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May 14, 2022 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
42:46
In Defense of Nick Fuentes (Sort Of...)

Richard discusses the ups and downs of Nick Fuentes; the confused sexuality of Zoomers; politics as a multi-level marketing strategy; and the road to January 6. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Hello everyone, this is Richard.
Welcome back to my journal.
It is Friday the 13th of May 2022.
I will do these podcasts two or three times a week.
They're ways of getting my thoughts out there in kind of a rough draft form.
And they are usually for subscribers only, but I will release some of these publicly, and I think I'm going to do that with this one, in defense of Nick Fuentes, sort of.
It's a hot topic, and I hope it inspires some people to join in the club.
But we actually had a very good discussion about this issue last Sunday with my members call, which is, you know, a lot like a Twitter space.
I'll usually lead the conversation, but I get a lot of input from subscribers, and they are often very fruitful conversations.
All right, so as I mentioned, the title of this journal entry is a bit clickbaity.
Well known that I generally dislike Nick Fuentes.
But I don't really want to dwell on those things.
As I said, it's well known.
And I think sometimes it's fun to talk about gossip or drama, etc.
But we don't really learn anything by doing that.
And it's a kind of situation of, oh, well, this thing blew up, so let's move on to the next thing, and it will blow up in six months or three years or whenever.
And I think this is really endemic to the dissident right, the alt-right.
A lot of these problems were quite present at the alt-right and have led me to conclude that the alt-right is an unworkable thing.
As a kind of movement, as it existed in 2017.
But I think there's a very strong tendency for people to get excited about drama and either denounce someone or profess their undying loyalty to this person.
And it's all rather meaningless.
And it really does...
It's at the heart of a movement that really can't learn anything.
Denunciations, it's not really that fruitful.
It's not really, I don't know.
It doesn't really accomplish anything.
It's an emotional release.
And it is unserious.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about my thoughts on this whole saga.
So this blew up a little while ago.
And I talked about it briefly at some places.
I actually have not watched the entire Kino Casino episode, which I think is some three hours or so, but I've seen some clips, I've gotten the gist, seen some highlights or lowlights, and I've read a couple mainstream articles on it, so I pretty much know what's going on.
I have seen this before.
So, what we have at the heart of this episode is a broken friendship between Jaden and Nick Fuentes.
And I think that in itself is a big problem.
The fact that these movements really are based on...
Friendship and personal loyalty.
Not necessarily ideological loyalty, but personal loyalty.
And I saw a lot of this when I was involved with the alt-right many years ago, where people would tell me someone's name as if I knew about them or cared about them.
I mean, I'm just making up a name, but it's like...
Well, did you see what White Eagle said on Twitter?
You know, oh, we can't lose him.
It's this weird kind of thing of, who is this person?
Is this person the proverbial incel basement dweller?
Is this person insightful?
Or does he just tweet a lot?
Does he just lurk on your Discord server and has gained clout or credibility that way?
Why do we care about this person?
And I don't want this to sound too snobby or harsh, but, you know, I remember seeing a poster, a kind of digital poster for the AFPAC event, which gathered that entire movement.
And I'll talk about that movement a little bit.
And you had these figures on there.
So there was Nicholas Fontes, I of course recognize.
The Red Elephants guy, Michelle Malkin, and Cassandra Fairbanks, and, you know, a couple of the people I knew of as either conservatives or alt-white grifters or whatever.
And then you had these characters, Jared Taylor and Peter Primalow, who were at the bottom getting billed below, you know, like Jason Video, or, you know...
Mike Clips or some, you know, Gamer John or whatever.
It was just bizarre.
And just building a movement based on, you know, oh, this guy's so based and he does live streams.
That just is stupid.
I mean, it's stupid in general, but I don't think it can actually ever go anywhere.
There's no real reason for anyone to care about any of these people or respect them outside of they're based and they're in our clique.
And again, I think that was endemic to the alt-right.
I think it was super endemic to the AF movement, which did grow out of it.
