comment revealed him as a self-described groper.)
@13 @Akira
First of all white boy, you do not help us by appealing to the same brand of authoritarianism that your opponent would use against us. Second, considering Ive seen leftist call Biden and his supporters fascist how long would it take for that authoritarianism you expouse to get directed at me and people like me? Not long if history shows.
But hey go ahead and continue to preach authoritarianism safe in your privlege that you’d escape such a thing like every other edgy fuck.
“Christian” is a meaningless label for themselves otherwise, the values of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Bible would matter.
Labels are what they do “socialist”? They are like team nicknames to know who to root for.
Since fascism whas a mostly chaotic ideology for predators, it seems to be a good label for these fuckers.