I don’t normally use Substack to rip into people, but allow me to come right out and say that Tucker Carlson has become a political hack. I will stop short of accusing him of taking money from Qatar to spread antisemitism, but only because I lack proof. Qatar does pay influencers to push similar narratives, and Carlson has always been a bit of a political chameleon who gravitates toward whatever beliefs may be convenient for his career.
My belief is that Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens were broken when Fox News and Daily Wire fired them. It can’t be easy to go from being one of the top stars on a major media platform to someone with a radically smaller viewership, overnight. I understand why they might chase fame, even in ways that sacrifice conscience.
There is a difference between chasing reach and chasing fame. Reach gets your voice into the national debate, but it does not necessarily get people to ask for your autograph at the airport. Those who chase fame rather than reach have succumbed to pride, and are likely to sacrifice truth. This is what I believe happened with Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
I did not know who Nick Fuentes was and had never heard of his ‘groyper’ movement until after Charlie Kirk’s death, when the media suddenly claimed that the shooter was a ‘groyper’ on the political right. I had to google ‘groyper,’ and what I saw when I came across Nick Fuentes was what looked like a young Richard Spencer. In other words, I saw someone on the ‘alt-right.’
My thought about Nick Fuentes was ‘not significant’ until Tucker Carlson gave Nick Fuentes a softball interview, in what appeared to be an attempt to put ‘Hitler is cool,’ and ‘Stalin is my idol,’ into the Overton window.
My goal is to ensure that such things do not make it into the Overton window.
I can, to a degree, excuse Nick Fuentes. He’s 27, so World War II is far enough before his time that he has never known anyone who fought in it, and has no emotional connection to it. To him and his followers, they might as well be talking about Caligula, and like younger people on 4chan, they probably think the reactions people have to such outrageous statements are funny.
Nick Fuentes is, at best, the political version of Andrew Dice Clay. He seeks fame, and will say anything, no matter how outrageous to get it. Like Andrew Dice Clay, he has to get more outrageous over time to keep his base engaged. Also like Andrew Dice Clay, he will eventually go too far, even for his own followers, and burn himself out.
In the age of Fight or Flight politics, it seems like everyone is doing a version of Andrew Dice Clay. Shock value is currently quite popular, and Fuentes is nearing the end of his popularity shelf life.
The attempts to normalize this troubled young man force us to address the alt-right, though, so I will do so directly, in the hope of ensuring that the actual right fully disassociates itself. The alt-right is evil, and we must reject it accordingly.
The Alt-Right Defined
To understand why this matters, we must define exactly what we are rejecting.
When the media call the alt-right an “alternative right,” they almost get it correct: the alt-right is an alternative to the political right, in opposition to the political left.
The alt-right, however, is not part of the political right. It is in fact, a mutation of the left’s collectivist worldview, stripped of its moral pretense.
The alt-right accepts every assumption the modern left holds about power, privilege, and identity. It simply rearranges the hierarchy and declares that white people should be on top.
The actual right rejects identity politics entirely.
The American right is built on the premise that individuals are morally equal under both God and the law, and that moral worth is measured by action and character, rather than ancestry or grievance. The alt-right rejects all of that. Its roots are not in liberty, but in envy, collectivism, and power, which is exactly where the modern left’s roots lie as well.
To understand how far removed the alt-right is from real conservatism, one has to understand what conservatives actually stand for. The right’s central idea is that freedom and equality come from the individual’s relationship to moral law, and not from his membership in any group. The Constitution codifies that truth: rights are endowed by the Creator, not granted by governments or redistributed among groups.
Conservatism rejects identity politics on principle. It holds that justice cannot exist where some are favored over others, and that fairness requires moral universals that apply to everyone. The left, having abandoned universal moral law, replaced it with hierarchies of victimhood. The alt-right, in turn, accepts those hierarchies as legitimate but wants to reshuffle the deck.
Where Nick Fuentes sees a black person, a conservative sees a person created in the image of God with certain inalienable rights, who both is and ought to be equal to the rest of us. Where Nick Fuentes sees a ‘Jew,’ a conservative still sees a person created in the image of God.
