The Girl Who Went Home to Nebraska

And the dreams that never were

Christopher Brunet is not without controversy, and his latest work, a 30,000+ word exposé on Nick Fuentes and his America First Movement- better known as Groypers- represents a bold and well-researched attack on a personality and phenomenon that are a fixture in the wider right. Make what you will of Brunet’s beef with the Manhattan Institute, or his criticism of Trump administration policies, but loose cannon or not he keeps firing (for the record, I admire Chris Rufo and the work he has done, and my hope is to reconcile people on the right who are doing serious work as opposed to stunts and grifting). AF espouses hardline American nationalism, hatred of Jews, and an idiosyncratic Catholicism which has been officially denounced by American bishops, while cultivating an aesthetic blend of twink homosexuality, pedophilic anime tropes, and quasi-ironic allusions to traditionalism, intermixed with rape fantasies. The Groypers are a numerically moderate and vocally large faction within the right-o-sphere and they are known to be viciously loyal to their young leader.

Nick Fuentes, seen fresh from pegging . . . his pants.

When I learned of this project, I expected that when it dropped it would cause a firestorm. The controversial Brunet was controversially dunking on the controversial Fuentes; surely their respective friends and enemies would leap in to tear at any vulnerability revealed or mistake made. To my surprise, however, it seems to have hit with little of the force I anticipated. On X, where Brunet has over 55,000 followers, the thread has- as of this writing- gotten 570 likes, and on Substack, where the article appears in its entirety and Brunet has 10,000 subscribers and is a bestseller, it has 30 likes and 20 comments. It must have taken an enormous amount of work to put this together and so far it has attracted relatively little notice.

But why? The piece is timely, as Fuentes has come under criticism for encouraging doxxing and his own attempts to deal with being doxxed, including legitimately deadly threats against his life. Sure, those events happened a few months ago, but Fuentes is still in the public eye, mostly for criticizing President Trump, with whom he met before the Trump camp essentially declared Fuentes and his crew to be personae non gratae. That full story remains to be told, but one imagines Trump has ready access to the kind of information about Fuentes that Brunet had to dig for, and once he started asking around, he didn’t like what he found. But that the young leader of a significant faction of rightists has denounced the president would seem to beg the public’s question, what is Nick Fuentes all about? Brunet provided the answers, and, well, crickets.

Fuentes greeting a female admirer like a true alpha.

Granted, the piece is extraordinarily long (it actually loads slowly on my laptop and not really at all on my phone), so perhaps that discouraged some people who might otherwise have looked at it. But I suspect that in large part it has to do with Fuentes’ actual status on the right. I never really kept up with things in the Groyperverse before Brunet’s essay dropped, but I assumed others did, as he has over 500,000 followers on X. Surely, I figured, everyone will come out swinging on this one; the Groypers themselves, at least, should be mad. A few of them dropped comments and I’m sure Brunet is getting hate mail and death threats, but by and large the wider online right just passed on saying anything. I attribute this in part to an implicit recognition that AF isn’t really part of the actual right in any meaningful sense, though there is more to it that that.

Fuentes’ schtick is that he is a hardcore tradcath American patriot quasi-white nationalist (despite being Mexican), and his movement is about restoring Christian values and fighting Jewish power. There are posts and videos and memes and slogans and banners and hashtags etc. all attesting to that, but that’s really it. It would be too much to even call it a movement; America First is an internet phenomenon comprised solely of transmittable, ephemeral imagery. Even the IRL activities are fodder for online discourse. None of it is in earnest. Despite proclaiming “Christ is King” and advocating for traditionalism, Fuentes is at odds with basic Church teachings, has no personal interest in marriage- much less women in general- and surrounds himself with a crew of abject degenerates who in turn preside over online spaces largely given over to “humor” showcasing the full range of internet perversion. His knockoff integralist-Christian nationalism is a cynical pose, adopted by young (and not so young) people who simply wish to use Christian and patriotic imagery to poke at their online enemies.

There’s a sense in which Fuentes resembles Charles Maurras, save that he lacks the Frenchman’s charisma, masculine presence, work ethic, intellectual depth, dynamism, collegiality, political instincts, personal asceticism, earnestness, and influence. They are both associated with organizations called the AF and both railed against Jews, so there’s that. And, as noted, they both got themselves on the wrong side of the Catholic Church they each claimed to support, though Maurras was able to work himself back into Rome’s good graces later in his career and returned to canonical belief before his death in 1951. But their most significant overlap is that Fuentes and his followers represent a kind of internet parody of Action Française, a LARP version of an actual political movement. And it is where they come together that the differences between the Groypers and an authentic right wing movement are most stark.

