Tucker Interviews Fuentes

1,557 words

Full interview available here ^[2].

Overall, despite one glaring flaw, Tucker Carlson’s interview of Nick Fuentes was a major net positive for the movement.

Fuentes’ strongest point was towards the end, when he gave a surprisingly tasteful explanation of the woman question which Tucker mostly agreed with. It was a refreshing change from Fuentes’s low IQ “incel” nonsense from previous years.

Fuentes began with his red pill story. He was canceled for asking common sense questions about Israel, while at the same time Mark Levin was talking about America becoming majority non-white. He initially disliked Trump for being a statist in his libertarian-leaning PragerU days, but then he realized the importance of immigration and of winning elections, no matter what, to combat censorship. I have no doubt that Tucker’s audience will find Fuentes’s red pill story to be relatable.

Echoing Machiavelli’s advice to either treat men generously or destroy them completely, Nick ended by saying, “You either crush the left or feed them. There’s no middle ground.” He added, “Half-measures just antagonize and empower them.” This is an important message for Tucker’s conservative audience (along with the Trump administration) to hear and internalize. In fact, internalizing it may be a matter of life and death, of total victory or total defeat.

But Fuentes fumbled on pushing back against Tucker’s mushy race-blind civic nationalism. This was surprising, given that Fuentes has a long history of criticizing people who are weak on race realism. After initially rejecting Tucker’s suggestion that he had internalized their attacks, Fuentes missed several opportunities to advocate for race realism.

Basic 4chan 2016 talking points would have sufficed to rebut Tucker’s position, which mostly boils down to a shallow desire to be nice because of his Christian values. And Fuentes’ handling of the woman question shows that it’s possible to be radical without being abrasive. It would have been easy to poke holes in Tucker’s Alt Lite civic nationalist and tone policing without being nasty. But Fuentes passed up opportunity after opportunity.

Fuentes failed to push back against Tucker’s extreme religious individualist statements. Tucker actually claimed that God created individuals not groups, which is obviously false. Groups are real too. Such ideas as a “chosen people” and “original sin” presuppose not just the existence of groups, but the existence of group-based moral traits.

Tucker also sought to undermine group identity with the NAXALT fallacy (not all X are like that, a common barrier to race realism which we explored in our internal poll ^[3] of the movement). NAXALT is true but it’s also not an argument for ignoring groups and group differences. You can still hold the door open for an old black lady while understanding that our races are unsuited to living together.

Tucker also said that we are required to love everyone based on a faulty interpretation of “love thy enemy.” But as Carl Schmitt explained, Christ was referring to a private or personal enemy, not a public or political enemy. The ancient Greco-Roman world which Christ was steeped in had a stark differentiation between public and private enemies. We don’t need to play patty cake with our political enemies.

Fuentes also disavowed “genuine racial hatred” and Tucker concurred. No, I don’t think it’s healthy to be seething about blacks all the time. But I find the Christian urge to tone police internal thoughts and feelings as opposed to objective conduct to be tiresome and unhealthy. It is perfectly normal to get angry at the sight of Iryna Zarutska being murdered by a black career criminal while other blacks look on in bovine indifference. I see no value in lying about our feelings.

Furthermore, there is a tedious double standard in which conservatives will tone police white people but not non-whites, or at least not with the same vigor. This problem is echoed in Tucker’s rejection of collectivism and identity politics. Dr. Greg Johnson wrote an entire book ^[4] explaining why white identity politics is necessary, inevitable, and perhaps most importantly for conservatives, moral. The argument I found must compelling in White Identity Politics is that nonwhites have no incentive to drop their identity politics, thus it is unlikely that they will do so, and thus whites must develop their own identity politics to survive. This is perfectly fair and just.

If Tucker and other conservatives don’t like identity politics then they should devote the vast majority, if not all, of their energy into combatting nonwhite identity politics instead of white identity politics. Again, the tone policing only goes one way, and in the opposite direction of what is logical and just.

Fuentes did assert that identity is reality, and Tucker seemingly agreed, but Tucker then said that America would just be like Rwanda, and Fuentes failed to criticize this outlandish claim. Fuentes could have pointed out that failure to assert white standards — i.e., a lack of white identity politics — has led to most major American cities being violently ethnically cleansed of whites. Multiculturalism doesn’t lead to racial harmony. It leads to Yugoslavia. Conservatives are not obligated to make unworkable and malevolent multicultural policies somehow work.

Despite all historical evidence to the contrary (just ask a campus liberal about how racist the Founders were) Tucker clings to the notion that America is unique because it is a proposition nation. Fuentes, again, failed to rebut this. One of baby’s first red pills is how the meme that America is a “melting pot” came from Israel Zangwill’s play by the same name in 1908. Even then, the keynote line that “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming” was regarding European immigration, not pet-eating Haitians or truck-crashing Sikhs. Historically, 1908 was yesterday afternoon, and most of the random people we’re expected to sing kumbaya with arrived only a few years ago. America was never a proposition nation. Modern migrants aren’t pioneers. America was always a normal nation until it was retconned as a social experiment in the 1960s. Even if it was an experiment, it was a mad science experiment that catastrophically failed.

Tucker and Fuentes would probably have to agree to disagree on whether differences between people is driven by race or culture. Fuentes could have acceded the point for the sake of continuing the conversation and then asked if differences are cultural, why should whites be expected to assimilate nonwhites into American culture? Who will pay for it, and what will be the cost in time and money? The first question is rhetorical, we all know whites will pay.

In 2003, Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion for Grutter v. Bollinger which upheld “race conscious admissions” which is a euphemism for get whitey. She wrote “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” 22 years have passed and non-whites are still not our equals. Ironically, some of the least assimilated are blacks, who have lived here for centuries. Fuentes could have asked Tucker for a plan on how to assimilate nonwhites, along with a loose timeline and budget. Maybe real multiculturalism just hasn’t been tried yet.

So why did Fuentes fumble on race when he did an exceptional job addressing the woman question? Both are biological facts with political consequences which the establishment wishes to be taboo. I can’t read his mind, but maybe he is leaning towards his priors as many of us do. Maybe seeing Charlie Kirk die shook him, especially after there was an attempt on his life. Maybe he is trying to cast himself as a more radical version of Charlie Kirk like he cast himself as a more optical version of Richard Spencer, but if so, it’s unlikely to work given his extensive past comments. The most likely explanation is that Fuentes decided that honey was better than vinegar, but overdid it.

I do not think Fuentes “sold out” as some have suggested, but his discussion with Tucker highlights how easy it is to fall into using surrogate issues for white identity politics like religion, economics, culture, constitutionalism, etc. because they are easier. That’s by design.

Fuentes did a very poor job advocating for race realism when he had the perfect opportunity to do so. He could have firmly defended his principles without being abrasive. But that failure is overshadowed the huge success that is the fact that the interview took place at all. It used to be a common rule that if Tucker said it, so could you. Thus, Tucker and Fuentes dealt a major blow to cancel culture simply by having a respectful conversation together. It also synergizes well with JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Matt Walsh standing by the young Republicans who were doxed in a group chat leak by Politico and Gavin Wax.

Despite Fuentes’s lacklustre performance on race, I am confident that his interview will only serve to further unite the Right so we can crush the Left. If Tucker is willing to interview someone as controversial as Fuentes, why not Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, or Kevin MacDonald? I’m certain that it is only a matter of time until Tucker has them on and that they will do a much better job explaining race realism than Fuentes. That’s ultimately why Tucker’s interview was a decisive victory for all of us.