The legendary singer and actress Barbra Streisand once sued a photographer for putting a picture of her cliffside mansion on an obscure website, arguing that it threatened her privacy. Her actions backfired spectacularly. Before the lawsuit, only six people had downloaded the photo. After the lawsuit, hundreds of thousands of people had seen it. The “Streisand effect” has since become a generic term for when an attempt at censorship achieves the opposite of its goal.
If I were writing a glossary entry on the Streisand effect, I wouldn’t put a picture of her next to it. I would put a picture of Nick Fuentes. Fuentes launched his career as a college freshman in 2017 with a barely watched show called America First. In Fuentes’s telling, he was a mainstream Republican in high school. Then Donald Trump’s rise radicalized him against immigration, and the experience of being ostracized by fellow Republicans for questioning Israel radicalized him against Jews as a whole. Whatever the truth of this origin story, it didn’t take much for Fuentes to transform himself from a mainstream conservative into a lover of dictators (including Communist ones), an across-the-board bigot, and a textbook antisemite.
