← To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
To The Contrary with Charlie Sykes
Ali Breland: Nick Fuentes and the Far Right’s Rising Influence
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A
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B
I'm Charlie Sykes. Welcome to the to the Contrary podcast. I hope you're having a great Labor Day weekend. Long weekend. You know, we could dwell on all the things that have been happening in the news over the last week. The initiatification of the cdc, the the attempts to strip the Fed of its independence, Donald Trump's incredibly petty action removing Secret Service protection from Kamala Harris. As so on Brand the occupation of Washington D.C. continues. The occupation of Chicago just seems to be a matter of time. And normally I wouldn't mention a local Wisconsin political story, but I think this one has a Little bit of national resonance. On Friday, we got the surprise news, and this really was a surprise news to people here in Wisconsin that conservative state Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Bradley announced that she is not running for reelection next year. Now, you might remember that the Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have become the most expensive judicial elections in the country, in part thanks to Elon Musk. Remember when Elon Musk parachuted into Wisconsin and pumped something like $20 million into the campaign of another conservative candidate for the Wisconsin Supreme Court and lost badly. In fact, I think you could say that that was one of the turning points in Musk's brief political career. Had he won, he would have been a kingmaker in the Republican Party, the conservative movement. But he not only lost, he lost by a humiliating, humiliating margin in a swing state where these elections are normally very, very close. Well, reading the tea leaves, the incumbent conservative who is one of three conservative members of the court, right now, the liberals have a 4, 3 majority. Rebecca Bradley, who's up for reelection, basically says no mas. I think she recognizes the Musk effect and what's been happening to judicial elections here in Wisconsin, which means that. And again, it's hard to predict these things, but the odds have gone up now that the liberal majority in the Wisconsin Supreme Court will go from 4 to 3 to 5 2. Because of this announcement, which really does come as kind of a surprise. So I mention all of this as we get into the weekend, but what I wanted to do today was to step back and because I continue to be fascinated by the background and the trajectory of right wing ideology. You know that this is something that I talk about a lot. We're joined today by Ali Breland from the Atlantic, who had a remarkable story last week, America's Next Top Racist. And it is about Nick Fuendes. First of all, thanks for joining me, Ali. I appreciate it very much.
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D
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
- [05:15]
B
Okay, let me tell you why I am slightly obsessed with this. Because, and I mentioned this on a podcast earlier this week that somebody else mentioned, you know, that Nick Fuentes is becoming more and more influential. He is the coming thing. And I say, you've got to be kidding me. This guy is a neo Nazi. And I'm not sure about the neo part. And yet part of me remembers this pattern that we've seen over and over again where people that we are tempted to dismiss because they are so extreme or so just is out there suddenly become mainstream. But, but I have to say that Nick Fuentes as you put it, you know, pushes his bigotry, but his influence continues to rise. So let's just talk about that. I mean, there's nothing subtle about Nick Fuente's bigotry, is there?
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D
No, not at all. That's part of the conceit of the piece. Was like this dynamic that I found really interesting with Nick in that he, like you said, is like growing more powerful all the time. But this is not normally how it goes for people like him. There's like this sort of old guard, the sort of freshman class of these, like, far right white supremacists, in some cases neo Nazis. People like Richard Spencer, Andrew Anglin, who ran this website, this neo Nazi website, the Daily Stormer. This cast of guys still exists. They're posting stuff. Spencer has like over 100,000 followers, maybe more. But for the most part, their, their sort of role, their influence, their. Their power is diminished. Nick has doubled down on these same kinds of politics. He's praised Hitler. He says the N word on his streams more regularly. He says like very clearly racist things. There's no like dog whistles with Nick ever. He's just like saying the worst things you can say out loud. But despite some of them.
