I had hoped to blithely scribble my last page and be laid onto my final satin pillow never having dealt with Nick Fuentes.
I’d heard snippets of the twenty-something yap about Hitler being “cool” and Stalin “a great man of history,” so why desire to explore his mind further? But he’s going mainstream, hitting the biggest of the half-disgraced-media-stars’ podcasts, Tucker Carlson and now Mr. Morgan. So here we are.
It is said to be a generational thing, whether you think Piers Morgan or Nick Fuentes “won” the interview on Piers’s podcast last week. But I know young people who thought Nick lost and old people who thought he won handily.
The point, however, is not that Mr. Fuentes won, but that Piers Morgan lost.
He went into the interview aiming to milk every “gotcha” possible, making Fuentes repudiate past statements or pin him as an evil “racist” and “sexist” and “misogynist” if he wouldn’t.
Piers had unhinged himself from any objectivity, so committed was he to his objective of destroying. And failed.
Why?
Piers doesn’t realize how the values he holds — of being anti-racist and anti-sexist, etc. — are now on shaky ground. Progressives and liberals and centrists have all school-marmed these topics so much and with so little precision (and no generosity) that the young men of Nick Fuentes’s generation are, apparently, over it. Completely.
The dominant moral paradigm since World War II has been unified by treating Hitler as the Devil — that and a general self-congratulatory pride in not being racist and sexist and such. Yes, Hitler was put down: a great success. Yes, the subjugation of the Negroes was ended: the Civil Rights movement won. Bigly. But Nick just smirks. “Sure I’m racist,” apparently earnestly meaning that he’s not complying with the old rite: ask forgiveness for every joke or hyperbole made against the Hitler’s The Devil cult.
Nick’s excuse is the current (and inarguable) context: a post-war ideological consensus that ended in persecuting — or, at least, continual denigration of and discrimination against — young white men, especially young Christian white men.
In this context all the accusations amount to nothing. They are wet noodles instead of the flails as in days of yore, in the days of the Silents and the Boomers. “The Age of Man is over; the Age of the Orc has begun,” rung through my mind as Nick Fuentes smirked his superiority over the old scold Piers.
Being a moralistic Grundy no longer cuts it, Piers. You have to acknowledge more devils, come up with coherent policy, and address interviewees — even those you loathe — with a hint of respect.
The Age of the Anti-Hitler is over; the Age of the Anti-Woke has begun.
We could have asked for a better bellwether. But it’s not up to us individually. I was over the Age of Anti-Hitler decades ago, and have been weaning myself off the moral preening about race and misogyny for years now. There are more devils and better issues. But what we’re left with at the moment is Nick Fuentes smirking over the limp-witted Ms. Grundy, Piers Morgan.
