Jay Caspian Kang writes:

Part of what separates Fuentes from his fellow-streamers is that he is capable of keeping his thoughts in a coherent, if odious, order. He once offered a trollish, occasionally captivating, and always grossly bigoted hour-long act; that has evolved into something more like a daily address, one that presents a code of behavior and a set of distinct ideas. As recently as a year ago, I’m not sure I could have told you what Fuentes thought about anything outside of his hatred of minorities, gays, and Jewish people. Today, he has developed a vile but discernible vision for the U.S.—something few of his predecessors in the role of far-right boogeyman have been able to do.

Fuentes’s narrative about the U.S.’s current state of affairs begins in a familiarly reprehensible place. Jewish oligarchs, he claims, have bought America, and now control every politician, media outlet, and lever of power. These same oligarchs, in Fuentes’s account, have launched a campaign to smother all criticism of Israel. As proof, Fuentes will point to TikTok, and theorize that big money in politics pushed legislation against that platform, precipitating its sale to Larry Ellison, an ardent supporter of Israel, who will now, Fuentes believes, change the app’s algorithms to suppress pro-Palestinian content. This same group of oligarchs, Fuentes argues, are behind mass migration to the U.S.—this is one of the main tropes of the “great replacement” theory, a racist conspiracy that seemed to motivate many of the young men who attended the rally in Charlottesville, years ago—and have impinged on the sovereignty and livelihoods of white men by pushing for open borders. Fuentes has always had awful things to say about Black people and immigrants, but his recent turn has basically cast them as pawns in the oligarchs’ game.

Crucially, Fuentes has become one of Donald Trump’s most ardent critics on the right. He repeatedly tells a story about a nation of young men in flyover country who believed that Trump would realize a new vision of America and who now have been betrayed. These young men, as Fuentes put it recently, are looking at China and the United Arab Emirates and asking why America couldn’t build “world wonders” and “peaceful” cities. Their interest in MAGA was both industrial and quasi-socialist: they believed that Trump would drain the swamp and bring new legislators to Washington, D.C., who would restore manufacturing jobs, and that America, a failing empire, would “draft” people like them, devastated by poverty and the opioid epidemic and general aimlessness, back to work. All that was a lie, Fuentes now says. Trump has been in or around the heart of political power for more than a decade, and, according to Fuentes, is a sellout who has been bought by the oligarchy. Only Fuentes is willing to put America first. [Continue reading…]