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B
I mean, some of them, like he has a problem with, from your article, he has a problem with organized, you know, which he described as a transnational gang. Says Hitler was really fucking cool, has said that we need to go back to Burning Women Alive. Uses the N word. You know, talks about being a racist. He doesn't like J.D. vance because J.D. vance is not going to be a racist because he's in a mixed race, married. And again, so people need to understand that there's nothing. We're not projecting anything onto Nick Fuentes.
- [07:36]
D
No, exactly. Yeah. It's like a extremely cut and dried case. Just among the most racist people who has a public platform that you could find. And unlike Spencer and sort of the company he kept, Fuentes's star is still rising. He has become this force that people on the right kind of tried to ignore, tried to dismiss for a long time, but now they feel like they have to engage with them. And people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and even Elon Musk recently kind of tried to attack him by accusing him of being the argument the Knicks fans would say is like a federal agent, but like, you could argue just any kind of plant or agent that he's like his, his support is artificial. They see him as this like, force that needs to be handled because he's becoming a problem.
- [08:21]
B
Okay. So let, let's. Let's quantify. When you say that he's becoming more and more influential, you point out he's one of the most popular streamers on Rumble, which is, people may not know, is a. Is a big right wing platform similar to YouTube. He gets. He gets hundreds of thousands of views for every one of his videos. How else do you quantify his rising influence? I.
- [08:44]
D
This might be a bit of an annoying answer, but like, so in one sense, he is quantifiably, like quite influential. But I think from studying Nick and like following him for a long time, I think that the bulk of his power is actually kind of more qualitative. He is by most metrics, like, less popular than someone like Charlie Kirk or Candace Owens. But he has this sort of very aggressive fan base and very deep following. So like, this is like hard to quantifiably prove, but I would wager that his fan base is more devoted and more hardened than someone like Kirk, even though Kirk has much, much wider reach. And I think that that's what makes Fuentes so powerful is that I wrote a story about Charlie Kirk, I want to say, in like December, January, and that story didn't get like a huge response from TP USA people. This past story I wrote about Fuentes just went extremely viral on Groiper Internet. I got hundreds, over 100 replies of people sort of like engaging with the story that were Groipers and criticizing me. The last time I wrote about Nick Fontes, I wrote a profile of him in 2023 for Mother Jones that got tremendous attention on that section of the Internet. Like his people care a lot, to the point where in the past too, they've shown up at real world events when Nick asks them to. So yeah, like, his influence is very deep in that regard. There's a very passionate base that's into him.
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B
Okay, so just. Could you just define what gripers are?
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D
Yeah, fair. Good question. I take this for granted sometimes, but Groiper is. There's. There's different types of Pepe. The Fr. Pepe is this. This meme that became adopt. It was like a 4chan thing and it became adopted by the far right. Not all of 4chan is far right, but the far right section did adopt Pepe as this like sort of joke figure. There's a specific iteration of Pepe that is called the Groiper. It looks a little bit different and I don't exactly understand how we get from that to Nick Fuentes calling his fans Groiper and themselves calling him Groipers. But that's, that's the link. It's a reference to, to this far right version of Pepe.
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B
Again, I want to just keep establishing this before we get too deep into this from your article about where Fuentes is. And by the way, for people who have long memories, remember when he had dinner with Donald Trump, he and Kanye West, I mean, boy, that was an event at one time. And remember what Donald Trump said about Fuentes? This guy gets me. Okay, just keep that, just keep that in the back of your mind. But you go through all of his rhetoric and this is an interesting paragraph. To me, this is shocking rhetoric. Even in 2025, when the far right has embraced race science and the federal government could be mistaken for pursuing the aims of the proud boys. Proud MAGA figures regularly engage in Fuentes grade bigotry. Consider Laura Loomer, the influencer and Donald Trump confidant. She's called Kamala Harris a DEI Shaniqua and described Indian immigrants as third world invaders. But even XI stops short of the vile slurs and Hitler praise expressed by Fuentes. So the point here is the window has moved so far over that we're talking about people who are saying things and doing things that would have been utterly unacceptable, you know, even in the most conservative circles and now. But even they are not as extreme as the guy who is the rising, one of the rising figures on the right. I mean, this is so. I guess part of it is it feels like there's like a vortex where the frame keeps getting pushed further and further to the right, that it's like watching crack addicts need to up their doses. It's like, no, the crack isn't strong enough. We need the pure methamphetamine. Is that part of what Fuentes is doing that I'm going to say something even more shocking than the people who would have shocked you five minutes ago.
