Strikes me as on the money. I'm not up to speed on Fuentes, but that's just because nothing I've seen has garnered enough interest to warrant the trouble. But the sick and tired of the "go in the corner and live little lives" strikes me as real. Anyone who dares to long for more is considered a threat.
Not to ideologically align myself with a character like Nick Fuentes; he is problematic in a lot of ways - but I think dismissing him as a fringe "Hitler loving Nutcase" and chalking up his reach and influence to the immaturity of disaffected young white Christian men (maybe not your conscious opinion but implicit in your writing) is akin to the boomer's cogitative dissonance you write about often. Young people, of all political persuasions, do not like Israel nor large multinational corporations owned by the same 3 investment companies. I respect you not being interested in writing on these topics and don't expect you to address every political issue people are concerned with; but taking pot shots and dismissing legitimate voices that talk about stuff others don't want to is not a great look to your Gen Z readers. Fuentes has also been known to say "black-pilling is gay" so to say he pedals in hopelessness seems to me a mischaracterization.
I'm not an expert on Fuentes but I've actually listened to some him over the years and have never once encountered anything that seemed like self-improvement advice. I agree that much of his content is well within the range of what many people on the right believe, but the stuff about Jews is definitely in there. Just go to his Rumble page and look at how many of his videos have "Jew" in the title. Frankly, he's a classic antisemite in that he's become obsessed with Jews, and as continued becoming more obsessed with them over time.
I don't really get Fuentes, but your reaction seems fair. What I've been able to piece together is it seems like there are multiple levels of irony and in-jokes going on with him, such that I don't really know what he believes and don't care enough to figure it out, if he even wants people to be able to figure it out.
I would still say AVOID in any event, but I think Aaron was a little too dismissive here, even if he's basically correct.
>do not like Israel
I still think the median younger person is apathetic towards Israel. This still represents a major change from superlative Boomer support for Israel. There's a lot of hatred for Israel / support for Palestine among normie leftists, but on the right it's mostly only among online weirdos.
>nor large multinational corporations owned by the same 3 investment companies
This isn't really true, but dislike for "capitalism", however understood, is a real trend among the young.
I won’t go as far to guess your age just by your reaction to my comment, but I would warn you to underestimate the radicalization of young people at your own peril. Pretending it’s only a small number of chronically online incel weirdos will not make them go away. (I am married with a screentime of around 2 hrs a day so I don’t identify with this group but have a lot of friends and acquaintances that do)
A large part of the reason I have trouble buying this stuff is I just haven't seen it. I've seen my share of anti-black racism over the years, but I've never really been exposed to anti-Semitism IRL. However it has been all over a number of rightist parts of the Internet for a long time, going back to at least the days of the "blogosphere" of the 00s.
But the Palestine stuff, it's everywhere on the left. I'm only still personally in touch with a few leftist childhood friends, but they're all worked up over Palestine, or they were when it was the peak activist issue. And I was familiar with it as a leftist issue even among classmates in high school.
Of course, what's very dead among younger Christians is the Dispensationalist Zionist stuff. I've also experienced that stuff IRL among the old folks, and the young are just puzzled by it. But in an apathetic way.
The average Gen Z Trump voter is well to the left of the average Aaron Renn reader. The average Gen Z leftist is well to the left of her Democrat-voting parents.
I don't think I underestimate the youth's radicalism -- but I'm more of the thinking that sometime after the Boomers and Gen X are out of the picture, the dam is going to break and there will be a leftist surge that dwarfs the Great Awokening.
I'll second this. I've recently had a young man walk into my church that is steeped in Fuentes stuff, and studying it has been opening my eyes. I think pagan groyper wearing Christianity as a skinsuit is going to join Islam and woke/therapeutic/post-Christianity as the main competitor worldviews that are seeking to supplant Christianity.
Can you say more? Maybe an example or two? I take it you mean something different than the typical Driscoll "Man Up" lecture, but what it would be isn't clear to me.
I can at least give a parallel experience I saw at a Southern Baptist university.
My students were deeply, deeply contemptuous of a "born again virgin" presentation they got at chapel. Basically, the guest pastor taught that if you had pre-marital sex, you could ask Christ to restore your virginity and then your future marriage would be just as pure as if you had waited until your marriage night. He said that a man who judges a woman on her number of sexual partners was a sinner and that Christian men had an obligation to marry a woman who had her virginity restored in this way.
After the pastor finished, a woman got up and talked about her evidently lengthy sexual past. Unfortunately, this was one of the few chapels I missed for a doctor's appointment so I only got it second-hand from the students in my Constitutional Law course. They claimed that she was basically boasting at having a significant number of sexual partners, with her husband on the stage behind her looking humiliated. She said that she went to this pastor, prayed with him, and Jesus had returned her virginity. Then God, evidently, sent this man to be her husband and became her first on their wedding night.
