“…the two problems that he pointed to were too much trade and immigration. As I’ve pointed out, this makes no sense when placed alongside his support for AI and automation…”
IMO there is a messaging issue here, where normal people feel like they're being simultaneously told to prepare for AI and automation to destroy the job market, but also we need mass migration to fill a bunch of jobs. “Wait, so my job and my kid's jobs are going to be AI'd or sent to India, but we also want to import more domestic competition on top of that?”
You could compare the “how do we teach 50 year old redneck truckers to code?” freakout of about 10 years ago (anticipating self-driving trucks) to today's headlines revealing that a huge number of truckers are recent immigrants who seem to think that the field is both stable and lucrative. “Just learn to code” was a failure of forecasting and narrative, and it was largely not a product of conservatives.
Hey Richard, great article, quick question: Do you think this bodes well for the right wing quest to rule America indefinitely?
As of right now, Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters (toughness), got some Asian ones (anti Affirmative action/Black crime against Asians). Do you believe that Fuentes maybe endangers this?
Nobody knows how a post-trump GOP pushes forward, but based on the stats you made in the article where non-hispanic whites are a minority, will an explicitly anti-brown rhetorical style succeed?
Many Hispanics see themselves as white, and many conservative non-whites are starting to vote more ideologically. Is embracing Groyperism the right wing equivalent of letting hyper-woke staffers run the comms department when the counrty is way further to the center?
I guess I’m not sure why this article was written now rather than say a year or two ago. Republicans’ rhetoric in the 2024 campaign was far more right wing in terms of race and immigration than the previous two Trump campaigns, and a lot of these examples you cite didn’t start in 2025.
But a year or so ago, Fuentes was telling his followers to vote for Kamala and was saying things like “your body my choice” while Trump was denouncing the idea of supporting a federal ban.
Also around this time, your position on MAGA was that it wasn’t really about ideas; they were at most secondary concerns. The core tenet of MAGA was fealty to Trump. Whatever he says or does is what MAGA is. Fuentes obviously violates this tenet. Add Israel to this, and I’m not sure why Fuentes is being portrayed as the real face of MAGA all of a sudden.
From a cultural standpoint it absolutely DOES matter how long one's family has been in the country. Full cultural assimilation generally takes 3-4 generations. There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
So it just isn't true that a recent naturalized arrival is as fully culturally American as someone whose ancestry goes back to the pilgrims. This goes both ways. Expat Americans are still culturally American even if they renounce their citizenship. Naturalization is ultimately just a piece of paper. It does not have a magic power to change who a person fundamentally is and how they were raised from childhood.
I'm not sure I follow. My ancestors arrived in North America 400 years ago. My wife's, a few decades before that. We have more in common - ideologically, socially - with many people who arrived in the US in the past few decades than we do with many people who've been here 3-4 generations. I've also lived outside the US at times. The experience for immigrants (or visitors) to the US is very different than that of US citizens going to other countries. (At least it used to be.)
“We’re facing an ideology that says maybe a third of the population are true Americans, and everyone else has a second- or third-tier status.”
This is essentially why the Trumpublican coup will soon stall and even fall apart. As yesterday showed, the other two thirds are getting and taking their opportunities to “throw the bums and thugs out.”
The issue of Israel is fundamentally different from all other issues because it makes perfect sense for whites to oppose Indian immigration if those Indians vote for anti-white left-wing parties that openly base themselves on the view that whites are evil oppressors. Even opposing immigration of secular Ashkenazi Jews for the same reason would be logical.
But naturally throughout history, nations have sought allies with strong technology, a strong military, and proven loyalty. Therefore the hatred toward the alliance with Israel, an utterly loyal ally of the United States that today shares similar values and similar enemies with the American right, already departs from normal historical patterns and from rationality, and stems from Nazi-style conspiracies and a schizophrenic-paranoid worldview.
This is ridiculous. They spend all their time thinking about how to deport people and very little time thinking about how to win their votes. Naturalized immigrants swung toward Trump and this didn't change their thinking at all. Now if immigrants swing back to Democrats they'll say they have to keep them out because of how they vote, when they've made their entire politics about targeting new arrivals.
>>"Maybe Fuentes talks about race 80% of the time and endorses color-blind nationalism 20% of the time, and the proportion is flipped for Vance...."
You've just persuaded me that "nationalist" and "racist" have huge overlap in current American politics. I've always thought it was a left leaning liberal take (driven by somewhat cosmopolitan contempt of culturally "localised" proles and obsession with race/racism generally) but that whole section whose beginning I quote above is very convincing.
