But I just sat through 45 minutes of the worst, most antisemitic, misogynist, misanthropic “greatest hits” of Fuentes’s podcasting career, and after listening to it I draw two conclusions: (1) Nick Fuentes is a cynically depraved monster, sincere in his moral corruption; (2) his psychological appeal to lost and disaffected kids is easy enough to recognize. Between the rants about Jews and women I heard a comprehensively corrosive skepticism of all things and institutions, emblems of a failed world that people like him and his audience were born into, one that gave them the short end of the stick. […]
These people are not conservative in the proper sense of the term, and they likely never will be. They have nothing to conserve, no investment in “the system” or the establishment, which has let them down. The idea of respectability itself is a mug’s game to them, one that people are dealt in or out of on the basis of arbitrary political factors — and they are its losers. Fuentes speaks directly to them, and he offers Jews and feminists as an explanation for their helplessness. That is why he is a force for evil. But it would be desperately foolish to ignore why he has drawn his audience: He is tapping into a dark corner of the same “burn it all down” sentiment that is widespread among youth of all political sides. He is drawing on the same slipstream as Zohran Mamdani is — a man who, not at all coincidentally, also smirkingly offers Jews as a convenient scapegoat for the world’s problems.