The Other McCain

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Elliot Rodger and Nick Fuentes: The Satanic Politics of Self-Destruction

Posted on | December 24, 2022 | Comments Off on Elliot Rodger and Nick Fuentes: The Satanic Politics of Self-Destruction

The first I remember hearing of Nick Fuentes was when Michelle Malkin tried to retrieve him from the trash dump of Jew-hating nihilism. That must have been 2019, and I don’t know if Malkin (whom I greatly admire) has expressed regret over the evident failure of that effort.

Malkin has been a stalwart opponent of our de facto open borders policy for as long as I’ve known her, and I suppose she must have seen some potential in Fuentes and his following of “Groypers.” Try to steer these misguided young fellows back onto the path of sanity, she probably figured in her maternal way, but three years later there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of reform, as Fuentes continues to play the role of Holocaust-denying Pied Piper, a sort of 21st-century Willis Carto.

Those who take the turn down the Jew-hating road never arrive at any good destination, and surely this is no coincidence. Clearly, God intends to keep the promise quoted in Genesis 12:3, and no wise man would deliberately choose to get on the wrong side of that issue.

Having always been a philo-Semite, and somewhere to the right of Bibi Netanyahu in terms of my ultra-Zionist tendencies, I have long contemplated the cosmic significance of such things, but realize that “now we see through a glass, darkly,” and must patiently await the workings of divine providence. But I digress . . .

Hate Leader Nick Fuentes
Is Recruiting Incels
The racist troll who dined with Trump is courting
a new online following: raging misogynists.

That’s the headline on a 2,500-word story in Mother Jones, where the editors apparently believe it is newsworthy that guys who can’t get laid could be an important political constituency. Am I the only one who wonders about the correlation between (a) conspiratorial hatred of Jews and (b) inability to get laid? It’s sort of like the connection between feminism and obesity, I suspect. Ordinarily, I would pay no attention to Nick Fuentes, but the editors of Mother Jones want me to do so, and for some reason the comparison that springs to mind is Elliot Rodger.

Humanity… All of my suffering on this world has been at the hands of humanity, particularly women. It has made me realize just how brutal and twisted humanity is as a species. All I ever wanted was to fit in and live a happy life amongst humanity, but I was cast out and rejected, forced to endure an existence of loneliness and insignificance, all because the females of the human species were incapable of seeing the value in me.
This is the story of how I, Elliot Rodger, came to be. This is the story of my entire life. It is a dark story of sadness, anger, and hatred. It is a story of a war against cruel injustice . . .

So begins “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger,” the 100,000-word “manifesto” he published online to announce the motive for his 2014 murder spree — the Mein Kampf of Beta male losers.

How does this happen? What kind of person decides that the ideal solution to his personal problems is mass murder? A telltale clue came from Rodger’s manifesto, where he mentions Monette Moio, “a pretty blonde girl” who was the younger sister of one of his middle-school classmates. According to Rodger, she was part of “a group of popular Seventh Grade girls [who] started teasing me. . . . I started to hate all girls because of this. I saw them as mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” This enraged the girl’s father:

‘She was ten years old for God’s sake — she can barely remember the guy. He’s a sociopath. She hasn’t seen him since school.’
‘She’s devastated over the whole thing. . . . It’s like she’s being implicated in this terrible tragedy for something she hasn’t done and can’t remember.’ . . .
Mr Moio added that he and his daughter only remembers Rodger as a ‘strange kid’.
‘He was weird then and he’s weird now,’ he said. ‘He had a secret crush on her, but she was completely unaware of him. She had no idea… If you think about it, he could have killed her, he could have come after her.
‘I was hands on at that school and I don’t remember him. She just remembers that he was a strange kid, she knew he wasn’t a normal type person, but there are a lot of people like that at that age.’