This was in the late 2010's, so my students would have been born around the turn of the millennium. The ones I talked with about this chapel were pretty outraged. Normally, chapel doesn't come up very often in casual conversation but they were already talking about it when I entered the classroom and wanted to know my take on it right away. Their basic take was 1. Born-again virginity is nonsense, God forgives sin he doesn't remove consequences, 2. This woman had grievously wronged her husband by doing this chapel, and 3. the pastor was a con-artist lying to middle-aged women to fill his offering plate.
They did not use typical manosphere language with me. I don't know if they were unfamiliar with it or if they were afraid to use that kind of language in front of a professor at a Baptist college. The things they were saying, though, definitely have manosphere counterparts.
I think the moral of this sort of absurd stunt is that those involved don’t actually take sexual sin seriously. They apparently have been more influenced by the sexual revolution than they realize. I believe in the forgiveness of sins. I believe truly evil people can change—I’ve seen it happen. But I’ll believe that pastor can restore virginity when I see him restore a drunkards liver, bring back a murderers victims from the dead, and put money that has been wasted back into people’s bank accounts. Sin can really be forgiven—and God can truly restore the years the locusts have eaten—but the temporal consequences don’t simple disappear. No reasonable person makes this claim for other sins that serious—and no one who makes this claim for this one is a reasonable person.
Good night, that is *insane.* If I was writing a satirical work on the topic of how the evangelical establishment has tended to treat men's sin and women's sin, I would avoid including anything close to that as too unbelievable.
What university was this?
(As a side note, if someone who was promiscuous in the past demonstrates genuine contrition and changed behavior, it would be unfair to judge them for what they were rather than what they are. On the other hand, my name isn't Hosea. IKYKY.)
The advice I've given young men is that there is no biblical right for any woman to be married and no preacher should ever tell them they're obligated to adopt a person's children by another father. If they are uneasy about a woman's past, they have a right to not have baby-daddy drama or past partner poison in their marriage.
I think you're in the minority insofar as Christian people with authority are concerned. There is so much shaming and pressuring of men, and of course none of women.
Like, yeah, I'm in my early 30s. Statistically I will probably have to marry a divorcee and/or one of those types of women. But good grief don't tie it to my Christian walk or act like I'm some no account loser or playboy for not being married yet. Not like I or any of the *many* other Christian men (and boy howdy I know a decent number in my personal life) wanted life to play out like this.
Strikes me as on the money. I'm not up to speed on Fuentes, but that's just because nothing I've seen has garnered enough interest to warrant the trouble. But the sick and tired of the "go in the corner and live little lives" strikes me as real. Anyone who dares to long for more is considered a threat.
Not to ideologically align myself with a character like Nick Fuentes; he is problematic in a lot of ways - but I think dismissing him as a fringe "Hitler loving Nutcase" and chalking up his reach and influence to the immaturity of disaffected young white Christian men (maybe not your conscious opinion but implicit in your writing) is akin to the boomer's cogitative dissonance you write about often. Young people, of all political persuasions, do not like Israel nor large multinational corporations owned by the same 3 investment companies. I respect you not being interested in writing on these topics and don't expect you to address every political issue people are concerned with; but taking pot shots and dismissing legitimate voices that talk about stuff others don't want to is not a great look to your Gen Z readers. Fuentes has also been known to say "black-pilling is gay" so to say he pedals in hopelessness seems to me a mischaracterization.
I'm not an expert on Fuentes but I've actually listened to some him over the years and have never once encountered anything that seemed like self-improvement advice. I agree that much of his content is well within the range of what many people on the right believe, but the stuff about Jews is definitely in there. Just go to his Rumble page and look at how many of his videos have "Jew" in the title. Frankly, he's a classic antisemite in that he's become obsessed with Jews, and as continued becoming more obsessed with them over time.
I don't really get Fuentes, but your reaction seems fair. What I've been able to piece together is it seems like there are multiple levels of irony and in-jokes going on with him, such that I don't really know what he believes and don't care enough to figure it out, if he even wants people to be able to figure it out.
I would still say AVOID in any event, but I think Aaron was a little too dismissive here, even if he's basically correct.
>do not like Israel
I still think the median younger person is apathetic towards Israel. This still represents a major change from superlative Boomer support for Israel. There's a lot of hatred for Israel / support for Palestine among normie leftists, but on the right it's mostly only among online weirdos.
>nor large multinational corporations owned by the same 3 investment companies
This isn't really true, but dislike for "capitalism", however understood, is a real trend among the young.
I won’t go as far to guess your age just by your reaction to my comment, but I would warn you to underestimate the radicalization of young people at your own peril. Pretending it’s only a small number of chronically online incel weirdos will not make them go away. (I am married with a screentime of around 2 hrs a day so I don’t identify with this group but have a lot of friends and acquaintances that do)
I'm an elder Millennial.
A large part of the reason I have trouble buying this stuff is I just haven't seen it. I've seen my share of anti-black racism over the years, but I've never really been exposed to anti-Semitism IRL. However it has been all over a number of rightist parts of the Internet for a long time, going back to at least the days of the "blogosphere" of the 00s.
