This is admittedly a strange choice for my very first post on this blog. I won’t normally waste my time talking at length about political commentators, “influencers”, extremists, or conspiracy theorists, since there’s too many of them spouting too much idiocy for me to pick one to focus on. Besides, God has given me bigger fish to fry. But this case hits close enough to home that I feel compelled to say something.
Nick Fuentes admittedly flew under my radar until it was brought to my attention not only that he posted “Your body, my choice. Forever. ” on Twitter/X in the aftermath of Trump winning the 2024 U.S. election, but also that he grew up in La Grange Park, Illinois and attended Lyons Township High School. Having grown up in Brookfield, Illinois (the town bordering La Grange Park to the east) and attended Riverside-Brookfield High School (a rival school to LTHS), it feels kinda fated that I should weigh in on this. It seems that, as usual, someone from RB will have to keep someone from LT in check (I was too emotionally-incompetent to handle school rivalries when I was actually in high school, but I’ve since matured to the point where I can joke about them)!
I won’t address every position I’ve seen reports of Fuentes taking, simply because some of them pertain to issues I don’t have an official position on. My aim with this post is threefold:
- Take a trip down memory lane, using this post as an excuse to talk about my school days (something I rarely get to do anymore);
- Speculate on what factors in our neighborhood may have contributed to Fuentes turning out the way he has, in the hope of prompting readers who actually grew up around Fuentes to do the same and more openly discuss what actually went down to lead him on the path he’s taken, so they can prevent their own kids from falling into the same traps; and
- Warn Christians how attitudes like the ones Fuentes holds that I do cover here can help set up the societal situation the Bible describes existing at the onset of the apocalypse.
Hilariously Bad Logic
I admittedly had to look up a fair amount about him on Wikipedia (and the page was updated quite a few times in the course of my research, might I add! {note how many edits were made between November 12th and 16th, 2024}); while we probably grew up somewhere between a few blocks and a couple miles away from each other, we’ve admittedly never met each other, due to the difference in our ages (he would’ve entered kindergarten the same year I entered 7th grade). But I must say, many of his claims would come across as hilarious if there weren’t people out there who took them seriously!
For example, consider his attempt to explain his position that being an “involuntary celibate” was “more heterosexual” than having intercourse with someone of the opposite sex:
“Having sex in itself is gay, I think. I think that it’s really a gay act. Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses … I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s a little sus. …I think, really, I’m like the straightest guy.”
Those who went to high school in the late 2000s (like me) may remember when “gay” was thrown around as a slang word to describe an object or situation, typically as a substitute for “stupid” (e.g., “that looks so gay” instead of “that looks lame”; “this is so gay” instead of “this sucks”). LGBT ideology wasn’t taught as vigorously in those days as it has been in recent years, so most people who used the word this way got away with it. Regardless of whether one condones using the word “gay” with this definition, Fuentes’ line of reasoning is clearly using it when referring to “need[ing] cuddles”, “need[ing] kisses”, and “need[ing] to spend time with a woman” as “gay”, only to switch it to being a synonym for “homosexual” in order to reach his conclusion that he’s “the straightest guy” (of course, a hug-obsessed person like me thinks he’s depriving himself with his attitude on cuddles!). This is even worse (in the sense of “more blatant“; subtle equivocation fallacies are more dangerous because they’re easier to fall for) than the equivocation fallacies on the word “homosexuality” that I bring out in Chapter 13 of my upcoming book; in those cases, the equivocation is subtle enough where you need to actively pay attention for it!