In other words, it was all in Elliot Rodger’s mind — the “teasing” was imaginary, his “suffering” the product of his silent obsession with a cute girl who “was completely unaware of him.” And as for his “war against cruel injustice” — what he described in a YouTube video as his “day of retribution” — it was nothing but a violent gesture to dramatize and call attention to his ultimate choice of suicide. Rodger scapegoated innocent people, blaming them for his personal problems, but his “day of retribution” ended with the tacit admission that only way to end his “suffering” was to kill himself. He was the problem.

Nick Fuentes doing his “America First” podcast

The 24-year-old hosts a nightly broadcast with a cult-like following among young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. For the last five years, Fuentes has pushed a vision for an “America First” movement that fuses white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism in calling for a nation dominated by white Christian men. . . .
Fuentes is advancing one of his latest strategies for cultivating followers: making overtures to men who feel aggrieved by women.
Over the past year, Fuentes has made a point of speaking directly to these men — many of whom identify as “incels” — in numerous appearances on his nightly livestream, far-right podcasts, and Telegram. Historically, incels defined themselves as “involuntary celibate,” but the term has become inextricably associated with misogynist incels, men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex.
Fuentes claims to understand them because he is one of them. “I’m an incel, I’m a proud incel,” he claimed on his nightly America First podcast in January. He’d never had sex, he explained, because, “I’m choosing instead to lead a historical right-wing movement.”

Let’s talk about this “cult-like following.” Prior to the publicity he got for meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the audience for Fuentes’ videos was pathetically small, reaching somewhere between 1,800 and 6,000 viewers for each episode. In October, as the nation was preparing for the midterm elections, some of his videos got fewer than 1,000 views. So if you’re using “cult-like” as a synonym for tiny, then, yeah, Nick Fuentes has got a “cult-like following.” And probably a “cult-like” penis, too.

Since the Mar-a-Lago meeting, the size of Fuentes’ audience has grown to the tens of thousands, but that’s still an insignificant number in comparison to, say, Tim Pool, who has 1.3 million YouTube subscribers and routinely gets more than 200,000 views on his videos.

It should be obvious that the reason Mother Jones (and other liberal media) are giving a fringe figure like Fuentes free publicity is as a way to smear all conservatives as implicated in his craziness. And let there be no doubt about this — it is unmitigated lunacy:

Fuentes launched into what sounded like a political stump speech in which he outlined the world he would create with his followers’ help. “Why don’t we take the message to the men and say, ‘Hey men, hey men, vote for me, I’ll destroy feminism,” he said, vowing to “make it harder for women to become whores,” and “to incentivize women to be in monogamous marriages for the long term and to have and raise kids.”
The dark fantasy he was selling would not only fulfill his Christian nationalist agenda, it would give incels the unfettered access to women that they’ve long sought. That alignment is part of what makes Fuentes’ pro-misogyny marketing strategy so effective, says Right Wing Watch researcher Kyle Mantyla. “If they can impose Christian nationalism on this country, that will also solve their incel problem by making women second-class citizens who have no right to refuse to marry them, have sex with them, and bear their children.”

Can you even imagine being Kyle Mantyla, who has been on the payroll of People for the American Way since 1999, and it’s your job to pay attention to people like Nick Fuentes? Talk about “suffering” . . .

You cannot solve self-inflicted problems by scapegoating, and what the “incel” delusion has in common with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories is that both offer explanations for personal failure that focus on blaming others. Anti-Semitism is not really political at all. It’s not about U.S. policy in the Mideast or about Israel’s policy toward its neighbors, it’s about losers (both foreign and domestic) who view Israel and the Jews the same way Elliot Rodger viewed Monette Moio, as “mean, cruel, and heartless creatures that took pleasure from my suffering.” Even as we recognize the appeal of scapegoating by “right-wing” figures like Nick Fuentes, however, we must avoid the temptation to buy into the Left’s identity-politics victimhood mentality, which is the same damned thing.

