How Concerned Should We Be About All These Nazis on Social Media?

Yes, the problem is getting worse. Ignoring it isn't working. Platforming it isn't working.

Last weekend Ben Shapiro’s conservative media outlet Daily Wire, a support group of failed actors, comedians and writers who got together to pretend their failure is due to politics and wokeness rather than just being incredibly bad at making movies, cut ties with one of their key talents, to use the term very loosely. Candace Owens didn’t get along very well with her co-hosts for a number of reasons that very much prove “sufficiently hating LGBT people” isn’t necessarily the only qualification you need to be a Daily Wire superstar.

Now, I think it’s a mistake that the media keeps insisting something along the lines of the reason Owens was fired being that she’s critical of Israel or supports Palestine, although this would definitely take her off the Secret Santa rotation. Suffice it to say that there are two big reasons one might oppose Israel—one has to do with disapproval of their actions, and the other is something else. Candace Owens’ beef seems to have a lot to do with the other thing.

Very shortly after Owens was ousted, a Twitter user, some dormant throwaway called “standace owens,” started tweeting and almost immediately accumulated nearly 20,000 followers.

This isn’t just some Candace fan. This is Nick Fuentes. He’s one of the most prominent legitimate neo-Nazis in America. And when I say legitimate neo-Nazi, I’m acknowledging that the left has a real bad habit of drawing an enormous red circle around several politically disparate cross sections of humanity, a circle that might include Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Clint Eastwood, Jordan Peterson, and your cousin who laughed at a Dane Cook joke, and slapping the word “NAZI” on it with big dripping letters.

Words have meanings. At least, they used to. A frustratingly common sentiment seems to be that words are actually just sounds we make to vaguely indicate endorsement or disapproval. Late last year when a number of writers on Substack tried to convince the owners to remove Nazis from the platform a strong backlash presented by many of even the more prominent writers is that there’s effectively no such thing as a Nazi because it’s never been adequately defined. What do you mean by Nazis? Do you mean anti-vaxxers? Do you mean men’s rights activists?

Maybe the real Nazis were the friends we made along the way

The questions were partly in bad faith but in another sense they did have a point. You really do see it all the time. “Donald Trump is a Nazi. Elon Musk is a Nazi. Andrew Tate is a Nazi. J.K. Rowling is a Nazi. Ricky Gervais is a Nazi.” The right does the same thing, albeit their usage has more to do with reclaiming and commanding ownership of the word as a weapon. Liberal gun control advocates are Nazis. LGBTQ people are Nazis. People on both the left and the right call Joe Biden a Nazi. It really has just come to mean somebody we strongly disagree with.

It's because it’s short and snappy. Its meaning is less blurry than “fascist.” Unlike “fascist,” “Nazi” invokes specific imagery. It’s a sharp word, severe, with fricatives and plosives, like “pedophile.” It’s also very definitive—it’s the worst thing that you can really be accused of being. It brings to mind not only evil, but a type of evil that cannot be explained or understood and, many will argue, it is wrong to even attempt to understand it. Understanding it slopes to explaining it, which slopes to humanizing it, which slopes to excusing it, which slopes to justifying it.

We humans have a funny way of feeling like we have to lean on absolutes to remove doubt that we’re in some way endorsing something. If I say that, for example, Trump isn’t a Nazi, you might have the same defensive reflex as you would if I started a sentence with “I’m not racist, but…”

You think I’m about to come out with some dumb enlightened centrist shit. Start listing the things I admire about the man, like the mythology of Mussolini making the trains run on time. Gonna go Ken Bone on you.

Let me be clear: I’m about as anti-Trump as it’s possible for anyone to be, and I’m about as anti-Nazi as it’s possible for anyone to be. If I say Trump isn’t a Nazi, I’m not making an attempt to excuse him or justify him or to rank Trump and Nazis against each other on a tier list. I am simply refraining from making a category error.

And I don’t think these kinds of errors are made completely unconsciously. I like to apply the Wikipedia test: Would it make sense to begin a Wikipedia article about, for example, Jordan Peterson with a phrase like “Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian neo-Nazi and psychotherapist…”? That’s how you start an article about, say, David Duke.

That’s right, his middle name is “Bernt.” I basically only included him in this article to shoehorn that fact in somehow. You thought it was Barry or Byron or something.

Actually, if you do want to get as nitpicky as Wikipedia, then even that would be a category error—Duke is a Klansman, not a Nazi. But that kind of pedantry is the domain of textbooks and sarcastic reactionaries. Wikipedia prefers the term “white supremacist,” and on this level I’m willing to say Nazi is close enough for rock ‘n’ roll. It still doesn’t describe every monster.

