The Race War Is a Scam

When Your Only Choice is Losing, Flip the Board

Summary.
Nick Fuentes and the Groypers have real grievances that cannot simply be dismissed or censored away. The case I am making in this article is that it is a mistake to assume those grievances can be resolved by repeating the same identity-based politics that produced them, as it leads only to a larger, more coercive state. Returning to limitations on the power and incentives of government offers the only way to address legitimate concerns without sliding into a permanent cycle of division and violence.

What Are You Going to Do About It?

Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent time looking into Nick Fuentes, the Groypers, and the wider implications of their movement. As with everything in modern politics, there is a dividing line: a growing group that has accepted the movement and its grievances as legitimate and another that dismisses it outright or treats engagement itself as a moral failure.

What interests me is what sits beneath that split. Stripping away the different reactions, the grievances expressed by young straight white men has emerged as an explicit political force.

This is also no longer confined to the United States. The same conversations are increasingly happening in the UK and across Europe, which means they have moved beyond theory and now have the potential for real political and social consequences.

Whatever side of this debate you are on, I have one question: what are you going to do about it?

To the Groypers first. Your grievances are acknowledged and you have a growing voice, what are you going to do about it? What is your plan? Specifically, what policy changes do you want, what power do you need to accumulate to implement them and what happens if you fail?

The same question applies to those who reject Fuentes outright. If you believe his ideas are dangerous, what exactly are you going to do about it? If his ideas become policy, what then?

Without a plan, this is all just theatre

The Illusion of Consensus

I released a podcast with Carl Benjamin this week regarding this topic. If you look at the YouTube comments, it appears I was annihilated. I largely was. But taken at face value, that reaction is misleading in a way that matters.

I’ve been making podcasts for over a decade and I understand how platform incentives work. YouTube doesn’t optimise for balance or truth; it optimises for attention, because attention sells ads. When the algorithm sees a title involving Carl Benjamin and Nick Fuentes, it doesn’t send that video to girls who like Taylor Swift. It sends it to people already primed to engage.

The data confirms this. Only 16% of viewers on that episode were subscribers to my channel. As such, the video was delivered almost entirely to a motivated subculture, and because I questioned some of the ideas, the response was hostile (perhaps coordinated), using similar language from people who understand the new rules of the game.

The comment ordering system compounds this. Comments are ranked by engagement, not representativeness, which means the consensus of response is pushed to the top, pushing down alternative opinions.

All this matters because echo chambers amplify anger and manufacture the illusion of consensus. People start to believe they are the silent majority when they are, in reality, a motivated minority being algorithmically reinforced. A byproduct of an algorithm designed to maximise revenue for YouTube.

None of this means their grievances aren’t real. It means the feedback loop is real, and it pushes people toward escalation by making escalation feel both popular and necessary.

Audience Capture

This puts me in a unique position. Audience capture is real. It would be easy for me to lean into this, agree with them, drive clicks and collect ad revenue. But avoiding audience capture is a responsibility I don’t take lightly.

Shifting my views because I got smoked in the comments would be the wrong response. The right response is to recognise which grievances are real, validate what deserves to be validated and then ask the harder question: what happens now?

Whatever side you are on, I hear you. Now walk me through your solutions. What does it look like in policy terms and where does it end?

The Scam at the Heart of This

After thinking about this seriously, talking it out with friends, listening carefully to people across the spectrum and researching historical context, I’ve come to the simple conclusion that…

…This race war is a scam.

Not because nothing is happening. Rapid social change has created winners and losers and many people feel blamed, dismissed, or stripped of legitimacy by institutions that no longer seem to represent them. These grievances are not unique to the Groypers; they overlap with those of many other groups, because this is how politics works.

Whether people like it or not, demographic change is a central component of this. It is real, visible and in Western liberal countries it has been rapid. Denying its destabilising effects is dishonest and counterproductive and when the state allocates resources, protection and status by group, identity becomes power and population change starts to feel existential.

It is when you start to walk through the reality of policy change it becomes more real, for example, the furthest-right responses to this reality require levels of coercion most people in the West are not prepared for, because they involve the state policing identity, movement, association and ultimately belonging. The type of ethno-nationalism being promoted in certain corners of the Internet does not reject DEI, it demands the most intrusive version of it.

Who Controls the State

The Groypers are not alone in feeling angry or marginalised. The pace of change over the last few decades has displaced many groups in different ways. Despite being portrayed as a youth movement, it is common to see comments from people in their 50s and 60s expressing the same views.

That points to something broader. Government is not just failing to work for the Groypers, it is failing to work for large numbers of people. Outside of the wealthy or those connected to the state, performance is largely declining across public services and economic opportunity, leading to loss of institutional trust.

Failing to recognise this means repeating the same mistakes, because the scam is that organising politics around race or any other group is really just a fight over who controls the state. That fight does not resolve the underlying problems, instead it creates a self-renewing cycle where every proposed solution requires more power, more enforcement and a new round of winners and losers defined by identity. It is the factionalism that George Washington warned would lead to tyranny in his farewell address.

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”
- George Washington

Washington was describing the mechanical end point of factional politics: that once power becomes the prize, every grievance turns into a struggle for control of the state and every struggle escalates.