"Vance, for example, has said that Americans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have more of a claim to the country than their political opponents" . Funny how that applies to Trump himself right? His mother was born in Scotland, and his father was the son of German immigrants who came to the US after the Civil War. No one has pointed this to him because everyone knows that he really means that "Whites have more of a claim to this country than their political opponents"
Leftists have been posting this meme for a while:
https://x.com/BrandonLBradfor/status/1985787020057387416
“…the two problems that he pointed to were too much trade and immigration. As I’ve pointed out, this makes no sense when placed alongside his support for AI and automation…”
IMO there is a messaging issue here, where normal people feel like they're being simultaneously told to prepare for AI and automation to destroy the job market, but also we need mass migration to fill a bunch of jobs. “Wait, so my job and my kid's jobs are going to be AI'd or sent to India, but we also want to import more domestic competition on top of that?”
You could compare the “how do we teach 50 year old redneck truckers to code?” freakout of about 10 years ago (anticipating self-driving trucks) to today's headlines revealing that a huge number of truckers are recent immigrants who seem to think that the field is both stable and lucrative. “Just learn to code” was a failure of forecasting and narrative, and it was largely not a product of conservatives.
Hey Richard, great article, quick question: Do you think this bodes well for the right wing quest to rule America indefinitely?
As of right now, Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters (toughness), got some Asian ones (anti Affirmative action/Black crime against Asians). Do you believe that Fuentes maybe endangers this?
Nobody knows how a post-trump GOP pushes forward, but based on the stats you made in the article where non-hispanic whites are a minority, will an explicitly anti-brown rhetorical style succeed?
Many Hispanics see themselves as white, and many conservative non-whites are starting to vote more ideologically. Is embracing Groyperism the right wing equivalent of letting hyper-woke staffers run the comms department when the counrty is way further to the center?
I guess I’m not sure why this article was written now rather than say a year or two ago. Republicans’ rhetoric in the 2024 campaign was far more right wing in terms of race and immigration than the previous two Trump campaigns, and a lot of these examples you cite didn’t start in 2025.
But a year or so ago, Fuentes was telling his followers to vote for Kamala and was saying things like “your body my choice” while Trump was denouncing the idea of supporting a federal ban.
Also around this time, your position on MAGA was that it wasn’t really about ideas; they were at most secondary concerns. The core tenet of MAGA was fealty to Trump. Whatever he says or does is what MAGA is. Fuentes obviously violates this tenet. Add Israel to this, and I’m not sure why Fuentes is being portrayed as the real face of MAGA all of a sudden.
From a cultural standpoint it absolutely DOES matter how long one's family has been in the country. Full cultural assimilation generally takes 3-4 generations. There are mappable political differences in voting preferences based on national origin from 2-3 generations back.
So it just isn't true that a recent naturalized arrival is as fully culturally American as someone whose ancestry goes back to the pilgrims. This goes both ways. Expat Americans are still culturally American even if they renounce their citizenship. Naturalization is ultimately just a piece of paper. It does not have a magic power to change who a person fundamentally is and how they were raised from childhood.
I'm not sure I follow. My ancestors arrived in North America 400 years ago. My wife's, a few decades before that. We have more in common - ideologically, socially - with many people who arrived in the US in the past few decades than we do with many people who've been here 3-4 generations. I've also lived outside the US at times. The experience for immigrants (or visitors) to the US is very different than that of US citizens going to other countries. (At least it used to be.)
“We’re facing an ideology that says maybe a third of the population are true Americans, and everyone else has a second- or third-tier status.”
This is essentially why the Trumpublican coup will soon stall and even fall apart. As yesterday showed, the other two thirds are getting and taking their opportunities to “throw the bums and thugs out.”
The issue of Israel is fundamentally different from all other issues because it makes perfect sense for whites to oppose Indian immigration if those Indians vote for anti-white left-wing parties that openly base themselves on the view that whites are evil oppressors. Even opposing immigration of secular Ashkenazi Jews for the same reason would be logical.
But naturally throughout history, nations have sought allies with strong technology, a strong military, and proven loyalty. Therefore the hatred toward the alliance with Israel, an utterly loyal ally of the United States that today shares similar values and similar enemies with the American right, already departs from normal historical patterns and from rationality, and stems from Nazi-style conspiracies and a schizophrenic-paranoid worldview.
This is ridiculous. They spend all their time thinking about how to deport people and very little time thinking about how to win their votes. Naturalized immigrants swung toward Trump and this didn't change their thinking at all. Now if immigrants swing back to Democrats they'll say they have to keep them out because of how they vote, when they've made their entire politics about targeting new arrivals.
They're just haters looking for excuses to hate.
>>"Maybe Fuentes talks about race 80% of the time and endorses color-blind nationalism 20% of the time, and the proportion is flipped for Vance...."
You've just persuaded me that "nationalist" and "racist" have huge overlap in current American politics. I've always thought it was a left leaning liberal take (driven by somewhat cosmopolitan contempt of culturally "localised" proles and obsession with race/racism generally) but that whole section whose beginning I quote above is very convincing.
"Vance, for example, has said that Americans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have more of a claim to the country than their political opponents" . Funny how that applies to Trump himself right? His mother was born in Scotland, and his father was the son of German immigrants who came to the US after the Civil War. No one has pointed this to him because everyone knows that he really means that "Whites have more of a claim to this country than their political opponents"