Insights From A Local
Fuentes claims to be Catholic. Let’s take that at face value, and consider the possibility that he may have gone to St. Louise de Marillac School in La Grange Park (which closed down after the 2019-20 school year). I don’t know whether Fuentes ever went to the school or its Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) program at any point between kindergarten and 8th grade, so it’d be nice if anyone who grew up within his circle(s) could confirm or deny this, since it would determine the relevancy of what I’m about to discuss. That school was built in 1956, with the church building having opened the previous year. According to this heritage page, the St. Louise de Marillac Church (now the North Campus of the Holy Guardian Angels Parish) is the second-oldest church building in the village of La Grange Park, after St. Michael’s Lutheran Church (which I attended with my mom and step-dad in my early twenties, incidentally), which opened in 1953. My dad and some of his siblings were students at St. Louise in its earlier years, and my sister and I attended its CCD program on Wednesday nights for a handful of years, to the point where each of us went through the “First Communion” ritual (although we were pulled out before going through the “Confirmation” ritual, like my best friend eventually did at the Catholic congregation his family attended). Moreover, I attended kindergarten through 4th grade at Brook Park Elementary School, whose playground is directly across the street from the main entrance to the church building. In fact, the very first general election I was old enough to vote in (2012), the easternmost entrance hall of St. Louise’s school was the poll location where I cast my ballot!
As I explain in Chapter 1 of my upcoming book, my mother pulled my sister and I out because shortly after I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, one of the teachers was talking with my mother and casually mentioned that “Karl can be a bit disruptive, but I just yell at him and he stops” (apparently, the CCD teachers hadn’t received the memo about my diagnosis, and so assumed — as they had in previous years — that I was just another troublemaker). And even while I was attending, I recall asking quite a few questions of my CCD teachers in an effort to understand what they were teaching better, and half of my questions were perceived as “disruptions”! (In hindsight, I suspect this is one of the reasons I got so into apologetics once I was exposed to it in 2003 — I legitimately wanted the answers!) I even remember some nights when our class was shown videos, and I’m disturbed in hindsight about the propagandistic emotionalism of some of them (e.g., a cartoon about a group of friends in a culture where Christians were persecuted, where one of them ends up captured and killed after they cut corners while praying the Rosary {scroll to “The steps to praying the Rosary are:”; wherever it says to “Pray” “the ‘Our Father'”, “Hail Marys”, or “the ‘Glory Be'”, they just said the name of the prayer the number of times stated}; and a short live-action film about a kid who wants his grandma’s famous dessert at his First Communion party where she dies before his First Communion, but the family finds her recipe book and is able to have her cooking at his party after all). Even worse, I recall an older acquaintance or two who attended their school around the same time as my dad who said he was offended that a certain priest never molested him, thinking it was because he “wasn’t pretty enough” compared to the boys who were (I think it goes without saying that they dodged a bullet)! Also, my dad is left-handed, and the Nuns tried to teach him to write right-handed, evidently having bought into the entirely un-Biblical idea that Satan was left-handed; the teachers eventually gave in, but none of them had experience teaching a lefty to write, so my dad has bad handwriting to this day.
Long story short, I have good reasons to think that St. Louise produced at least as many apostates as it did devout Catholics. If whatever Catholic upbringing Nick Fuentes had in La Grange Park was anything like how things were done at St. Louise, I can understand why he latches on so readily to ideas with no basis in sound Biblical teaching (and ideas contrary to it, to boot!), and why his attempts to defend his positions can get as incoherent as the example quoted in the previous section! Indeed, Ken Ham & Britt Beemer’s book “Already Gone” dug into the reasons why 2/3 of American Millennials who used to attend church on a regular basis have since left it behind, and the survey they conducted along the way revealed that it was generally due to the very factors alluded to above: people not sufficiently answering their sincere questions, and hypocrisy, legalism, and/or self-righteousness in the congregations they attended; how they were taught even comes in for special mention in their chapter on Sunday School {Scroll to “Taught but Not Caught”}. The cruel irony is that this book was published in 2009, when Nick was just entering his formative years; so his life trajectory very well could have been altered for the better if his parents had gotten a copy of this book and utilized its recommendations.