I never took an emphatic side on the great Substack war of Nazis vs Freedom of Speech because I think restrictions on expression should be extremely limited and very carefully considered and with respect to the platform owners I don’t think I trust them with it. However there should be no dispute that any time I’m talking about Nazis I’m talking about Nazis. If I don’t mean Nazis then I will use a different word.

Watering down the term “Nazi” only serves to diminish how bad these people are and how evil what they want is. It allows popular tame-but-a-little-edgy people to block criticism and management of actual Nazis by whining that you might come after them next. Category errors also cripple our ability to genuinely confront malignant ideas—strawmanning people might feel good but it doesn’t help your case.

Crucially, when everyone’s a faux Nazi, it just lets the real Nazis sneak into the crowd unnoticed.

This brings us back to Nick Fuentes.

He should have made better choices, he could be hosting a game show right now.

Nick Fuentes is a Nazi. A white supremacist, if you want to get encyclopaedic. A vicious, diehard antisemite who’s pretty open about his Jew extermination aspirations and the degrees of existence he’s willing to suffer other minorities. The snarling king of the Polluxes, though his child-sized moustache is an honorific to David Duke he’s largely dispensed of swastikas and white hoods in favour of Gen-Z frog memes. If you ever wondered what became of “Pepe the Frog,” the cartoon mascot people laughed at Hillary Clinton for calling a hate symbol, half a decade of inbreeding turned it into a shoddily drawn character now named Groyper.

The practice of Nazis appropriating silly frog memes in order to cutesy-poop their way into mainstream culture goes back to the more recognisable face of mainstream neo-Nazism, Richard Spencer, who was famously wearing a Pepe pin when he got his clock cleaned by a passing antifa supersoldier. Richard Spencer never got a personal audience with Donald Trump. Nick Fuentes did. That’s how you know this tactic of platforming Nazis to let them hang themselves with their own rope isn’t working as planned. All Fuentes did was make the frog look stupider.

Fuentes knows that the frog is dumb looking, it doesn’t project strength like a swastika does, but the project of the neo-neo-Nazis isn’t to display strength, it’s to draw ridicule. The idea is that they see their perceived enemies—Jews, minority groups, protected classes, basically anybody who isn’t straight and white with a short back and sides—as having gained some kind of ideological power through victimhood. The frogs, the idiotic clown memes, the claims of white genocide, are all attempts to cargo cult and reverse engineer the Holocaust and civil rights in an effort to get deplatformed ideologies replatformed, protected, and elevated.

And boy howdy it seems to be working.

Though I’ve been told more times than I can count that there only, like, twelve of these people in the entire world and that platforming them and giving them sunlight and a voice will be like pushing a vampire into the sunlight, it sure does seem like there’s a hell of a lot of Groypers now, doesn’t it?

I think it is a category error to call Elon Musk a Nazi. I don’t think it’s a category error to call him a fucking idiot. His grand project to rework the mechanisms of moderation, to engineer western ideology and push the zeitgeist to the right, is above and beyond his ability to control and rein in even for how evil a project it is in the first place. He’s trying to put his thumb on the scale by establishing special protections for Nazis while shaving a few inches off the left side of the political spectrum in the apparent hope of shifting the centre to better reflect where he thinks he is. He’s just too politically illiterate to know where that is.

Earlier in the week Musk lost a lawsuit he launched against a nonprofit research group who published their findings about Twitter’s level of hate speech increasing since Musk lifted all account suspensions and relaxed all rules. That seems like such a no-brainer that you wouldn’t even need research to come to that axiomatic conclusion, but Musk’s contention in filing the lawsuit was that the CCDH faked the research and there is no detectable hate speech on Twitter, now X. This, fittingly but apparently coincidentally, happens to be the very same week in which a strategic operation by Nick Fuentes has dominated Twitter’s trending topics with Groyper memes since last Saturday. One can quite literally read about Musk’s mewling protestation that there’s no hate speech on Twitter and the very next tweet over will have five Happy Merchants in it.

The popular view among well-meaning free speech absolutists is that platforming Nazis is just giving them an opportunity to debate and suffer the failure of their arguments in the free market of ideas, but this popular idea doesn’t take into any account whatsoever the ability and willingness of the Nazis to strategise. And these people are absolutely not free speech advocates. The very second they have the means and power to do so, they will burn free speech to the ground and you’ll never hear such an alien concept uttered again.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in dealing with Nazis is to think they’re stupid. That they’re illiterate knuckle-dragging backwater white trash morons. Again, this is the image that they are deliberately trying to cultivate with the dumb frog memes and clown emojis and “frenworld” nonsense. They want to cloak and shroud the fact that they are very savvy about clocking every single inch of rope that you give them. They will use it and mock you for it.

