Fuentes Syndrome and the Dynamics of Faction

A brief look at methods

When you max out your saturation in the narrow subset of a targeted demographic using a model that requires controversy to drive growth, you quickly discover that it is less resource intensive & time consuming to target adjacent movements/sub demographics/spheres than it is to go after the nominal enemies of your adopted ideology or rhetorical framework.

Fuentes poses no threat to the Cathedral, or deep state, or whatever term one wishes to use to feel smart or differentiated. Fuentes is the perfect foil to the liberal democracy structure, corralling youthful angst and mile wide-millimeter deep dissent. He is free to act as a "dye pack" in the way banks put explosive dye devices in money to mark stolen bills and make them worthless. Associating, or being associated with, Fuentism renders you known & understood, and therefore easily dismissed out of hand and/or categorized permanently.

Thus, Fuentes Syndrome drives take slingers to "punch close" to drive drama and controversy, peeling away followers & fans, and generating grist for the take-mill. The core content doesn't matter; it's modular, extendable, reducible, scalable in perpetuity, because it's nothing more than branding, marketing copy, becoming "the [TAKE] guy" in the byplay, background, and jargon of the sphere.

So, the Fuentarded content generator can always have a "next ad campaign" by targeting someone or something proximal, shoehorning it into the branding, and making the line go up. When the goal is Line Go Up, the target list will always become "cheap + easy" && "novel or unexpected."

It's a little bit postmodern to attribute this to Fuentes; this tendency is broadly observable throughout the history of modern warfare, say 1066 forward, with a few examples predating that. Mao’s communist revolution is a good example that’s easily accessible to most minds. Mao and his vanguard adopted the broad stroke tenets of marxist-leninism¹ but very quickly ran into a problem: Chinamen in the aggregate were both dumb and illiterate. While Marx was incorrect about the progression of dialectical materialism needing to start in industrialized societies, Lenin did enough configuration work to keep the charade viable. But a large body of ugly, lazy, incapable men is always requisite to a communist movement. These are the foot soldiers the vanguard relies upon, and for them to be “ready” for communism, they need to be informed enough to know that passably attractive, industrious, canny men are out there, living enviable lives of substance worth stealing².

Pre-communist China was a fascinating, unique sort of gilded shithole. Western manipulation and the technology gap made the Manchu Regime particularly susceptible to domination, such that none of the European Powers treated China like an adversary. They were more like a curiously large hornet nest parked over a really nice lake. If you don’t like this characterization, leave a better one in the comments. The Europeans dehumanized the Chinamen while simultaneously importing dangerous ideas and technologies. The Manchu fell, but China wasn’t able to continue its governance rotation cycle, a system that had been ongoing for thousands of years.

• China gets dominated by a foreigner group that is more industrious, inventive, masculine, or capable;

• the new rulers get seduced by the million efficiencies of Chinese bureaucracy when it comes to managing bajillions of Chinamen;

• Chinese bureaucracy subsumes the invader governance structure;

• china coasts on this fusion until a neighbor detects an advantage and attacks.

I am painting with a broad brush; here is more granular and interesting coverage of China. It’s focused on the revolutionary period of the twentieth century, but it delves relatively deeply into the historical precursors. You should watch it.

European involvement messed up the predictable cycles China had come to expect, and it was ripe for “disruption,” in the silly parlance of gay start up culture³. Similar to the range of diseases introduced to the Indians by the Settlers, the suite of ideas introduced by Europeans into the eastern Orient was devastating. It was only a matter of time before some soulless piece of shit came along and took advantage of the situation, and that piece of shit was Mao.

The Chinese elite did a speed run of the European ideological buffet, with characters like Sun Yat Sen and Chiang Kaishek filling approximately the same role as Mao: ham-fisted leader of a more or less geographically constrained gang. They sloppily applied the ideological precepts in a very general sense while assiduously deploying Chinese greed, which is like regular greed, only moreso. What it amounted to was gang based turf fights scaled up to the breadth of the Middle Kingdom. While there was definitely periods of genuine ideological struggle, they were brief and totalizing, with the winning ideology shamelessly exterminating their defeated competitors within a given region⁴.

All of the internal struggles between nominal marxism and nominal nationalism occurred under the threatening cloud of ascendant Nipponism. The Chinese warlords could talk tough and walk tall, but they were midgets of both mind and body when it came to the Japs.