- [12:52]
D
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that is a deliberate part of his project. So since at least 2021, maybe earlier when he started doing this, when he was at Boston University, he specifically and repeatedly said that he sees part of his project as being the person who is like on the vanguard pushing the right to, like the further right or dragging them rather. And so like when in 2019 he did this thing called the Groiper wars, where he urged his followers to show up at real life events and troll people like Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump Jr. Congressman Dan Crenshaw. The function of what he was doing was trying to pressure them in to take Further right positions and sort of be more amenable to the things that he believed in. I think the technical term for this is this is like a version of entry ism where you like try to insert yourself into an existing party and then drag your party towards the direction that you want it to be in. And so that's like what Nick is trying to do. And he said over and over. And so each time that the more mainstream wings of the party move a little bit, right, Nick goes further and further out. Some people, including, like his former allies, like, he has made a lot of enemies that are ideologically aligned with him. They thought that his project would wash out because he'd just go too far to the right at some point. But it's still working. And you can see this really well in like Charlie Kirk, specifically Charlie Kirk and Nick were just at loggerheads back around 2020, prior to 2020. And now Kirk and especially in the last couple of years has started saying things that were unthinkable for Kirk to say. And that Fuentes was saying like five years ago, he. Kirk talks about like a war on whiteness, right? This is like, yeah, okay, rhetoric in 2019. But now Kirk is saying it and grippers are dunking on Kirk saying, you're Nick now you're Nick, like five years ago, like, we brought you over.
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B
This is so interesting because, I mean, there is that pushing some of the rhetoric that we got about the replacement theory, which is now almost mainstream in Republican circles, was again, the kind of thing you would have only found in white nationalist sites a few years ago. So the door was open for a lot of this extreme rhetoric. And so let's talk about that and go a little bit background that, you know, who opened the door for the Nick Fuentes. I mean, so he's pushing the others to the right. But obviously there was a trend in which things that would have been absolutely, you know, unacceptable in the era when Republicans were nominating Mitt Romney and John McCain and people like that for president and now are almost like the background noise of the right wing movement. When did that happen? How did that happen? What's Trump's role?
- [15:40]
D
Yeah, Trump definitely helped aid and abetted. There's this like Fuentes quote, It's pre2020. I forget the specific year. But he very quickly understands and sees Trump. He calls him a like rocket ship that everyone else can latch themselves onto that is moving again, to use the trite phrase, the Overton window to the right. And so Nick both sees, I think, an opportunity in that both for his own, like, personal career gain, but then an opportunity to operate in the space that Trump is, like, opening up to also even move to the right of that and then have like, a sort of, I guess a way of being in a style of politics that is, like, also moving a bunch of other people to the right. And he's also focusing specifically on the youth. I don't think it's, like, super intentional that he's. He's doing that. I think he's just a young person. And so he naturally is equipped to speak to young people and is probably most interesting, interested in influencing his peers, which he does a really good job of. But the other thing about kids sometimes is that, like, edgy stuff is fun, edgy stuff is cool.
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B
It's the counterculture. Yeah, yeah.