Speaking of books, it’s also possible that LT psychologically broke him, if its reading curriculum was anything like what my Freshman class at RB had to read. I was in Honors English 9, admittedly, so maybe the regular English 9 courses had a curriculum that wasn’t so actively depressing. What do I mean by “actively depressing”? They gave us pretty much all of the most depressing books possible: The Pearl by John Steinbeck, 1984 by George Orwell, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Night by Elie Wiesel — it was as if whoever designed the curriculum was trying to make us all emo! I got a “D” on the work I handed in for Night (the book with the happiest ending of the four listed above!), with a note from the teacher that said, in part: “You cannot dodge the assignment.” Believe me, I would’ve done the assignment correctly, if reading dozens of pages of first-hand eyewitness accounts of what people were put through at Auschwitz hadn’t emotionally overwhelmed me to the point where I couldn’t focus on doing the assignment correctly, and just wanted the whole ordeal to be over! While working through the third set of chapters (my class was assigned starting and stopping points each week), I was having a meltdown and told my dad that I was upset over the book, and he told me “Then stop reading it! They shouldn’t be making you read stuff that makes you this upset.” Alas, the course I was reading it for was required for graduation, so I included my dad’s remark in the portion of the assignment I wrote that night; obviously, my teacher didn’t agree — and there was even a built-in excuse for making 14-and-15-year-olds, people who are extremely prone to severe mood swings and just starting to figure out how to navigate more adult emotions, read books like this: Elie started going through the stuff described in the book when he was younger than us. And bear in mind that during the year I read these books (and a handful of years on either side of it), one of the meds I was on was Zoloft — an antidepressant that made my normal disposition in those years “deliriously happy”, to quote my mother.
If my Freshman reading curriculum got that close to psychologically breaking me, just imagine how much it could’ve messed up someone even more psychologically unstable! If anyone who went to LT in the early-to-mid 2010s can confirm or deny that their required reading curriculum was similarly depressing, I would greatly appreciate it. For all we know, Fuentes’ current status as a Holocaust-denier may have started out as an overreaction to being so traumatized by reading Night when he wasn’t emotionally-ready to handle it, that he wanted to convince himself it was a work of fiction!
It’s scary to think that if that CCD teacher had never mentioned yelling at me to my mother, if I’d never been introduced to Biblical apologetics, and if I’d been on a different combination of drugs in my Freshman year that left me just a little more emotionally-unstable, just a couple more bad influences may have been all I needed to end up like Nick Fuentes. Praise God that it all worked out for me!
Those Who Don’t Know Their History…
I think it’s also worth taking a detour to address the claim that Fuentes’ goal is to turn the Republican Party into “a truly reactionary party”. Granted, I’ve only been able to trace this quote to an article by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has become more and more unreliable over the last several decades; however, Fuentes seems to be in one (heck, several) of the categories where the SPLC still gets things right for the most part (I bring up the categories where they’ve abandoned all integrity in Chapter 12 of my upcoming book). And granted, I’m not a Republican, so how that party bills itself is of no consequence to how I live my life. But reactionary movements, more often than not, end up being just as in the wrong as the problems they’re reacting to. Tim Warner brings this up in a context that brings this discussion back into my wheelhouse {Scroll to pages 13-14 in the PDF, under “The Rise of Modalism in Phrygia: Praxeas, Noetus, & Sabellius:“}:
The opposition in Phrygia of Asia Minor where Montanism began [in the third quarter of the 2nd century A.D.] was in part concerned with the multiplying persons of the Godhead and the apparent obfuscation of monotheism. AS WITH MANY REACTIONS AGAINST GROSS HERESY, THE OPPOSITION OVER-CORRECTED BY GOING TOO FAR IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. The “fix” took the earlier (Jewish & Christian) concept of the Spirit as being a limited manifestation of God Himself and emphasized it to the point of applying the same idea to the Son. The new doctrine sought to stress rigid monotheism by claiming the unity of God as one Person against charges that (Montanist) Christianity was a form of poly-theism [sic]. According to this view, God has always manifested Himself through a limited aspect of His own Person, sometimes referred to as Logos, or Son, or Wisdom, or the Messenger of the Lord, or the Spirit of God. None of these manifestations had an individual identity apart from the Father Himself. (This was in contrast to the earlier view that Logos was “begotten” by God, and thus had become a distinct Person at the beginning of creation). Consequently, Jesus in the flesh was also a limited manifestation of God Himself. God simply manifested some portion of Himself in a form that temporarily assumed flesh. The new interpretation was intended to oppose Montanus’ multiplication of the Godhead to three distinct Persons.
