Dumbest pro-Fuentes Talking Points
Identifying and refuting the most asinine arguments made in defence of Nicholas Joseph Fuentes
1) The claim that Fuentes isn’t actually an anti-Semite. In 2024, someone on Twitter responded to Biden’s poor debate performance against Trump by asking “Who exactly is in charge?” Fuentes replied “Jews” . Dr. Jordan Peterson responded “You [Nick J Fuentes] [really] are a psychopathic Rat”. Fuentes replied “Coming from the strung out crybaby who works for the deicidal traitor Ben Shapiro — I shit on you. You are a fraud.” Fuentes is clearly an anti-Semite.
2) The claim that Fuentes was taken out of context to make him seem like a bigot. Ignoring the fact that there are very few contexts which would justify calling Dave Rubin “Jewy Jewstein” , or saying “Dinesh D’Souza is gonna roll up to our shore from India, from smelly, open-defecation India, and he’s going to tell us that Robert E. Lee was a racist” or calling Matt Walsh a “Shabbos goy race traitor”, Fuentes isn’t better in context. When Fuentes had a debate, linked here, against Destiny, the Krassenstein brothers, and George Santos (with Suleiman Ahmed, Sneako, and Andrew Tate on his side), Fuentes called for all non-Christians to be legally barred from every government office (elected or appointed) at any level, he denounced the American constitutional system on the grounds that “Americanism” was a heresy, he defended Kanye West’s comments about Hitler, and he denounced Destiny and Santos as degenerates for being bisexual and homosexual respectively. In Piers Morgan’s Fuentes interview (linked here), Morgan asked Fuentes about clips of him praising Hitler, saying black people should be “in prison for the most part”, saying that women should be legally banned from voting, and criticising JD Vance for marrying a “jeet” (a pejorative term for someone from India.) Fuentes doubled down on these claims. So, no, Fuentes from the clips isn’t substantively different from Fuentes in context (regardless of what Steven Crowder has said.)
3) The claim that Fuentes didn’t mean his praise of Stalin. Steven Crowder claimed that Fuentes just meant that Stalin was an interesting historical figure to study. For context, details linked here, Fuentes had told Tucker Carlson that December 18th was an important date for him. Carlson asked why. Fuentes replied that it was Stalin’s birthday and he was a fan. Carlson asked Fuentes if he were describing himself as “a fan of Stalin.” Fuentes replied he was “always an admirer”. An admirer is, by definition, someone who admires someone. That’s not even remotely the same thing as finding them interesting to study. Pretty much everyone who regards Caligula as an interesting historical figure acknowledges that Caligula isn’t admirable. It’s also worth noting that, when Pearl Davis asked Fuentes about his Stalin comments, Fuentes expressed his doubts about the historicity of the Holodomor. You don’t flirt with Holodomor denial because you find Stalin an interesting historical figure, you flirt with Holodomor denial because you’re pro-Stalin.
4) The claim that Fuentes isn’t a Holocaust denier, just someone who debates the numbers. Joe Rogan said this, to James Tallarico, but it’s a dumb argument. Fuentes said he found it difficult to believe that the Nazis actually used gas chambers to kill people but that even if it were true, which he finds unlikely, the sole reason “Hitler casts a long shadow” is because the Holocaust “confers a political benefit upon Jews.” Disputing the historicity of the empirical fact that the Nazis used gas chambers to murder people is clearly Holocaust denial, not quibbling about the numbers.
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5) The claim that Fuentes isn’t an incel but is just waiting until he’s married. Fuentes openly calls himself an Incel. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a chance he’s lying but the reason I say that is because Fuentes said that after dating and kissing a girl in high school, he chose to become an Incel. Fuentes’s fans posited that that’s not an Incel, that’s a Volcel but Fuentes continued calling himself an Incel and as such was accused of being a Fakecel. Fuentes responded that he wasn’t voluntarily celibate because he didn’t choose to be uninterested in sex, that the same people who called him a Fakecel would have said the same thing about Hitler, and that all he wanted was “total Aryan victory”.
