The Hierarchy of White Ignants

What Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and the GOP "Civil War" reveal about the near future in the U.S.

I’m temporarily hyper-focused on 27-year-old Nick Fuentes — an extreme Anti-Semite, misogynist, racist, Hitler fanboy, and putative leader of the Groypers, a movement made up of miserable, misguided “extremely online” young White dudes, many of them incels with access to firearms. Fuentes reached a new level of prominence last week due to his widely-viewed interview with Tucker Carlson, which has caused a rift in the Republican Party along a few different fault lines.

The “interview” — more like a series of softball questions rolled lazily down the middle — is painful to watch. I could not make my way through all of it (two-plus hours, 25,000 words). Fuentes has a screechy, gravelly voice and the warped demeanor of an angry gremlin. Carlson radiates the blousy, smug, unearned privilege of a life lived without self-reflection.

I’ve mostly avoided watching Carlson, a Far Right pundit, anti-Semite and conspiracy-theorist grifter (he promotes, for instance, the “great replacement” theory). He is becoming harder to ignore these days. Formerly with CNN and FOX before turning independent, Carlson is a product of the Conservative establishment. His father ran Voice of America, a major propaganda outlet for the U.S. government, directed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (a Right Wing media company), and was, by all reports, a CIA operative. Recently Carlson has discovered the occult, claiming that good Christian Right Wingers are in an existential struggle with demonic astral entities (actually, that is kind of what I think, but in my model it is the Right Wing Christian types who have been possessed by malevolent Archonic forces).

I’ve been enjoying the take on the GOP “civil war” from the Youtuber, The Amazing Lucas. I am still shocked that the public discourse in America has moved this far, this fast, to the openly fascist / openly racist side of the dial. Many black commentators, prepared by their history, are completely unsurprised by this turn of events.