It grew out of the alt-right, of course, but I think it probably could be more accurately described as post-alt-right in the sense that you can't underestimate how young some of these people are.
I think some of these people were 13 years old when Trump announced that he was running for president in 2015.
They barely remember...
Events like Charlottesville.
Maybe even some of them came in after January 6th or something like that.
I don't know.
But you have a lot of young people with very short memories.
So I think the fact that you have this friendship nationalism, this movement based on...
Clout within a click is a huge problem.
Now, yeah, sure, to a degree, all movements are like that.
But to embrace it to this extent is asking for trouble.
It's just not going to work.
It will end up almost invariably due to human nature and personal jealousy and so on, just like this.
Of people claiming, you know, oh, Nick fudges his numbers.
Again, Maybe true, maybe not.
I don't know.
Some horrible anecdote about looking for ejaculate on a couch with a blacklight.
I mean, it's so specific, it seems it probably is true, but I don't know, and I don't care.
It's silly gossip.
But it's just going to end in this kind of shabby, petty, rivalry, jealousy stuff.
What's interesting, and from what I've read, Nick has confirmed this, the source of the breakup was the fact that Jaden seems to not be an incel.
And he had a girlfriend and therefore wasn't dedicating his life solely to Nick.
I mean, I find that rather sad.
And I think someone...
You know, someone like Jaden should be applauded for having a GF and having a life.
And I get the impression that he probably does want to have a life and will probably leave this whole scene and be the better for it.
But that incel thing, I think that is getting at something very important.
I would just say this.
And I was joking with a friend of mine about this.
I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that Nick Fuentes is an actual incel in the sense that he's not having sex.
The reason why I believe that is that when you have any sort of celebrity, it is an absolute aphrodisiac.
Even if...
Maybe you could even say especially if, but even if that celebrity is a kind of negative celebrity of being the bad boy.
So I can speak to this from personal experience.
I won't go into details, but basically a bunch of girls are throwing themselves at you.
So the idea that...
And Nick...
I think Nick achieved less...
Like, mainstream media fame than I did.
Because I, you know, spoke to the media at every opportunity and was kind of played into their kind of, oh, this is Spencer, the well-dressed boogeyman kind of persona.
Nick had much more intense celebrity within the movement.
Much more than I did.
Much more intense loyalty.
I just, I can't believe that someone like that isn't getting laid.
Now, you know, there's always been questions about Nick's sexuality.
When he did this Catboy Cammy thing a few years ago, I forgot if it's 2018 or 2019.
Yeah, I mean, it raises some eyebrows.
And as I said at the time, I mean, look.
I don't care about that movement.
I'm not connected with it.
I look upon it objectively in the sense that I'm outside of it.
I don't have any dog in that race.
But yikes.
I mean, what could Nick have possibly tried to achieve?
So it's not just so much that it was a mistake or something like that, because everyone makes mistakes.
And, you know, Politicians flail around and then have miraculous comebacks.
Athletes have lows and then highs.
I don't care about mistakes or misjudgments.
The question is, can you learn from it and do you have the ability to kind of make a comeback?
Or is there something about you that's worthwhile?
But it's just the oddness of the mistake.
It's like, what are you possibly trying to achieve by that?
And it, yeah, it was creepy, to put it mildly.
I think maybe one of the funniest things about it I remember is it wasn't so much that the pair, Nick and Catboy Cammy, were looking at each other adoringly, but I think on that video, Nick denied the existence of dinosaurs or something like this, you know?
So...
The science types say that religious people are wacky, but then these crazy scientists claim that giant lizards walked the earth.
I mean, who's the religious fanatic now?
Yeah, that type of argument.
That's amusing.
But, yeah, I generally think that either Nick is gay or that...
He has a very screwed up sexuality that's actually understandable in terms of his age and the movement that he's in.
It's an isolation, alienation from women and all of the horrors of the internet.
These are very online people.
All of the horrors of the internet are at their fingertips.
