By Surya Gowda
Monday, June 22, 2026
Charlie Kirk’s assassination last September set the
internet ablaze with conspiracy theories. All available evidence pointed to the
alleged shooter being Tyler Robinson, a then-22-year-old man from Utah who
purportedly leaned left politically. But many online observers, including some
major right-wing influencers, came to the conclusion that it was instead Israel
and “the Jews” who were to blame for the activist’s death. Mainstream media
outlets condemned and debunked these antisemitic conspiracy theories. They
were, however, joined by seemingly unexpected company: Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes, a white nationalist livestreamer who has gained
a significant following among young right-wingers in recent
years, claimed prominent influencers like Candace Owens and Ian Carroll were wrong to promote falsehoods about Kirk’s
death and were even engaging in “low-IQ antisemitism” by doing so. In the
months since, Fuentes has become increasingly critical of his own far-right
political faction for being intellectually unserious. He’s criticized Dan
Bilzerian, a podcaster making a congressional bid in Florida on an
anti-Israel agenda, for blaming Jews for all the world’s problems despite not
knowing “anything about anything,” and has denounced political activist Jake Shields for promoting Adolf Hitler’s supposed
benevolence. Fuentes thinks members of his movement are experiencing a form of
“mass psychosis,” in which they are willing to believe every
conspiracy theory that exists. White nationalism, according to one of its
paragons, is getting dumber.
***
Richard Hanania was a white nationalist before it was
cool. Between 2008 and the early 2010s, he penned pseudonymous articles for
little-known alt-right websites, in which he argued things like “race mixing is like destroying a unique
species or piece of art” and Hispanics “don’t have the requisite IQ to be a
productive part of a first world nation.”
Hanania, however, has long since moved on.
It’s not that every single thing he believed over a
decade ago was wrong “or that the entire worldview was just kind of crazy,”
Hanania, who now calls himself a classical liberal, tells me. “No, there were
aspects that were true: People do differ, some people contribute a lot more to
society than others.” He compares an inventor with a career criminal to
illustrate his point.
Rather, the same elitism—or, more precisely, bias toward
excellent individuals—that drew him into the white nationalist movement
ultimately drew him out.
Hanania has previously written that he first adopted a racial
nationalist worldview due to his support for free market economics and limited
government: Racial minorities had historically voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, who typically opposed
such libertarian ideals. Thus, he concluded that if Americans wished to defend
their liberty and property, they should limit nonwhite immigration and seek to
maintain a predominantly white demographic core. (Indeed, this particular
intellectual progression became so common among right-wingers in the 2010s that
it was dubbed the “libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline.”)
But reason and experience eventually changed Hanania’s
perspective. He still believes in capitalism and hereditarianism—that is, the
doctrine that genetics play a central role in determining individual
outcomes and traits, including intelligence—although “some people can take
[hereditarianism] too far,” he tells me. But he’s come to think that numerous
tenets of the “red-pilled” worldview, such as a highly exaggerated understanding
of sex differences and a belief that authoritarianism is superior to democracy,
are simply false.
There’s also an extreme form of racialism, Hanania says,
that posits that whites are biologically predisposed to democracy, and indeed,
white nationalists often claim that immigration from China, India, and Latin
America will make American culture and political norms less democratic. But:
“Now, there’s been literally one movement in American history that has
attempted a serious coup,” he says, referring to the January 6 Capitol riot—in
which the overwhelming majority of those arrested were white. The era
of Trumpism “has just completely discredited that stuff.”
Over time, Hanania also began to hold white nationalists
themselves in contempt. For one thing, he noticed that conservative whites who believed in the
importance of racial identity tended to be more hostile to free markets than
their nonidentitarian counterparts. For another, he found that white
nationalists neither venerated human excellence nor were anything approaching
excellent themselves. Rather, they were largely egalitarians who resented those they
perceived as “snooty elites” and who wished, per Hanania’s interpretation, to
be associated with the achievements of their race because they lacked any of
their own. The movement Hanania had earlier imagined to be fighting for the
interests of the aristoi turned out to be one of, by, and for hoi
polloi.
“If you yourself are not a loser, once you’ve taken a
look at the quality of people you’ve attracted, it should become clear that a
shared racial heritage alone cannot form a rational basis for political
activism,” he wrote in 2025.