Now, let us return to Fuentism and the factionalization of the American Right.

There are scores of unique ideolectual movements that can be accurately categorized as “rightward,” and each of them has their own set of elites, which in turn have their own leaders who themselves have a retinue of commoner followers. To the outsider and/or normie, these distinctions and competing hierarchies may seem inconsequential, but to the denizens of the Sphere, knowing who stands where, what for, and with who, is requisite to participation. More work needs to be done to catalog, analyze, and understand this ideolectual ecosystem, and I hope someone eventually does put in the time and effort. For our purposes, we are only going to look at one specifically: Fuentes and his “America First” gang. Like Mao, he is a jilted elite, deprived of status and station he feels he deserves. This deprivation is one of the drivers of both his behavior and the rhetorical viscera, by which I mean the connective tissue that between the consolidated memes⁵. Like Chinese communism prior to the 1950s, his gang may seem powerful regionally, but it is dwarfed by Greater Liberalism, the collection of liberals, progressives, leftists, and their thralls that compose the status quo in the academy, industry, commerce, and society.

I have to assume some part of Fuentes thought about taking on Greater Liberalism, at some point at least, but that’s a real battle against a dangerous enemy. Fuentes, like Mao, found far more success in attacking fellow travelers who differ in outlook by mere degrees. Like Mao’s battles against the various disparate and similar factions, these tiny and largely inconsequential victories serve to drive expansion of the gang and feed the bloodlust of its members. It must be said that it’s not a waste, it isn’t really counterproductive, because the ostensible Right Wing thought & principles of America First are little more than window dressing for the real goal: expanding the Fuentes gang. Everything is about recruitment; use the principles when they serve the purpose of bringing in more gang members, and abandon them when they stand in the way of bringing in more gang members.

So, Fuentes is pro Trump when it is getting him more adherents, and he is pro Harris when it gets him more adherents. He criticizes blacks when it drives engagement, then plays slap ass with negroes when it drives engagement. Take this lens, “recruitment as the only principle,” and apply it to the history of his “movement,” and the whole thing makes a lot more sense. He’s not a hypocrite, he’s not a traitor, he’s not a fair weather friend; he’s a gang leader existing in an ecosystem where quantity is the only quality that matters.

For the principled Right Winger, this behavior is despicable. It reeks of selfishness, greed, and shortsightedness. But it’s inaccurate to say it is unique to Fuentes. It is, in fact, the rule and not the exception. True, it would be more honest for the gang to be called “Fuentes First,” but honesty in the postmodern media market is the fastest path to irrelevancy.

This is my assessment of the man, for lack of a better term, and the facets of his movement. While their are far too many foreigners in the ranks, there are also lots of good American men and boys standing proudly behind Fuentes. Further still, it is not uncommon for him to parrot talking points and precepts with which I agree, concepts and statements that are objectively Right Wing, just as Mao often made statements fully inline with “marxist-leninism with Chinese characteristics.” There almost certainly was a point in his life when Mao actually believed in communism, and I think the same goes for Fuentes in regards to Right Wing thought & politics. But at a certain point, “Chinese Communism” was just the ideolectual trappings hanging on the actual rhetorical framework of “Mao First.” When Mao was sidelined by the Communist Party of China, he reconfigured the belief structure and built a new gang to get himself back in power.

The principles didn’t matter. The nation didn’t matter. The people didn’t matter. Those things were just means to an end, the end being power + control.

1. One of the reasons I am particularly haughty when it comes to political science and political theory is that so few people who make it their business and pleasure to discuss concepts within these categories actually take the time to read up on them. It’s not restricted to the Left, my chosen adversary, either; low resolution perspectives and broad-brush tactics are ubiquitous online as well as in the academy. Understand, I am not asserting that only the experts get to talk. Rather, I think that if you’re going to shill concepts, you should at least have a passing familiarity with both canon and dogma of the opposition.

2. It can never be overstated how critical spite, jealousy, rage, and ugliness are to successful communist initiatives. This is why (((certain))) [[[things]]] never change.

3. Start Up lexicon is all leftist, and once you notice it, you can’t ever see it any differently.

4. When exploring Chinese history, keep in mind there are 3 Chinas: North, South, and West. The myriad ethnicities, cultures, and subgroups have their own internal dynamics, but they are subservient to the greater geographic determinism of these three Chinas.

5. His patter, his facial expressions, his demeanor, his wardrobe, etc.