Trump seems to be losing control over the MAGA movement he created. His surrogates remain confused, comparing Zoran Mamdani’s success mobilizing young New Yorkers to the rise of the Hitler Youth. Meanwhile Zoomers on the right are openly embracing white supremacism.
Last night, I finally watched Tucker Carlson’s long interview with Nick Fuentes. I hesitate to even mention the guy, but the frog is clearly already out of the bag.
Carlson began by inviting Fuentes to recount his political coming of age story, which I heard with a mix of recognition and revulsion. Recognition, because some of the experiences he describes are not foreign to my own. Revulsion, because Fuentes decided to build and worship an idol out of his woundedness. He calls it “America First.”
Fuentes story starts in 2016. He came from a mostly white Chicago suburb, was raised on talk radio, and was initially drawn to libertarianism and Ron Paul. He then got swept up in the Trump wave and began wearing the MAGA hat on his liberal college campus. For his generation of young conservatives, he says, Trump looked like “the savior of Western civilization.” 😳
Fuentes also recounts the moment when, as an unknown college freshman, he criticized Israeli’s influence on US politics and was publicly denounced by Ben Shapiro as an antisemite. He claims he was then quietly frozen out by conservative institutions that had been grooming him. That betrayal left a mark. It was the moment he realized the grip that Israel has over US politics, that conservatives were as cowardly as Democrats when it came to confronting that power, and that he would have to go his own way.
I recognize some of the contours of his disillusionment. I, too, was once drawn to Ron Paul because I was disenchanted with the permanent war machine and the bipartisan obedience to finance capital. Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich were the only real anti-war Democrats running in the 2008 primaries, but I was voting in Florida and the Democratic party canceled their primary in the state that year; so I registered Republican to vote for Paul after seeing him trash his own party’s foreign policy at the GOP debate.
As I wrote in a 2018 political autobiography, it was the Iraq War, the 2008 crash, #Occupy, and the Bernie Sanders campaigns that convinced me that neoliberal capitalism is a political theology that sacralizes market competition and military supremacy while hollowing out any deeper sense of common civic life.
Fuentes followed his disillusionment into white nationalism and misogyny, I followed mine past adolescent libertarianism into Christian anarchism and Rudolf Steiner’s vision of a threefold social order: a suspicion of all sovereign idols—nation-states, corrupt political parties, for-profit corporations—combined with the active hope that cultural, political, and economic life might be consciously differentiated rather than fused into one monstrous monopoly.
Fuentes and I are a generation apart. He’s a Zoomer; I’m a Millennial. He is half-Mexican; I am half-Jewish. But what struck me watching the interview is that we are both symptomatic, in very different ways, of the same hollowed-out American culture he claims to despise. I fear that he and his groyper fan boys are not an anomaly but the new normal poised to inherit a MAGA movement Trump can no longer contain.
Let me begin with Israel, because that’s where Fuentes himself locates much of his radicalization. In the interview, he describes realizing that Republicans would denounce Barack Obama as an antisemite simply for abstaining on a U.N. resolution about West Bank settlements, essentially upholding long-standing U.S. policy. He saw how any dissent on Israel was treated as radioactive. You could criticize anything in American life except the special relationship with Israel. That, he decided, revealed who really ran the two party duopoly.
The way he processes this is familiar and deeply dangerous: “neocon Jewish types” behind the Iraq War, AIPAC as puppet-master, Christian Zionists as dupes. There are real problems here: the lobby system, the settlements, the brutalization of Palestinians… But he metabolizes them into a civilizational conspiracy.
I understand the frustration from another angle. As I wrote in my political autobiography, my own coming-of-age involved a subsidized “Birthright” trip to Israel in 2005. I was 19, and with dozens of other young American Jews was flown across the ocean, bused from site to site, shown the miracle of Israeli agriculture and security, told that this was “my land,” that we were a chosen people, that intermarriage was a threat, that the IDF and the high-tech sector were the cutting edge of our destiny. It was intoxicating, in a way. The group organizers did everything to make me feel like I’d finally found my tribe.
Then I started talking to Palestinians and reading about the daily humiliations and dispossessions that underwrite the Zionist project, and something in my meaning-seeking teenage brain broke. The “chosenness” rhetoric began to look less like a sacred covenant and more like a justification for genocide. I saw Jewish supremacism up close and was disgusted by it.
That disgust led me away from tribal exceptionalism into a more cosmopolitically pluralist but also decidedly Christian worldview. See my recent articulation of this approach to pluralism here:
Between Earth and Empire: Cosmopolitical Democracy Beyond the Liberal Horizon
I refuse to allow what is most essential in the Jewish prophetic tradition—the uncompromising call for fidelity to the divine through justice, compassion, and the defense of the vulnerable against the abuses of power—to be reduced to the violent maintenance of a particular ethno-state. For me, Christian faith radicalizes Jewish monotheism: God becomes flesh not to secure any nation’s dominance but to shatter the idol of domination altogether.