***
Hanania is not the only former or current white
nationalist to take issue with the movement on elitist grounds. Alt-right
figurehead Richard Spencer, for example, endorsed Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for president in 2020 and 2024, respectively,
on the basis that liberals are simply more competent managers of the American
empire. In a 2023 discussion of his political evolution, Spencer explained
that he’s become critical of populism in general, as he thinks it “is going to
lead to toxic QAnon cults and J6 almost invariably.” Needless to say, this
version of Spencer is a far cry from that of a decade ago, who exclaimed
“Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” following the 2016 election. The
alt-right movement he once helmed, which married white identitarianism and
populism, apparently proved too dysfunctional for him to bear.
Fuentes, too, often laments
that his movement has been “captured by losers and idiots.” As previously
mentioned, he frequently attacks the “low-IQ antisemitism” of influencers like
Owens and Bilzerian, who purportedly go far beyond Fuentes’ own brand of
antisemitism by promoting even more outlandish conspiracy theories and
excessively militant rhetoric regarding Israel and Jews. Fuentes, for
what it’s worth, has himself engaged in conspiracism over the years, promoting,
for example, the ideas that dinosaur
bones are a hoax and that Israel
killed President John F. Kennedy. Nevertheless, he worries that the far right’s intellectual sloppiness is
turning intelligent young men off from the cause. In making these critiques,
Fuentes is, of course, going to war with his own audience: He seems to hope his
unserious movement can still be a more serious political force.
Neither Spencer nor Fuentes have rejected racialism; they
still believe in the unique excellence of the white race and would like to have
a white country if that were a realistically achievable political goal.
Nevertheless, the core of their critiques of the white nationalist
movement—that is, that it suffers from a dearth of human capital—is strikingly
similar to that of Hanania’s.
Another one-time white nationalist who has renounced racialism out of a concern for human excellence,
however, is a popular Substack writer who goes by the name Deep Left Analysis.
When we corresponded in March, he outlined a number of personal experiences and
data points that caused him to question his allegiance to the white nationalist
movement and ultimately reject the ideology—and the right wing generally—over
the course of a decade.
In 2012, he said, immigration restriction was not popular
with mainstream Republicans and was largely the niche issue of the alt-right.
In those days, he considered it “absolutely crucial” to stop the influx of
nonwhites into the United States. “Because nonwhites vote Democrat, mass
immigration will eventually destroy the Republican Party, which means that
white people will have no political vehicle with which to resist their
inevitable genocide,” he said, referencing 1804 attacks by black Haitians on
the nation’s white population, which some scholars characterize as a genocide.
Into the late 2010s, Deep Left also believed that
excellence in the arts and sciences was a fruit of the “European racial soul.”
While nonwhites might be able to emulate things like space travel, classical
music, and philosophical idealism, the genius required to invent them could
never be “entirely separated from its biological origin.” The large majority of
white people, he acknowledged, were “nothing special”; however, since whites
alone possessed the “Faustian spirit,” they alone could become geniuses. “Mass
immigration, in reducing the white population, would snuff out this genius, and
drown it in a sea of poverty and mediocrity,” he told me.
But living in majority nonwhite areas during the 2010s
helped disabuse him of the notion that multiracial societies inevitably breed
ethnic strife. He noted that although he experienced hostility on account of
his (white) race once or twice, his interactions with nonwhites were generally
positive. Moreover, he “saw how Hispanics in 2020 were turning toward Trump, disproving the idea that nonwhites
are biologically predetermined to vote Democrat.” Gradually, he accepted that
“the ‘inevitability of race war’ was more based in hysteria than ‘evolutionary
biology.’” Different races, he added, “can live in harmony so long as
institutions are strong.”
It was ultimately the COVID-19 pandemic, however, that
led Deep Left to repudiate white nationalism and the broader right wing
altogether. He recalled how in early 2020, numerous right-wing pundits said the coronavirus was a “Chinese bioweapon” but
swiftly switched gears to proclaim that it was “just the flu.” Meanwhile, the
unthinking “right-wing masses just went along with this shift from ‘bioweapon’
to ‘flu’ without missing a beat.” He felt “the dominant epistemology of the
right wing was simply whatever sowed dissension and chaos—they had no concern
for the truth.” President Joe Biden ending the lockdowns and thereby disproving right-wing
predictions of “COVID tyranny” was the final straw. In 2021, Deep Left became
an “unironic Democrat.”
