Carl Trueman’s recent First Things essay, “How Critical Theory Paved the Way for Nick Fuentes,” makes an elegant academic mistake. From his perch at Grove City College, Trueman suggests that the radical relativism of the left—the Foucaultian, Frankfurt-born impulse to “unmask power”—has somehow fertilized the soil for Fuentes and his Groypers. It’s a tidy thesis, and nonsense. Fuentes isn’t a Marxist misfire or a post-structuralist in disguise. He’s something far less exotic: a radical born of political betrayal, not philosophical contagion.
Trueman treats Fuentes as if he’d been breast-fed a steady diet of Adorno and Derrida. In reality, Fuentes’ intellectual diet consists of MAGA rallies, meme pages, and livestreams. He isn’t the bastard child of critical theory; he’s the disappointed son of Trumpism. He says it himself—constantly. His disillusionment has nothing to do with semiotics or social construction. It’s rooted in the plain-spoken belief that American conservatism sold him out: that the so-called nationalist right proved just as obedient to donors and foreign lobbies as the left he despises.
Fuentes doesn’t quote Foucault. He quotes Netanyahu—usually with disgust. His endless rants about “America First” aren’t academic experiments in power, but furious outbursts against America’s blind allegiance to Israel. His movement wasn’t born in an Ivy League-seminar but in the digital gutter—where disaffected young men watch Republicans ship billions abroad while their own towns decay. What Trueman calls the residue of critical theory is really the residue of desertion.
And Trueman, like so many respectable conservatives, refuses to look directly at that wound. He’d rather locate Fuentes in the genealogy of ideas than in the failure of a movement. It’s far more comfortable to blame French theory than to admit that the GOP has become a shameless grift—a party of flag-draped donors and Bible-quoting lobbyists. But the men drawn to Fuentes aren’t quoting Marcuse. They’re quoting Trump’s campaign promises, word for word, and wondering where they went.
The irony is that Trueman’s essay replicates the very evasions he condemns. Critical theory loves abstraction because abstraction absolves. Trueman abstracts Fuentes for the same reason: to avoid owning what the right has become. MAGA promised rebellion and delivered merchandising. It promised sovereignty and delivered servitude—to corporations, to consultants, and to Benjamin Netanyahu. The same men once told to “build the wall” now watch their leaders build careers instead.
There’s a particular cruelty in watching establishment conservatives worry about Fuentes, feigning shock that someone so supposedly toxic could sprout from their own soil. They call for Tucker Carlson’s head, scandalized that he dared to interview the boy wonder of the online right, as if pretending he doesn’t exist might undo what their own stupidity and spinelessness created.
What they refuse to confront is that Fuentes’ appeal isn’t just ideological—it’s visceral. It’s born of disgust, hurt, and resentment for what America promised and then abruptly withdrew. These young men were told they were inheriting a country; instead, they got a circus. Their anger is personal. His following isn’t fueled by hate alone; it’s driven by humiliation, by the slow, sick realization that the movement they believed in was never really theirs to begin with.
None of this excuses Fuentes’ more controversial takes. It simply explains its audience. The young men who follow see a system that exports billions to Tel Aviv while ignoring Ohio, that preaches free speech while looking to cancel anyone who dares to stray from the pre-approved script. They’re told their president is anti-war—a man worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize—even as he eyes Venezuela and rattles sabers at Nigeria. It’s diplomacy by doublethink: preaching peace while plotting invasions.
Critical theory didn’t pave the road to Fuentes. Complacent conservatism did. Fuentes is what happens when you promise young men meaning and give them a middle finger instead.
The left refuses to admit its utopias collapsed. The right refuses to admit that its heroes lied. Both lack the humility to face their own reflection. That’s why the same nihilism seeps from Berkeley to Breitbart: the inability to speak openly and honestly about failure. The American right, like the left it loathes, can’t stop sermonizing about power while quietly indulging in its every excess. I know this. Fuentes knows this. And I suspect Trueman does too.