This reactionary form of monotheism has had a revival of sorts in modern times among Oneness Pentecostals. The official modern theological term is “Modalism,” indicating that the Son and Spirit are merely “modes” through which God has interacted within the creation and with man. The churches which teach this view today often refer to themselves as “Apostolic Churches.” Yet this concept is anything but “apostolic.” It actually appeared first outside of Christianity in apostolic times with the claims of Simon Magus whom Peter denounced in Acts 8. Simon Magus was designated the father of Gnosticism by several of the earliest writers. Irenaeus wrote that Simon was “glorified by many as if he were a God; and he taught that it was himself who appeared among the Jews as the Son, but descended in Samaria as the Father while he came to other nations in the character of the Holy Spirit.” Thus Simon Magus was the first to teach this concept. However those who held this view in Asia Minor [circa A.D. 175] had no apparent link to Simon or his teaching earlier heresy.
{Italics, boldface, underlining, and content in parentheses in original. All-caps and content in brackets mine.}
Of course, I’m not surprised that Fuentes is ignorant of the history behind views of the Godhead that pre-date the Co-Equal, Co-Eternal Trinitarianism that Catholicism and most if not all of its daughter denominations hold to be so unquestionable. Quite frankly, most of Christendom is! {If you’d like to educate yourself on this, click here and scroll to “The Evolution of God Series:“; the article I just quoted from is part 5.} But as we all know — yet all too often fail to heed — those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it.
With how badly the Democratic party and its adherents have been messing up our society for quite some time now, what do you suppose the odds are that a “reactionary” Republican party will only go as far as reasonably necessary in the opposite direction? Our nation is at a point where I see no way that such reactions won’t backfire. The Republicans who now control the Presidency, the Senate, and (more narrowly) the House can change as many laws as they want, but no change brought about will last for any significant time unless hearts change — otherwise, they’ll just change all the laws back, and then some! This battle needs to be fought in the heavenly dominions where spiritual warfare applies (Ephesians 6:12; I explain this verse here), not the earthly dominions where political maneuvering gets things done (for better or worse). And the reality is, 4 years is not enough time to change the hearts of the sheer number of people in the U.S. that the demonic forces have successfully brainwashed into calling evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20). And when the Republican party wields lawfare as a weapon and cite Christian beliefs (actual or purported) as the reason for it, they’re setting Christians up to be persecuted once the shoe inevitably comes back on the other foot.
Why do I say “inevitably”, when Trump’s win so clearly showed that people are fed up with the direction that Democratic leaders have been taking things? Well, as I demonstrate in Appendix D of my upcoming book, the 70th “seven” of Daniel 9:27 will already be underway 5 years from now. Maybe Trump (or Vance, if an assassination attempt on Trump eventually succeeds; I said sometime back in the 2020 campaign season that I expect whoever wins in 2024 to be assassinated in 2025, based on my assessment of the U.S.’s societal situation at that time — and I’m hoping more than ever that I’m wrong!) will enforce Christian nationalism to the extent that the wicked will revolt against it all after (or even before!) the 2028 election, leading the U.S. into enough chaos that another nation (perhaps the 10-king confederacy mentioned in Daniel 2:41-44, 7:7,23-24; & Revelation 17:12-17) can conquer it, throwing the U.S. Constitution out the window and enabling Christians to be killed in the very place that’s prevented Christians from being persecuted more than anywhere else in history. Or, maybe one of the nations that will ultimately merge with others to become the 10-king confederacy will do so before the U.S. can even have another election in 2026, and Christians will already be tortured and killed in this land before the 10-king confederacy even officially exists.
