I did this rant originally for TikTok but thought I’d also share it here. I recorded it the other day, after observing the right wing meltdown over Donald Trump’s announcement that the regime has struck a deal to allow 600,000 Chinese students to obtain visas to attend universities in the U.S. in exchange for a “rare earths” and tariffs deal that honestly feels like a bigger win for China than for the U.S.
Among those issuing angry responses was self-described racist podcaster Nick Fuentes; the “groyper”/incel streamer who has effectively crowned himself the voice of angry, white supremacist young men. He dropped a lengthy response, from which I’ve cut a relevant clip to include in my rant. (I used a longer clip on TikTok that included a screed laying out the specifics of what he and his lot want: namely the literal expulsion of some 10 million undocumented immigrants from the U.S., door-to-door raids, a total halt to all immigration and more, presumably with a whiter country as a result. But most of that isn’t relevant to the point, and also headache-inducing, so it’s not included here.)
But beyond whatever is happening inside this young man’s soul, what was interesting is that he seems to have caught onto to the Republican grift, and now routinely calls it out. Fuentes, a quarter Mexican Chicagoan and self-described racist, attended the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally in 2017 and left college as a result of the backlash. Five years later, after launching his podcast, he was dining with then-former president Trump as the fomer Kanye West’s plus-one at Mar-a-Lago (maybe Trump viewed him as one of the “good people … on both sides.” But through his open and almost giddy racism, Holocaust denial and misogyny, he has placed himself beyond even the Republican Party pale, leaving him, ironically, free to criticize Trump and Republicans in a way the podcast bros whose job is to tow the party line and get young white men to vote as enthusiastic Republicans cannot, and would never do. That’s not a defense of him. It’s just a fact.
With Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza fracturing the right, as it already has done with the Democrats, we’re watching some of the right wing broletariat catch onto the Republican post-George W. Bush game; wherein Republican candidates whip white and even some Black and Latino Americans, particularly men who fear job and economic resource competition from immigrants, into a xenophobic frenzy by name-checking George Soros, adopting the language of white replacement, and taking maximalist positions on immigration, detention and expulsion, only to backslide into safe, pro-big business policies once they’ve retained power. They do this because their real truth is that who they serve are the billionaires who fund them; not the people who tend to vote for them — mainly white Americans who have been groomed by right wing media for decades to believe that not only are all of their problems caused by “illegal immigrants,” Black people, affirmative action and women who won’t shut up and make them a sandwich; but that if they give Republicans enough power, they’ll make all of these bad things go away, clearing the path for them to inherit the Ivy League seats, affluence, jobs, and trophy wives they believe are rightfully theirs, by virtue of being “the real Americans.”
Little did they know, it’s Trump who gets all of those bennies, while they get nothing more than cruel spectacle — which for some folks seems to be enough. But not everyone agrees.
This is my message to disgruntled white Americans who are catching onto the game being played on them, which by the way Republican politicians who serve the billionaire class (and before them, Dixiecrats who served the planter class) have always played the exact same way over the decades: using racial integration, busing, crime, same sex marriage, and more, to whip up votes. They do it because it almost always works — at least, until folks wake up.
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