- [16:46]
D
Like, it can be. And, like, being an edge lord is, like, nice. And, like, people will grow out of Nick's project, but then he'll find, like, a new, younger cohort. And even the people that grow out of it still, like, carry some of those influences with them. Even if they moderate, they're moderating from a place that's much further to the right as to where they would have moderated from 10 years ago from the politics of their youth. And I think that's, like, playing out all the time. Like, Even from Trump 1 to Trump 2, you can see that there is, like, a larger appetite for these kinds of. For the right things. And I think that that's not entirely because of Nick. I think he understands the ways the wind is blowing, but that's a little bit because of him and, like, who he is able. Been able to influence. I'm rambling, but I want to make one other point on this. Like, he. Campus conservative groups have traditionally been, like, extremely. I think they've been the sort of, like, farm league for the right. And, like, what.
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B
Of course they have, I guess, like.
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D
Yeah, who goes out to be in positions of power later on. And so Nick has been really good about influencing that group of people. He's also tried to sort of influence campus conservative organizations. There's, like, a long track record of TPUSA organizations getting infiltrated by Nick Fontes type gripers and people with his style of politics. And so, like, it's not just his rhetoric. This sort of politics that he's, like, espoused have, like, seeped their way into the future of the party or the people that will become the future of the party.
- [18:13]
B
Well, we need to get to this question. Like, why should people care about this you know, what is the influence that he's going to have on the real world? But, you know, one of the things that is pretty clear is that what you're seeing on the right is there are no gatekeepers anymore. And the gatekeepers and the people who have crashed the gates are unable to prevent others from coming behind them. So let's go back to this period. What did you call it when he and his followers were going to the TP USA things and they were heckling Charlie Kirk. Would they have his name?
- [18:46]
D
The Grand.
- [18:48]
B
Okay, the Grandpa Wars. So I. I really thought at some point, again, perhaps naively, that, you know, when a lot of these very, very, very edgy folks began to break with him, you know, Charlie Kirk, you know, even Marjorie Taylor Greene, even Paul Gosar, Laura Loom, all of these people, Tucker Carlson, are saying, you know, you know, Fuentes has got to go. It hasn't worked. That's amazing to me. So as you mentioned, the name Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer was a very prominent white nationalist white supremacist who is now, I think, very much marginalized. Why does Tucker. Why people like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owen and Charlie Kirk failed to stop the rise of Nick Fuendes? I mean, that's amazing to me. You would think that when these guys were really on the edge, are going, hey, okay, you know what? This guy's too crazy. But it's not working, is it? There's no limit. There's no guardrail.
- [19:51]
D
Yeah. There is two broad answers to this. I think that one of them is technological, and I think that the other is substantive. On the technological bit, Nick just was, like, using the platforms and the technology that were really going to be useful and are useful now in building parasocial relationships with the younger generations that these people that were criticizing him don't have access to or we're not using in the same way. Nick, even now, I think, is being clipped a lot and goes viral on Tik Tok and his, like, style of speaking, too, and his, like, sort of charisma. He's, like, very, very talented. This is something that Tucker, like, acknowledged even as he was criticizing him. He's just, like, very, like, good at what he does. That made him, I think, like, they gave him a broad appeal that put him in a lot of places that made it hard for him to be shut down and pushed out. And then on the sort of substantive bit of it, he spoke specifically to the kinds of things that young people really, really cared about in a way that not no one else, but almost no one else is talking about. And this has made him extremely durable. He has like a sort of ideological, nearly an ideological mode. He's not like completely alone. He talks about the sort of material and financial issues that really stress younger generations out and stress Gen Z out a lot in a way that, that no one else is quite equipped to do. Tucker Carlson gets like very close and I think that he is the other person who speaks to these issues the best. But like ultimately like a guy who's, you know, now he's 26, 27, but when he was 22, 24, that's just like more appealing to listen to someone tell you about these kinds of things who is your own age than Tucker Carlson, who again is good at speaking about them, but you know, lives in like a really nice house in Maine and is really rich right now. I think the other bit of it too, more recently is that Nick is also one of the only voices on the right to kind of give if people are interested in criticizing Israel. Like your options are either to go to the sort of like further left and liberalism or yeah, you don't have another place unless you're a right winger. If you're a right winger. And Nick is like one of the only avenues for that. His avenue is extremely anti Semitic and like bad, but like extremely. This is, this is like I guess how you, this is very appealing, I think to people and makes him very, gives him a lot of power.
