Nick Fuentes vs. Piers Morgan

I don’t remember when I first became aware of Nick Fuentes. It was not long ago; perhaps weeks ago. And I had never heard him, only of him. He was, it seems, someone who loved Hitler and Stalin. Someone anathema to the right and the MAGA right, like the John Birchers back in the dahs of William F. Buckley. A radioactive character.

Last night Piers Morgan had him on for a long interview. I understand why. Tucker Carlson has been taking a huge amount of criticism for featuring Fuentes, and giving him a “softball interview,” not long ago, and not challenging his outrageous beliefs. “Platforming” him. So Morgan thought he could cash in on the publicity by also having him on, and then grilling him properly. Doing the supposed public service of showing everyone what a monster Fuentes really is, and more importantly, showing that he is a better journalist and more reliable right-winger than Tucker Carlson.

So I finally heard Fuentes speak for himself on Piers Morgan’s program.

Fuentes came across as honest, kind, likable, and highly intelligent. Piers Morgan came across in as dishonest, nasty, incompetent, and clueless. And the comments were some of the funniest things I have read in donkeys’ years. All pro-Fuentes.

Rather like Trump, Fuentes is saying things everyone knows are true, but no one is allowed to say. He is deliberately saying it in provocative, very direct, even hyperbolic ways, as a liberating protest against censorship and hypocrisy.

“I’m a racist, sure. Everyone is racist.” And Morgan uses that against him like a club. Yet that is just what the left is always saying about “whites”: that we are all racists, no matter what we think. So okay, so what? What’s the point in saying no? Fuentes is not a racist—he avers that all are equal before God. His point is that we need to get past this obsession with racism—with race.

“Hitler was cool.” Fuentes is not endorsing Hitler—he is stating a fact, plain and in our faces, that we deny at our peril. Why did anyone think a plurality of Germans voted him into office? If we cannot see the attractiveness of Hitler, we will vote another one into office. Of course Hitler was cool: he had a real sense of style. Great uniforms, great speeches, great rallies. He was not a “madman,” and he was not a one-off.

Fuentes’s most notorious quote is this, I gather: “"Jews are running society, women need to shut the f--- up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part, and we would live in paradise ... White men need to run the household, they need to run the country, they need to run the companies."

This is of course deliberately outrageous. Fuentes himself apparently does not believe this as stated. It is hyperbole. Yes, Jews are highly influential—the question is whether this is a bad thing. Yes, women have a tendency to talk too much—to gossip, for example. Everyone knows this in their hearts, but cannot say it. And the Bible says women should defer to their husbands and keep silent in public gatherings. “For the most part” is clearly wrong, but blacks are obviously more inclined to violent crime than “whites.”

Fuentes made a lot of good and rarely heard points, about “performative cruelty,” about the value of celibacy outside of marriage, which seemed to go right over Morgan’s head.

But the essential point is this, and it is Fuentes’s essential point: if I disagree with someone else’s opinion, is it right to hate them or condemn them as a person or try to silence them or bully them? Of course not. This is not fair or honourable or Christian. Yet that is what Morgan and our present society immediately does.

Fuentes is a brave and honest man, and seems to be a true Christian.