The popularity of Nick Fuentes is in its way a fulfillment of Ross Douthat’s much-quoted ominous prophecy that the “post-Christian right” will rise to replace the Christian right. While the young streamer may proclaim Christ and the Catholic faith, he plainly wears this identity as a skinsuit. Daniel Mahoney correctly identifies him as an avatar of “the new pagan Right,” owing much more to Nietzsche than to Jesus as he openly admires totalitarians and seeks to position himself as a political powerbroker.
Of course, this development is a liberal analyst’s dream come true, and multiple mainstream outlets have been milking the moment for all it’s worth. Several have cited the work of Richard Hanania, who argues that Fuentes embodies the natural end-state of conservatism. Hanania himself has an infamous past in the alt-right fever swamps, which he has disavowed in the process of reinventing himself as a sophisticated anti-Republican critic. Yet he and Fuentes still have something in common: In their distinct ways, both of them see the world through pagan eyes and analyze it with pagan logic. Their political projects may be at odds, but their post-Christian vision—or, rather, nostalgically pre-Christian vision—is shared.
The first Christians distinguished themselves from their pagan neighbors by a special care for the weak, the outcast, and the inconvenient. They refused to live by cold utilitarian logic, going out of their way to rescue human beings left to rot on the empire’s dungheaps. This instinct repulses Hanania, who regularly attacks those “crazy enough to value the fetuses of strangers.” It’s no wonder the pro-life cause is unpopular at the polls, he suggests, because if people are that crazy, it’s hard for the sane normal people to predict “what else they’re capable of.” Against this “low human capital” morality, Hanania sets his enlightened lack of “a religious belief in a thing called ‘human life’ that has some kind of inherent value.”
In general, Hanania believes that the greater good sometimes requires human sacrifice—from babies with Down syndrome, to babies born without most of their brains, to incapacitated elderly people. One might say he practices seamless-garment utilitarianism, consistently maintaining that the weak should die when they overburden the strong. If society must expend resources on “creatures who can’t be trusted to take care of themselves,” he would rather we reform factory farming than lavish attention on “people who are stupid and weak.” His rhetoric echoes Heinrich Himmler’s exasperation at those Christians who insisted that care be spent on such people “in the name of a doctrine of pity that goes against nature, and of a misconceived notion of humanity.”
Fuentes may not campaign for selective abortion or euthanasia, but he displays a similar root contempt for weakness and low intelligence. He’s pained by “low-IQ anti-Semitism,” obviously not because he has anything against anti-Semitism, but because it makes his version thereof look stupid by association. He appears to hate his own followers, who regularly give him Super Chat money in exchange for verbal abuse. When someone asked if he would consider a book club, Fuentes said there was no point, “because most of you are too dumb to understand the books.” Hanania observes this sadomasochistic game with something like amused admiration.
Fuentes may insist that he’s superior to the godless pagans, yet he fantasizes about a kingdom very much of this world. In a viral tweet, he says that “White people need to restore the Roman Empire like the Jews restored Israel.” Rome’s lost glory is a recurring theme of his song. A monologue about the importance of “demythologizing Hitler” incorporates the meme that white men constantly think about the Roman Empire, except Fuentes seems to be serious. Sometimes this is mixed with integralist rhetoric about crusades and Catholic monarchy, but the consistent object of his fascination is power.
That fascination is most grotesquely evident in Fuentes’s long paper trail of hypocrisy on sexual ethics, where he pays lip service to the Christian ethic while indulging in the most depraved sexual power fantasies. He holds forth on the evils of pornography, only to turn around and circulate 4chan rape cartoons. He loves to imagine himself having his way with submissive female or male partners, sometimes in a pederastic key. In other words, he longs to be a high-status man in the old pagan empire he pines for, where might made right, and any orifice would do. It’s hardly surprising that when fellow alt-right personality Ali Alexander was credibly accused of predatory homosexual acts, Fuentes rushed to downplay them.
In subtler ways, Hanania also acts as an apologist for sexual paganism, gesturing obliquely toward a loosening of boundaries around what constitutes a criminal act. One tweet polled reader reactions to a thought experiment in which a fourteen-year-old girl’s parents traffic her to Jeffrey Epstein in exchange for $10 million in a mutual fund. “Should this be allowed?” Hanania asked, curious to know how the responses broke down by gender. He followed up with a raised eyebrow at people disgusted by this thought experiment who “have names like Bob456Flyers” and photos indicating they couldn’t afford new phones. “Moralism and inability to consider hypotheticals,” he sneers, “are hallmarks of the lower classes.”
Fuentes claims to be the populist voice of those lower classes. But when the mask slips, his own cold elitist sneer is clearly revealed. And when the invocations of Jesus’s name are peeled away, he is no less committed to the repaganizing of America than Hanania. At the same time, Hanania is no less of a Nazi sympathizer than Fuentes. He is simply reviving more socially acceptable elements of the Nazi project.
Louise Perry’s powerful image of Christianity as a clearing in a dark forest comes to mind, the forest representing paganism kept at bay through the generations. The forest begins to regain its lost ground as the labor of maintaining that clearing, that patch of tamed garden, is abandoned. Some look to the left only, or to the right only, and flatter themselves that they have anticipated every threat. But on all sides, dark roots are stretching themselves out to stake their claim, to choke out life.
There is a time to plant and a time to “hack,” as Perry puts it. The keepers of the clearing would be well-advised to grab their axes and get hacking.
