Men must be allowed to be men.
Nick Fuentes is a problem. His influence is growing, fueled by his deft channeling of valid grievances. He has been further buoyed by neoconservatives and the progressive Left, both of which are desperate for “Nazi” bogeymen to validate their anti-MAGA hysterics. However, their ritual denunciations of Fuentes and his groyper legions are worse than useless. They merely encourage groyperism by providing a bigger kick of frisson due to breaking social taboos.
Chris Rufo argues that Fuentes’s critics misapprehend the groyper phenomenon by taking it in earnest instead of recognizing the “hyperreal” run amok. The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard used the term to denote the condition of postmodernity wherein our representations of reality become more phenomenologically real to us than reality itself, until they detach from reality entirely. “Emptied out, [signs] then circulate through digital media,” writes Rufo, “where they drive the discourse and, while purely derivative, still spark real emotional involvement.”
Immersion in the hyperreal explains why Fuentes’s worldview is so liquid and incoherent. He was able to transition smoothly from being an early MAGA adopter in 2015 to going to war against Trump in 2024. He operates with a double script, inhabiting a version of himself on his livestream that is antithetical to the one he presents to mainstream podcasters. It’s why he can diagnose the deformities of the sexual revolution in a manner consonant with Catholic teaching one day, and the next celebrate the arrival of sex robots as “the best thing man has ever created,” because “women are going to be f***ed!”
There’s no meaningful distinction between sincerity and flippancy when the exigencies of the digital market have detached both from reality. In hyperreality, one can be a white nationalist without being white, and with little cognitive dissonance.
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