Nick Fuentes and the Lost Boys
Plus: The tragic case of a transgender Nazi, and war drums are beating against Iran.
This week, I published a piece about the online provocateur Nick Fuentes. The basic premise was simple: my co-author, Ryan Thorpe, and I argued that when one looks beneath the spectacle and digs into some of the stories that have accumulated around him, they invariably lead toward disaster, destruction, and human wreckage.
As we discovered in our reporting, Fuentes has led many of his followers to blow up their lives and their relationships, lose their jobs, and become “unemployable” after their descent into his universe and their mimicry of his behavior. Fuentes’s largest known funder transferred him $250,000 in Bitcoin just before killing himself. At least half a dozen of his followers were convicted in federal court after storming the Capitol on January 6. At least two mass shooters have been fans of Fuentes. These are the kinds of psychologies that are attracted to the “Groyper” digital subculture.
Fuentes is a skillful demagogue who’s mobilizing his followers to assume all of the downside risk and blow up their own lives to advance his self-interest. Fuentes will drop the N-word, rail against the Jews, and joke about raping women. All these views are noxious, but they should be understood not as statements of principle, but as part of a rhetorical spectacle put on by Fuentes—one that is cynically designed to gather as much attention as possible. In an update to the antics of a Jerry Springer or Howard Stern, Fuentes creates a digital spectacle through intensely negative and shocking rhetoric, then harvests clicks.
Fuentes is a nihilistic Peter Pan figure, leading the lost boys to ruin and, by channeling resentment, telling them that they do not have to grow up. Fuentes knows that the young men he is galvanizing in the digital space are not really engaging in politics, because winning in politics comes with authority and responsibility—something that they are not capable of assuming. And so, by letting them stew in digital nihilism, he is saying to his followers, ‘You can remain in a perpetual angry adolescence. You can be angry teenagers at age 35 because the system is stacked against you, which allows you to complain but doesn’t require you to grow up.’