It leads to a kind of screwed-up sexuality, and it leads to these weird statements like, it's gay to have sex with women, or inceldom is the ultimate form of manliness, and I would rather have sex with a tranny than a woman.
All this just weird nonsense that's extremely creepy, but I think speaks to...
The predicament of a lot of Zoomers, like Nick, maybe suspecting that they're gay is the wrong way to look at it.
Maybe the better way to look at it is they are just immensely sexually screwed up and frustrated.
That's probably what the case is.
The incel thing was very important to him.
I mean, the inceldom was the source of the friendship breakup.
And I think this gets to a larger issue, which is worth discussing.
And that is the playing to his fan base.
So, you know, someone like myself, I don't get accused.
Of being a grifter in the sense of, I just tell my audience what they want to hear.
So let's take a step back.
Let's define grifter.
Now, you could apply that label, grifter, to almost any political person, public intellectual, political entrepreneur, etc.
You could just say, oh, they're a grifter.
They're taking donations on Patreon.
They're on a sub stack.
Whatever.
And you can say, oh, they're just a grifter.
Well, I think that's an extremely unfair way of describing someone.
You know, I mean, where does the definition of grifter end?
Is a journalist for the New York Times or BuzzFeed, are they grifters exactly?
I mean, because they're getting a paycheck to write about politics and talk about politics?
I don't think so.
I would define grifter...
In the sense of someone who cultivates an audience and delivers them comfort food for money.
And these people can be intelligent.
They can be unintelligent.
Someone like Caitlin Bennett.
She does publicity stunts.
She tweets about Catholicism or family values or whatever.
Her main asset is the fact that she kind of looks like the daughter or housewife that you would want.
Maybe not my cup of tea, but she has an audience.
And so she'll tweet about her cooking.
Like, oh, look, I'm such a good housewife.
I just made this chicken dinner for my hubby.
It's a way of allowing...
Or I'm going to wear a bikini and carry a semi-automatic weapon around.
You know, a kind of new version of a chick with a dick, I guess.
She...
It's titillating.
It offers a kind of parasocial relationship with her audience, where her audience can, in a way, be married to her.
Or have Caitlin Bennett as the audience's collective daughter.
So it's very similar to OnlyFans.
OnlyFans is not really about porn.
Because porn, as we know, is ubiquitous on the internet.
And 99.9% of people don't pay for porn.
They get it for free.
And yeah, they're, you know...
There's some sites that have paywalls or something like that, but where you pay $9 a month or whatever to get, I don't know, high definition or whatever, but the vast, vast majority of people just get it everywhere.
It's ubiquitous.
It's ever being churned out, etc.
But what is it about OnlyFans?
That relationship that the mark can have with his OnlyFans Model is the feature, not the bug.
That's what it's about.
It's about that fantasy of being married to her.
And so we shouldn't really be surprised when a sizable proportion of OnlyFans, not only do they pay $9 a month, but they'll just send this girl $1,000 on PayPal.
And I'm sure there's some male models who have very similar parasocial relationships with their female fans or male fans.
So it's that simulation of an actual relationship, of a familial relationship or a love relationship.
That's the secret sauce.
That's what makes OnlyFans work.
And I think in that sense, the kind of grifter is very much like an OnlyFans model.
Although this grifter is not, you know, showing us his genitals, but is telling the audience what it wants to hear.
In offering that kind of parasocial relationship, comfort food.
A lot of grifters can be intelligent and can, you know, legitimately put forth discourse that's a contribution.
I'm thinking of Glenn Greenwald.
He is a journalist.
He is a good writer, highly prolific.
But let's be honest.
What is his secret sauce?
Who is his audience at this point?
His audience are conservatives who want to hear about how liberals suck so hard.
They're terrible.
The GOP is the true working man's anti-war party, anti-state party, whatever.
They want to hear that from this gay journalist who's been lionized and was involved in the Snowden leaks.
So he, although Glenn Greenwald is an intelligent guy, of course, the reason why he's lost a lot of respect is just that he doesn't, he's offering comfort food.