Fuentes, by contrast, took his justified anger at Zionist exceptionalism and inverted it into a new exceptionalism: a chosen nation of white Christo-fascists. He rightly perceives the problem of Israel’s ethno-religious nationalism masquerading as universal democracy, but he answers it with yet another ethno-religious nationalism. He trades one tribalism for another. That is not resistance to supremacist idiocy, it is just an intensification of rivalry within the same idolatrous logic.
…
The interview is not primarily about sex and gender, but Fuentes’ record on these topics is well-known and partially recapitulated in his discussion with Carlson. He has suggested that “a lot of women want to be raped,” for example. Carlson, representing an older conservative sensibility, tried to defend a patriarchal conception of marriage in which women are at least afforded a kind of dignity in their “traditional roles” as mothers and tenders of the hearth. Such a fixed concept of gender roles is hardly my ideal. But Carlson’s is at least recognizable as a worldview with its own internal coherence. Fuentes cannot even grant that. Women, for him, are essentially liberal, decadent, and duplicitous. They must be subordinated or silenced.
This is not simply bad politics (unless the Thiel-wing of the Republican party somehow manages to repeal the 19th amendment, Fuentes’ misogynous “America First” movement will never win an election). It feels like a war on eros itself.
Eros is not reducible to genital desire or gender roles. It is, from my process philosophical point of view, a cosmic principle: the lure toward richer intensity of experience, the creative yearning for complex wholeness that permeates atoms and galaxies as much as sexually reproducing organisms. In their human form, masculinity and femininity are not static, sealed-off essences but polar qualities inflecting every person differently. Our sexual and gender identities are improvisations within a deeper, dynamically evolving erotic field.
To hate women—or queer and gender nonconforming people—is finally to hate the risk of becoming, to say no to evolution and thus to the relational essence of cosmogenesis. It is to demand that the world stop moving so that one’s fragile sense of self need not be disturbed.
But is this Fuentes’ fault? Or is he simply a symptom of what our thoroughly commodified culture has done to eros? America has industrialized sex into an always-on porn economy. We have yoked the erotic to advertising and brand identity. We have stripped young men of any credible rites of passage into adulthood while flooding them with simulacra of conquest. We have left them alone with their desire and their shame behind screens promising instant gratification and delivering only the numbness of nihilism.
Neoliberal capitalism is the default religion of American civilization. Its sacrament is consumption; its gods are personal pleasure, corporate profit, and national security. It has very little to say about love. It has nothing to say about initiation. It tells young men that they are units of human capital, competing in a gamified marketplace, and that if they fail—economically, socially, romantically—it is their fault.
Figures like Fuentes are filling this void. He tells humiliated boys that their suffering is not meaningless but proof they are under attack. He inspires them to play their heroic part in a civil war to save Western patriarchy. These Zoomer teens are not simply lonely and underemployed, they are the dispossessed heirs of a decaying civilization. Fuentes has already convinced thousands of young men that women are not worth the effort, that nothing can be learned from the effort to love; that they are just treacherous beneficiaries of feminist conspiracies. He has convinced them that Jews are not complex individual human beings but by nature a shadowy collective of conniving puppet-masters.
He is offering young men what our hollow culture cannot. But groyperization is not initiation into adulthood. It is recruitment into a cult of permanent adolescence.
In my recent post “Beyond MAGA and Wokeshevik Ressentiment: Or how to avoid a civil war,” I argued that contemporary American politics is increasingly organized around a taste for sacrificial catharsis. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a national tragedy that many experienced with a kind of grim satisfaction.
Kirk’s murder deserves clear condemnation, I wrote there. But condemnation need not include canonization. His shock-jock rhetoric was poisonous before he was killed; his martyrdom does not retroactively purify his project. Likewise, the widespread left-wing celebration of his death says more about the rapidity of our civic decay than it does about social justice.
Fuentes is far further right than Kirk, and he has rushed to fill the void left by Kirk’s absence. He is a pure distillation of this new phase of sacrificial politics. He thinks in enemies and purges: Jews, women, Blacks, queers, globalists are all enemies of state, akin to terrorists. His fantasy of paradise is explicitly built on their subjugation or elimination. It is no wonder that actual Nazis are rallying behind him.
But if we are honest, there is a mirror image of the same politics of sacrifice on the wokeshevik left: fantasies of guillotines, gleeful mobs celebrating the assassination of hated pundits and CEOs, an inability to distinguish between accountability and annihilation. The enemies are different. The mockery of justice and worship of revenge is the same.
From a process-relational perspective, this is a fundamental category mistake. It treats peoples and nations as if they were static objects that can be purified once and for all, instead of nodes in an evolving network of relationships that must be collectively tended and continually renegotiated. It treats persons—concrete centers of moral concern—as expendable pawns in a winner-take-all game of chess. It confuses the brief catharsis that comes from punishing an enemy with the slow, difficult work of reconciliation.
Fuentes is not an alien infection in an otherwise healthy body politic. Shutting him up will not help heal this wound. He is what you get when a spectacle republic, run as a neoliberal temple, stops offering real meaning and settles for bloodsport.