- [22:13]
B
Well, you also wrote this. She said the secret to Fuende's success may be that he shares the politics of many far right Trump supporters, but does not position himself as a MAGA personality. He's not limited by the party line or by the desires of wealthy Republican donors. So as he basically say, look, I'm free. I'm gonna give it to you straight. When these other guys are party liners, is that part of the appeal?
- [22:37]
D
There is an aesthetic dimension that I think people read as authenticity that like, of that, that is very appealing. But I think that the actual practical implication of that is that he doesn't even have to say I'm more authentic than these other people. He just simply talks and doesn't ever contradict himself. And so that makes him like super, super attractive.
- [22:59]
B
Okay, so let, let's, let's talk about why this matters. And, and you, you, we've, we've touched on this. I mean, first of all, he clearly, you know, fringe right folks, you know, to the, you know, in his direction. And I've seen this over and over again over the last decade and a half is that nobody wants to be flanked on the right, so they become more and more radical because you don't want to be the establishment figure. So you're starting to see Charlie Kirk saying some of these things. You're starting to see. You're starting to see Tucker Carlson say some of these things. But you also talk about the way that his style is infiltrating the government and our politics. So talk to me a little bit about that, because that's one of those moments where you go, oh, shit. You know, this is part of what's happening that you actually point out that the White House now posts on X in a gleefully cruel style that seems inspired by Fuentes followers. Talk to me about that.
- [23:57]
D
Yeah, I think that the world was really different in 2016 through 2020, but part of the reason that the White House did not post in this style was because there was not anything close to a mainstream, like, meme vocabulary. Even if this isn't mainstream, like, even towards the mainstream of the writer, like, if you were, like, a little bit online, like, it was harder to find these kinds of things. And the posting style that Nick helped promulgate and, like, yeah, like, what he was able to do is establish this language of posting in this, like, really hardcore way that wasn't just him, but was like, sort of of the Internet that he came from.
- [24:38]
B
There's, like, gleefully cruel, though, is a good way of describing it. You know, when you see it, you know exactly what you're talking about.
- [24:45]
D
Yes. Yeah. And he. Now that's, like, what the White House posts to, like, go to the point. They're referencing things like which way Western man. They're referencing this style of not just him, but in the way that he comes from. And there was this specific instance where someone that I was identified as a griper or self identifies. The White House hosted one of their memes, which just kind of shows the reach that his sort of, like, digital footprint has.
- [25:11]
B
And some of the people who are, you know, you know, some of his supporters are in significant positions in the administration. I mean, this is the other thing is to recognize that these. Some of these youth organizations tend to be feeders. And I think the most disturbing name that shows up in your article is Paul Ingrazia. Is that how you pronounce it? He's the liaison to the Department of Homeland Security. And this guy is. Has been. I can't believe this. Has been nominated to lead the U.S. office of Special Counsel. So Paul Ingrassi is a supporter of Nick Fuentes.
- [25:46]
D
Yeah, I think that Paul would contest this. He declined to speak to the story. But what Paul has said to be, to be very clear, so that, you know, the listeners can make their own decisions on this, is that he, in a substack post, wrote free Nick Fuentes when Nick was, I think it was banned from Twitter or something like that. His argument was it was on free speech grounds. But, like, you know, that's a very specific person to make a free speech argument over. Yeah, there's other free speech people he's not. Or issues of censorship he's not talking about. And then he was also at a Nick Fuentes rally. A reporter that was there, Amanda Moore, told NPR that he was there for about 20 minutes. And Gracia disputes this and says he was there for five to 10 minutes, didn't fully understand what was happening and left. But, yeah, it seems like he does know who Nick Fuentes is and seems to have like an interest in him and in. Gracia also has his own sort of like, far right politics and is, again, I don't know if he's a griper for a fact, but he has this sort of griper style of operating online and being aggressive about his political positions and sort of being on this, like, far right kind of vanguard. Nick claims. And the Groiper movement claims to have infiltrated further than just Paul and Gracia. I don't know this for a fact, but it does seem like. Like there is this sort of thing in the water at least that is influencing them to operate more like gripers.