He's offering a narrative that makes his audience feel warm and fuzzy inside.
For profit.
And a lot of profit.
I wish I had his subscriber base, obviously.
So, Nick was like that in the sense that he recognized the youth inherent in the alt-right of 2017, certainly inherent in the AF or Groyper movement, and he played to them.
And so, even if Nick was just banging chicks left and right...
And, you know, the Swedish bikini team was visiting his house every weekend.
Even if that were the case, I think he would have desperately tried to hide that.
Because he had to present himself as an incel for his audience.
And his audience did not so much see him as a leader.
Because a leader is someone who's, by his nature, egotistical and is going to order people around and lead them.
They saw him as a kind of emblem of themselves, as their avatar, as the ultimate young incel Zoomer who is representing them.
And again, that was an absolutely successful model.
He understood his audience.
He catered to them.
He represented them.
And they were very loyal to him, at least for a time.
It lasted a lot longer than I thought it would last.
But I don't think Nick is going away, but I do think that any time there's a kind of, like, crack in the ice, it's almost a matter of time before it comes caving in.
now Now...
I first learned about Nick.
I can remember this.
Back in 2017.
And he was a young conservative.
He was in high school.
Not in high school.
I think he had just gone to university at the time.
He was a freshman.
In 2017.
And he was the kind of ultimate person that we were trying to reach.
And maybe that was, I look back at it now, I think it was mistaken to try to reach those people, but he was kind of the ultimate person that the alt-right was trying to reach.
Oh, here's the disaffected conservative normie who has rejected conservatism and is now on the Trump train and loves the alt-right and is edgy on social media and so on.
I remember seeing an interview with him.
On Stefan Molyneux's show and just hearing about him.
And he got connected with James Alsup.
And so Alsup was a very similar figure.
Someone who didn't really present himself as an ideologue, but as a kind of conservative normie who now is a nationalist and all that kind of stuff.
And I...
I did know that he went to Charlottesville.
I never saw him at Charlottesville.
I mean, I was only with a very small amount of people in Charlottesville.
But he went there.
And I can remember the fall and winter of 2017 post-Charlottesville.
And, you know, immediately after that event, there was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm.
Related to the fact that we felt like victims at that event.
So it was, we were mistreated by the police, we weren't allowed to speak, we had a permitted rally, blah, blah, blah.
And there was a lot of enthusiasm and kind of team building, you could say.
But very, very quickly, all of that started to fall apart.
And the...
Alt-Right went into these series of spasms, mostly led by people like Nick or Andrew Anglin or Weave, that were basically trying to find a scapegoat or trying to attack some part of this very broad movement and attack it and kill it.
And I think kill it like a scapegoat.
It is putting the Sens...
Of the community or whatever onto something and pushing the scapegoat out into the desert to die.
First, there was the anti-e-girl war that was this massive attack on any female in the movement that was, you know, led by Anglin and company, also led by people like Roosh.
You know, I'm sure Nick took part in that.
I mean, Nick has famously talked about, you know, no e-girls ever kind of thing.
And they did that for a little while.
And then that seemed to bizarrely morph into an optics campaign.
So it went from being wildly misogynistic to we're the best, we have the best optics.
And what did the optics mean?
Like all kind of scams or lines of attack, it was based on truth.
It was based on a truth of, you know, there are these low-IQ Wignats out there.
So Wignat is Wigur nationalist.
You know, and I think they kind of pinpointed Matthew Heimbach or something, Matt Parrott or something.
Object of ridicule.
Although I was considered a Wignat.
Certainly.
I think for my views.
I don't know.
Sometimes I'm a Wignat.
Sometimes I'm a liberal.
Sometimes I'm a federal agent.
They do all sorts of contradictory attacks on me.
But anyway.
So it was...
We need to...
Those Wignats are the ones ruining the movement.
So we can't have these helmeted rallies in public.
We need to be conservatives because the conservatives are moving towards us and we need to kind I think there's actually a lot of truth to that claim.
