11/20/2025
There are many groups seeking to exploit disaffected people on both the right and left of center by appealing to just enough points to disguise who they really are… and keep those things hidden till they can fully indoctrinate and radicalize you. Cult Strategy 101.
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Michael Smith
November 17 at 9:11 PM
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If you don't already know who Nick Fuentes is, you might want to find out.
The constellation of online activists and disaffected young men who gather under Nick Fuentes’s “America First” banner bills itself as a clarifying force on the right - a movement willing to say what others allegedly fear to say. But its provocations do not represent a renewed conservatism or an updated nationalist tradition. They represent a repudiation of both. In rhetoric, in philosophical foundations, and ultimately in political ambition,
Fuentes’s movement is not an extension of American conservatism, rather it is the antithesis of it. If it resembles anything at all, it is the authoritarian, collectivist ethnopolitics that darkened Europe in the 1930s. It is based in the same old Jew hate as old Adolph promoted.
American conservatism, properly understood, begins with the presumption of individual dignity and the restraint of state power. The constitutional order is not a tool to be discarded when inconvenient; it is the central mechanism by which liberty is secured. From the framers to Tocqueville to the postwar conservative thinkers who shaped the movement - Russel Kirk, William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer - there has been broad agreement that the American project is a moral one, grounded in natural rights and sustained by vibrant civil society rather than coercive state engineering.
Fuentes and his cohort reject this inheritance entirely. They speak the language of the right while hollowing out its content. Their politics is not built on a moral anthropology that recognizes inherent rights; it is built on racial identity, demographic panic, and the conviction that cultural homogeneity must be enforced from above. The state - especially an authoritarian state - ceases to be a limited instrument and becomes instead the vehicle for asserting dominance in a zero-sum struggle among groups.
This is not merely an intellectual deviation. It places Fuentes’s movement in unmistakable proximity to the Volkisch currents that fed National Socialism in the 1930s: the subordination of the individual to the collective; the obsession with ethnic purity; the insistence that democracy is decadent, pluralism corrosive, and constitutional limits obstacles to national “renewal.” Fuentes’s movement mirrors the same illiberal impulses. Its preferred politics is not persuasion but mobilization - of resentment, of grievance, of cultural despair. It promises restoration but demands conformity. It claims realism while trafficking in the same mythic narratives of destiny and decline that characterized Europe’s radical nationalists.
Contrast this with the mainstream conservative tradition, which has always sought to conserve - not uproot - the cultural, institutional, and constitutional architecture of the United States. American conservatism assumes that a diverse, pluralistic republic can cohere around shared principles rather than tribal membership. It embraces ordered liberty, not ethnic order. It defends institutions because they discipline political passion and protect individuals from the state. These are not mere formalities; they are the foundations of the nation.
Fuentes’s project, by contrast, treats these foundations as impediments. It is not a harder-edged conservatism. It is an illiberal alternative to conservatism - a politics that resembles the authoritarian ideologies conservatives spent the twentieth century resisting, not the principles they sought to uphold.
It should not be ignored that Fuentes and his followers praise Hi**er and Stalin as paragons of brave leadership.
Any of this sound remotely conservative to you?
It sure as hell doesn’t to me.
And yet, there are conservatives – by intent or accident – working to legitimize this movement.
Unattended, this is the death of both conservativism AND the MAGA movement. If this “movement”, one adjacent to the Tate brothers claiming that Islam is the way to go because it is “more muscular”, is allowed to become viewed even as an adjunct to modern conservativism, we might as well hang it up.
The task for the right is not to absorb or sanitize this movement. It is to recognize it for what it is: a distortion that threatens to confuse a rising generation about what American conservatism actually means. The future of the right depends on drawing that line clearly - and on refusing to cede the language of patriotism to a movement that misunderstands both America and conservatism at their core.
I’m so disappointed that people I considered much smarter than me can’t see what is happening and seem to be saying, “Hey, ole Bob is a nice guy. He’s just a little bit Hi**erish.”
Like being a little bit pregnant, being a little bit Hi**erish ain’t a real thing.
This is the moment for which the American and global left has been waiting.
The task for the right is not to absorb or sanitize this movement. It is to recognize it for what it is: a distortion that threatens to confuse a rising generation about what American conservatism actually means. The future of the right depends on drawing that line clearly—and on refusing to cede the language of patriotism to a movement that misunderstands both America and conservatism at their core.
