Written by Michael Delgado.
Like most other things, elections are bigger in America. They’re so big they spill over; everyone
follows them. Before November 5th, Britons could talk about ‘the election’. And they did in the
streets, in seminars, with Boris during live panels on Channel 4. The feelings aren’t mutual; poll a
random group of 10 Hoosiers and you won’t to find more than a couple who could even recognize
Keir Stramer. None of them would ever be able to name a single British ‘political pundit’. But even
here, Nick Fuentes doesn’t need much of an introduction.
Nick – a Boston U drop-out, Youtuber, and self-proclaimed ‘straightest guy’ – had dinner with the
President of the United States a couple years back which made a lot of people very mad. Nick has a long history of making people mad. He’s started chants for Putin, praised the Taliban, called sex
with woman gay, and most recently, in response to Trump’s victory, tweeted ‘Your body. My
Choice’. This, again, made people pretty upset.
Nick is one of the darlings of the ‘New Right’. The loose coalition of Republicans with a chip on
their shoulder. A lot has been made about how Trump rode this kind of dissatisfaction and bitterness to victory – twice now. The poor, working-class, fly-over-staters were mad and out for blood because of Nafta, and mine closures, and Mexicans. People like Nick and other pundits like him are often seen as egging all this on. This has caused a lot of coverage and fear that there is some huge clandestine incel movement deciding elections or that there’s some large contingent of the population who want a Catholic autocracy.
But Nick knows what he’s doing. He says things to get a reaction –the reaction is the point. Whether or not he actually genuinely believes any of what he says its irrelevant. Whether his viewers actually believe it is too. He’s a troll. Every time he praises the Taliban or calls for killings of Jews he’s grinning and winking at his followers. He’s saying ‘watch this’ while he incites another New York Times op-ed, or a Twitter ban, or a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. To his supporters, all of this is really funny. Nick is one of their own and making a mockery out of ‘the
establishment’ – armed with its op-eds, bans, cancelings, condemnations etc. – with just a tweet. He is David.
But very few people actually tune into Nick’s America First ‘show’ for a half hour of his ramblings.
The show itself is little more than Nick trying desperately to out-do himself with just how racist he
can he can be in the hopes that he says something just racist enough that it blows up. He lives off
the coverage he gets every time he says something stupid.
Nick isn’t the first; the whole ‘New Right’ was built off of this kind of stuff. Trump did it a lot in
2015. But they’re often given too much credit for it. Trump and Nick aren’t masterminds that broke
the code, that somehow tricked the media into inadvertently and accidentality propelling them to
notoriety or the White House. But this isn’t a tail-wagging-the-dog situation. The media loves it and
has been helping it along every step of the way.
The New Right’s tendency to cause scandal through social faux pas, whether through off-colour
jokes or Nazi salutes, was outrageous if not simply bizarre to a large portion of Americans. This
made it a major cash-cow for the media. The Trump Show was anything else people had ever seen
before on C-SPAN and they couldn’t get enough. Cable news ratings set records and cable
executives made a lot of money. CBS Executive Leslie Moonves on the Trump Presidency: “It may
not be good for America. But it’s damn good for CBS.”
Reporting whatever weird thing Nick says isn’t really news. People tweet hateful things every day
and don’t end up on NBC. But when they report on it then it becomes news. It can often end up
creating its own news, like when Nick upset someone enough with his tweets that they went to his
house to confront him just to get pepper sprayed on camera, a victory for NBC who can now drag
the story out a little longer. This kind of stuff gets clicks so they write more. Its why cable news
often over reports on crime. ‘If it bleeds it leads’.
But its been almost a decade since Trump shocked CNN’s cable audience by calling immigrants
rapists on live TV and there were consequences for the near ceaseless free ad time he got from the
media; he got another four years. Because of the fame the media has earned him, Nick Fuentes’
attention-seeking tweets now have real implications for the political landscape of the world’s largest
economy. He finally struck gold with the ‘Your body’ tweet last month and it paid off, people are
talking about him again. You’re a few thousand miles from his home in suburban Illinois but you’re
still reading an article about him. But if it wasn’t for the constant coverage, he’d be stuck rambling
on his show that nobody watches.
Now it doesn’t matter if he genuinely believes that democracy sucks or if denying the Holocaust
was just a joke, his constant exposure means that some people are starting to think he’s right. His
‘Your body’ tweet was followed by a massive increase is misogyny online. The overton window has
shifted. The media created a gollum. The New Right is stronger than ever, empowered by a second
Trump term, and they don’t need the media anymore.
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