Obviously, I think you should look good and look presentable and so on.
I also totally agree that the conservatives are moving towards the alt-right or the dissonant right, although that Kind of twisted in an interesting way, which I think I'll talk about in just a little bit.
So the notion was we will blend into the wallpaper of the Republican Party as optics amnats.
So we'll wave flags and dress in khakis and polos and talk about how much we love America and so on.
We can't have that.
We can't have, on the one hand, the wignat, the guy with tattoos who's screaming and attacking people.
We can't have that.
We also can't have Spencer.
Now, Spencer, granted, dresses well, but he's, you know, an atheist and he hates conservatives and he's into Nietzsche and he says...
You know, all sorts of outlandish things.
And, you know, we can't have that either.
We need to kind of blend in and kind of, you know, work our way up the conservative movement ladder.
Soon, you know, the conservatives will be us.
This was the idea.
I think there was kind of inherent contradictions to Wig-Natism, or Am-Natism, or Optics-ism, And these are the contradictions.
Some of these people who are professed amnats have the worst optics.
Not all of them, but most of them.
There's another contradiction, which is that, and I don't think this contradiction was quite foreseeable, but the conservative movement went...
Towards Trumpism and then towards QAnon and all sorts of things.
The conservatives became more radical than the alt-right.
And I didn't foresee that, and I don't think many other people did.
It's a wild thing where if you look at these two rallies, like look at Charlottesville in mid to late 2017 and then January 6th.
Very similar.
You can make a lot of comparisons with them.
They are Trump-based rallies that went out of control for various reasons and became albatrosses hanging around everyone's neck.
That's a fair description.
There wasn't a lot of crossover between the two.
Now, there's some notable crossover, Nick Fuentes being one person, Baked Alaska, famously went into Nancy Pelosi's office.
Some appliance is beeping.
I'll just let it go.
But there wasn't a lot of crossover.
The people who went to Charlottesville were, I would say, mostly alt-right people.
There were many white nationalists.
There were some people invited, as I learned later by Jason Gessler, actual neo-Nazis and so on.
There was a whole host of people.
But you could say that they were kind of the non-conformist types.
January 6th was very different.
January 6th was Normies.
Now, the Groypers were there, and the Groypers were derived from the alt-right, no question.
But it was a Normie rally, and the Normies had become more radicalized than the alt-right of old was.
I mean, the normies were invading the Capitol.
The normies were talking about hanging Mike Pence.
The normies were talking about keeping Trump in office for four years, I guess, maybe forever.
No one made any of those types of claims in Charlottesville.
I mean, I can remember when the Charlottesville rally was scuttled, when a state of emergency was called before the rally even began, and 99 out of 100 people left.
and went home and then chaos ensued in downtown.
I don't need to revisit this.
Maybe I'll revisit it in another broadcast.
I'm going to go to the next.
January 6th was far more intense and has obviously eclipsed Charlottesville by a factor of a hundred or a thousand in terms of discussion about it and its impact and its legacy.
So I don't think AF fully recognized that idea.
It was a weird thing.
I think mainstream conservatives molded into the alt-right just as much as the alt-right kind of molded into conservatives.
Interesting.
Worth talking more about that.
But the other contradiction at And Nick absolutely had an organic following.
There are many people, grifter types, who I find to be just totally synthetic.
I'm thinking of someone like Jack Murphy or something like that.
I don't think he had any sort of audience.
I think he was propped up by multiple people.
He had an audience because Tim Pool gave him an audience.
He had an audience because the Claremont Review of Books or whatever it is decided to give him grants.
I think he was entirely synthetic.
Not entirely, but mostly synthetic.
Nick had a genuine audience that he created and cultivated in the ways that I described earlier.
And that was the reason that he got in bed with longtime conservative activists.
Women for Trump, Women for America First, Alex Jones, Ali Akbar.
All these people have long legacies of dirty tricks, of conservative political engineering, etc.
And they saw Nick.
He has a real audience.
He has 10,000 Zoomers watching his stream in 2020.