We don’t think in terms of minorities. We think in terms of people, as individuals, all created in the image of God, and all with certain inalienable rights.
The political left would love to bunch the alt-right in with the actual right, as doing so allows the political left to pretend that we believe what the alt-right believes. The left wants the alt-right to be just a slightly more extreme version of the actual right, even though the two worldviews are moral opposites. The entire leftist narrative depends on pretending otherwise.
The Democratic Origins of Identity Politics
Identity politics did not pop up out of thin air. It was born out of the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 as a coalition to defend slavery, with an openly collectivist moral structure built around race. Individuals were not judged by character, but by their assigned role within a racial order. White men ruled while black men worked the fields. After the Civil War, the same party imposed Jim Crow, built the Klan, and enforced segregation.
When the civil-rights movement made overt racism untenable, Democrats rebranded themselves as the defenders of minorities, but defending minorities required keeping them dependent such that the moral premise of group hierarchy stayed exactly the same. Thomas Sowell captured the essence of this transformation when he said that modern progressives treat minorities “not as equals, but as pets.” The left sees minorities, not as capable equals, but as helpless wards in need of assistance.
The Democratic worldview did not change; it simply adapted. Its moral vision was always one of group management to decide who counted and how much. Race determined both moral worth and social station before, and it still does to this day.
The left traded the old chain of oppression for a leash of dependency, and then congratulated itself for its kindness. The left now looks at the right and says, “What? You don’t think they need our help?!? What is wrong with you people?!?”
I’ll answer that. What is wrong with us is that we truly see people as individuals, and we choose not to hate. We don’t see a black person and think, “This person cannot succeed on their own so I had better elevate them.” What we see is someone truly equal to us, who can elevate him or herself.
It would be wrong to say the left reversed its hierarchy after 1964. It merely flipped the color scheme. The same elite class that once claimed to protect the purity of white society now claims to protect minorities from it. The common thread is the elite’s conviction that it has a moral right to rule.
The left’s coalition today is a pyramid. At the top sit the intellectual and political elites, people who imagine themselves as morally enlightened to dictate virtue and guilt for everyone else. Beneath them are the identity blocs: racial minorities, women, and the LGBTQ++ community, each assigned moral value based on the perceived oppression the elite assign them. At the bottom sit those declared “privileged,” condemned for advantages the elite say exist but never name.
The top never changes: the elite always rule. They alone are above the identity system.
In this way, the left never abolished hierarchy. All it did was to reorganize it, extending its patronage from one set of dependents to another. The elite remain the same, managing the moral economy of society, and granting indulgences to favored groups, and of course staying on top.
The Alt-Right’s Reclamation of the Old Left
The alt-right takes the left’s system of collective identity and removes its disguise. Its spokesmen, people like Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, are perfectly open about what they believe. Fuentes calls himself a fan of both Hitler and Stalin. He understands that fascism and communism are both collectivist, authoritarian, and left-wing. Spencer, who coined the term alt-right, describes himself as a socialist. He dreams of a “national socialism for the twenty-first century.”
The alt-right does not want liberty, and to pretend that those who do are adjacent to them is absurd. The alt-right wants the same thing the political left wants: control.
The alt-right rejects capitalism, the concept of ‘inalienable’ rights, and other Enlightenment ideals. They believe society should be ordered by collective identity, and they differ from the left only in which group they want at the top.
The alt-right is not an extremist version of conservatism, but the resurrection of the Democratic Party before 1964, where racial hierarchy is justified by collectivist compassion, with white people at the top of the pecking order. Its dream is the same dream the old Democrats had, to use the machinery of the state to enforce racial order.
Where the left talks about “white privilege,” the alt-right says, “We want that.” They are moral twins arguing over inheritance.
The left and the alt-right both begin with the same moral error: the belief that people are defined by the groups they belong to. Both reduce human beings to demographic abstractions and see life as a zero-sum struggle between collectives. In both systems, justice is not moral balance, but power distribution.