There are quite a few different ways the U.S. could cease to be a (prominent) nation (nothing recognizable as the U.S. is ever mentioned in end-times prophecy, implying we’ll no longer be a world superpower by the time any end-times prophecies are fulfilled), and the 10-king confederacy could come into being as the new domineering world superpower; but the only details we know for sure are the ones the Bible actually gives us, which don’t pick up until a time when the 10-king confederacy is already underway, per the Aramaic text of Daniel 2:42 specifying that it’s describing “part of the kingdom’s end” (מִן־קְצָת מַלְכוּתָא) as being “strong”, and part as being “broken” (I’ll give an obsessively-accurate word-for-word translation of Daniel 2:31-45 — seriously, I spent 2 nights translating the whole passage as accurately as possible from the Aramaic! — in a post that I’ve already written but haven’t posted yet, so you’ll get more clarification then); hence, the 10-king confederation could even exist for a little while before the apocalypse starts. What chain of events will get the world to that point, the Bible simply doesn’t say.
As such, I won’t pretend to predict (much less know) all the details behind which public figures have to make which (geo)political maneuvers, in what order, at what times, to bring about the situation the Bible describes at the onset of the apocalypse. But God knew all those details from the beginning of the universe’s existence (Isaiah 46:9-10), so I’ll just let Him surprise me. As long as I can (with God’s grace and providence, of course) withstand any and all devastation that happens to come my way, just knowing when it will unfold is enough to keep my sanity grounded. My priority is to spiritually-prepare myself to depend on God and follow His instructions through it all, and to help others to do the same.
That said, I have been researching about and paying attention to the trajectory that tolerance toward Christian beliefs has been taking in the U.S. over the last few decades, so I can make some reasonable guesses as to what will contribute to Christians here starting to be persecuted as badly as they have been in most other places throughout the Christina Era. Indeed, Jesus warned his followers that by the first half of the apocalypse there wouldn’t be any nations where Christians are generally safe.
“See to it that no one misleads you. 5 For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will mislead many people. [Note that the quotation marks around “I am the Christ” were added by the translators; if they’re omitted, then this verse is referring to people who profess Jesus, but teach false doctrine — and how many preachers like that have there been throughout the Christian Era?] 6 And you will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. 7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8 But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pains [i.e., the apocalypse will be preceded by a period in history when everything mentioned in verses 5-7 is happening all over the world, simultaneously].
9 “Then they will hand you over to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. 10 And at that time many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. 11 And many false prophets will rise up and mislead many people. 12 And because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will become cold. 13 But the one who endures to the end is the one who will be saved. 14 This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.
(Matthew 24:4c-14 2020 NASB, boldface added)
“All [the] nations” includes the U.S.A. (or whatever’s left of it by that point). And Nick Fuentes embodies many of the “ideals” that I suspect will get the U.S. (or at least a significant fraction of its citizenry) to finally abandon the 1st Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause wholesale when it comes to Christians. More on that later.
