It’s easy to spot, but hard to defuse.
Probably the best-known thing Nick Fuentes has ever said about women is that a lot of them want to be raped. After his interview with Tucker Carlson touched off a frenzy of dispute over his influence on the American Right, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro showed a clip of Fuentes, in his signature peekaboo style, acting almost embarrassed to say that “there’s, like, a lot of women that really want a guy to beat the sh*t out of them.”
This is how most people encounter Fuentes, if they don’t watch his daily livestreams on the YouTube alternative, Rumble: they see portions of his show lifted onto other platforms to reveal, and deplore, what he really believes. Part of what makes this a slippery business is that Fuentes likes to dance around the edges of ideas that gain appeal as he feigns reluctance to state them outright. One of his many skills as a broadcaster is to give the constant impression of being forced against his will to confront uncomfortable realities about which he alone, though it pains him, is willing to be honest.
His bit about rape, for example, is one he developed on an earlier episode—apparently lost in one of Fuentes’s many expurgations from various hosting platforms, but partially available on Rumble for now. “Look,” says Fuentes, “you need to hear this. You need to hear this, I’m sorry.” Then he goes on to badly misread the abstract of a 2009 study, and to conclude that “only 9% of women are completely averse to having a rape fantasy.” What the study actually found was that 62% of women have had rape fantasies, and of those 62%, only 9% were completely repulsed by them. This would mean, if the study is accurate, that about 56% of women have fantasized about rape with at least some pleasure.
Details, details. Fifty-six percent is still technically a majority. Fuentes might be innumerate, but he’s still not wrong in the eyes of the “groypers,” his most devoted followers. They are interested in Fuentes’s larger point, which is that some basic truths have been made illicit even to contemplate. He thinks one of those truths is that, as he told Tucker, “the whole political system is just based around women never being accountable for their choices.” Another is that most women want to be raped.
“This is the facts, folks! Am I an extremist for showing you facts?” asked Fuentes after skimming the 2009 abstract. “I used to be a normal person! I used to be a normal person, and then I started reading all these kinds of facts.” This one outburst could serve to define Fuentes’s entire persona. He presents himself as a nice kid who got “mugged by reality,” as Irving Kristol once said of the neo-conservatives Fuentes now despises. Once upon a time, he listened to Fox News’s Mark Levin—“that goes to show how normie I was,” he said to Tucker. But then, the story goes, he was forced reluctantly out of the mainstream by his refusal to ignore true things—about women, about black people, and, of course, about Jews—which had been made unsayable.
There are such things, of course. When the social scientist Charles Murray examined the evidence that average racial differences in IQ are partly genetic in his book The Bell Curve, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that “Mr. Murray can protest all he wants, his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a n***er.” On the subject of women, before Larry Summers was revealed to have exchanged scandalous emails with the infamous sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, he had to resign as president of Harvard for a much sillier reason: he speculated that women’s different tastes and aptitudes might lead them, on average, away from career paths in science and technology.
How precisely nature and nurture intertwine to produce those differences, and what we should aspire to do about them, is a delicate matter worthy of serious discussion. But it hardly needs saying at this point that, for a good stretch, such discussion was placed vigorously out of bounds for anyone who wanted a glamorous or well-funded career. This was maddening. It also made it nigh on impossible to draw some pretty important social distinctions between things you shouldn’t say because they’re false, things you shouldn’t fixate on because it’s rude, and things you should discuss in serious company, but with nuance and care.
In matters of race and sex, all those different kinds of things were often treated as equally incendiary. They got lumped together into a big and jumbled category of “things you can’t say”—in any spirit, for any purpose, at any time. The predictable result was that many young people, watching their elders for cues about how to operate as adults in the world, concluded that all politically incorrect statements belonged in a single category of things you must not think, for some dispositive but mysterious reason. The reason, they concluded, must be that every forbidden thing is true.
This is what makes it counterproductive—though it is often perfectly justified and extremely tempting—to address Fuentes with expressions of disgust or moral indignation. Those are the same rhetorical modes that groypers have come to treat ipso facto as signs of panic and dishonesty on the part of dissembling adults. In the groypers’ estimation, a taboo marks a forbidden truth the way an X marks the site of buried treasure on a map: there is simply no other reason for it to be there. The fact that rules of speech in polite society often serve many other purposes—to delineate standards of basic decency, for example, or to close off failed avenues of thought that have already been pursued with disastrous consequences—has ceased to matter very much. The healthy functions of social nicety, and the legitimate occasions of moral outrage, have been manipulated and mangled so thoroughly that they have lost a lot of their plausibility. Invoking them now tends to make things worse.
So when people describe Fuentes as a misogynist—which he is—or a racist—which he also is—those otherwise apt descriptors ring like the hollow pejoratives they have become after being so recklessly over-used for so long. They give Fuentes license to maintain that he’s being “canceled” for “just asking questions.” The right-wingers he courts are the ones most likely to be drawn in by this claim, because so many of their fellows really have been viciously calumniated for sincerely asking questions or acknowledging sensitive facts. “Now I’m being canceled by the Right,” Fuentes told Tucker—and when Tucker was in turn criticized for giving Fuentes such a sympathetic interview, he too positioned himself as a victim of right-wing cancel culture.
President Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, whose “Project 2025” was indeed the object of baseless mass hysteria during last year’s presidential race, leapt to Tucker’s defense against what he called a “venomous coalition” of would-be censors. It was a colossal unforced error on Roberts’s part. What led him into it, though, was an instinct to defend allies from public denunciation by default. That is an instinct that developed gradually and for good reasons on the Right, to stave off years of bad-faith attacks. Now, after long and painful experience, many conservatives are primed to side with anyone who claims to be the victim of a witch hunt. That’s why Fuentes wants so very much to come off as one.
In light of all this, it’s worth being calm but specific about what Fuentes is actually up to. Take the rape clip as a case study. The basis of it is a factual inaccuracy: Fuentes is wrong about how many women, in the study he’s reading, report having pleasurable rape fantasies. This is important, since his next move is to make a show of having no choice but to follow the facts where they lead (“Am I an extremist for showing you facts?”).
Really, the supposed facts are incidental to the sentiment, which is that women are the opposite of whatever liberal feminism insists they are. Fuentes doesn’t have to say this outright; his audience already suspects it to be true. All he has to do is insinuate that the data, however he may have misconstrued it, leads inevitably to the unspoken, unspeakable, and therefore enthralling reality. This he does with evident relish and masterful finesse. “When you look at a woman, does this change how you look at a woman and what you think of her?… Does this change maybe how you would treat them?” We know what the answer is supposed to be. From the unstated premise that we have always been told to think of women as intelligent, independent equals to men, we are invited to conclude that they are in fact emotional, irrational sub-humans who secretly want to be raped.
It’s not that hard to explain why civilized people don’t talk about women in this way: not first and foremost because it’s mean, but because it’s false. It’s a pinched, feverish, and incomplete assessment of the human species that wouldn’t follow even from Fuentes’s mistaken premises. The fact that some women fantasize about being raped doesn’t reveal the true nature of womanhood, any more than the fact that some men fantasize about raping reveals the true nature of manhood. Groypers are as wrong about this in their way as critics of “rape culture” are in theirs, and for the same reason: neither men nor women are mere animals defined by their raw urges. That’s not something we pretend to think because we can’t bear to admit otherwise; it’s something we believe because it’s true.
It wasn’t second-wave feminists, despite their pretensions to the contrary, who came up with the idea that women are fully rational people. That idea emerged over generations of experience and careful thought beginning at least with the Bible’s 31st book of Proverbs, if not earlier. It wasn’t Gloria Steinem who said that women “have received from the gods the gift of reason,” or that “not only men, but women too, have a natural inclination toward virtue and the capacity for acquiring it.” It was the first-century A.D. philosopher Gaius Musonius. Whatever else we may rightly say about the differences between the sexes, the inherited wisdom of centuries has taught us to see women as equal in humanity to men, not as a matter of decorum but as a matter of reason and revelation both.
On this as on most of his favorite subjects, Fuentes borrows the alluring fragrance of the secret to cover up the stench of the simply false. This is easy to do in areas where moral consternation is often substituted for rational argument. That is why organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, ostensibly devoted to fending off anti-Semitism, have often inadvertently made it easier for people like Fuentes to traffic in it. In a report entitled “Very Fine People,” for instance, the ADL argues for using machine learning “to recognize and remove prohibited speech” from online platforms. The report invokes, but never defends, the persistent canard that President Trump called murderous white supremacists “very fine people.” (He actually went out of his way to clarify that he was referring not to violent rioters, but to peaceful demonstrators on both sides of the fraught debate over tearing down Confederate statuary.) At one point the report lists, among signs of incipient hate speech, “conspiracy theories about Jews, and pro-Trump messaging.” Crying wolf like this only makes it more difficult to credit accusations of anti-Semitism even when, as in Fuentes’s case, the real deal is at the door.
So when Fuentes suggests that the Holocaust was a hoax, this obvious lie takes on the savor of a daring transgression, and efforts to refute it are tainted by association with efforts to suppress free speech. When he insinuates that “perfidious Jews” need to be executed, or that he wants an underage bride, his defenders conflate legitimate objections with performative disgust. If it’s true that criticisms of feminism or Israel are sometimes treated as tantamount to death threats against women or Jews, then it must also be true, the groypers reason, that hatred of women and Jews is as legitimate as criticism of feminism and Israel. The logical fallacy is easy to identify but alarmingly hard to defuse. It needs careful handling. If it continues to gain purchase, groyperism will be a political loser at best and a civilizational disaster at worst. But making the case against it will take more than pointing at it and sputtering.
Above all, answering the groypers will require mounting a forthright and courageous, but also clear and patient, defense of basic principles that have been given a bad name by many of their supposed defenders. It’s easy to feel like advanced societies shouldn’t have to explain why people are, though racially and sexually different, equal in the rights to life and liberty that belong to them as human beings. But that idea, wrought carefully over millennia, has been sufficiently manipulated in the past century that it now needs explanation and demonstration to new generations who have too often encountered it in perversely degraded forms. If it has fallen on hard times, it has this indispensable advantage: it is true, and the resources for defending it are richly on offer in the Western intellectual tradition. It’s time to make the case for it again.