When politics is organised around identity rather than restraint, compromise stops being possible because losing becomes existential. At that point, the question is no longer whether the system changes, but how it is forced to change.

This is why we must discuss consequences. If you believe liberalism has failed, delivering this programme will require a massive structural transformation of countries like the US, the UK, and much of Europe, requiring levels of coercion that end any serious commitment to liberty.

Winning Makes the State Stronger

So let’s run a thought experiment. Imagine a best case scenario: the Groypers succeed politically without violence. Immigration is halted, multiculturalism is ended and the state formally defends a defined national identity.

To maintain this outcome, the state must define identity in law, permanently control borders, regulate association and suppress large amounts of dissenting culture at levels far higher than seen recently with ICE. And none of this is temporary, it requires a security-focused state embedded deeply into social life, constantly enforcing compliance.

Even then, the end state is never reached. Demographics continue to shift through birth, marriage, belief and culture. Maintaining control requires increasingly strict definitions and an expanding search for internal enemies with power consolidating upward into the bureaucracies and enforcement agencies.

If large portions of the country reject this direction, what happens at the next election? Does the project unwind, or does the system harden into something openly authoritarian to preserve itself?

And this is the successful outcome, one which produces permanent coercion.

Losing Makes the State Stronger

Now consider failure. The movement never gains majority support, instead compromises are rejected and politics closes as an outlet.

Angry people without political representation do not disappear. They fragment, radicalise and escalate. Even isolated violence or the credible threat of it strengthens the state, because it always does. Surveillance expands, dissent is treated as danger and original grievances become untouchable because they are now associated with extremism or domestic terrorism.

Either way, winning or losing, the result is the same. The state grows.

Why the State Is the Only Winner

When I interviewed Michael Malice, he said something that stuck with me: once you start viewing government as rival gangs fighting over control of territory, everything becomes clearer.

The primary goal of politicians is not to serve the public, most of this know this is a lie. It is the acquisition and defence of power. When the state controls taxation, money creation, law and resource allocation, capturing it determines who benefits and who pays. Under those incentives, identity politics is rational.

This is why the race war is a scam.

It traps everyone in a permanent fight over identity while the only consistent winner is the state itself.

The struggle becomes the point. The journey of being heard or ignored, winning or losing, gives meaning, while the promised end goals remain unreachable, which justifies continued expansion and extraction.

Why Fighting Identity with Identity Fails

I’ve had the same conversation with liberals as well. You think Fuentes is dangerous, cool, so what are you going to do about it? Censor him? Deplatform him? Cancel him? They tried this; it failed and made him stronger. Why? Because it validates him, confirming the story he tells his audience: that their grievances are real and the system is hostile to them.

Likewise, victimhood politics demonised straight white men in the name of equity, while DEI imposed state-mandated preference. Grievances can be recognised without reproducing the same identity-based framework.

Fighting identity politics with more identity politics produces a vicious cycle. Extremes grow, incentives harden and the state expands as the only force capable of managing the chaos.

The Only Way the Incentives Change

This is why I reject the race war entirely, because the proposed solutions are a fraud. They are either unachievable, or if partially achieved they are unstable and demand permanent enforcement, guaranteeing endless conflict and a reduction in liberty.

The American Founders understood that liberty requires constraints on power. They designed a system to make power hard to use, hard to keep and hard to abuse - but that system has failed because modern government has outgrown its constraints.

James Madison argued that factions are inevitable, suppressing them strengthens their appeal but the real danger arises when institutions can no longer dilute and contain them.

Therefore the alternative isn’t utopian. It’s rational, fair and anti-utopian: equality before the law, no identity-based entitlements, no state-mandated preferences and a state that administers rules instead of morality.

The Hard Path

Institutional pluralism is the harder path because it resists the temptation to impose order through force. It accepts disagreement without turning it into existential conflict and it is the only path that returns America to what it was designed to be: a system where power is constrained, dispersed and difficult to capture.

This path does not require agreement on outcomes, but instead agreement on limits. As long as the state can allocate power, status and protection based on preference and identity, conflict is rational and permanent. Remove those incentives and the conflict loses its fuel, because the prize disappears. Rather than one group winning, everyone has the opportunity to win.

So the choice is not between Nick Fuentes and his opponents; that binary exists to keep the system alive. The real choice is structural and colder than that: whether to continue feeding a system that converts grievance into power, or to end this cycle and refuse to let the state arbitrate identity at all.

One path produces endless escalation, coercion and eventual violence. The other does not promise harmony, but it preserves liberty, and that is the only outcome worth defending.

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Closing Note for the Groypers

If you’re reading this and think I’ve just dismissed you because I don’t understand your grievances, let me be clear. Whether I personally agree with you is beside the point. What matters is whether your strategy can actually deliver what you want. My argument is that pursuing those goals through state power is likely to fail and even if it succeeds briefly, it will be almost impossible to sustain.

What I’m saying is that the only approach with a chance of delivering durable outcomes tighter limits on the state. The irony is that the very constraints many of you reject are the only mechanisms that would reliably secure what you want without handing the same power to your enemies in the next election.