There is a particular vice that afflicts imperiled movements, and I speak not of ignorance nor malice, though both are present in abundance. I speak instead of cowardice. More precisely, it is the quiet, calculating decision to tolerate what one knows to be wrong because confronting it might cost something. Modern American conservatism is now awash in this vice, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the indulgence of figures like avowed racist Nick Fuentes, and the moral rot that surrounds him.
For those unfamiliar, Fuentes is a twenty-seven-year-old self-proclaimed incel who has made a name for himself, and built a following on the furthest extreme of the Right, by spewing nearly every variety of hatred and stupidity imaginable. He is precisely the caricature the Left invokes whenever there is a disagreement with conservatives. We need not linger long on this point, because his invective does not deserve the space. But it is worth examining what Fuentes actually says when given the opportunity to clarify his views, because the usual defenses collapse immediately.
When confronted publicly with his own statements that Jews “run society,” that blacks should be “imprisoned for the most part,” and that women should “shut up,” Fuentes does not retreat into irony or context. He does not claim exaggeration or parody. He affirms them. “That’s all true,” he says. “That’s 100 percent true.” Asked whether those targeted by these remarks might find them offensive, he responds not with regret, but amusement. He finds it “hilarious.” When pressed on whether this makes him a racist and/or misogynist, he does not object to the label. He accepts it calmly, even proudly.
When I wrote in a prior essay about the important distinctions between being conservative and being right-wing, this is the sort of nonsense I had in mind, albeit in its most extreme form.
Because here we see that Fuentes is not merely a fringe character, but something worse: an anti-conservative. Conservatives confront hard realities knowing full well that doing so will subject us to slander. Enforcing immigration laws is denounced as hatred for immigrants; support for law enforcement is reflexively labeled racist; protecting life in the womb is dismissed as misogyny. These are the predictable slings and arrows launched by an opponent who must defame because it cannot defend.
Fuentes, however, is not defamed. He does hate immigrants. He is a racist. He is a misogynist. Proudly so. And he therefore calls for policies that advance his bigotries. That we must even pluralize that word is troubling enough. That such a figure has found a home on our side — a man whose hatreds are so numerous they require a catalog — is cause not for handwringing, but for immediate alarm and action.
There is no need to cross-examine Nick Fuentes. We lawyers have a phrase for cases that require no such indulgence: res ipsa loquitur, which translates to “the thing speaks for itself.” Fuentes is precisely that: a thing, and a particularly loathsome one, who, like the fool described in Proverbs 18:2, “hath no delight in understanding, but only that his heart may reveal itself.” His rhetoric is not distorted by enemies, nor misunderstood by critics. It is offered plainly, repeated eagerly, and defended proudly. He speaks for himself, and in doing so disqualifies himself from speaking for Christianity, conservatism, or anything larger than his own vulgar appetites.
Any claim that Fuentes is misunderstood ceases to be charitable and becomes willfully dishonest. His defenders are not protecting a victim of distortion; they are laundering a confession. This is not a man whose views have been caricatured by hostile media. This is a man telling you exactly who he is, in plain English, and daring others to deny it on his behalf.
Fuentes presents himself as a persecuted truth-teller, a lonely defender of white Christian America besieged by hostile elites. This pose is fraudulent from top to bottom. He is not being persecuted for defending Christianity or American values. To the extent he is condemned, it is quite properly for going out of his way to say loathsome things, for collapsing individuals into collectives, for substituting grievance for moral reasoning, and then daring to invoke Christ and tradition as his alibi. That this performance has found an audience is troubling. That it has been tolerated — and in some cases quietly protected, even tacitly advanced — by counterfeit conservatives and Republican leadership is disgraceful.
Christ’s words — “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you for my sake” — were not an invitation to manufacture scandal. They do not sanctify every man who is denounced. They bless those who are denounced for righteousness, for truth, for fidelity to Christ, for that which is good and holy and merciful and just. Fuentes is not being reviled for proclaiming the Gospel or any other truth. He is denounced because he deliberately traffics in provocation, knowing full well that outrage is his oxygen, and then retroactively baptizes the backlash as proof of virtue. This is not martyrdom. It is self-inflicted notoriety masquerading as sanctity.
To constantly fall back on his supposed Christian faith is not merely dishonest. It is blasphemous. Fuentes is no more a Christian than he is a conservative. Christ told us that we know a tree by the fruit it bears. One cannot, in one breath, call for the incarceration of most African-Americans, rail about a global Jewish conspiracy, demean immigrants and women, and then claim to love one’s neighbor as a good Christian. This posture is not merely false; it is, quite literally, anti-Christ — though one suspects the actual Antichrist will be considerably more clever and subtle.