6) The claim that if you get rid of Charlie Kirk, you get Fuentes instead. Outside of dialogue with someone who supports Kirk’s murder, this argument is utterly ridiculous. Kirk was alive and well when Michelle Malkin associated herself with Fuentes, when Congressman Paul Gosar promoted Fuentes, when Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene opened for Fuentes at AFPAC, and when Trump hosted Fuentes (alongside Kanye West and Milo Yiannopoulos) at Mar-a-Lago. Fuentes isn’t a response to Kirk’s murder.
7) The claim that Ben Shapiro should debate Fuentes. Fuentes (and his videographer) tracked down Shapiro to the hotel where he and his family were staying and Fuentes angrily confronted Shapiro (in front of Shapiro’s children) while the Shapiros were on their way to the hotel. Fuentes demanded that Shapiro debate him (and berated him for not doing so). Shapiro ignored Fuentes and walked his children with him to the hotel. Fuentes’s videographer filmed the encounter and posted it on the Internet. Even if there were any reason for Shapiro to debate Fuentes before then, which there wasn’t, after that, Shapiro had a very good reason to refuse ever to reward Fuentes with his desired debate.
8) The claim that supporting Fuentes is necessary to support free speech and/or oppose censorship. Supporting the First Amendment (which Fuentes doesn’t, for the record, it explicitly says you can’t impose an official religion) requires accepting that Fuentes is legally entitled to vocalise what he says but, by the same token, everyone who calls out his pro-Nazi commentary is legally entitled to do so. Defending the legality of speech isn’t the same as defending its content. Even if you say that Twitter or other social media shouldn’t censor him, that view doesn’t translate to ‘therefore I should hand him the proverbial microphone to magnify his views for my audience.’ There’s a tremendous difference between not censoring someone and actively promoting what that person says.
9) The claim that Fuentes being eighteen years old when he started being accused of anti-Semitism in any way mitigates anything. In 2016, Ben Shapiro was the number one target of online anti-Semitic death threats amongst journalists in the United States, with said threats coming primarily from the “alt-right” in protest of Shapiro’s then opposition to Trump. Steven Crowder interviewed Shapiro about this at the time. After that, eighteen-year-old Nick Fuentes tweeted at Shapiro questioning him on his supposed dual loyalty to America and Israel. Shapiro responded that that tweet was anti-Semitic. Did Shapiro have good reasons to construe that tweet as anti-Semitic? Yes. Fuentes was eighteen but why was that relevant? Does Twitter have a policy of announcing the age of a user who tweets something whenever the user tweets? No. Does Twitter disclose the age of users if you look up their profiles? I suspect not but even if it does, do we really expect Shapiro to look up the age of everyone who tweets at him before responding? Do we expect Shapiro to preface any response by asking the person to whom he responds “how old are you”? Those aren’t realistic expectations or reasonable ones. Fuentes having been eighteen is irrelevant.
10) The claim that Fuentes isn’t Alt-Right. At one point, Shapiro elicited backlash, from Fuentes supporters, for calling Fuentes Alt-Right due to Fuentes not identifying as such. In the very speech to which they were responding, linked here, Shapiro acknowledged that Fuentes claimed not to be Alt-Right but posited that Fuentes was lying. Shapiro was right. Fuentes had said that he agreed with the Alt-Right in terms of goals and viewed himself as fellow travellers with the Alt-Right but that he didn’t call himself Alt-Right because it was bad branding. He attended the Alt-Right rally in Charlottesville and he appeared on an episode of Richard Spencer’s podcast in which he told Spencer that he called himself a “nationalist” instead of a “white nationalist” since he regarded the phrase “white nationalist” as redundant and Spencer explicitly agreed with Fuentes. Fuentes is clearly on the Alt-Right.
My name is Matitya. This is one of my Miscellaneous Musings.