But the Palestine stuff, it's everywhere on the left. I'm only still personally in touch with a few leftist childhood friends, but they're all worked up over Palestine, or they were when it was the peak activist issue. And I was familiar with it as a leftist issue even among classmates in high school.
Of course, what's very dead among younger Christians is the Dispensationalist Zionist stuff. I've also experienced that stuff IRL among the old folks, and the young are just puzzled by it. But in an apathetic way.
The average Gen Z Trump voter is well to the left of the average Aaron Renn reader. The average Gen Z leftist is well to the left of her Democrat-voting parents.
I don't think I underestimate the youth's radicalism -- but I'm more of the thinking that sometime after the Boomers and Gen X are out of the picture, the dam is going to break and there will be a leftist surge that dwarfs the Great Awokening.
This seems relevant:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-178607709
I'll second this. I've recently had a young man walk into my church that is steeped in Fuentes stuff, and studying it has been opening my eyes. I think pagan groyper wearing Christianity as a skinsuit is going to join Islam and woke/therapeutic/post-Christianity as the main competitor worldviews that are seeking to supplant Christianity.
> hate, hate, hate the
> therapeutic blended family stuff
> they hear in church.
Can you say more? Maybe an example or two? I take it you mean something different than the typical Driscoll "Man Up" lecture, but what it would be isn't clear to me.
I can at least give a parallel experience I saw at a Southern Baptist university.
My students were deeply, deeply contemptuous of a "born again virgin" presentation they got at chapel. Basically, the guest pastor taught that if you had pre-marital sex, you could ask Christ to restore your virginity and then your future marriage would be just as pure as if you had waited until your marriage night. He said that a man who judges a woman on her number of sexual partners was a sinner and that Christian men had an obligation to marry a woman who had her virginity restored in this way.
After the pastor finished, a woman got up and talked about her evidently lengthy sexual past. Unfortunately, this was one of the few chapels I missed for a doctor's appointment so I only got it second-hand from the students in my Constitutional Law course. They claimed that she was basically boasting at having a significant number of sexual partners, with her husband on the stage behind her looking humiliated. She said that she went to this pastor, prayed with him, and Jesus had returned her virginity. Then God, evidently, sent this man to be her husband and became her first on their wedding night.
This was in the late 2010's, so my students would have been born around the turn of the millennium. The ones I talked with about this chapel were pretty outraged. Normally, chapel doesn't come up very often in casual conversation but they were already talking about it when I entered the classroom and wanted to know my take on it right away. Their basic take was 1. Born-again virginity is nonsense, God forgives sin he doesn't remove consequences, 2. This woman had grievously wronged her husband by doing this chapel, and 3. the pastor was a con-artist lying to middle-aged women to fill his offering plate.
They did not use typical manosphere language with me. I don't know if they were unfamiliar with it or if they were afraid to use that kind of language in front of a professor at a Baptist college. The things they were saying, though, definitely have manosphere counterparts.
Thanks, Benjamin, that's exactly the kind of account I was looking for.
And good grief, if that's not Babylon Bee material I don't know what is! I am with Tom below; that reads like over the top satire.
It's not, sadly.
I think the moral of this sort of absurd stunt is that those involved don’t actually take sexual sin seriously. They apparently have been more influenced by the sexual revolution than they realize. I believe in the forgiveness of sins. I believe truly evil people can change—I’ve seen it happen. But I’ll believe that pastor can restore virginity when I see him restore a drunkards liver, bring back a murderers victims from the dead, and put money that has been wasted back into people’s bank accounts. Sin can really be forgiven—and God can truly restore the years the locusts have eaten—but the temporal consequences don’t simple disappear. No reasonable person makes this claim for other sins that serious—and no one who makes this claim for this one is a reasonable person.
Good night, that is *insane.* If I was writing a satirical work on the topic of how the evangelical establishment has tended to treat men's sin and women's sin, I would avoid including anything close to that as too unbelievable.
What university was this?
(As a side note, if someone who was promiscuous in the past demonstrates genuine contrition and changed behavior, it would be unfair to judge them for what they were rather than what they are. On the other hand, my name isn't Hosea. IKYKY.)
I taught at Louisiana Christian University.
The advice I've given young men is that there is no biblical right for any woman to be married and no preacher should ever tell them they're obligated to adopt a person's children by another father. If they are uneasy about a woman's past, they have a right to not have baby-daddy drama or past partner poison in their marriage.
I think you're in the minority insofar as Christian people with authority are concerned. There is so much shaming and pressuring of men, and of course none of women.
Like, yeah, I'm in my early 30s. Statistically I will probably have to marry a divorcee and/or one of those types of women. But good grief don't tie it to my Christian walk or act like I'm some no account loser or playboy for not being married yet. Not like I or any of the *many* other Christian men (and boy howdy I know a decent number in my personal life) wanted life to play out like this.
Just when I thought I was out…
I mean bless you for not just dumping on young men.