Christopher Rufo’s invocation of hyperreality in his criticism of Nick Fuentes and the wider anti-Israel right wing is an interesting segue into postmodernism, particularly for a conservative activist. His primary criticism of Fuentes, that he is a media influencer draped in layers of irony that make his pronouncements largely redundant, is correct in its analysis. There is no reality behind his ideology, just further levels of obfuscation and comedy. Praising Stalin or engaging in Holocaust revisionism are just ways of reaching toward a barely-coherent ideology of authoritarianism. There’s nothing serious behind it. Fuentes is a gay Mexican Catholic calling for the establishment of a theocratic WASP ethnostate.
Rufo cannot go further than this though. “Rather than engage in the surface-level debate, conservatives should seek the deeper ground of reality and deconstruct the ‘metapolitics,’ or underlying rules, of this conflict. Conservatives should do this by treating Fuentes as an essentially fraudulent phenomenon. He is a manipulator who pretends to believe in every evil in order to drive clicks, cause chaos, and achieve celebrity, even as a villain”[1].
His attempts to get beyond hyperreality are themselves caught in the hyperreal itself. There is no return to the real, only further declination down the path of constructed realities with esoteric rules. Trump is a hyperreal president. The whole nature of political establishments (whether national or international) is to exist beyond the real, obscuring themselves in lobbying networks and conspiracies, writing narratives via their pet influencers.
The coherent structure that Rufo wants to ground politics upon has never existed beyond a surface level phenomenon. There are always deeper layers of power and influence, many of them self-referential and unserious (look at Klaus Schwab, a pantomime villain, or the Israel lobbies, rammed with idiots like Douglas Murray and Ben Shapiro). You can’t take it seriously because there’s nothing serious to see. You have political commentators and politicians proudly stating they’d like to nuke Gaza while denying a genocide (which Israeli politicians regularly invoke when they declare the end of Palestinians in Gaza). You have institutions geared toward a global reset which primarily revolves around digital IDs and social credit systems. Intelligence agencies regularly declare the capability to warp reality itself, declaring terrorist incidents and national emergencies on arbitrary and ever-changing criteria.
It’s both pernicious and ridiculous. American presidents (and presidential candidates) have been variously senile, corrupt, rapists, abusers and practically non-governing. Trump was easily swayed by advisors[2] (on trade, fiscal policy and coronavirus) and has become just another pro-war president in hoc to the military-industrial complex and Israel. Biden’s decision-making was undergirded/undermined by his White House team. And all of them have been Epstein’s friends/acquaintances. No one escapes influence operations.
As Harrington notes on the lockdown’s effects on Gen Z, “this sense of generalised unreality seems to have become, especially for the young, a permanent fixture”[3]. The nonsense of coronavirus regulations was the realisation that power is ephemeral – you can just do things without regulatory limits or bureaucratic nannying. Political reality is entirely constructible (or destructible as the obverse of the same). It predates Gen Z and coronavirus. We were lied into wars. Various defining events (9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing, the JFK assassination, the Epstein files) have roots in the actions of intelligence agencies, criminal organisations and industrial complexes. Scott’s deep politics[4] is the closest thing approaching an underlying reality, and is itself full of contradictions and complexities that overlap ideologies and interests. The actors involved in these conspiracies don’t even know the full narrative, only playing their part. Puppet masters are networks of desires that require security. They cut across ideological divides and construct realities that can secure specific interests, scaling up into vast conspiracies with no central control.
There is no real in politics. Politicians are playing catch up with the machinations of economic and cultural events that they watch with either yearning or indifference. Inflation and monopolisation is the norm, effectively returning us to the stagflation of the 70s and 80s. Demographic replacement via immigration creates a disunited polity – a nation of communities and tribes. Their decision-making is curtailed by the networks that get them elected, hamstrung by a process that requires conspiracy to accomplish anything. So-called independent politicians are only known as such because of their ineffectuality. They are caricatures, to either demonstrate the democratic “reality” of politics or to be scapegoats.
Being truly posthistorical, politicians invoking a milquetoast democratic socialism are hailed as revolutionary. Thatcherism or tariffs are at the forefront of right-wing economic thought. Transformative politics is caught in the doom loop of failed utopias and reformist inertia. Envisaging a system beyond democracy or beyond capitalism is to place oneself in the insane asylum. The utopic is part of the technological array[5], with the rapid development of autonomous AI becoming the destination of utopian politics. Only robots can dream the future.
When your reality is so blatantly and contradictorily constructed, everything falls into a melange of scepticism and irony. Nick Fuentes is not unique, he’s just another Bonnie Blue or Jake Paul. Politics is just another arena of hyperreality, like porn or YouTube. All one can do is question and thereby begin their own construction of reality. You have no influence over these things, you are just bits of information in a network that is largely uncontrollable. “We should point the public in a constructive direction and marginalize those who would sabotage the conservative cause”[6]. In other words, Rufo wants to limit the information you see and connections you can make. This is just another influence operation as that is all politics is. We are all caught in the hurricanes of hyperreality.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-podcast
[2] Bob Woodward, Fear
[3] https://unherd.com/2025/03/beware-the-lockdown-generation/
[4] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7346913B238B70DFB5966BE51FA3B8A8/S1557466012033219a.pdf/div-class-title-systemic-destabilization-in-recent-american-history-9-11-the-jfk-assassination-and-the-oklahoma-city-bombing-as-a-strategy-of-tension-div.pdf
[5] https://collapsepatchworks.com/2025/04/30/the-new-sovereigns-on-the-limits-of-acceleration/
[6] https://www.city-journal.org/article/nick-fuentes-tucker-carlson-podcast
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