- [27:07]
B
See, this is the thing, the thing in the water. I think what people need to understand is there's like this gravitational pull to the right so that the. You may not use the rhetoric of a Nick Fuentes, but the support for the white ethnostate is there and it's influential. And it's been well documented how. I mean, it's hard for me to even talk about Laura Loomer as less extreme than Nick Fuende is because she is a. I mean, I think she's a crazed, openly bigoted individual. And yet it's been well documented that she's incredibly influential with the Trump administration. We have Tucker Carlson, who's embraced the replacement theory, who's very, very influential on the right. On Friday, in my newsletter, I wrote about Stephen Miller. Again, we all know that Stephen Miller is the. The principal ideologue and perhaps the architect of a lot of the things that are happening day by day. And you read Stephen Miller and he doesn't engage in the kind of, like, really vicious slurs of Nick Fuentes. But it's. I mean, what, what, what is. If you were drawing an ideological map of the world, where would Nick Fuentes, Laura Loomer, Stephen Miller be?
- [28:24]
D
That's a good question. I think that some of the differences appear to be more superficial than substantive.
- [28:36]
B
Like, stylistic.
- [28:38]
D
Yeah, stylistic. Like Fuentes and Loomer used to have a better relationship. I think that they've fallen out for, you know, whatever number of reasons. Maybe Nick was just, like, simply too anti Semitic. I believe that Loomer is Jewish. But to get to your broader point, though, like, all of these coalitions within the Trump administration or within MAGA or on the right are, like, right now, there's kind of. I think Will Summer called it like an Omni battle or an Omni fight or something like that. And there is, like, a lot of tension going on, but they all sort of triangulate together, even when they're in contradiction on these similar sets of positions that they do unite on that are quite concerning. So, like, Bronze Age pervert is another Internet figure that represents Bronze Age pervert.
- [29:22]
B
Okay.
- [29:23]
D
Yeah, he. He's like, far right and has said sort of, like, really nasty things about, like, African Americans or Africans being subhuman. He's quite racist. He and the Groipers and his own cohort of followers. He's quite influential on the online right, too. They're not friends with Nick Fuentes. They have a bunch of sort of beef. They're enemies. But they all come together on sort of issues of, like, far right racism and what they think about black people, what they think about Jewish people. And they're positive, and they're pro mass deportation. And so this kind of underscores like, a sort of, I guess, like, not a good thing if you're, you know, anywhere on the center to the left. But, yeah, not good. Things are sort of very salient right now.
- [30:15]
B
Well, also, part of it is, you see, you talk about sort of the gleefully cruel style. There is that sort of gleeful support of brutality and force as well that you see increasingly gaining traction in MAGA and then reflected in what the President of the United States is actually doing. The. The desire, the appetite, the appetite for the use of force against people who are seen as aliens, who are seen as scum, who are seen as invaders of the country. This is actually pretty now mainstream in MAGA and is reflected in a lot of government policy. For people who are wondering, what is the trajectory here? Somebody asked me well, is Trump gonna feel like he's under pressure from his base to pull the troops out of the cities? Like, no, absolutely. He's going to be cheered on by this sort of thing. I mean, and so I guess this is also the danger that if you have the appetite for this and that appetite is being stoked and is being encouraged, it is scary. And the problem is that even for the more, you know, hardcore MAGA types, if anybody raised their hand and say, hey, maybe we shouldn't be so brutal, maybe we shouldn't be so cruel, they would be filleted on the new right, correct?