Note that Maurras fought actual duels with actual men, as opposed to wrist-flappingly encouraging online mobs to swarm his enemies.

Interestingly, despite his pose as a right-wing culture warrior, a quick glance at Fuentes’ X activity shows that he spends most of his time attacking people on the right from the perspective of their being insufficiently critical of Israel. He hates the Trump administration with the white heat of a thousand Bulwark articles, despite the president mostly implementing policies AF has been publicly advocating for for years. There’s little there on the religious side of things either. As noted, he shows no real evidence of engagement with Catholic teaching beyond what he can mine to attack Jews and other rightists. If he has read Augustine or the other Church Fathers, there is no evidence of it from his public statements. He similarly shows no awareness of contemporary rightist Catholic thought; nothing about the integralists or post-liberals, no mention of First Things, etc. Despite their conceptual overlap, he seems to have never heard of the aforementioned Maurras.

For all of his mockery he longs for the attention of serious people, wanting to be treated like the significant media figure he sees himself as, but no one outside of his group takes him as such. I have never heard of a non-Groyper on the right (or anywhere else) referencing him in any capacity other than distain. He has a strange history of getting out of trouble, most notably for his complete lack of consequences for loudly and publicly encouraging people to enter the Capital during the January 6th Electoral Justice Protests, while others have faced stiff prison sentences for even tangential association with those events. It’s the kind of thing that makes sensible people… cautious. The public figures who do gravitate to him, as Brunet shows, are generally cast-offs from more serious outlets, people mired in scandal, grifters, and degenerates. Fuentes will platform anyone who flatters him, which has brought down further controversy, most particularly due to his association with one Ali Alexander, a nefarious fixture from the dark side of Republican politics, who currently faces numerous accusations of soliciting sex from underaged boys and exploiting his position in both mainstream politics and AF to do so.

When I pulled up this video, the ad preceding it was for child sex trafficking awareness. The algorithm certainly has theories.

All of this, I think, leads serious people on the right to treat the Groypers as a sideshow. Perhaps that’s why there was a bit of indifference to Brunet’s exposé. But I think this is a mistake. We should take the Groypers and their culture of valorizing exploitation and perversion seriously, because it’s a reflection of a wider problem in society in general.

The Groypers are a collection of mostly young men looking for some place in the world where they can belong, feel valued, and put their talents to work for something worthwhile. A healthy society creates opportunities for such people, both men and women, to allow them the chance to contribute, which is not only essential for the well-being of individuals, but the common good. Our society is not healthy, and rather than opportunities, it presents the young with a series of rent-seeking obstacles to navigate if they hope to fulfill their potential. The legitimate ones- the rent-seeking operations that have to at least ostensibly follow rules as they squeeze you- are bad enough. Your path to a career as a professional, an artist, a soldier, anything really, involves a long string of gatekeepers looking to profit from your ambitions and energy. But as the exploitation becomes ever more onerous and expensive, some people come to the conclusion that they have no way through by ordinary means and start looking for alternatives.

There is nothing wrong with seeking out ways around the sclerotic and exploitative system; indeed, much of what I so and many others do here on Substack is constructing just such an alternative. But for many others, the attempts on the part of the young to break from the normie program are invitations to creative grifting. Such people understand that the internet is full of eager souls looking for answers and relevance, and thus has arisen an entire class of grifters who provide pseudo-community and a spurious sense of meaning, under the guise of some great movement. Thus the Groypers. America First is a tarpit, sucking in unwary mastodons looking for fresher pastures into a stagnant black morass of loli, catgirls, and rape jokes.

Imagine you are a young man of a traditionalist temperament. You’re looking around at the world and you do not like much of what you see. There’s a sickness in everything, and you are confident that it can be solved with a RETVRN to the values of the healthy society you imagine once was. The people you look to at first for answers- your parents, your pastor, the media you read- don’t really have much to say, and really don’t seem to see the problem as being that serious. You think, ‘I’ll be a conservative activist,’ for the ten minutes it takes you to realize that access to that world is reserved for people with connections and malleable principles. So you realize you need to get creative. You cast about online and find a group called America First.

They welcome you in with open arms. Right away you absorb the jargon and the in-jokes; it’s easy because you come from the same aesthetic universe- anime, video games, pop culture memes, etc. You can sense the energy and enthusiasm. You feel like you’re really doing something now, and what’s better, you get to turn your intensity back against all those normiecon people and institutions that failed you. You’re on a crusade. Deus Vult. Christ is King.

