It’s been more than a week since Tucker Carlson’s interview with groyper leader Nick Fuentes roiled the right. Many felt a line had, finally, been crossed by Carlson platforming someone who described Hitler as “really fucking cool.” The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro accused Carlson of “normalizing Nazism;” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Fuentes had “spread a poison that is profoundly dangerous” and scolded Republican senators for staying silent on the issue; Newsweek columnist and conservative radio host Josh Hammer posted on X, “The great Charlie Kirk is rolling in his grave right now. Simply despicable.”
Others were not so sure that Carlson’s hosting a Hitler fanboy, autocracy enthusiast, and opponent of mixed-race marriage amounted to a lapse of judgment. Far-right pundit Candace Owens declared that Carlson was “very well-liked now by both sides” and called his critics “Zionists.” Kevin Roberts, president of the arch-conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, fired back at those who criticized the organization’s “close friend” Tucker Carlson, labeling them a “venomous coalition.” (The next day, Roberts clarified that he and Heritage did “denounce” Fuentes. But, ever since, the organization has been in a messy, public civil war.)
Amid this, you might think it might be time for a reckoning. Everyone who even lightly affiliates with the GOP could, say, go look in a mirror and ask themselves whether they should keep debating the level of Nazi loving that is acceptable.
Instead, the far-right’s favorite fellas keep recording podcasts.
Enter into this fray a couple more pundits: Conservative provocateur Christopher Rufo and far-right publisher and shitposter Jonathan Keeperman, better known on X as @L0m3z. Hosting their brand-new show earlier this week on the right-wing network The Blaze, the duo attempted a sort of meta-commentary on the Tucker and Fuentes incident.
“We’re maintaining strategic distance and an emotional coldness with this bait. We’re looking at the bait. We’re analyzing the bait. We are—we are kind of deconstructing the bait. But we’re not taking the bait,” said Rufo of taking the bait and recording a podcast about the Fuentes situation.
Keeperman then waxed grad-school with a postmodern theory of the situation:
Historical Nazism was awful. It was monstrous. It was a disaster. But they’re falling for what postmodern theorists called ‘hyperreality.’
There’s reality, the world as it is, social connections, material connections, really meaningful things in the world. Then there’s hyperreality. These are simulations, or digital representations, or zeros and ones that simulate some past reality, but they don’t actually have the embodied force or real social weight of those past events.
So, I like to say that Nick Fuentes is not a Nazi, because Germany was denazified in the 1940s. And—besides pockets of skinheads or neo-Nazis in Europe and elsewhere—Nazism is a long-dead ideology; and instead, he’s using the symbols of Nazism to drive controversy and then to increase his kind of attention and notoriety; to play the villain in the left, to play the spoiler on the right.
To sum up: Fuentes saying positive things about Nazis doesn’t matter because Nazis don’t exist anymore. Somehow, despite the invocation of “postmodern,” this intricate argument seems to miss that the first part negates the second part. Can Nazism be a “long-dead ideology” if a major right-wing figure is saying Hitler is “cool”? Tough to argue, but Lomez tried!
In general, this academic framing tracks with the thinking-man’s-far-right personas that both Rufo and Keeperman have carefully curated. Rufo, a former documentary filmmaker, rose to prominence with his online crusades against critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Keeperman has said that he aims to create a “right-wing counterculture.” Here’s how I described him in the piece I wrote about a pronatalism conference earlier this year, of which his company, Passage Publishing, was a sponsor:
Keeperman, who often uses the pseudonym Lomez, has created a niche in republishing works by fascist thinkers—for example, a British volunteer soldier who fought on Francisco Franco’s side, a WWI-era German nationalist, and a Russian czar loyalist who “chronicles the chaos, courage, and tragedy of his struggle against the Bolsheviks.” On X, where Keeperman posts to [118,000] followers, he decries immigration (“no, actually we don’t want your huddled masses”), makes liberal use of slurs, and theorizes about “bioleninism,” the idea that the political left exists because “the dregs of society cannot accrue status of their own, and so depend instead on the state and its unofficial organs to give them status in exchange for loyalty.”
Rufo and Keeperman’s new show is on Fuentes’ radar, too, and it doesn’t seem like he’s very happy about it. In fact, there was a subtle whiff of competitive panic when he mentioned it on a broadcast earlier this week:
Who the fuck is watching that? “By the way, I know how we’re gonna fight Nick Fuentes. You like Nick Fuentes and the groypers, you’re gonna love this.”
It’s Jonathan Keeperman, a Jew academic…here’s another Jewish academic who’s 50 years old telling you it’s about the left… Passage Press. The guy sucks—three feet tall, and the guy sucks, and Chris Rufo is even worse. Eat shit. Place your bets.
Fuentes has reason to be concerned. Rufo and Keeperman’s intellectual posturing appears to be capturing a mainstream audience in a way that his own, far cruder, approach has failed to do. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat interviewed Keeperman on the paper’s “Interesting Times” podcast. Keeperman spoke at this year’s National Conservatism conference, an increasingly influential annual conservative confab. Passage Publishing produces the books of Curtis Yarvin, one of the intellectual darlings of the tech-right, and a reported influence on Vice President JD Vance.
Rufo has made even wider inroads into the political mainstream: Florida governor Ron DeSantis has praised him and he has been described as a major influence on the Trump administration. Vance has amplified Rufo on social media, both retweeting him and responding to his tweets.
In contrast, last year, Vance called Fuentes “a total loser.”
Fuentes proclaims to return those sentiments. “You can’t make me go and vote for some fat‑ass with some mixed‑race family,” he said on a broadcast earlier this year.
But might he also crave the same attention the vice president has paid to Rufo and Yarvin? Toward the end of the broadcast earlier this week, Fuentes appeared to extend an invitation—in a roundabout, backhanded way—to Vance. “We want to leave the door open,” he said. “I don’t trust Vance at all. I don’t trust anything he says, but it’s a long way away until 2028, and I’m open to talking to anybody.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.