- [31:38]
D
Yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, they'd be dogpiled online. There's, I think, people who are in positions of power now that have, like, entrenched themselves or, like, have sat down and, like, have committed to these kinds of positions. The point of, like, all of these things kind of meeting in the middle is it does embolden Trump. And the other thing, too, that's like, I don't. I'm trying not to make a slippery slope argument, but that is a kind of.
- [32:03]
A
Of.
- [32:04]
D
As these things keep going further and further to the right, you can kind of see the inklings of new things that are starting to happen, and they're nascent. That suggests, like, an even further right movement is coming. So, like, mass deportations in the focus on, like, illegal immigrants are, you know, that's like, one thing that the administration has pushed, like, very aggressively. They've also floated and started to talk about, I guess, like, ending birthright citizenship, and then not just ending birthright citizenship, but then revoking the citizenship of citizens whose, like, parents maybe got citizenship or were, like, residents illegally and things like that. And then on the online right, too, you can see a sort of rhetorical framework being established around this kind of argument with this new Internet term. It's not new, but it's become more popular lately called heritage Americans, arguing that people that have been here for generations deserve more owed more than people who have been here for a less amount of time. And you can kind of see these like, like, hierarchies that starts to establish that go further than just, if you're illegal, you need to go, or if you are a criminal, you need to go, then it becomes you're an illegal, and then it becomes, you know, you're not white and we need to strip your citizenship and so on and so forth.
- [33:17]
B
So you touched on this before. But, you know, where does this go? Let's talk about Post Trump. And by the way, I'm Day by day I'm less convinced that Trump is not gonna go for a third term. But let's just say that he doesn't, that we go past this. Your article starts with Nick Fuente attack on JD Vance. That JD Vance is not the guy, that he's not racist enough, he's married to a non heritage American woman. So where do you see this going in terms of the factions? How does it play out, do you think? Yeah, does it break apart? I guess. Is it gonna continue to be this monolith that we've had when Donald Trump has loomed over the political landscape?
- [34:00]
D
I'm curious. I don't fully know, but I do think that these kinds of ideas will continue to live on because the people that are passionate about them have like kind of figured out how to wield the levers of power effectively to make sure that these kinds of very far right, very nativist style politics stays. And like, I mean we'll see what the tech right does. Like I'm not convinced that they're out of the picture at all. Even though they've been more quiet lately. These are people with worth billions of dollars. But I do think that like to the point of what Nick has already established, like there's a group of young people whose politics have been trained and built in this very far right environment. They're not just going to go away. Yeah, people like Vance are ascendant, but at the same time, I mean, I don't know, like no one knows in 2020. We thought politics were heading in like one direction and that, you know, you had these like small towns in Texas and like deep red Texas where people were like having BLM protests and they were polling. First time is saying that racism is like a real problem and that dissipated. So like 180s can happen. I don't know. Some people think that the right is currently overplaying its hand.
- [35:13]
B
You think? So explain something to me that I don't fully understand. You, you, you mentioned, you mentioned the tech bros, the tech billionaires who have tended to be more libertarian and clearly given the nature of their industries, have not been as nativist as other elements of maga. So how does that play out? What, what are the, the tech billionaires you think, are they sitting on the sidelines watching all of this? Because there was a moment where Elon Musk actually got into kind of a fight about the whole question of visas for high, you know, for, for, for tech workers and things like that. I mean there's an inherent strain. There isn't There.