Gen Z Mindsets At Their Worst
Fuentes evidently has some method to his madness: when answering viewers’ questions, he often bills them as “jokes”. Click here for a prime example that someone posted on X. He’s even gone on record explaining that this gives him probable deniability in a segment that gives us some additional insight into his worldview. {Watch starting at the 1:04 mark; skip to the 3:22 mark when you reach the first ellipsis (…) }
I don’t know if I’ve ever explained this — and I don’t know if I should, even — but, irony and post-irony is [sic] so critical for a variety of reasons. …beyond that, irony is so important for giving a lot of, like, cover and plausible deniability for our views. That’s what these people don’t understand… Earnestness, this sort of academic filibustering, obfuscating — this is not effective political communication, especially not when you’re dissident [I originally misheard this word as “dissonant”], and especially not for young people. What is required is somebody who is tactical with their language. Tactical, okay? Use irony because — you know, when it comes to something like Holocaust revision — I mean, this is a subject that you cannot deviate from the popular consensus on, but you also, you also can’t, like — I also think you really can’t (chuckle) tell the truth if you adhere to that. …When it comes to a lot of these issues you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you. Oh, well, you know, “what does that mean?” Well, I was being ironic. Well, I was joking. Well, it’s whatever. Well, you don’t understand the tone. Well, you don’t understand humor. And that’s true — and it is true, to a great extent. …Irony is a very important, like, linguistic and rhetorical weapon, so that we can be subversive. And that is what they don’t understand. We are dissidents. And as dissidents, they want to crush our ideas, our modes of communication, our organizing, our networking, that is why we must subvert those rules. We must be tactical. I use sardonic humor to convey a point subversively. I’ve never, you know — well, I do actually, literally, on my show say “Just kidding! That’s a joke, whatever.” But the point is made, but the point is delivered. It’s all a joke, bruh! (Laughs)
When watching the video and transcribing what Fuentes said, I originally misheard him as saying that academic filibustering and obfuscating is ineffective politically, “especially when you’re dissonant”. In my defense, “dissident” and “dissonant” both make sense in the context. But I do think Fuentes’ “sardonic humor” is an attempt to make his own cognitive dissonance palatable. You’ll see in my upcoming book and as I post more on this blog that I’d rather take the intellectual high road by going out of my way to reassess my worldview until I’m not dissonant! Of course, in a book he wrote in 2002, Ken Ham spent a chapter discussing the mindsets of different groups of people in our day, in terms of obstacles to successfully evangelizing to them. Consider some of his warnings about people in the final category:
I believe this group represents where our culture is heading. In my opinion, it is probably the hardest group to reach. These people are the products of our universities and public education. They are now starting to get positions of power in the government at local and national levels. As they are the products of the influence of Group 6, they have provided the mystical element they need: the universe (or nature) is ‘god.’ This is all part of the New Age religion that is sweeping the world. Of course, in one sense it’s nothing other than a form of Hinduism, but because it’s been birthed in our Western culture, it’s often entwined with our scientific mindset.
…If ‘god’ is nature, then how can ‘god’ be both good and evil, health and disease, full of joy and suffering? The universe seems very contradictory. It’s only the Bible that explains why this is so. The Bible not only explains the origin of evil but also the reason for the existence of death. Because this group of people is interested in supernatural things, sometimes they will listen when you argue authoritatively from the Bible. However, sometimes they will accept what you say and yet accept what they believe at the same time. Because truth is relative [in their view], they live in the world inconsistently anyway. They are happy to live illogically and inconsistently.
{Boldface and content in brackets mine.}
I think Ham’s prediction was spot-on. And speaking of “the influence of Group 6” (click the phrase “a chapter” above and read the description of Group 6, so their connection to the quote below will be more clear), Fuentes gave us some additional insight into his worldview and the thought process of many people in Gen Z (Nick Fuentes is definitely in Gen Z; I was born around 2/3 of the way through Gen Y) earlier in that same video:
my generation is completely nihilistic, I mean that is really the backdrop of what we’re talking about — all of it is contextual. Nobody gets that; everything is contextual, okay? …Our generation, my generation [in] particular’s coming up where everything has been destroyed, I mean, we are living in the ruins of everything earnest, everything sincere, everything that actually had meaning — religion, ideology, nationalism, all of that, it’s all gone — you know, even the family, we have nothing, okay? I came up in school, and it’s like, literally like a dystopian, like liberal, Fukuyama wasteland where it’s about holding hands and the diversification of America and all the — you know, lab coat feminist, all this s***. And so, that being the backdrop of my generation, being ironic is sort of the language of this nihilistic era. I, I think, at least… talking in a post-ironic, ironic way, is very much symptomatic of that condition. You know, earnestness, sincerity, this sort of “true belief” — that, that doesn’t exist for this generation, so I think irony is actually very important for communicating with young people, I think other young people understand that… Why do you think it is that young people watch my show? As opposed to, you know, watching Fox News or, even things like Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder? It’s because I am speaking the language of other Zoomers.