So if Fuentes is not really a conservative, and he is not really a Christian, what is he? He is, in fact, a Marxist, stripped of economic jargon and repackaged for the Right. The mechanism is identical. The individual is dissolved into a group. History is reduced to a struggle between categories. Moral agency is replaced with inherited guilt or virtue. Grievance becomes identity. Power becomes the point. Only the nouns change. Where the Left speaks of class and race, Fuentes speaks of nationality and race. Where the Left speaks of oppressors, Fuentes speaks of enemies. This is collectivism — collective guilt, collective outrage — and it is no less corrosive because it is positioned, somehow, on the Right.
Christianity insists that every soul stands alone before God, and conservatism demands that we judge the individual. But Fuentes insists that identity precedes conscience. Christianity subordinates the nation to moral law, and conservatism seeks to hold it to account. But Fuentes subordinates moral law to group survival. That is not a Christian or conservative insight. It is a pagan one, and a familiar one at that.
Yet Fuentes himself is almost beside the point. He is not the disease. He is the rash. The real indictment belongs to the adults in the room who know better and say nothing. And here the role of Tucker Carlson must be confronted honestly. Carlson has gone out of his way to present Fuentes not as a crank, but as a serious dissident voice — a misunderstood critic of liberalism, a brave speaker of forbidden truths. In doing so, he has not merely interviewed Fuentes; he has helped normalize the permission structure that allows figures like him to flourish. Carlson need not endorse every vulgar sentence to achieve this effect. He need only signal that Fuentes is worth hearing, worth protecting, worth laundering into respectability.
The consequences are predictable. Republican politicians, media figures, and self-styled anti-establishment conservatives grow wary of drawing lines, not because they doubt Fuentes’ extremism, but because they fear offending the Carlson types. The calculation is crude but unmistakable: Carlson has reach; Fuentes draws from that reach; and no one wants to be seen as attacking an ally of an ally. Thus cowardice compounds itself. Silence becomes prudence. Prudence becomes complicity.
Donald Trump will not confront this movement because he does not arbitrate moral disputes inside his coalition. He is not a thought leader so much as a blunt instrument who acts instinctively.
J.D. Vance’s silence is worse. Vance understands Christianity. He understands the danger of collectivist thinking. He understands that this rhetoric is un-Christian, un-American, and ultimately self-defeating. And yet he remains quiet, not out of confusion, but calculation. This is cowardice masquerading as prudence, and it is precisely the sort of failure one expects from men who prefer proximity to power over the inconvenience of moral clarity.
The Republican establishment follows the same small-minded arithmetic. Our margins are thin, they tell themselves, and Fuentes has a following. We cannot afford to lose these voters. And so they indulge the indulgent, excuse the inexcusable, and congratulate themselves on managing a coalition. They are not managing anything. They are being held hostage. Worse, they have convinced themselves that this is statesmanship.
One wonders whether there is an even more cynical rationalization at work: the belief that these figures serve as the Right’s attack dogs, the unsavory but useful enforcers who frighten the enemy and energize the base. Yes, they are vulgar, but they are our vulgarity. Yes, they are reckless, but they fight dirty — and the Left fights dirty too. They are the bacteria meant to keep the fungus in check. This logic has never ended well. Movements that outsource their aggression to people without moral restraints do not control them. They are eventually discredited by them. More often than not, they are reshaped in their image. The bad guys never remain on the perimeter. They metastasize.
Even if one were inclined to ignore the moral collapse — which one should not — this indulgence is also strategically idiotic. Figures like Fuentes repel normal people. They foreclose coalition-building. They guarantee that every conservative argument will be morally discounted in advance. They lock the Right into a shrinking demographic cul-de-sac and then applaud their own supposed bravery. There is such a thing as addition by subtraction. Having Fuentes on the team is subtraction by addition. The nation wants leaders who call out extremists on their own side. But a party that lacks moral clarity, that lacks any conviction beyond its own advancement, that is addicted to the same grievance theatrics it condemns in others, can only rage and lose.
This cannot be dismissed as a free-speech issue, nor as a personality dispute, nor as a matter of tone. It is a moral and spiritual error, and it must be named as such by conservatives, by Christians, and by anyone who still believes that ideas have consequences.
Nick Fuentes is not the future of conservatism, any more than he is a disciple of Christ. He is a warning. And those who refuse to confront him are not neutral. They are complicit. The time for hedging is over. The time for silence has passed. If conservatism is to survive — morally or politically — it must rediscover the courage to say no, even when doing so costs something. Especially then.
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