You do notice there are an awful lot of debates about why current age of consent laws are bad. Well, not really debates; everyone actually seems to be on the same page about it. There’s much less interest in discussing anything about Catholicism, apart from what is polemically useful in relation to Jews. No one seems to care that the Church doesn’t seem especially supportive of what you’re doing. You chalk that up to all the corruption and indifference you’ve seen with your own eyes. This is the same Church that made light of the pedophilia in its midst, after all. Of course, you find yourself joking quite often about that very thing, but you give yourself permission- after all, it’s ironic. It’s humor. It’s what guys do. Same with the anime porn, it’s just a big joke. Sure, not everyone would get it, so you keep it in the group, passing around hard drives and sharing the really . . . funny . . . stuff by way of Tor.

You learn- ironically of course- that dating and marriage are totally gay and spending time with women is a sure sign of effeminacy. That’s not quite traditional, of course, but again, it’s all just in good fun, just like all the femboy stuff. You were pretty sure when you signed on that this was going to be a right wing Christian movement- remember all the crusader gifs? But now you’re listening to Destiny and Kanye West and Andrew Tate. It seems like there are a lot more nuances to all that than you imagined. But the one thing that cannot be questioned is Nick Fuentes himself, the sun around which this system revolves.

Pictured Above: Total Irony

Eventually one of two things happens in a situation like this if the participant continues. One, you realize it’s all a giant scam and embrace it, taking what you can from the unwary. You end up like Beardsley or any of Fuentes’ other lieutenants, or Ali Alexander himself, a freelance parasite attaching himself to any rock from which he can ambush passing boys. Or else you never do figure it out and drive your life over a cliff, condemned to fall weightless for the rest of a miserable life. One of the saddest characters in Brunet’s piece is Nathan Clodfelter, who ruined his life in every possible way in order to become a full-time Groyper. He joins a long list of other right wing once-weres who went off that same plunge, like the whole crew from Charlottesville took, all of whom either turned fed and/or made their piece (not a misspelling) with the system or else disappeared into age-of-consent-debating insanity (why is everyone doing this?).

Some, of course, escape before it gets that bad. But then, what happens to them? What is it like to get a chance to feel like you’re making a difference, making the world a better place, only to discover that not only were you making things worse, but that all the good work you thought you were doing amounted to nothing? Surely some bounce back, find a new outlet, and let their disillusionment fuel them to greatness, or at least worthiness. But for others, the dream surely dies.

You may be wondering why I gave my essay the title I did. Reading Brunet and the sordid stories of pervert grifter after shameless hustler made me think of the closest analogue to the swamps of the online right- Hollywood. Both ostensibly offer creative misfits the chance to present interesting ideas to normie audiences, but in practice are plagued with vile human beings who drain every ounce of authenticity they can from the unwitting who approach them in earnestness. They feed on it, like vampires. I think of Harvey Weinstein, of a whole world of people fully aware of his predations who looked the other way, so used to it as they were. Perhaps there’s a parallel there as well. I thought of the women he exploited, and to be real, those who were willing to be exploited to get what they wanted. Some women he raped, but others sold themselves for what he offered. I’m not naming names; draw your own conclusions.

Everyone has a story to tell.

But think for a minute about that girl you never heard of. She’s the one who went out to Hollywood full of dreams of being a star. Everyone in her small town told her she was brilliant on stage and screen, and she knew, deep in her heart, that she only needed a chance. But before anyone would ever get to see what she could do, word came down that a certain director required a different sort of audition. It was made clear that if she refused, she would never work in Hollywood, ever. But as badly as she wanted to be a star, that still, small voice inside her, that pledge she’d made to Christ at that Baptist Church lock-in when she was 15, rang out from her heart, and she wouldn’t trade her soul, much less her body, for a movie role. She said no, and just like that, all the doors were shut against her. You never heard of her; she went home to Nebraska, her heart broken. These days, when her nursing shift is over, she still goes to the movies sometimes. She can still imagine, when it doesn’t hurt too much.

The sort of people who take genuine authenticity, love, talent, energy, and hope and drain it for their own purposes, taking all, giving nothing back, and leaving the husks of lives behind, that’s the problem. Everything wants a piece of you, your job, your games, your parasocial relationships, the whole fake and gay world we live in wants access to your very blood. Be careful to whom you offer yourself. It can be a matter of life and death. And on the other side of that, there’s a special place in hell for the destroyers of dreams, for the exploiters, the users, the abusers, and the indifferent. I hope you see the light before the end.

EDIT: Dudley Newright’s latest reminded me of this story, which I meant to mention. White men blacklisted from publishing fiction for the crime of non-diversity ranks right up there with the kind of evil I mentioned.