- [35:52]
D
Yeah. I don't want to claim to have like too much inside knowledge into this, but my rough sense of sort of like observing from the outside is that it seems like these people are in some ways sincere ideological actors, but they also operate in their own best interests. And in that there has not been political fights in the administration that have been like super germane to their interests. Like the H1B fight was over high skilled immigration, that they found it probably in their best interest to kind of be quieter. That said, they do definitely care about things that are not just purely related to their own bottom line. There's an interesting moment, and I'm curious to know where he is on it now, where Marc Andreessen was tweeting cryptically a lot about the Civil Rights act and how it was a vector for how it was like he saw it as a weakness that forced tech companies to hire Chinese people that could potentially, in his view be national security threats by stealing technology and bringing it back to China. That rolling back the Civil Rights act is. Is something that I guess, like, he sees as potentially benefiting him, but is also like, you know, the sort of weird ideological project. I don't know if he's interested in doing that again. He was tweeting very cryptically about it, but there are things that like, I think could cause them to. To get interested and remobilized again. They're very powerful people. So, like, I don't know, it's just a matter of time.
- [37:24]
B
Whatever happened to Elon Musk, by the way? Have you heard of him at all?
- [37:28]
D
Yeah, I mean, he, he's like out tweeting. He's like, become. This is not news. But like there was. Did you see like the Scottish, the woman that went viral on right wing Twitter?
- [37:40]
B
Yeah, tell me about.
- [37:42]
D
Yeah, yeah, it seems like it was like there was a lot of misinformation about it, but like, Elon Musk was right up there with this far right figure, Tommy Robinson, and disseminating information. He's like, there's just like a full singularity between him and people like Alex Jones and, And sort of dissemin these conspiracy theories.
- [38:02]
B
You know, I mean, you mentioned now I started thinking about Elon Musk among the things that kind of have gotten lost in all the shuffle of all of the shock and awe and going back to the white ethnostate. How extraordinary it is that the Trump administration is giving refugee status to white South Africans at the same time it is shutting the door to people all around the world again, just a Few years ago, the notion that somehow we would embrace white South Africans uniquely as victims would have been so absurd, and yet it is now official US Government policy. So if you wonder what the sort of the, the penumbra, the echo of some of this is, you're seeing it in things like that. But that's Elon Musk, right? The South African thing, which is weird.
- [38:50]
D
Yeah, yeah. He has certainly gone like an ideological. I wouldn't call it a progression, an ideological art. He has been on an ideological arc that is, like, hard to. To fully grasp or understand from, like, the Obama years where he, he did see himself as like a liberal or a Democrat. But, yeah, that kind of thing does, I think, to the point you're making or you're hinting at, like, give up the entire game. This is like a group of people that they supposedly needed help, but there was only like, I think a few dozen of them that ended up coming here. It's just, it also speaks to, I guess, like, how willing Trump is to sort of engage in this sort of croniest things that, like, do not really benefit, like, a large amount of people, but benefit, like, what people around him want. It's like he sees politics, again, as this, like, very transactional thing. And to bring it back to Fuentes, though, it's like he's helped create these kinds of people that have these, these far right politics. They're going to be around people like Trump and further in the administration. They're going to be sitting there with, like, the leverage to try to enact their vision to someone who is, like, fairly transactional, like Trump, if they offer him the right things at the right moment.
- [40:01]
B
No, I mean, this moment could be. I mean, could be one of those moments that we're going to feel the, you know, the reverberations for 40 or 50 years. You know, you think about the influence of, say, the late 1960s, 1968, all those people that came into politics during that period, you know, how much influence they had in previous decades. And that could be the same. You know, part of me is naive enough, I hate to say, describe myself as naive, but, you know, wants to think that some of these young people will grow up and look back at some of the things they're tweeting and putting out with horror and regret, but you just never know. So this piece is, I have to say I've been. Is a really important piece. It's in the Atlantic. America's next top racist. No matter how far Nick Fuentes pushes his bigotry, his Influence continues to rise. It is really a must read. Ali Breland, thank you so much for your time this weekend. I appreciate it.
- [40:57]
D
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on.
- [41:00]
B
And thank you all for listening to this Labor Day weekend edition of to the Contrary podcast. You know why we do this, why we're going to continue to do this into the fall, into the winter, and as long as it takes. Because we need to keep reminding, reminding ourselves that we are not the crazy ones. Thank you.
- [41:19]
A
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