Remove race from the equation, and the alt-right and left are exactly the same. Flip the race component and they trade places.
Blindfold Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nick Fuentes, and they might fall in love.
Nietzsche called the transformation of envy into moral righteousness, ressentiment. The oppressed become holy and the successful become evil. The more a movement relies on this logic, the less it cares about truth, and the more it worships grievance. This is why both the left and the alt-right thrive on outrage, purity tests, and tribal belonging. They are not movements of principle, but are driven entirely by emotion.
The true right has nothing in common with any of this. We reject tribal morality outright. Our foundation is the individual as the smallest and only moral unit in society.
Well, that’s not entirely true. We talk in the language of individualism, but if you watch how we act, it’s actually the individual family, and when I raised my children, I gave them every privilege I could. I call that ‘good parenting,’ and every parent should do the same.
The right believes that all people are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights that precede government and group membership, and that all people should be treated accordingly by a limited government that protects liberty, rather than reducing it.
Conservatism does not ask who you are; it asks what you do. It does not promise equality of outcome; it guarantees equality before law. It does not measure guilt by ancestry, or salvation by class. The right’s moral structure is flat: there are no “more equal than others” groups (as in Orwell’s Animal Farm), no moral aristocracy, no designated victims, and no artificial barriers holding anyone back.
That is why fascism, socialism, and the alt-right all belong on the left side of the spectrum. Each rejects individual moral agency in favor of collective identity, replacing personal virtue with group loyalty. Each wants an elite to define truth, and to enforce obedience.
The actual right rejects all of that.
The Political Mirror
C.S. Lewis warned that “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” The alt-right and the modern left are both tyrannies of that kind.
The modern left and the alt-right are mirrors facing each other, amplifying their reflections of one another. The alt-right is in fact a subset that broke off from the left, the left’s obsession with white guilt having created a reactionary movement of white grievance from within their own space. The more the left insists that identity defines morality, the more the alt-right insists that identity defines survival.
Of course these groups hate one another. Both also hate the actual right.
This feedback loop is politically convenient for the Democratic Party. The existence of the alt-right allows the left to conflate conservatives with extremists, smearing individualists as racists. The media gladly oblige, portraying classical liberals and fascists as neighboring species. In truth, the alt-right and actual right are moral opposites of one another, where one believes in freedom and the other in control.
By keeping the public trapped between these two false alternatives of collectivism on the left vs collectivism on the alt-right, the elite preserve within their base this notion of the right as being evil, securing their own position atop the pyramid of identity groups they have created. The more society fractures into tribes, the more indispensable the managers of those tribes become.
The alt-right is not a rebellion against the left so much as the left’s shadow, accepting the left’s moral framework, and then demanding that they be the elite.
America’s actual right, its classical liberal and conservative tradition, is the only force that ever broke this pattern.
It was conservatives who wrote that “all men are created equal,” conservatives who fought to end slavery, and conservatives who championed civil rights when the left was still segregating buses and schools.
It was not Ronald Reagan who said about busing, “I don’t want my children growing up in a jungle, a racial jungle.” That was Joe Biden.
It will be conservatives who must once again insist that moral worth and justice occur only with individuals. We reject group identity entirely.
Civilizations decline when they trade moral law for group power. They recover only when they remember that the individual is created in the image of God.
The right does not need an “alternative.” It needs to stand firm on the belief that truth belongs to individuals.
Nick Fuentes is an angry young man with no moral compass who says horrific things for attention. He is an adult version of a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in the grocery store, and I’ll bet when he was three, his parents gave in to him.
Nick Fuentes’s followers are the political equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys. We need to speak to them firmly, but with compassion. Some of them can be saved.
Tucker Carlson seems to want to shift the Overton window enough to bring Fuentes and his followers into the conversation, but real conservatives cannot allow that to happen.
Such people of course have the freedom of speech, but as actual conservatives, we must also speak, and in doing so, we must in one loud voice, reject the alt-right.
We must also note that Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are now a part of the alt-right.
Let them speak into the void. I refuse to listen.
