How critical theory paved the way for Nick Fuentes

I was teaching an undergraduate colloquium on critical theory at the University of Notre Dame when the news broke of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Nick Fuentes.

The timing was interesting because the colloquium’s final document for discussion was a 2023 Hedgehog Review essay by Malloy Owen. Owen traces the fascinating migration of critical theory — a family of philosophies often associated with the Left — to the Right of the political spectrum. Even a superficial glance at contemporary political discourse indicates the plausibility of this thesis. The rhetoric birthed by critical theory (“It is all about power,” “Established institutions are ineradicably corrupt and need to be torn down,” and “Everything you have been told is a lie”) is obviously no longer a monopoly of the Left.

Owen mentions Carlson, although it may be generous to attribute his Fuentes interview to intellectual commitments. The gig media economy favors pundits who are prepared to transgress boundaries; their exchange had no real intellectual substance. The two men commiserated with each other over how they had been victimized by establishment conspiracies, and Carlson avoided anything approaching a question that might have challenged Fuentes’s well-documented views on the Jews and on Hitler. Indeed, even Fuentes’s claim to be a fan of Stalin merited no exploration. The interview was all very therapeutic and hardly a replay of Chomsky vs. Foucault.

Yet it also revealed how some on the Right are indulging in the same critical theoretical games as those on the Left.

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