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I marched with democratic socialists and canvased for Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. I remain convinced that Democrats torpedoed the left-populist alternative to Trumpism because they were more afraid of losing their corporate donors than they were of “losing our democracy.” Our economic order is quite obviously unjust and neither party has shown any interest in doing what needs to be done to redistribute wealth and power in a way that would actually restore some semblance of democratic rule. But I do not believe any party or government, no matter who is in charge, can be safely identified with our salvation.
My own Christian anarchism entails a refusal to sacralize any state, combined with a devotion to the figure of Christ as the revelation of divine power in the form of non-coercive love. The Kingdom of God will not arrive on Air Force One. I have a hard time imagining anything more heretical and counter to Christ than “Christian nationalism.”
Rudolf Steiner’s picture of a threefold social organism gave me a way to translate my admittedly esoteric Christian spirituality into what I believe is a coherent political program. In “The Urgency of Social Threefolding in a World Still at War with Itself,” I argued that modern societies conflate three distinct spheres—cultural-spiritual life, political-legal life, and economic life—into one centralized machine. A failure to properly differentiate the spheres encourages the dominance of one sphere over the others. The 20th century showed us the consequences: under communist one-party rule, a centralized command and control economy leads to starvation of undesirables while culture is reduced to propaganda. Under neoliberal capitalism, commercials replace culture and politicians and legislation become products sold to the highest bidder. When a particular religion or culture takes control of politics and the economy, we end up with theocratic genocide.
A healthier commonwealth would differentiate these spheres:
- Cultural-spiritual life governed by freedom: schools, churches, media, arts, and sciences deciding their own ends, not serving as mere instruments of state or market.
- Political-legal life governed by equality: individual rights protected regardless of class or creed.
- Economic life governed by cooperation: associative organization of production, distribution, and consumption to meet human and ecological needs, not shareholder value as ultimate end.
The rise of someone like Fuentes is not surprising. In a society where cultural-spiritual life has largely been colonized by corrupt political and neoliberal economic forces—where education is job training, where religion is either privatized self-help or nationalist theater, where journalism is driven by advertising revenue—young men receive almost no serious initiation into what it means to be a free and responsible citizen. In a society where economic life is organized as a war of all against all, they experience themselves as losers in a game they did not design and whose rules are rigged. In a society where politics has been reduced to spectacle and revenge, they learn to understand power as the right to vanquish enemies rather than the capacity to serve the common good.
Only in such a cultural vacuum can a misogynist jingoist appear to especially lost souls as the one telling the truth.
…
I do not think the United States has ever been a “Christian nation” in any literal sense. It was founded amid genocide and slavery, justified by a mix of Enlightenment rhetoric and providential myth. But there was a radical intuition at its core: that a political community might be organized not solely along lines of blood and soil but around a claim about persons—that they bear inalienable dignity, a right to life and liberty that no state or market can touch.
Whatever credibility that intuition once had has been steadily eroded by the religion of the market and the cult of nationalism. We are now at a point where large swaths of the population, especially young men, no longer trust any institution enough to be formed by it. They have been catechized instead by social media algorithms and the dark pleasures of ressentiment.
Fuentes is a creature of this—Peter Pan cosplaying in a power suit, forever ruling Neverland from his livestream, playing the role of priest of the puers in the very temple that malformed him.
I do not pretend to have a blueprint for renewal. But I am convinced of this much:
The answer is not another round of technocratic centrism, which only deepens the hollow. I have zero hope that the Democratic party can be reformed. A truly novel political movement from outside the corporate duopoly is needed, one that does not idolize another savior figure preaching hopium but recognizes the limits of national politics and redirects its efforts toward damage control at the top so as to take responsibility for rebuilding this country from the ground up, focusing on local organizing.
The answer is not Fuentes’ white-Christian Leviathan, but it will require a recovery of some sense of the spiritual center of our shared civic life, that there is a transcendent dimension at the heart of our humanness, a divine Love that judges our false idols and calls every soul, without exception, into deeper participation in a Sacred Body.
Without that sense of the sacred to humble us, “justice” is reduced to revenge, and “freedom” is conflated with domination of others. With it, there is at least a chance that we might remember our finite identities—Jewish, Christian, atheist, Mexican, white, Black, queer, man, woman, trans, etc., etc.—not as fortresses that define us but as particular ways of belonging to a more-than-national, more-than-racial, more-than-gendered reality.
Fuentes is a warning sign posted at the edge of a civilizational cliff. I write that sentence and wonder whether we’ve already leapt off the cliff and are suspended in midair pretending it is not too late…
This is what happens when a civilization forgets how to initiate its young, abandons them to the myth of the market and false gospel of technocracy. We are starved for meaning. My aim is not to shove Fuentes off the edge. Indeed, he has already leapt off it under his own misguided volition. I am rather trying to help midwife another way of being human together that treats persons as sacred, eros as a transformative mystery, and power as the capacity to care for each other and the earth rather than the right to crush whatever stands in the way of our childish fantasy of world domination.
Footnotes2Plato 
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