We need to tap into that.
And they are hardcore, least rhetorically.
So Nick ultimately got involved in this structure that...
I have identified as multi-level marketing.
And so, what do I mean by that?
So, imagine a typical multi-level marketing scheme like Mary Kay or doTERRA or something like that.
Now, there's the product, right?
Makeup or essential oils or whatever.
And you have the producer who...
Gets it out there.
And then you have a series of channels.
So it's kind of like a wheel with multiple spokes coming out of it.
And if you create a channel, you're going to create an additional down channel or downstream.
So let's say I have been in doTERRA for a long time.
I'm good at selling this product.
I have like a hundred good customers.
20% of those customers are going to start selling it themselves, and I'm going to get a kickback from that.
It is a pyramid scheme, you could say.
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.
Those are illegal, obviously, but they're also just inherently...
It was not a pyramid scheme in that sense, but it is a pyramid scheme in a different sense.
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.
If you're in second, you might profit.
And if you're in third, you're going to lose your shirt.
This is how it operates.
And so you have all of these channels.
So Nick was, and this is part of optics, I think it's part of Nick's background in conservatism.
It's part of Nick's just personality.
He was a channel manager for the alt-right.
But the key is, is that all of those sales, those super chats that he was getting, or Bitcoin donations or whatever, They were kind of ultimately going upstream.
So when the alt-right first emerged in 2015 and 2016, there was shock and confusion and hatred on the part of mainstream conservatives.
They were like, who are these alt-conservatives?
We don't like them.
They're evil.
They hate us.
They're like Trump.
They're socialists.
They're from the left.
Blah, blah, blah.
You hear all that.
No one said that about Nick.
People would run cover for Nick by saying, oh, he's just a concerned young conservative.
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.
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.
Well, the latter is a bit unbelievable, but the former is absolutely true.
She wanted to go get his audience.
Those people, Alex Jones, wanted to get his audience.
Those people who were organizing January 6th wanted Nick involved to get his audience.
He has an organic audience that they do not have.
They are simply...
He is a personality with a cultivated audience in the way that I described.
But it wasn't the alt-right in the sense that the alt-right was antagonistic towards conservatism.
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.
So to take this analogy of multi-level marketing, there's the product, you know, Mary Kay, doTERRA, whatever.
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.
But he was a particular down channel of that whole system.
And that, too, was a secret of his success.
And he played that role, and he followed it all the way to the end, which led to January 6th.
But optics was part of that...
It wasn't opposed to it.
So the optics game led to the greatest optics catastrophe in conservative movement history.
Remarkable stuff.
Now, I would just say a couple of things in closing here.
One thing we learned...
About Nick from this Jaden, you know, expose was that, you know, everything's kept...
He doesn't involve people.
He just kind of gets people on his board, but he does everything secretly.
Okay, whatever.
That's not terribly surprising.
Might be more efficient that way.
But I would say this.
There...
The fact that you had this friendship nationalism group of people in their 20s operating like this really is an indictment of the boomers who love all this America First stuff.
We just need to talk about immigration and birth rates and Christianity, CRT.
Where were the older people?
Why are they so...
Incapable of taking charge of anything.
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.
Why did they just allow this thing to go off the rails?
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, they're too conservative.
They're too penny-pinching and visionless to actually fund something.
I mean, I have experienced this myself over and over again.
Nick experienced this.
He was making all of his money from Zoomers, from people sending in Super Chats or anonymous Bitcoin donations.
Where are the adults in the room?
Why are these boomers this useless?
And again, I don't even agree with them.
I don't agree with any form of America First movement or American nationalism.
I am past that.
I don't even want it to succeed on some level.
But I do have to ask, where were the adults?
Why didn't they control the corporation and the infrastructure?
And why didn't they fund it?
These are good questions to ask.
And I think in this sense, Nick's antagonism to Boomers was pretty right on.
On some level, when you don't take responsibility, you can't complain when something goes up in flames.
All right, that's all for now.
I'll talk to you soon.
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