Nick Fuentes hates America.
This should not come as a surprise. The Nazi influencer, despite his ridiculous stature and his very un-Aryan skull, sees himself destined to ignite fantasies of Third Reich trains, torchlight processions, and the totally justified eradication of World Jewry, instead of advocating for the ideas of the founding fathers, Coca Cola, Hollywood, Thomas Edison, or Sonic Youth.
Hardly anything could be as ill-chosen as Fuentes’s “America First” moniker. In fact, the movement’s house elf and Hitler fan is a walking contradiction—not least because he doesn’t seem to understand the brand he sets himself up as a flagship for. And yet, he is not just an “influencer”, but America’s first real Nazi celebrity.
This is a constellation that deserves scrutiny within the post-war history of the Nazi celebrity phenomenon. Especially in the context of Germany, where Fuentes’s real inspiration lies, and where many of his household characteristics—the show of victimhood, the Jew hatred, the anti-intellectualism, and the (national) socialism—first developed something of a profile.
Many of Fuentes’s household characteristics—the show of victimhood, the Jew hatred, the anti-intellectualism, and the (national) socialism—first developed something of a profile among post-War German neo-Nazis.
In Germany, Nazi celebrities always had a weird smell to them: disgusting at first, but on getting closer, you noticed interesting, popularity-enhancing aromas. They were in the news because they said outrageous things, but people wanted to “meet” with them, have a beer with them, talk to them directly. As I was told at a free speech event not long ago: “Just put a Holocaust denier in front of me, and I will destroy him with my argument in 3 minutes”. There is nothing you cannot sort out over a nice Mass of Weizen! Jovial, and yet, you know, critical.
A particular corner of German post-War Nazi culture was less about denying the Holocaust outright than spouting the idea that the Germans were its real victims. A bit like the type of Palestinian victimhood narrative today in which the rape of women and mutilation of their bodies on October 7 really was just a cry for help, and strangling toddlers to death an act of resistance. Germans definitely had it bad, man. That lunatic leading them on! That crazy time, and then the economic crisis. Unemployment. Poverty. What else were they supposed to do but erect a gigantic industrial infrastructure solely aimed at the annihilation of the “anti-race” (Gegenrasse)?
For instance, Erika Steinbach, long-time president of the “Federation of Expellees” (“Bund der Vertriebenen”), made it her cause to point to the harsh fate of Germans in the Eastern European nations the Nazis had occupied. The Beneš Decrees of 1945, which restored the Czechoslovak Republic, foresaw the expropriation and revocation of citizenship for ethnic Germans in that territory, many of whom had shown allegiance to the NSDAP during the war of destruction (Vernichtungskrieg) and had played a significant role in the deportation of Jews from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and other Eastern European states. Erika, who comes across as some-person-you-dislike’s aunt, with her discretely glistening pearls, and her blonde blow-dry wave, always simpered at us on talk shows and in official processions of the German expellees, who sported SS runes and other Nazi symbols in their otherwise very festive displays, complete with decorated cows and crucifix kitsch.
The point of these shows was hard to understand, but it certainly contributed to their popularity in the 1980s and 1990s that they coincided with the “Historians’ Dispute” of 1985 and a general wave of historical revisionism during that time. In the now-infamous dispute between Jürgen Habermas and historian Ernst Nolte, the latter claimed that the Gulag Archipelago was the blueprint for the Nazi concentration camps. The “racial murder” of the National Socialists arose only out of fear of the earlier “class murder” of the Bolsheviks, so that the Bolsheviks—many of them Jews—were in fact the direct role models for Holocaust-style mass murder. Though Nolte later withdrew some of his claims—his revival of the totalitarianism thesis, the political equivalent for the idiomatic “night in which all cats are black”—he was immediately celebrated as a hero by the German far-right, as he was seen as boosting the idea of “unfair” treatment of Germans after the Third Reich.
According to Ernst Nolte, the “racial murder” of the National Socialists arose only out of fear of the earlier “class murder” of the Bolsheviks.
Besides Erika who is still with us, and the late author of The Three Faces of Fascism, other intriguing Nazi celebrities inhabited the 1980s and 1990s. There was Michael Kühnen, known as the “gay neo-Nazi”, who in fact inspired not a few German underground music bands, perhaps through his flamboyantly existentialist fashion-sense and pronounced cheekbones. He, predictably, died of the celebrity disease AIDS.