Indeed, the comment section of this YouTube video was full of people calling Fuentes “based” and expressing desire to go check out more of what he has to say! (Checking the profile of the video’s uploader reveals that his sense of humor — and so, likely, that of the people who tend to watch his uploads — is typical of someone from Gen Z or late Gen Y; trust me, I’ve seen stuff from way too many of the channels listed under his “Subscriptions” and “Favorite Channels”!) After hearing from my sister and her friends about what was going on at RB in their senior year (the second year after I left), I can confirm that Fuentes’ description of school became more accurate there pretty much just after I graduated in 2009. And from being involved with Snowball during all 4 years I was at RB, I can confirm that the “holding hands and the diversification of America” part was reasonably accurate even while I attended. I would honestly be surprised if anything about his description of LT in the early-to-mid-2010s was inaccurate!
That point Ham made about people who are “happy to live illogically and inconsistently” may explain why Fuentes was willing to say “Your body, My choice” {italics added}, despite the fact that he’s not calling any of the shots with abortion policy. I also can’t resist pointing out that his statement is more accurate under a pro-choice regime, if you understand “My” as meaning “the man’s” (as all the pro-choice women who had this message spammed to them after Trump’s victory were clearly meant to take it). I’m still having conniptions over how masterfully Ham brought this out just a few months ago when responding to a statement by Pete Buttigieg:
Men are more free in a country with access to the murder of children? Yes, men are “more free” to abandon the women they use sexually, with no consequences. More free to “sleep around,” refuse to marry, or selfishly use their time, resources, and finances for themselves, instead of the child they helped create. Yes, more free to have affairs and cover them up or “pimp out” women and girls through sex trafficking and prostitution. Yes, men are “more free” when they can sacrifice their own children on the altar of their own pleasure—more free to sin against women, against their own children, against their own bodies, and against their Creator.
Fuentes having no problem with inconsistency in his views may also contribute to why he has so many white supremacist beliefs, yet claims not to be a white supremacist, passing off the term “white supremacist” as an “anti-white slur”. Unfortunately, the Anti-Defamation League documents that “Rather, Fuentes positions himself as [a] ‘Christian conservative’ who opposes societal shifts – on immigration, abortion and more — as nefarious efforts, led by the left, to fundamentally erode America’s Christian values. This cloaking of ideology is a ploy to attract mainstream support.” {Content in brackets mine.} And that’s where I fear Christians are going to really start getting screwed over in the years ahead.
Extreme Views Provide Excuses For Extreme Measures
You see, while I agree that many (though not all) of those “societal shifts” are part of deliberate efforts to erode the Christian values the U.S. was founded on (after all, the key players throughout the 20th century who got the ball rolling for many of those shifts said as much in their own writings!1), Fuentes’ calling himself a “Christian conservative” as an alternative label for “white supremacist” gives the impression that white supremacy is part and parcel of the Christian faith (or at least, a “conservative” version of it; of course, those who throw around this word never seem ready to specify exactly what “conservative” people are trying to conserve!). Of course, the Bible teaches exactly the opposite about white supremacy (indeed, “races” and racism in general) and hardly promotes wholesale opposition to immigration:
and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation [and the Bible leaves open the possibility that God’s process here may in some cases involve immigration on the part of someone and/or their parents], that they would seek God, if perhaps they might feel around for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us
(Acts 17:26-27 2020 NASB, boldface added)
But in a world that’s getting increasingly intolerant of Christian beliefs, we can expect more than a few people to pounce on statements that give such false impressions about Christianity and use them as excuses to persecute Christians.