Telling black people they’re oppressed by “systemic racism” is no more helpful that telling people that they’re victims of an international Zionist conspiracy, and the fact that Kanye West has apparently been sucked into the vortex of anti-Semitism shows how similar these beliefs really are. And both of these persecution fantasies are similar to the “incel” thinking his problems in life are the fault of the cute girl who (at least in his mind) was mean to him in seventh grade. It does not matter, in the grand scheme of things, that some cute girls actually are cruel, or that some white people really are racists, because these facts are inadequate as explanations of individual unhappiness. That is to say, there are black people who are happy and successful despite the reality of racism and, on a personal note, I have managed to have a pretty good life despite the fact that Vicky Jones never reciprocated my interest in seventh grade.

Likewise, the existence of bad Jews (e.g., George Soros) does not prove the existence of an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy, especially when we realize that some of Soros’ most vocal critics are themselves Jewish. But the Left wants you to believe that everyone who criticizes Soros is an ideological soulmate of Nick Fuentes and the danger is that people will start believing this: “If they’re going to call me an anti-Semite no matter what I do, why not just go all-in on this Jew-hating thing?”

The Left’s incessant name-calling — “racist! sexist! homophobe!” — can have a demoralizing effect on conservatives, and when you find yourself on their target list, it’s a test of character, requiring strength to resist their attempt to define you as evil. The Left is satanic in this way.

Satan is a liar (John 8:44), and a false accuser (Revelation 12:10) who “deceiveth the whole world” by his slanders against God, and against God’s people. When the Left aims its slander machine at you, the experience should give you some sense of what Jesus felt when he was falsely accused by the envious Pharisees, and when you reflect that Jesus was entirely blameless — whereas you are unquestionably a sinner — then you must realize that, however unjust the accusations against you may be, you cannot lash out at the enemies who chastise you.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”
— Romans 8:28 (KJV)

Exult in your chastisement! Take pride in your scars! If you love God and are truly seeking His will, then your suffering is proof that you are among “them who are called.” How you conduct yourself in the moment of crisis will be the test of your faith, and the proof of God’s favor.

It is not God’s will that we should be miserable and hopeless, tempted to self-destructive despair. Jesus said: “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:8). So who is it that’s pointing people down the road to destruction? Who is it that tells us we must surrender to hate? Could it be . . . Satan?

Knowing myself to be nothing but a wretched sinner, my Calvinistic belief can be summarized simply: If God means to destroy a man, no one can save him, but if God means to save a man, no one can destroy him.

However vain it may be to think of myself as indestructible, it is nonetheless a fact that I have not yet been destroyed by my enemies, who have never ceased to plot my destruction. God keeps His promises, and we must remember that it is not by our virtue that we deserve His favor, but rather that we are beneficiaries of His grace.

We are “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards said, and are entirely dependent on God’s mercy for our preservation. We have no ground to complain for whatever misfortunes may befall us, since our sinfulness means we deserve nothing but death.

It was not my intention, when I began writing this, to preach a sermon, but here I am 2,000 words later, at the point a preacher would issue the altar call, with the choir singing “Softly and Tenderly.” Occasionally this blog is a mission and a ministry, I reckon, and perhaps a comfort to our Internet congregation, a source of hope amid the prevailing gloom. Earlier this month, the radical mayor of Richmond ordered that the remains of A.P. Hill be exhumed and his monument be removed from the intersection of Laburnum Road and Hermitage venue. When my great-grandfather, a private in the 13th Alabama Infantry, was captured at Gettysburg, he was serving under A.P. Hill; thus I have a personal reason to resent the insult to that general’s memory. Yet I can endure even this without complaint, as I recall the words of a man far wiser than myself:

My experience of men has neither disposed me to think worse of them nor indisposed me to serve them; nor in spite in spite of failures which I lament, of errors which I now see and acknowledge, or of the present aspect of affairs, do I despair of the future.
The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

Yes, sir. We shall carry on. Merry Christmas, and Deo vindice.



 

Category: History, Religion

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