White nationalism … is getting dumber,” writes Dispatch reporter Surya Gowda, according to one of its paragons.
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In addition to white nationalist live-streamer Nick Fuentes claiming prominent influencers like Candace Owens and Ian Carroll are promoting falsehoods about MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk’s death as “low-IQ antisemitism,” Fuentes has become increasingly critical of his own far-right political faction for being intellectually unserious.
“He’s criticized Dan Bilzerian, a podcaster making a congressional bid in Florida on an anti-Israel agenda, for blaming Jews for all the world’s problems despite not knowing ‘anything about anything,’ and has denounced political activist Jake Shields for promoting Adolf Hitler’s supposed benevolence,” writes Gowda. “Fuentes thinks members of his movement are experiencing a form of “mass psychosis,” in which they are willing to believe every conspiracy theory that exists.”
But Fuentes is not the only white nationalist calling out the creeping idiocy of the movement.
“Richard Hanania was a white nationalist before it was cool,” writes Gowda. “Between 2008 and the early 2010s, he penned pseudonymous articles for little-known alt-right websites, in which he argued things like ‘race mixing is like destroying a unique species or piece of art’ and Hispanics ‘don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation.’ Hanania, however, has long since moved on.”
Hanania, told Gowda in a recent interview however that he now calls himself “a classical liberal” who still believes people still contribute “more to society than others,” but more now due to personal choices than race. Reason and experience changed Hanania’s perspective, he told Gowda. There was also an extreme form of racialism that posits that white people are “biologically predisposed to democracy,” and that white nationalists claim immigration from China, India, and Latin America will make American culture and political norms less democratic.
But then came the Jan. 6 attempted overthrow of U.S. democracy.
“Now, there’s been literally one movement in American history that has attempted a serious coup,” said Hanania, referring to the Capitol riot, in which the overwhelming majority of those arrested were white.
The era of Trumpism, he said, “has just completely discredited that stuff.”
He also blasted the movement’s creeping acceptance of autocracy, as has alt-right figurehead Richard Spencer, who endorsed Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for president in 2020 and 2024, on the basis that liberals are simply more competent managers of the American empire.
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Another one-time white nationalist who recently renounced racialism out of a concern for human excellence, however, is a popular Substack writer who goes by the name Deep Left Analysis, who changed his view after living in majority nonwhite areas during the 2010s.
But all, like Fuentes, often lament that the movement has been “captured by losers and idiots.”
“Still others may continue to complain about the stupidity, conspiracism, and other pathologies endemic to the white nationalist movement but largely fail to either come up with a plan to address them or substantively reevaluate their political positions,” writes Gowda. “Fuentes, for all his condemnation of ‘low-IQ antisemites’ and belief in white excellence, doesn’t seem to know whether or how he can make white nationalism great again, so to speak. His contempt for his audience of ‘complete f—— idiots’ is clear. But, despite calls for the far right to clean up its act, he is unable to escape these dynamics. Indeed, it doesn’t help Fuentes’ case that he has participated in the very dynamics he decries by promoting all manner of conspiracy theories himself,” writes Gowda.
“All signs point toward the white identitarian movement becoming not less populist, conspiratorial, and idiotic in the foreseeable future but more so,” Gowda adds. “Right-wing writer Scott Greer, who was once an associate of Fuentes, explains that ‘conspiratorial populism is the beating heart of internet politics.’ It is both entertaining and only demands of its adherents that they believe in ‘an evil cabal of elites that oppress the noble masses’ and, thus, has wide appeal across ideological and racial lines.”
Far-right influencers have a financial incentive to maximize their audiences by playing to idiot conspiratorial populist sentiment and focusing their commentary toward UFOs and space lasers than immigration, which might turn entire groups off.
“For all intents and purposes, this is the new alternative right,” Greer writes.
“How anyone within the white nationalist movement reacts to this development in the medium- to long-term remains to be seen,” Gowda says. “For some, the uninspiring nature of white nationalists may prompt them to shed racialism in favor of elitism. (As Hanania puts it, they might begin to wonder, ‘Why does this thing I believe only attract losers and idiots?’) Others might invest energy into reconstructing guiding principles for the movement. What seems certain, however, is that a white nationalist movement that lacks a positive vision for white people, let alone humanity, is a movement that’s bound to run out of steam — and perhaps already has.”
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