Deep Left’s political evolution entailed his becoming
more self-consciously elitist. Over time, he came to view the most relevant
political distinction no longer as the one between whites and nonwhites but as
the one between elites and masses. Elites he defines not so much as members of
the upper class but as individuals of outstanding quality who pursue higher
ideals like truth, goodness, and beauty; the masses comprise everyone else,
including many conservative whites. “In 2012, I genuinely feared that nonwhites
might someday execute a new Haitian genocide. But now it seemed to me that the
people who most resembled Haitian revolutionaries were the MAGA conspiracists.
I recognized their type, and I was disgusted,” he said.
As is true of any political thinker, Deep Left’s
ideological development also had a psychological component. He mentioned
overcoming the “loser culture” of the far right by recognizing that it was
healthier to focus on improving himself instead of blaming “the elites” for his
personal problems. But what I found most striking was his changing relationship
with his own Jewish identity. “Initially, I felt righteous about being a ‘token
Jew’” within the white nationalist movement, he said. “I had overcome my biological
nature—like Saint Paul, I was a traitor to myself, so that I could be a martyr
for the truth.” Now, however, he sees that his “self-hating martyr complex was
itself emotionally motivated, and was not as logical or coldly rational as I
liked to imagine.”
***
As Fuentes and others demonstrate, recognizing the idiocy of the white
nationalist movement by no means requires one to reject white nationalism. But
for individuals like Deep Left and Hanania, doing so is the only rational
response to noticing certain structural features of the movement that make it a
magnet for such idiocy.
As Deep Left wrote in February, “the alt-right was founded, at its core,
on anti-elitism.” The elites of Western countries, in alt-right propagandists’
telling, ignored black crime, covered up for Muslim grooming gangs, and opened
the borders to nonwhite migrants—“and the elites just so happened to be
disproportionately Jewish.”
“If you distill the alt-right down to its purest essence,
removing all else, you can dispense with race realism, with anti-feminism, or
homophobia, and all that remains is antisemitism,” Deep Left explained in the
February post. Anti-elitism and antisemitism, for the alt-right, are in effect
one and the same.
This quirk of the white nationalist movement explains why
it was so vulnerable to being overtaken by a more amorphous conspiratorial
populism. If the most important thing is to be “red-pilled” on “the Jews,” then
there is room for substantial diversity of belief, cognitive ability, and even
ethnicity within the coalition. An anti-Israel leftist like Ana Kasparian, a black Republican conspiracy theorist like
Owens, and a white nationalist like Fuentes may all unite against Jewish power.
Per Deep Left’s reading, the white nationalist movement was all but destined to
morph into a racially diverse set of unintelligent, conspiracy-peddling
antisemites over time. Politics based in anti-elitism are bound to deliver not
a white ethnostate but kakistocracy—that is, rule by the worst—he said, citing Hanania.
Hanania himself points out that far-right ideas on racial identity
typically appeal to people of lower intelligence and social class worldwide. He
cites research showing correlations between intelligence, as measured by IQ or
proxies for it, and more “antiracist” views in Britain and socially liberal attitudes more broadly among American
community college students and foreign students seeking entry into U.S.
universities. A 2017 study on political ideology in China, he notes, also found
that wealthier and better-educated individuals were less likely to be nationalistic.
While the correlations may be partly due to the fact that educational
institutions often teach students left-wing narratives on race, Hanania says
these data demonstrate how intelligent people prefer ideologies that allow them
to feel smart for adopting the correct intellectual positions over ones that
tell them they should take pride in their inborn traits. When you create a
political movement—such as white nationalism—that is based on shared identity
rather than ideas, “you’re putting out the bat signal for every loser in the
world who has nothing in his own life that he can take pride in.”
For these two, addressing the problem of far-right
stupidity at the root means pursuing an altogether different politics of
elitist liberalism. Hanania calls his current philosophy Nietzschean liberalism, as it combines a classical liberal
belief in free markets, individual liberty, and democracy with a “Nietzschean”
belief in hierarchy among humans. Deep Left similarly advocates for neoliberalism under the assumption that it best allows the
intelligent, competent, and vital to thrive. Confronting the idiocy of many
white identitarians impelled both of them to realize that what they value most
is not (and perhaps never was) the white race but the excellence and aspiration to truth, goodness, beauty, and
progress with which they associated whiteness. And they agree that liberalism
is a better system for allowing excellent individuals to flourish than any
other.