There was Franz Schönhuber and his “Republikaner” Party (not to be confused with the GOP). Schönhuber was a former Waffen-SS member, who got 14 per cent of the votes in the 1988 state parliamentary elections in Bavaria by inciting hatred against minorities. He was a proper enfant terrible who came with the exact right amount of charisma and fanaticism to fill the gap left by of another former member of the NSDAP, the more prominent Franz-Josef Strauss (1915-1988), chairman of the Christian-Social Union, the Christian-Democratic Union’s dark-conservative and secessionist “sister party” that only exists in Bavaria—a man like a force of nature.
And let’s not forget Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), who was clearly an empowered female before it was cool (the takeover by the Nazis in 1933 is known as the Ermächtigung—literally “empowerment”), when she shot those artsy films for Hitler. In the later years of her long life, wheelchair-ridden Riefenstahl—is there a more Nazi-emblematic name? —of course denied having anything to do with Nazism. To anyone who held a microphone in front of her, she bellowed: “Ich bin kein Nazi!” She also told the Daily Express that, after reading the first page of Mein Kampf, she became a “committed National Socialist”—but that was in 1934, and who doesn’t forget one or two things after such an exciting life. Hardly anyone had a career like her in the NSDAP’s entertainment industry. After the Third Reich, she continued to make “great art”, as some critics said, and, as the young Federal Republic needed a little glamour to prop up its somewhat drab war-and-genocide-image, she was rebranded as “de-nazified”, and went on to work with Mick and Bianca Jagger, Helmut Newton, and Siegfried and Roy, among others.
Leni Riefenstahl clearly was the first “empowered” Nazi female.
There was then a relative silence from Nazi celebrities for a long time. The early 2010s saw a brief renaissance of far-right beliefs among the so-called “alt-Right” in the US, but outside 4chan, nobody paid attention to their blogs, forums, podcasts (Alternative Right, Radix, The Right Stuff, Counter-Currents, American Renaissance, etc.) for more than five minutes. Who even cares about Richard Spencer or Milo Yiannopoulos today?
Enter Nick Fuentes ca. 2024, a lower middle-class boy from a Chicago suburb. By the time he dropped out of college, he had over 500K followers on Twitter, who call themselves the “Groyper Army” (sigh). Today, at 27, he has 1.2 million followers and a show on Rumble which he calls “America First”. He has compared Holocaust victims to “cookies in an oven”, and said that the extermination camps’ “math doesn’t add up”, which he seems to confuse with how far he can count. He goes on constantly about the Israel Lobby. He says black people “need to be imprisoned for the most part”. As a gay groyper Nazi, he of course also hates women, and says so. Most importantly, Fuentes is a victim: of that girl who worked at Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, MAGA Conservatives, some podcasters, and, again, Ben Shapiro.
Fuentes said that the extermination camps’ “math doesn’t add up”, which he seems to confuse with how far he can count.
Oh, and he is “Team Hitler”. Hitler, you know, the Austrian who got naturalized as a German citizen in 1932. For some reason, being a fan of Hitler—who hated America—is constitutive of America First. I will return to this.
But first, I have a few questions.
How is it “America First” to make Israel, and not America, your top political focus? Should you not obsess more about America’s own problems instead? Perhaps it is true that the sole focus on foreign policy, as German political commentator Georg Fülberth said, is for those who “lack in spirit”?
And how can you be an American Patriot, when the US is the country with the world’s biggest Jewish diaspora, if you hate Jews? How is it beneficial to America to think that Israel is behind all the world’s problems?
You can talk about AIPAC all you want, but if you don’t say a word about Qatari influence on the US, how can say you’re all about America First? Would you not be equally interested in making transparent the influence of, say, the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab influence groups on US politics? For what it’s worth, I have no problem with lobbying per se. People lobby their interests—this is Realpolitik. But the sole focus on Israeli lobbying directly contradicts the claim of wanting there to be no foreign influence on US politics whatsoever.
And that only goes for the money coming in. Why not mention that “nearly all military aid to Israel—other than loan guarantees, which cost Washington nothing, the U.S. gives Israel no other kind of aid—consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers”? Why not consider whether Israel itself has more disadvantages than benefits from US aid, as argued by many? And how does the client state thesis fare in the face of the Democrats’ years-long secret support for Iran?