Recently the Nazi cartoonist who went by the name Stonetoss was unmasked by investigative journalists as a pudgy Texan named Hans Graebener, which seems a little on the nose. Elon Musk responded with a blitz of account suspensions to try to protect Graebener’s identity. The hypocrisy was quickly pointed out—Doxing, to the extent of revealing and reporting an anonymous person’s name and general location, is not against the rules on Twitter. It’s actually a practice endorsed by Musk, as  many of his favoured right-wing footsoldiers such as Chaya Raichik and Andy Ngo use it to attack and intimidate transgender people and others he disapproves of. Musk himself is the subject of a lawsuit for personally spreading this kind of information. Andy Ngo, who is either a Nazi or something very similar to one, understands this and revels in it. He knows Musk is an idiot. He knows the strategy.

A guy with a much more impressive moustache than Nick Fuentes once warned that you shouldn’t stare too deep into the abyss because the abyss is also staring into you. I’d love to never look at what the Nazis are doing, and to believe what so many moderates, liberals, and otherwise savvy Substack peers are telling me about the Nazis being fringe, few, powerless, and hopeless. But man, I do keep one eye on mainstream conservatism just to know and understand what I’m fighting against—the guys who actually do have power and influence and the ability to shape the course of society—and I feel at all times like the meme of Walter White screaming out the window of a car. These people, who aren’t Nazis but nevertheless believe more Nazi stuff than I do, are entangled in what they think is a very clever project to use Nazis as a weapon against The Left. To roll out the red carpet for these people under the assumption that they will trip on it at some point.

FREN STANDS FOR FAR RIGHT ETHNO NATIONALIST, IT’S ON PURPOSE

Christopher Rufo is one very high profile conservative strategist who generates a lot of nails-on-chalkboard scale cringe in the wide gulf between his perception of his own intelligence and the stone cold reality. He is a very, very stupid person who has somehow achieved buoyancy enough to move upward through IQs of even greater density. He sees himself as a kind of master of puppets, who will use the Groypers until they’ve worn out their usefulness to him. He’s not a Nazi. He’s not smart enough to be a Nazi.

Rufo and his friends are all so bedazzled by the very simple tactic of Nazis beclowning themselves on purpose that they’re willing to accept them as one of the “five families” of conservatism. Like Hitler is a mildly embarrassing uncle at a nevertheless pleasant family gathering of RFK Jr, Joe Rogan, and the guy who writes copy at the Babylon Bee.

It’s called No Friends to the Left, or alternatively, No Punching Right. If you like, it’s No Bad Tactics, Only Bad Targets. Milo Yiannopoulous was famous for embarking on this project back in 2016 as he campaigned for Trump’s presidency and used his position at Breitbart News as a catalyst for uniting “establishment conservatism” with what he termed “the 1488ers.” Milo later went on to work with—you guessed it—Nick Fuentes.

To spin right back around to the Daily Wire, the company’s CEO and co-founder Jeremy Boreing is another powerful figure in what you would call mainstream American conservatism who is engaged in the same grandiose project to shift the Overton window by grappling the media landscape rightward. He also feels that Nick Fuentes has a role to play in conservative media, as Boreing called in to a Twitter space this week to tell Fuentes directly how much of a fan he is.

I certainly won’t say this often, so savour the rare delicacy, but I do feel a genuine sympathy for Ben Shapiro here. He is, rare among his ilk and practically unheard of at the Daily Wire, a fairly intelligent person. Given that, he must feel like he’s taking fucking crazy pills listen to Boreing, his media partner, try to play neutral mediator between the orthodox Jewish Shapiro and a hysterical Hitler-worshipping Holocaust denier/enjoyer.

Again, Fuentes and his Groypers and others like them know exactly what they are doing. They are exploiting mainstream establishment conservative media’s tendency to see Nazis, Groypers, and 1488ers, and whatever the fuck Andy Ngo is, as useful muscle, knuckle-dragging buffoons, patsies who will do what it takes, enforce, take the heat, and promptly disappear under the bus. Make the Boreings and Rufos of the world feel like they are the puppeteers.

So how much should we be concerned about all these Nazis on social media? At least a little, I think. More than the fat zero that the blunt anti-censorship hysterics insist. Or at the very least we should be cognizant of what’s happening. I’m so sick of screaming out this car window.