🔒 How the Media Normalized Nick Fuentes

Through the bullet hell of bad news that has been the past couple of months, something that chilled my blood while flying deftly under the radar for most people was a couple of weeks ago when Glenn Greenwald came out in support of Nick Fuentes.

 I don’t have a lot of interest in Greenwald and most of what I know about him I learned from Eoin Higgins’ book about him, Owned. I know his influence, and so it’s particularly frightening to hear him reference Nick Fuentes as a peer. According to Greenwald, Fuentes’ media influence may be greater than, or even surpass, that of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

 The thing about Greenwald is that, besides the general rightward spiral, his politics are not something that can be easily pinned down. To him, everyone who is a peer he seems to sort of also consider his friend no matter what their ideology is. This is about as good a definition of “the elite” as I can come up with. To be a peer is to be someone of similar influence. It’s not a politics game, to him, so much as a power game. It doesn't matter if their schtick runs to the right of Ben Shapiro—if they pick their whiskey off the same shelf, they can be buddies with Glenn Greenwald.

 The topic of discussion is that there is a three-way feud happening at the moment between Carlson, Owens, and Fuentes. I don’t know all of the specifics as I haven’t dived too deeply into it (I think I’d rather pull my fingernails out) but the point is that, stunningly, despite his close friendship with Tucker Carlson and his partiality to Owens, Greenwald favors Nick Fuentes in this fight. Because they are peers now, and because Greenwald will always back whoever has suffered the most from the dreaded “cancel culture.”

Nick Fuentes, you see, is just like any other kid in Woke America with a promising career ahead of him that got completely wiped out because he, like, misgendered a barista one time. He’s smart, he’s funny, he’s charismatic, but he made the crucial mistake of just being critical of Israel. Greenwald actually takes care to make this point as explicitly clear as he can: The only reason Nick Fuentes has a history of being banned from social media and shunned from the political mainstream is that he is critical of Israel.

 So, I’ll just jump to the point, if you don’t know who Nick Fuentes is: He is a vicious, dedicated, explicit neo-Nazi. I’m not using “Nazi” in the colloquial sense that’s popular these days to speak of anyone to the right of Tom Hanks. I mean that he is probably the most prominent enthusiastically pro-Hitler personality in the United States right now, filling shoes previously worn by David Duke and Richard Spencer. He is critical of Israel in the sense that Osama bin Laden was critical of tall buildings.

Glenn Greenwald, who is Jewish, cannot afford to be this staggeringly ignorant about the risks of trying to launder this ideology into mainstream political discourse. If you want to take an Israel-critical position then it is extremely easy to find allies who don’t post shit like this every day.

So how the hell did this happen?

 Greenwald is obviously not the first mainstream media figure to try to smuggle Fuentes into the national conversation. The story of his sudden rise, from gutter troll to the type of man Glenn Greenwald thinks he can respect as a peer, is oddly tied up with Candace Owens and Kanye West. 

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