Speaking of The Muslim Brotherhood: in a research paper published last week, Egyptian activist Dalia Ziada and others show just how deeply the Muslim Brotherhood has dug its claws into the US’s political infrastructure.
In short, would you, an America Firster, not be interested in having the complete sphere of influence on US politics out in the open?
No, you wouldn’t. Because the real rage is directed at the Jews. Fuentes imagines himself as their victim in a double sense: a victim not just of Ben Shapiro and American conservatives who refuse to share his obsession with the only Jewish state in the world, but also a victim of “organized Jewry”, who, after all, made him antisemitic in the first place.
As a two-for-the-price-of-one victim, Fuentes has now earned himself millions of views on the Tucker Carlson show. For 2 hours 15 minutes straight, Fuentes aired his grievances to the world. And Tucker emulated a very understanding, equally Jew-hating father. Admittedly, most viewers never had such an empathetic, soft-spoken father as Tucker Carlson. The emotional manipulation was through the roof.
Admittedly, most viewers never had such an empathetic, soft-spoken father as Tucker Carlson.
There is something crucial to know about the “politics” of the Nazi celebrity: it doesn’t exist. Nazi celebrities never want to convince the political adversary of their views. In the strict sense, they have no political adversary, because their operational space is not politics, but moral pornography. This is also why they share so much of their apparatus of resentment (in which their worldview is exhausted), with the current Left.
This not only concerns the hate and the nihilism. On the emotional side, the nihilist left, like the nihilistic right—and Tucker is clearly the one carrying the elder’s wand for the latter—work on the same suppositions, none of which offer any escape from the “eternal return of the same” (Nietzsche) and more of the same. “The same”—the obsession with the “eternal Jew”. It is the big historical unifier, the one psychological pathology that everyone not only endorses, but endorses whole-heartedly, proudly, even sentimentally. It is the true bipartisan ideology.
And because Fuentes has no real politics behind his America First branding, just a truckload of nihilist resentment, his foremost sentiment, antisemitism, aligns neatly with that of the socialist left: anti-Americanism.
Nick Fuentes, like Tucker Carlson, does not support, never mind embody, American values or the American Dream. Both hate what America stands for and what once made it great: consumer culture, the heroism of Superman, the promises of the streets of New York City, and—immigration. Of course, America and its leading founding principle, the “pursuit of happiness”, means immigration. There is simply no capitalism without a certain level of immigration (whether mass immigration hurts the economy is a question for another day). However one wants to look at it, immigration is the American idea. America is the world encountered by Eddie Murphy in Coming to America (1988)—the paradigmatic American Dream movie. A film Fuentes probably hates, because Eddie Murphy, being black, should have been in jail instead of making movies.
Fuentes’s worldview, in a word, is that of the Steinbachs, Kühnens, and Schönhubers of this world, German Nazis who hate America’s “decadent-Jewy-mixed race” culture. This is as unsurprising as it is irreconcilable with anything associated with being pro-American.
Because Fuentes’s fame really took off with the Tucker interview, a word on Tucker Carlson, in a way Fuentes’s ideological foster father, and an equal in the realm of anti-Americanism. Tucker hates the laissez-faire multiculturalism associated with the American dream, as does Fuentes. He openly endorses Russia and its leadership, which itself is anti-American at its core. Russia is an autocratic state with practically zero immigration, a highly influential clerical class, and a zero-tolerance policy towards gays and minorities, features it shares with Iran, a country Tucker also praises. By no stretch of the imagination is partisanship for such illiberal governments “American”, unless you twist the idea of Americanness to mean theocratic rule. It is hilarious that Tucker would accuse Jewish Americans of “double loyalty”, when he flirts with pledging allegiance to Russia and Iran whenever given the chance. Fuentes is less decided on Russia. Perhaps he senses that you should not throw stones while sitting in a glass house.
I have no idea whether this brand of Germanic/pro-Russian/pro-Islamic theocracy “American Patriotism” has a future. But I doubt it. Fuentes may strive to be a Riefenstahl, but he is after all just a descendant of Mexican immigrants. And unless alignment with American Mamdanis and other Islamist socialists leads to a full-circle enactment of the horseshoe theory, Nick Fuentes will probably go the way of the Spencers of the American Right.