For instance, some of his anti-Semitic remarks could be exploited by anti-Zionists to further their own cause, and “pro-Israel” Americans (not to mention Orthodox Jews) could be killed for dissidence in the event that Fuentes’ views ever become official policy. Or, anti-Zionists could be killed in a “guilt by association” scenario where someone decides that “people like Fuentes” should be killed. I can honestly see this going either way, since both of the mainstream views on how to relate to Israel are unbiblical. It also doesn’t help that denying or downplaying what Hitler did to Jews hinders interpretation of the 7 kings of Revelation 17:10 (I’ll explain this in a later post, too).
Fuentes has spoken in support of Catholic monarchy. He obviously doesn’t understand that the U.S. specifically included the Establishment Clause at the start of the 1st Amendment because they knew full well how much havoc the presence of a state church (including Catholic monarchies) had wreaked in Europe over the centuries; for crying out loud, that’s the whole reason the Pilgrims fled to America in the first place!
He’s also a Christian Nationalist and Catholic integralist. I was technically a Christian Nationalist myself (I wasn’t aware of the term at the time), before I started more thoroughly investigating the connections between Biblical covenants. This led me to realize that Biblical covenants don’t apply to unbelievers, except for the Edenic, Adamic, and Noahic Covenants, which apply to all of humanity because they were given to the heads of all humanity. (You can get a more thorough explanation in Chapter 6 of my upcoming book.) Hence, imposing any Biblical standards on society that aren’t included in those 3 covenants (see Genesis 1:28-30; 2:2-3,15-18,24; 3:14-21; & 8:22-9:17 — note that Genesis 9:5-6 in particular was where God instituted civil governments for humanity) is to apply those standards beyond their divinely-approved scope. That won’t remain the case forever, though: Jesus will be calling the shots for all nations once he returns (Psalm 2:8-9 LXX; Daniel 7:13-14,27; Revelation 19:16, etc.)! Sadly, I fear that many Christian Nationalists are effectively trading 1,000 years of ruling in Christ’s Kingdom and then enjoying the results for the rest of eternity, for 4 years (maybe 5) of living in a bastardization of that Kingdom.
Conclusion
Given all the articles I’ve cited that link Fuentes with Trump, I think it’s appropriate to close out by giving you some perspective on how I’m approaching Trump’s second term. After all, I never said much about what I thought about Trump during his first term (mainly because, living in the deep blue state of Illinois, I’d be chewed out for saying anything remotely positive about him)! Both then and now, my attitude would be best described as “cautiously optimistic”, but at the very least, I’m definitely going into it with more insight this time. In a comment on a post of his going into more detail on some of the things I bring up and/or allude to in this post, I think Warner said it very well:
I agree that the fervor in supporting Trump is misplaced, almost to the point of “worship.” Many Christians are putting their trust in a man instead of in God. I do not deny that Trump is being used as God’s tool. But I question whether that tool is actually to “Make America Great Again,” or as a test leading to judgement. My wife and I will vote for Trump, because the alternative is almost unthinkable. However, we will do so with the knowledge that God raised up both Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar for His own purposes of judgement.
P.S.: Regarding Post Length
Just a heads-up: compared to the other posts I’ve already written over the last few months, but have yet to post here because I just set up the website this last week, this post is pretty close to average-length for me (it’s about 6,500 words, including the paragraph you’re reading right now). Some of the posts I’ve already typed are little more than 2,000 words, and others are more in the ballpark of 10,000 words; one that’s still in progress is already so long that I plan on uploading it as a PDF! So if you’re a fan of longer “long-form content”, you’ve come to the right place!
- As just two examples, consider Margaret Sanger and John Dewey. Ironically, Fuentes and Sanger probably would’ve gotten along really well, assuming his parents didn’t immigrate to the U.S.! (In 1916, she opened her very first birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn because her target clientele was “immigrant Southern Europeans, Slavs, Latins, and Jews”. {Click the link on the phrase “Margaret Sanger” and scroll to “Racism and birth control clinics”. Boldface mine.}) ↩︎
A long read but very good!