In the Coen brothers cult comedy The Big Lebowski, Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) says, “Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.” His point is that when you have no identity, Nazism at least gives you a sense of who you are, and of purpose.
It’s a funny line, but now that a rising political influencer in America is an Adolf Hitler-loving, Holocaust-denying 27-year-old incel named Nick Fuentes, we ought to take Sobchak’s observation more seriously. Fuentes positions himself as the voice of a generation of lost white males, and though he comes off as a hysterical ranter—he praises both Hitler and Joseph Stalin—it’s a mistake to underestimate him. Say what you will about the tenets of Groyperism, dude, but at least it’s an ethos.
What is that ethos? Fuentes, now riding high on the boost Tucker Carlson gave him, laid out his core tenets in a couple of recent clips. In this one, he says he is “principally engaged in” trying to organize whites as a political group, to “raise the consciousness of an army.” Why is it, he asks, that Jews, Muslims, and racial minorities have political consciousness, but that is taboo for whites?