Hanania, in particular, has popularized the concept of
“elite human capital,” which he describes as a multiracial stratum of humanity that is
highly intelligent, interested in ideas, and lives by a moral code that “goes
beyond tribalism or a primitive form of machismo.” Classical liberalism
supports these higher types by leaving them free to pursue their missions in
the arts, sciences, and industry. In turn, these higher types largely—though
not completely consistently—support liberalism.
Hanania acknowledges that elite human capital makes
mistakes: He himself has spoken out against many of them, including foreign policy adventurism; diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; and market overregulation. Still, he generally thinks the best
remedy is improving elites’ character and convincing them of better ideas. This would amount to
forging elite human capital into genuine aristoi.
***
Hanania’s formulation of elitist liberalism is nothing
new—nor does it necessarily need to be couched in the thought of an illiberal
thinker like Nietzsche. Prototypical liberal John Stuart Mill advocated for
such a politics in his 1859 work On Liberty, where he wrote that only a
small minority of individuals are capable of genius but that “these few are the
salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pool.”
Liberalism with its “atmosphere of freedom” provides the soil necessary to
cultivate genius and lends these higher men the “freedom to point out the way”
toward wise and noble things to the masses. Liberal philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset similarly venerated the minority of excellent individuals within society
who made great demands upon themselves and lived “in service to something
transcendental.” Liberal rights and freedoms, Ortega says in his 1929 book The Revolt of the Masses, both protect these
excellent few from the barbarism of the masses and, in announcing the
“determination to share existence with the enemy,” reflect their noble ethic.
Hanania tells me he hopes he can “deradicalize” at least
some current far-rightists with his philosophy. His articulation of classical
liberalism is surely one that is more likely to appeal to white nationalists
than one that emphasizes liberalism’s commitment to tolerance and equality
before the law, for example. “People don’t deradicalize by SPLC [Southern
Poverty Law Center] or reading what the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] has to say
about somebody. They’re going to want somebody who shares their conception of
reality to a certain extent, shares their values,” he says. Of course, such an
“alt-right-to-libertarian pipeline,” so to speak, would only have a good chance
of taking hold among those white nationalists who were drawn to the movement
more out of a love of excellence than a love of the white race—or a hatred of
nonwhites.
Still others may continue to complain about the
stupidity, conspiracism, and other pathologies endemic to the white nationalist
movement but largely fail to either come up with a plan to address them or
substantively reevaluate their political positions. Fuentes, for all his
condemnation of “low-IQ antisemites” and belief in white excellence, doesn’t
seem to know whether or how he can make white nationalism great again, so to
speak. His contempt for his audience of “complete f—ing idiots” is
clear. But, despite calls
for the far right to clean up its act, he is unable to escape these
dynamics. Indeed, it doesn’t help Fuentes’ case that he has participated in the
very dynamics he decries by promoting all manner of conspiracy theories
himself.
All signs point toward the white identitarian movement
becoming not less populist, conspiratorial, and idiotic in the foreseeable
future but more so. Right-wing writer Scott Greer, who was once an
associate of Fuentes, explains that “conspiratorial populism is the beating heart
of internet politics.” It is both entertaining and only demands of its
adherents that they believe in “an evil cabal of elites that oppress the noble
masses” and, thus, has wide appeal across ideological and racial lines.
Far-right influencers have a financial incentive to maximize their audiences by
playing to this conspiratorial populist sentiment by focusing their commentary
more heavily on UFOs and space lasers than on strictly identitarian concerns
like immigration, which might turn entire groups off. “For all intents and
purposes, this is the new alternative right,” Greer writes. Greer even tells me that New York City mayor
Zohran Mamdani is popular among some on the alt-right despite his democratic
socialist beliefs, due to his criticism of Israel. “Being an anti-Israeli
populist appeals to them as well,” Greer said.
How anyone within the white nationalist movement reacts
to this development in the medium- to long-term remains to be seen. For some,
the uninspiring nature of white nationalists may prompt them to shed racialism
in favor of elitism. (As Hanania puts it, they might begin to wonder, “‘Why
does this thing I believe only attract losers and idiots?’”) Others might
invest energy into reconstructing guiding principles for the movement. What
seems certain, however, is that a white nationalist movement that lacks a
positive vision for white people, let alone humanity, is a movement that’s
bound to run out of steam—and perhaps already has.
No comments:
Post a Comment